Offshoring

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Some things from last night’s Weblogger meetup that just popped into my head.

While Jake was interviewing Chas and I, the topic of offshoring came up. I then decided that the next time I go on vacation, I’m going to turn guest-blogging duties over to one of my regular readers that lives overseas. That way, I’ll be offshoring my blog.

Later I was standing outside with Kristin and Ian, and they commented on my Daring Fireball t-shirt, saying that they needed to make their own (their own site t-shirts, that is, not make their own bootleg Daring Fireball t-shirts, though that got some laughs). They figured that they could probably pay local kids a dollar a shirt to do some nice ghetto-style silkscreening. This led to a mix of child labor/sweat shop/offshoring jokes, culminating in my declaration that, “We only abuse local children!”

Politically correct? No.

Funny?

Definitely.

iTunes “B-Boy Stance (Freestylers Revenge)” by Freestylers feat. Tenor Fly from the album Plastic Compilation Vol. II (1997, 6:50).

Mixes now Podcast compatible

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After poking around a bit, I discovered that (as long as I’ve got everything figured out correctly) it would be fairly easy to enable Podcasting support for the mixes I’m posting.

In theory, then, the post for Difficult Listening Hour 01 should now be Podcast ready, and I’ll do the same for all future mix sessions.

If there are any problems or issues with this, just let me know, as I’ve got no real clue what I’m doing here. :)

June Meetup

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Fun conversations and gadgetry at the Webloggers Meetup last night.

Apple eMate, June Webloggers Meetup, Ralph's Grocery, Seattle, WAPhillip Torrone brought a bunch of old and new hardware, gadgets, and toys along, including an Apple eMate, a Newton, and his cell phone — which is actually an old rotary phone that he’s hacked the cell phone hardware into. Pretty impressive!

Chas and Pops and I spent some time talking about Podcasts, and the possibility of my turning my dj mixes into a podcast stream. I’m still not entirely sure if I’m going to move that way, but I’m at least running it around in my head.

June Webloggers Meetup, Ralph's Grocery, Seattle, WAJake was wandering around interviewing anyone who’d sit still in his vicinity for more than a minute, and tossed a few questions my way. Look for some rather brainless-sounding pauses, “um”s and “aaahh…”s from me in an upcoming podcast from him at some point, if he doesn’t edit me out completely. ;)

As things were winding down, I spent a little time chatting with Kristin and Ian, both first-time attendees. Much enjoyed were the possibilities of answering Jake’s “What tech issue would you ask your state representative about if you had the chance?” question with “Teledildonics“, and Kristin and Ian’s picture outside the local Department of Homeland Security office.

A walk home afterwards, accompanied for a while by Jake and Chas until they went off their respective directions, and the evening was done. Not bad at all.

iTunes “My Weakness” by Moby from the album Play (1999, 3:37).

Tron sequel back in the works?

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An item in Boing Boing about Disney comic books caught my eye today. Not for the comic books, but for the subject of one of them…

…Tron, an extension of the original film and the 2004 video game Tron 2.0, as well as a lead up to a second feature film…

Could the long-hoped-for sequel to Tron finally be back in gear? I don’t want to get too hyped up about this — the last time I did, it turned out to be a 3 — but I can certainly keep my fingers crossed.

iTunes “New World Firestarter” by Bloodhound Gang, The/Ministry/Prodigy (2003, 6:05).

DJ Wüdi Mix: Difficult Listening Hour 01

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Yesterday while poking around on my Audioscrobbler statistics page, I clicked through to look at the statistics for my own mixsessions, and was pleasantly surprised to find that there are a few other people out there listening to them. Not many — but even one more than myself was enough to get my attention.

Prompted by that, and egged on by having a server that’s able to serve things out at a decent speed, I thought I’d start posting my old mix sessions again.

All the mixes I’ll be posting were mixed ‘live’ — running a Pioneer dual CD mixer directly into my computer and recording straight to .mp3 — and have had no post-mix editing done in the computer. As such, they’re not flawless, but they’re not bad, either, if I do say so myself.

Here’s the first: Difficult Listening Hour 01 (43m 03s, 39.43Mb). Tracks included are:

  1. Depeche Mode ‘Headstar’
  2. Wink feat. Trent Reznor ‘Black Bomb (Jerry in the Bag)’
  3. Pop Will Eat Itself ‘Menofearthereaper (Concrete No Fee No Fear)’
  4. Coil ‘The Snow (Answers Come in Dreams II)’
  5. Underworld ‘Dirty Epic (Dirty)’
  6. Drum Club ‘Sound System (Underworld)’
  7. Rabbit in the Moon ‘Subfusion’

Download, drop into your .mp3 player, and — hopefully — enjoy!

Update: If I’ve got things right, I should be podcast-enabled now.

Update: I’ve used iTunes to create a CD cover image, ready to download and print for a slipcase, or toss into iTunes. This should be the last update to this post…next week I’ll have a better idea of what I’m doing, and should be able to get all these steps done in one swell foop. :)

I can dream…

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Today, one of Seattle’s newspapers (I don’t remember which) had a huge headline across the top of the page:

JACKSON FREE

My first thought on seeing that was wishing that it was a declaration of content, not just a news story. I’d be thrilled if everything I read was “Jackson Free”.

Maybe now that the trial’s over, we’ll get a bit closer to that oh-so-happy day.

iTunes “Mr. Angry” by µ-Ziq from the album In Pine Effect (1995, 5:36).

LiveJournal Oddness

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Just wanted to thank Leareth for letting me know that my LiveJournal feed had suddenly gone all pear-shaped. I’ve found and fixed the problem, and it should go back to normal the next time LiveJournal updates the feed.

Also, a quick note out to the other 22 LiveJournal users out there who are subscribed to the woody_eclectic feed — I have no idea who set that feed up, but it wasn’t me! While I’m thrilled that someone did, there’s two important side effects:

  1. I often don’t know when the feed gets wonky.

  2. I don’t get any comments left to the posts on the feed. If you’d like to leave comments for me (which, in my world, is always a good thing), you’ll need to click through the link at the very top of the post (which usually looks something like http://feeds.feedburner.com/Eclecticism?m=758). That’ll send you to my real journal, and you’ll be able to comment there.

Just thought y’all should know. ;)

iPhoto Quandries

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A few questions about iPhoto — things that don’t make sense to me.

  1. Why can’t I export items that are on a burned DVD (or CD, I assume)? I’d certainly understand not being able to edit photos, rename them, assign tags, and so on — it’s stored on read-only media. But why in the world can’t I export unless the photos are stored on my local hard drive?

  2. When I drag photos from an archive on DVD into my local photo library in order to export them, why can’t iPhoto keep track of the correct tags? While the tags are fine in the archive, as soon as I copy them into the main library, the photos end up tagged semi-randomly, usually with only one or two tags (and those often seem to be “wedding” and “family”, for some reason).

  3. What is iPhoto doing when it loads an archive from DVD that was created with an older version of iPhoto and it presents you with the “Updating iPhoto Library” dialog box? Obviously, it can’t be updating the database on the DVD, that’s write-only media. I think that it’s creating an updated copy of the archive’s database on the hard drive to use, but if that’s the case, why doesn’t it save that archive for later use? It seems to me that it wouldn’t be terribly difficult to do that, and yet every time I try to load an archived photo library, I have to sit and wait for iPhoto to think.

Thanks to these three issues, I may end up re-importing my three DVDs of archived photos so that they’re all on my hard drive — and then hope that having all the photos available doesn’t slog iPhoto down too terribly. Not my preferred approach (especially as, given issue number two, I’d likely have to go through and re-tag all the photos), but as it is, I dread having to go back to old photo archives.

iTunes “Shining Star” by Earth Wind and Fire from the album Pop Music: The Golden Era 1951-1975 (1974, 2:50).