Enthusiastically Ambiverted Hopepunk
Whatever I’m geeking out about at the time.
This’ll be amazingly easy for me to do — I stopped watching TV roughly, oh, ten or twelve years or so, I think. Since then, the only times I’ve been around much TV has been when I’ve been over at someone elses house and they’ve happened to have it turned on.
There’s too many other things to do in life for me to waste time sitting around in front of the boob tube.
(via MeFi)
Blogchalking, which seemed to disappear at some point after I originally posted about it, has reappeared, so I’ve recreated my BC code — and here it is!
This is my blogchalk: United States, Washington, Seattle, English, Michael, Male, 26-30, Macintosh computers, movies, music, and other random bits.
A proposal for the ‘net community at large, and for Microsoft, in an effort to make complaints about/criticisms of Microsoft and its software easier to collect and analyze, with the intent of letting any concerned party at Microsoft sift through them at will for subjects relevant to their area of expertise.
Requirements: a weblog with an active RSS feed.
Methodology: The methodology from the user end is simple: include the acronym ‘YAAMR’ (for Yet Another Anti-Microsoft Rant) in the relevant weblog post; preferably in the title, though including it in the body should work also.
On Microsoft’s end, the process is also simple: create a Feedster search for ‘YAMMR’. Then, as Feedster allows one to subscribe to an RSS feed of a specific search, the MS employee could then subscribe to that RSS feed in their newsreader of choice.
End result: a real-time, constantly updated feed of issues that MS would do well to pay attention to, in order to improve relations with their current user base.
It goes without saying that this same method could be used for other companies or organizations also, requiring only the selection of a convenient acronym or set of keywords that could be used to trigger Feedster’s search results.
I don’t really expect this to get picked up, or put into practice. But I like the idea. Maybe it’d be more useable for smaller companies? In any case, there’s potential here, I think…
More random ideas connected with this: perhaps a Movable-Type powered site, with different categories for different companies or organizations (or one site for a specific company, with categories for the various software packages). These categories would be set up as TrackBack ping receivers for rant posts.
For instance, a hypothetical ‘www.microsoftrants.com’ could have categories for Word, Excel, PowerPoint, etc., then posts about issues with the software could ping the corresponding category. MS employees in the various software groups could subscribe to RSS feeds for the categories, enabling them to keep an ‘ear to the ground’ of what the ‘common user’ faces when using their software.
Hrm. Ideas? Questions? Comments? Words of wisdom?
I think I’ll toss this one out to the LazyWeb community. It’s not really a ‘problem to be solved’, as such, except that I don’t really have the resources (budget) to set this up on my own, and I don’t even know that the idea would catch on (not to mention that as I’m not an ‘A-list’ blogger [or even B- or C-list…probably somewhere around Q-list, I think…], there’s no gaurantee anyone would ever see this proposal otherwise). Better to toss it out to people more integrated with the various tech communities to see if any of them want to pick it up and play with it.
Robert Scoble pointed to Scott Johnson’s YAAMR post. Two hours after Scott made his post, he had an offer in his comments from a tester at Microsoft to pass on information about his crash to the appropriate team at Microsoft.
First thought: that’s cool.
Second thought: too bad things like this aren’t likely to happen for the rest of the poor shmoes battling Windows (like, oh, say…[ahem]…me, for instance). Offering high-profile bloggers help after they’re linked to by another high-profile blogger is certainly a nice thing to do, and nothing in itself to sneeze at, but all of Scott’s complaints with Windows are perfectly valid, and are the kinds of frustrations that many people have to deal with on a regular basis.
The fundamental problem itself is still unsolved — Windows is often a royal pain in the ass to deal with. Most of us have to deal with it on our own, though, and common experiences like Scott’s are going to keep happening, and Microsoft is going to continue to be perceived by many people as a lumbering, unstoppable behemoth of a company that can’t actually write decent software, but doesn’t seem to care because they’ve got such a lockhold on the industry.
Somehow, I just don’t see that happening anytime soon.
I just implemented a very nice little PHP script for my website that ties into my site search function — the end result being that my site no longer has a “404 File Not Found” error page!
In brief: if a visitor puts in a URL address that doesn’t exist, it gets shunted to my search script. If the script returns multiple hits, that listing is displayed, but if the script only returns one hit, the visitor is automatically forwarded to that page. Very slick.
As a bonus, it provides a convenient shortcut to searching my site — just put in whatever search terms you want after “http://www.djwudi.com/” and see what you get!
(script via Scriptygoddess)
Just got back home from seeing Bile, Zeromancer, My Life With the Thrill Kill Kult and (last, but most definitely not least) Pigface at the Catwalk. Awesome show.
Work let me off early so I could go, so I got home about 6:30pm. Changed clothes and waited around the apartment for Candice to show up, then we walked down to the club and got there just a bit before Bile started. They weren’t bad, but were a little harder than I usually go for — wasn’t going to complain about seeing them, but not someone I’m likely to go searching out the CDs for, either. The high point of their show was a cover of the J. Geils Band’s ‘Love Stinks’, which worked surprisingly well as an industrial track.
Since Bile wasn’t really our thing, Candice and I hung out near the entrance, and toward the end of Bile’s set Chad and Don showed up. Not long after that, Kim and Kayo joined us right about as Zeromancer was starting. Zeromancer was more to my taste than Bile — I still might not go searching out their CDs, but if I happened to hear that they were playing in town and I had the money to go, I wouldn’t mind seeing them again. Again, the high point of their set was a cover tune, this time of Real Life’s ‘Send Me An Angel’.
We’d all stayed at our spot near the entrance during Zeromancer’s set where we could actually hear each other, as well as keep an eye on the door, and during the downtime between bands both Kate and Rick showed up. Just in time, too, as MLWtTKK hit the stage not long afterwards. Their set wasn’t quite as good as I had been hoping for — they were only a three-piece (vocalist, drums, and synth), and so nearly everything was sequenced, and they didn’t have the stage presence that I’ve seen from them in videos. That said, the updated arrangements to some of their classic material were really good, and the live drums made for a good show musically — it was just the stage show that wasn’t what I’d hoped for.
Kayo and I had gone down to the main floor for MLWtTKK, spending our time standing just on the edge of the pit, tossing people back in when they went flying out and hauling the occasional body up from the floor after a tumble (one of my favorite positions for a good show, actually). When we went back to the rest of the group during the downtime, it turned out that they’d been given a choice spot to actually watch the show, in a security booth just behind the sound booth. We all stood and peoplewatched during the downtime (and believe me, a goth/industrial show is quite the place for peoplewatching), then I headed back out to the floor when Pigface came on stage.
Pigface, quite simply, tore the place up. Incredible set — anywhere from five to twelve people on stage depending on the lineup for the song, and constant insanely high energy. I stayed right on the edge of the pit area again, getting pulled in and taking a tumble once (then getting hauled right back up to my feet). Most of the songs were from their newest album, “Easy Listening (for Difficult Fuckheads)“, but they threw in quite a few old favorites, including ‘Divebomber’ (from “Notes From Thee Underground“) and finishing off with ‘Suck’ (originally from “Gub“, though it’s appeared in many incarnations on many albums over the years).
‘Suck’ first came out on the Pigface album “Gub”, credited to Martin Atkins, William Rieflin, Paul Barker, and trent reznor. When trent included a cover of ‘Suck’ as a hidden track on his ‘Broken‘ album, he listed the credits as ‘trent reznor with Pigface’. This apparently led to something of a falling out between trent and Martin, and trent hasn’t been involved in a Pigface project since…. Interestingly enough (for me, at least), when they introduced ‘Suck’, Martin said that “this is a song by trent reznor….” In all honesty, I didn’t know that they were still ticked enough at that to be making snide remarks at the shows!
At one point, they were playing a song off of EL(fDF) (the exact one I’m not sure of, as I haven’t quite memorized that album yet) that has the refrain “Jacob is a liar.” However, in a crowded club, at high volume, and with a ton of distortion, since I didn’t know the lyrics off the top of my head, the only thing I could make them out saying was “stainless steel papaya!” I knew that that wasn’t what they were saying, but it kept me laughing throughout the song — I didn’t actually find out what the actual lyrics were until Kate told me after the show.
Anyway, incredible show. My ears aren’t likely to recover before, oh, Thursday at the earliest, but that’s all part of the fun, right (for what it’s worth, I did have earplugs that I wore for some of the show, so it’s not as bad as it could be)? I also picked up a MLWtTKK shirt and the only Pigface album I didn’t have yet (“The Best of Pigface: Preaching to the Perverted“), plus earlier in the night I was handed a CD from a band apparently from Vancouver, BC by the name of Charlie Drown (I haven’t listened to it yet, so I have no idea what it’s like but I was told, “Here — you’ll probably like this,” when it was handed to me…). All in all, quite the good night.
I’ll leave off with something that Martin Atkins (the main force behind Pigface) said at one point during the set…
Never understimate the effect that you, as one individual, can have in any situation if you put your mind to it!
Wired has a great article about the special effects of the Matrix and its upcoming sequels (and speaking of which, the full trailer for The Matrix: Reloaded has been released, and kicks much butt).
In the course of the article, Wired mentions that much of the inspiration and technology for the more eye-catching special effects in the Matrix films were drawn from a project called The Campanile Movie, which is fascinating in its own right. The basic concept is taking photographs of an area and then wrapping them around a 3-D rendered landscape in order to create a photorealistic virtual environment. They explain it much better than I do, though….
(via Jason Kottke)
Annoyed by Safari constantly giving up on pages that won’t completely load in less than a minute? SafariNoTimeout to the rescue. Now that I’ve posted this, maybe I’ll remember to download it when I get home…
(via a comment to the Safari Beta 2 announcement)
SCENE: Evening in a bar. Our HERO walks into the the bar, pausing by the piano as the bar’s PIANIST plays an opening riff. The PIANIST looks up and greets our HERO as he plays lightly on the keyboard.
PIANIST: Evenin’! You look like you could use a drink.
OUR HERO: Yeah. I’d like a grasshopper, please.
PIANIST: [Calling to the bartender] Hey, can we have a grasshopper for the frog?
OUR HERO: Uh, that…that’s Kermit, Kermit the Frog.
PIANIST: Oh! Rowlf, Rowlf the Dog, here. Pleased ta meet’cha!
[ROWLF plays a fancy glissando on the piano]
ROWLF: I’m no Heifetz, but I get by.
[ROWLF continues to play lightly, as KERMIT looks out the window]
ROWLF: Lemme guess — broken heart, right?
KERMIT: Huh. Does it show?
ROWLF: Listen — when you’ve been tickling the ivories as long as I have, you’ve seen a broken heart for every drop of rain; a shattered dream for every falling star.
KERMIT: Exactly. She just walked out on me.
ROWLF: Eh, typical. That’s why I live alone.
KERMIT: You do, huh?
ROWLF: You bet. Finish work, I go home, read a book, have a couple of beers, take myself for a walk and go to bed.
KERMIT: Nice and simple.
ROWLF: Stay away from women — that’s my motto.
KERMIT: But I can’t!
ROWLF: Neither can I. That’s my trouble.
ROWLF: You can’t life with ’em, you can’t live without ’em.
There’s something irresistable-ish about ’em.
We grin and bear it ’cause the nights are long —
I hope that somethin’ better comes along.
KERMIT: I see what you mean.
It’s no good complainin’, and pointless to holler.
ROWLF: If she’s a beauty she’ll get under your collar.
KERMIT: She made a monkey out of old King Kong.
BOTH: I hope that something better comes along.
ROWLF: Ah, but what could be better, than a saucy Irish Setter,
When puppy love comes on strong?
Or a collie that’s classy…
A laddie needs a lassie…
A lover and wife gives you a new leash on life!
KERMIT: Uh — uh, was that a new leash on life?
ROWLF: Oh yeah. Uh, sorry about that. Two, three, four…
KERMIT: I don’t mean to scare ya, my friend, but I bet’cha,
come Father’s Day the litter bug’s gonna get’cha.
ROWLF: The urge is righteous but the face is wrong!
BOTH: I hope that something better comes along.
KERMIT: Still, it’s fun when they’re fetchin’,
and agree to see an etching,
that you keep at your lilly pad.
There is no solution, it’s part of evolution…
ROWLF: The pitter-patter of soles, the little feet of tadpoles!
KERMIT: Uh, Rowlf, tadpoles don’t have feet!
ROWLF: Oh. Sorry about that. Two, three, four…
KERMIT: There’s no limitation to mixin’ and matchin’.
ROWLF: Some get an itchin’ for a critter they’ve been scratchin’.
A skunk was badgered, the results were strong!
I hope that somethin’ better,
BOTH: I hope that somethin’ better,
I hope that somethin’ better comes along!
ROWLF: Beep-bop-biddy-biddy, doom-bom-diddy-diddy, dom-bum-um-ummm…
[KERMIT walks off]
ROWLF: It’s not often you see a guy that green…had the blues that bad.
I just got back from seeing The Core.
In an effort to kick-start my brain back into gear, I think before I go to bed tonight, I’m going to have to watch something that actually has decent plot, interesting characters, and — most importantly — some semblance of scientific crediblity.
Armageddon should do nicely.