Links for April 28th through May 1st

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Sometime between April 28th and May 1st, I thought this stuff was interesting. You might think so too!

  • DJ Richie Hawtin ties Twitter into his setlist with Twitter DJ and Traktor: "The Twitter DJ application utilizes feeds from an updated version of Traktor's standard broadcasting technology to send 30 second updates during Hawtin's set of what's currently playing to a designated Twitter account, allowing anyone following the Twitter group to obtain a unique insight into how a DJ builds the atmosphere and dynamics of a set, track by track, and in real time."
  • Ferris Bueller is Tyler Durden: "My favorite thought-piece about Ferris Bueller is the 'Fight Club' theory, in which Ferris Bueller, the person, is just a figment of Cameron's imagination, like Tyler Durden, and Sloane is the girl Cameron secretly loves. One day while he's lying sick in bed, Cameron lets 'Ferris' steal his father's car and take the day off, and as Cameron wanders around the city, all of his interactions with Ferris and Sloane, and all the impossible hijinks, are all just played out in his head. This is part of the reason why the 'three' characters can see so much of Chicago in less than one day — Cameron is alone, just imagining it all. It isn't until he destroys the front of the car in a fugue state does he finally get a grip and decide to confront his father, after which he imagines a final, impossible escape for Ferris and a storybook happy ending for Sloane ('He's gonna marry me!'), the girl that Cameron knows he can never have." (Continue reading comments for more exploration of the theme.)
  • How to Be a Successful Evil Overlord: "Being an Evil Overlord seems to be a good career choice. It pays well, there are all sorts of perks and you can set your own hours. However every Evil Overlord I've read about in books or seen in movies invariably gets overthrown and destroyed in the end. I've noticed that no matter whether they are barbarian lords, deranged wizards, mad scientists, or alien invaders, they always seem to make the same basic mistakes every single time. With that in mind, allow me to present…The Top 100 Things I'd Do If I Ever Became An Evil Overlord"
  • The Skinny on Using NASA Images: "The short version: All publicly available NASA images are on nasaimages.org, which is co-operated by the Internet Archive. It is most likely legal for you to use them for any purpose (commercial or otherwise) unless there's someone famous in the image. Keep reading for more detail."
  • Practical Tips for Combatting Swine Flu in Your Home: "*There is always some flu around and flu is always killing some people. Even when a raw mutant flu manages to kill off more people than a shooting-war, flu has never ravaged whole cities as cholera or the Black Death can do. As awful pandemics go, flu is like the snotty-nosed little sister of awful pandemics. *So if you catch the new swine flu, you're very likely not gonna die. *But since it is a flu, you're gonna kinda WISH you could die. *You're not ACTUALLY gonna die unless your lips are turning blue, you have bad chest pains, you can't swallow water, you can't stand up, you're having seizures and you don't know where you are or what your name is. As this document suggests, you're gonna want to watch out for those symptoms."

Birthday Bits

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So I turn 36 on Sunday. Pretty sure I can still claim “mid-30’s” at this point, though I’m getting perilously close to the “late-30’s.”

Upcoming or recent birthday-related bits include:

  1. Prairie and I getting bikes. This has been awesome. We’re both very glad that we decided to do this for my birthday, and that we went ahead and did it early, a few weeks ago.

  2. On Sunday, I’ll be losing the ponytail and sending it off to Locks of Love. This will mark six years since I decided that if I ever wanted to have long hair again, I better start growing it out now. I shaved my head one last time on my 30th birthday, then started letting it grow, and outside of a few trims to take care of split ends, have just let my hair grow since then. As the hairline goes and the forehead grows, though, it’s time to dodge the skullet bullet and shave it all back down again.

  3. Also on Sunday, we’ll be going to the zoo to see the brand-new penguin exhibit. H, P, and N will be joining us. Penguins yay!

  4. On Friday the 8th we’re going to the 7pm showing of the new Star Trek movie. Set phasers to ‘awesome’ (I hope…advance word is looking pretty good though).

  5. At some as-yet unspecified Saturday night in mid- to late-May, I’ll be heading down to Vogue Night. It won’t really be a birthday party as much as my monthly “gotta get out and bounce” night, but if someone were to say hello and perhaps spot me a drink, I doubt I’d complain.

  6. On July 3rd we’re going to Jason Webley‘s 11-year Extravaganza concert at Seattle’s Town Hall. This is very exciting for both of us. For a number of years, Jason did two big shows a year, one in fall and one in spring, which would always be very close to either my birthday or Prairie’s (which is Nov. 3rd, exactly six months after mine). It’s been a few years since we’ve been to any of his shows, though, as he’s been playing venues more suited to his younger, more energetic crowd, and as we’d prefer to sit in the back and enjoy the show rather than getting pushed about and stepped on (not intentionally or in a mean way, just the kind of thing that happens in a club show atmosphere) by rambunctious young’uns, we’ve been less inclined to head down to his more recent Seattle-area shows. Town Hall works very well for everyone, though — the kids get to bounce around in front of the stage, and us old fogies get to sit in the back and enjoy the music and show — so we’re looking forward to this.

And that’s everything I can think of.

And, of course, the annual bit of shameless greed*: on the off chance that someone should feel all birthday present-ish, feel free to poke around at my Amazon wishlists (helpfully categorized into photography, audiovisual, literary, gadgets, and other) or just hit the PayPal button on my about page and contribute to my Nikon D700 fund. ;)

* Disclaimer: this is mostly tongue-in-cheek, the economy sucks, and I expect nothing except perhaps some rolling of eyes and gentle mocking. Hugs and/or kind words are always acceptable birthday presents. Still, you never know what might happen, and it can’t hurt to toss the idea out there, right?

Links for April 23rd through April 27th

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Sometime between April 23rd and April 27th, I thought this stuff was interesting. You might think so too!

  • Gallery: Flickr Users Make Accidental Maps: "Billions of photos have now been uploaded to the internet, and many are tagged with text descriptions. Some are even geotagged — stamped with the latitude and longitude coordinates at which the image was taken. David Crandall and colleagues at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, analysed the data attached to 35 million photographs uploaded to the Flickr website to create accurate global and city maps and identify popular snapping sites." Neat stuff. If you dig into the actual report (.pdf link), you'll find that Seattle is the 8th most photographed city in the world, and the Space Needle is the 8th most photographed landmark in the world. Go Seattle — we're #8! ;)
  • Skin Deep Usability: On setting up a new Microsoft Surface touch-screen, "no keyboard or mouse" computer, and discovering (among other issues, like where the power cord goes, or what color 'rhodamine' is), that one 'undocumented feature' is that a keyboard and mouse are required to boot the thing: "The whole experience was probably best summed up by Amanda who, when asked why it was taking us so long to get the machine up and running, and why we all looked so unhappy, replied 'Oh, it's just so…Microsofty.'"
  • Locks of Love Helps Disadvantaged Children Suffering From Medical Hair Loss: "Locks of Love is a public non-profit organization that provides hairpieces to financially disadvantaged children in the United States and Canada under age 18 suffering from long-term medical hair loss from any diagnosis. We meet a unique need for children by using donated hair to create the highest quality hair prosthetics." I'm pretty sure I've got at least 10" of hair to chop, so this seems a lot nicer than just tossing it in the trash.
  • Get Great Gadgets. and Keep Them. – Last Year’s Model: "We love cool gadgets as much as anybody else. We just want to be thoughtful about the stuff we've bought. Even the most cutting-edge, tech-savvy geeks in the world are choosing to hang on to their phones or their iPods that still work just fine."
  • I Can Read Movies: I love, love, love the retro design of these film "novelizations". Beautiful work, and many are quite clever. Related, and also worth seeing: Harry Potter Redesign and Eight Films in Black and Red. Gorgeous work. This is the kind of stuff that makes me wish I was a graphic artist.

Introducing my Photoblog

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I think the time has come to formally introduce my latest endeavor to the world: Photography by Michael Hanscom.

My new photoblog.

As anyone who’s been paying any amount of attention to my ramblings for long knows, I occasionally pick up a camera, snap off a few shots, and hope that I’ve got something worth showing off. While I have the usual overdeveloped sense of criticism for my own work, enough people seem to think that I’ve got a worthwhile eye that I’ve finally decided to move forward on a project that’s been rattling around in the back of my head for a while, and I’m going to see if I might actually be able to sell the occasional print.

To that end, the photoblog. I’m opening things up with a small selection of some of my favorite shots from the past few years, though more shots will be added as I take the time to dig back through my archives to find more possibilities. Right now I don’t have much in the way of people, as I want to do a little research to make sure I’m on the right side of any legal considerations (that is, making sure I can sell photos taken at public events or festivals if there are identifiable people but no model releases — I think I’m in the clear, as I’m selling prints as art and not as product, promotional, or stock photography, but it’s good to be clear on things like this), but I’m hoping to get a broader range of photos up as time goes by.

In the meantime, please feel free to stop by the new site, poke around, and — should the spirit move you — pick up a print or two. If you’ve got any constructive criticism, questions, comments or words of wisdom regarding the site, let me know. And of course, as some of you have been watching my Flickr stream, if there are any particular shots you think should be featured, or that you’d like a print of, feel free to let me know…suggestions are always appreciated!

Lastly…wish me luck! I have no idea if this little project will be worthwhile in the long run, or just a fun distraction that won’t go anywhere, but I’m keeping my fingers crossed. We’ll see what happens!

Dreamhost Does Good

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Since I’ve occasionally groused about the hosting service I get with Dreamhost, I wanted to be sure to mention when things go right, instead of only when things go wrong.

For a few months, the server that my account was set up on, and which hosts all three domains under my control, was being tweaky, resulting in sporadic downtime. I’d been building up a small library of downtime reports in my support page with Dreamhost, when last month, things took a turn for the worse…and then, soon afterward, for the better. Of course, I didn’t really know about the “for the worse” part until I got the news of the “for the better” side of things.

The last time my site went down, when I submitted the support request notifying Dreamhost of the downtime, they replied relatively quickly, letting me know that the server I was on had become “unresponsive,” and they were working on getting this back up and running. About half an hour later, my sites came back up, and I didn’t think much more of it. Until the next day, when I got the following…

This is just a note to let you know that we’ve moved your account to a new server! We apologize for the lack of notice, but this was an emergency move as a perfomance and stability measure.

Apparently the server I’d been on had gone seriously downhill, and had to be replaced, necessitating moving my account to new hardware (and hopefully all the other occasional downtime I’d had was due to the developing hardware issues, and I won’t get those again). Most of the rest of the message was covering anything I might need to do to ensure that everything worked as it should, and as it turns out, I didn’t really need to do much of anything, as the transition was seamless. Then, at the end of the note…

…again, we really apologize for the abrupt nature of this move! To try and make up for it a bit, we’ve also set your account to now have unlimited disk and bandwidth, forever!

Ooooh. See those last few words? That’s nice to see. “Unlimited disk and bandwidth, forever!” No worries about storing large files (not that I tend to do that), no worries about surcharges on the (very) off chance that I get Slashdotted or Dugg. Just keep paying my yearly bill, and I’m set.

Dreamhost, I’ve had issues with you from time to time, but this? This is good. Thanks!

Archie vs. Pulp: Common People (Again)

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Slightly over a year ago, I found an inspired bit of silliness which replaced the text from an old Archie comic with lyrics from Pulp’s “Common People.” Deciding to continue the silliness, I used iMovie to put the audio of Pulp’s song under some simple ‘animation’ of the altered comic panels, and uploaded the end result to YouTube. At the time I did this, YouTube’s draconian audio scrubber that the music groups use to try to assure that we only listen to and enjoy music in ways that they approve of told me this:

Dear Member:

This is to notify you that your video Archie vs. Pulp: Common People has been identified as containing content that may be owned by someone else. The material identified in your video, the person claiming ownership of the material, and the policy they have designated for its use on YouTube are detailed below.

Material Copyright Holder Policy Countries
Audio from PULP-COMMON PEOPLE UMG Allow Everywhere

If the policy listed is “Allow,” you do not need to take action.

All seemed fine — though the song had been recognized and flagged, UMG had an ‘allow everywhere’ policy, so the video was fine. I thought that was nice, and thanked them in my blog post and on the YouTube page.

Apparently something has changed at UMG, and they’ve decided that graciously allowing fans to use bits of their artist’s music in projects like this isn’t kosher, because this morning I got a somewhat innocuous sounding email from YouTube…

Your video, Archie vs. Pulp: Common People, may have content that is owned or licensed by WMG.

No action is required on your part; however, if you are interested in learning how this affects your video, please visit the Content ID Matches section of your account for more information.

…which didn’t sound too horrid. My video “may have content” they own, “no action is required,” if I want to know how this affects my video, etc. Well, sure I wanted to know how this affected my video, so I went to YouTube, and found out that this affected my video quite a lot: it doesn’t exist anymore.

Your video, Archie vs. Pulp: Common People, may have audio content from COMMON PEOPLE by PULP that is owned or licensed by UMG.

As a result, your video is blocked worldwide.

What should I do?

Use AudioSwap to replace the audio in your video with a track from our library of prelicensed songs. After you swap, your video will be available globally.

Under certain circumstances, you may dispute the copyright claim from UMG. These may be any of the following:

  1. the content is mistakenly identified and is actually completely your original creation;
  2. you believe your use does not infringe copyright (e.g. it is fair use under US law);
  3. you are actually licensed by the owner to use this content.

Great. So I can replace the audio with different music — which wouldn’t exactly make sense — or I can enter the dispute process and try to convince someone that my use is Fair Use. I believe it is, but I’m guessing I’d probably end up on the losing end of that conversation.

And, of course, I don’t have the original iMovie file, so I can’t re-export the video to find some other way of hosting it.

However…

When I loaded my blog post, it seems that the block wasn’t totally implemented yet, as the embedded version of the video was still active (though I don’t expect this to last very long). After switching the video to High Quality to make sure the best possible version was downloaded to my computer for playback, a little bit of digging into Safari 4’s Web Inspector gave me the Google Cache URL of the video.mp4 file. A quick copy-and-paste of that URL into Safari’s URL bar, and a few moments later, the video file was sitting in my Downloads folder.

So, once again, after an upload to my webserver and through the magic of self-hosting, the video lives!

[flashvideo file=files/2009/04/archiepulp.mp4 /]

As before, credit where credit is due:

Links for April 18th through April 22nd

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Sometime between April 18th and April 22nd, I thought this stuff was interesting. You might think so too!

  • Sports fans are weird!: The strangest sports tradition I've heard of leads to probably the best lead in of any article I'll read today: "Throwing the octopus is easy. More difficult is concealing the eight-legged creature until the toss is at hand, a skill that requires determination, luck and the ability to walk normally with 4 pounds of slimy cephalopod stuffed down your pants."
  • When Worlds Collide: Spock Confronts the Ultimate Challenge: A six-page mini-comic prequel to the new Star Trek film, from May's Wired magazine (guest-edited by J.J. Abrams).
  • Talk Like Shakespeare Day: "In recognition of Shakespeare's 445th Birthday, this Thursday, April 23, 2009, will be Talk Like Shakespeare Day. Shakespeare is a part of our everyday lives. He coined more than 1,700 words still in use in modern English and his plays influence the way we think about the world we live in. Get in on the act!"
  • Doe v. Fortuny: Seattle’s Jason Fortuny (aka RFJason) ordered to pay nearly $75,000 for Craigslist sex ad prank: For the background, see Waxy's summary of the incident originally posted in 2006 when the actual incident happened, with multiple updates since then. The main link and Waxy's summary are both SFW, but many of the links from Waxy's post are NSFW. This was one of the most disgusting things I've seen someone do online, and I'm happy to see this judgement come down. Of course, this was only one person's suit against Jason — now that a precedent has been set, will more victims come forward?
  • It Was a Dark and Silly Night: Gahan Wilson Meets Neil Gaiman: "…we have some new work by Gahan Wilson: he illustrated this short animated adaptation (directed by Steven-Charles Jaffe) of 'It Was a Dark and Silly Night,' a story by Neil Gaiman, the author of (among many, many other works) 'Coraline.'"

The Narcissism Epidemic

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Continuing on the theme I started babbling about in The End of Empathy comes this Newsweek article asking, Are We In a Narcissism Epidemic?:

Perhaps, one day, we will say that the recession saved us from a parenting ethos that churns out ego-addled spoiled brats. And though it is too soon to tell if our economic free fall will cure America of its sense of economic privilege, it has made it much harder to get the money together to give our kids six-figure sweet-16 parties and plastic surgery for graduation presents, all in the name of “self esteem.” And that’s a good thing, because as Jean Twenge and W. Keith Campbell point out in their excellent book “The Narcissism Epidemic,” released last week, we’ve built up the confidence of our kids, but in that process, we’ve created a generation of hot-house flowers puffed with a disproportionate sense of self-worth (the definition of narcissism) and without the resiliency skills they need when Mommy and Daddy can’t fix something.

[…]

But no matter how you were raised, the handiest cure for narcissism used to be life. Whether through fate, circumstances or moral imperative, our culture kept hubris in check. Now, we encourage it. […] Well, you may need a supersize ego to win “America’s Next Top Model” or to justify your multimillion dollar bonus. But last I checked, most of our lives don’t require all that attitude. Treating the whole world as if it works for you doesn’t suggest you’re special, it means you’re an ass.