January 7, 2009
Favorite posts of 2008
For the 2008 recap I thought I'd pair my own narrative of narcissism with some cold hard server metrics to see if people liked reading what I enjoyed writing most last year.
First, here are the posts that I'm most fond of.
Zombiefest - What happens when you have a free weekend, a lot of alcohol, 17 movies spawned from the Night of the Living Dead, and a brother to consume it all with (oh, and a bar that wants you to DJ). Here's the first part of the results.
Iraqi on the corner - A local tale of hatred with a global context.
Evolving my music genome - What the iTunes Genius music recommendation algorithm to really says about me. (Hint: it says I don't know what the hell I am talking about.)
The biophony of Trout Lake - Nature's interweb.
Are you smarter than a student in 1924? - Also, did you know that the South lost the war?
Recursion - Art's long tradition of picture-in-picture.
Love of Country - An explanation of a big reason I went to Ghana. Still makes me well up a bit.
The Gigglesnort Hotel - The next in a series of posts trying to explain to myself why I am so messed up.
10 Days in Ghana - How I came across a man butchered to death with a machete and other initial thoughts.
An economy of enslavement - Visiting the last places Africans saw before entering New World bondage.
Ghanaian handicraft series - A six-part series on traditional crafts in West Africa and the amazing people who practice them.
Sally Struthers go home - My take on the West's wrong-headed approach to aid in Africa.
Call of the wild - Why trembling in your tent while a lion roars in the night is not so much different than that one musical passage that gives you the chills.
Rocks and hard places - Of cashew schnapps, faraway families, tribal chiefs and spirits in the material world.
Africa is a way of thinking - Probably my favorite post of the year, if not the most important. To paraphrase a related post, the things I saw in Africa will be with me forever, ineradicable viruses of the imagination.
Tom bo li de say de moi ya, yeah Jambo Jumbo! - How I almost died on safari in Kenya.
Slave to the cliché - If you love Powerpoint, don't read this. No wait, definitely read this!
But most of all, I missed YOU - It's a list! On a blog! Has to be good.
Can I blow things up? - A post almost four years in the queue: the announcement of the Forbidden City: Beyond Space and Time project.
The mashability index - Visualizing why certain artists get mixed together more frequently than others. This was fun.
At the end of the world. - Looked forward to this all year and it did not disappoint.
And here's the top ten most read posts (that were written in 2008) according to the server logs. Clearly I have no sense of my audience. I guess I only like 30% of you.
- How big is the Forbidden City?
- Forbidden City: Revealed on the History Channel
- A happening in China
- Favorite links of 2007 (see, people love lists!)
- Recursion
- Soar with turkeys
- Zombiefest
- Danger! Animated GIF from the early web! (What the hell?)
- At the end of the world.
- Testing 1-2-3
Thanks for reading, folks.
Here's last year and my favorites from 2006.
Posted at 7:24 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)
September 8, 2008
1¢ stage ... huh?
Thought I'd take a brief moment to explain the name of the blog, something I've never rightly done.
You get some hilarious pronunciations and questions, especially when trying to give out the URL over the phone in an interview, say. "A cent, as in one penny?" "Ascent's 'tage, like Hermitage?" "Nascent Stage, you mean like an infant?" "ASS-ent stage, what is this porn?"
Simply, an ascent stage is the part of the rocket that goes up as opposed to being the one that breaks for going down. Sadly, in the post-Apollo era this has mostly been the only stage a rocket has. We ain't landing anywhere with a rocket as long as we have a Shuttle.
Ascent stage refers usually to the upper half of the lunar modules that we put on the moon. The descent stage landed the astronauts (counteracting the moon's weak gravity); the ascent stage put them back up to link with the Service Module whose rocket would take them home. Simple enough.
But why the name? What I've always liked about the concept of an ascent stage (in addition to the space dorkiness) is that it implies progress, upward motion, forward movement. But also a discrete point in time, or phase. There's also something very slightly sad about it too, because to ascend means you descended at some point and you're leaving something behind. (In the Apollo case this was the descent stage itself.)
There's a classic image from the last Apollo mission where they left a camera specifically poised to capture the ascent back up to the orbiting command module -- something which had not been done on previous missions. Not sure what it is but there's something eerie and solemn about the footage that was captured. Two guys in a rickety polygon blasting off from a much more stable looking bottom half, which is now left to decay on the moon forever.
So, that's kinda the rationale or feeling behind the name itself: progress, ascendancy, upward motion ... tinged with mystery, loss, even desolation. My blog.
By the way, I'm considering a redesign. Input welcome. Via CAPCOM, naturally.
Posted at 6:40 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)
June 3, 2008
Metadata and spring cleaning
It's taken years, but I finally have backup where I want it. (Oh yes, dear readers! It's another post about data backup. Recline your chair and prepare for a mind-blowing post.)
My reasons for backing up seem to be changing. Certainly there's still the raw, precious data. Family photos and video, certain media projects -- these things have to be saved for posterity. But increasingly my reasons for wanting a backup are more about state than data. I want to return to the state my machine was in more dearly than I want the data it once contained.
Think of it in more concrete terms. What if you everything in your house -- every single physical item -- had a double in a storage facility? What if every time you bought anything you bought two and put one in a self-storage bin? Then your house burns down (and all your loved ones are safely vacationing on Maui). You can reconstruct your life from the storage facility, but it will be a massive pain in the ass. The state is all fooked. The effort involved in getting it back to a livable order is overwhelming, basically the same thing as moving -- an act which ranks just slightly below death of a spouse in terms of personal stress.
Ideally you'd want a legion of robotic moving specialists to reconstruct your house according to the old plans and place everything back as it once was. A bonus would be the option to redirect the robots as the spirit moved you, but at the very least you'd have an automatic replica. This is the source of my fascination with bootable clones.
The fact is, most of my data is replicable. My iPod and laptop all contain enough of my music library to reconstruct it if the main machine should fail. My calendar is online. Personal mail's all IMAPped up to the Great Google in the Sky. Work e-mail, replicated from servers. Photos are all on Flickr; video at any number of services. The set of truly precious, non-online-dwelling data is getting smaller and smaller by the day. Basically source files only.
My prediction is that in the near future state is all we will care about. You won't even think about data being local or remote. But you will care about speed-to-recovery. And that's all about the little things, how your machine behaves, how your kitchen was organized before the fire.
There are corollary effects of this attitude. Recently to alleviate some of the space pressure of five people in a home we decided to clean up some of the impromptu areas of storage in the house that had persisted since we moved in. You know what I'm talking about. Boxes that never got completely unpacked. Stacks of crap that made do in a guest bedroom only because you didn't know where else to put it.
I undertook the foolish exercise of building an attic in my garage. I can hardly hammer a nail straight much less build a structurally sound platform. Most of what we moved up there was non-essential: books, college notebooks (wanted to throw away but couldn't -- I'm going to need that Intro to Lit Crit some day, damnit!), winemaking equipment, random crap.
So I got it all up there. Stored. Except it wasn't really stored -- wasn't really backed-up -- unless I knew it was there. And this again is the influence of Google. Unless you can search for it, unless you know precisely how to get it back, you might as well throw it out, delete it. So I took photos of everything up there, where it lay in the attic. And for the books, well, it got a bit geekier as I finally finished cataloging and noting the location of every last volume with the superb Delicious Library.
Do I care about most of that crap up there? No. Do I care that I know the state of that crap. Absolutely. And that's the thing. If the garage burned down I would be OK. The stuff is replaceable. The index to that data is not.
Maybe I'm overthinking this because my father and brother are in the self-storage business. But I think not. Spring cleaning for me is really spring tagging.
Posted at 10:57 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)
May 5, 2008
Get ready for a little jolt, fellas.
As the Space Shuttle program goes, so goes Ascent Stage. It's time for a fundamental redesign.
The backend's been upgraded (MT 4.1) and good things are in store for the user experience too.
I shall endeavor to redo the website for less than the US $1B pledged to make pretty new American rockets. But only slightly less.
Sorry for any bumpiness.
Posted at 8:42 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)
April 7, 2008
Retweeting is just advancing in a different direction
Some housekeeping over here at Ascent Stage mission control. Site-dwellers may have noticed that the micropost area is no more. I staved it off as long as possible, but the little area for one-liners was up against a ticking clock.
You may remember that a while back I switched from a manually-updated area (pain) to one powered by the unstoppable Twitter. Thing is, in the interim with the advent of @reply functionality, Twitter became a two-way communication medium. Suddenly my carefully-crafted bon mots and trenchant insights (yes!) were subject to contamination by my irrepressible urge to respond to people. I knew I had to switch it over.
So what we have now is a running excerpt of everything that happens in my Twitterverse, including responses to people without the original context. Like listening to one half of a phone call. It is remarkably freeing, not having to care about what's there, just letting it flow. And, as Joi says, it really does kinda threaten blogging as we know it. Microposting is the new posting.
So if you're on Twitter, you can get it all sans-ramblings of the main blog at twitter.com/immerito. The Tweetstream is not, as yet, spliced into the main feed. (Feedburner, arghhh!)
Some links for you:
Follow Tweets old school thread style at quotably.com.
Fantastic Mac desktop client (kinda made it all click for me): Twitterific.
Twitter inspires all kinds of creative uses such as the ioubeer service and this fun mashup by pal Bryce.
Happy tweeting!
Posted at 7:04 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)
February 17, 2008
Danger! Animated GIF from the early web!
Heed little Sisyphus shoveling the mound that never gets any smaller.
Ascent Stage is being upgraded. I'm bound to screw something up. Gloriously.
(If you need something to do in the meanwhile flip through Stick Figures in Peril at Flickr. Always good for a laugh.)
Posted at 1:37 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)
January 3, 2008
Favorite links of 2007
359 links posted in 365 days. I just went back through them all and plucked out the most unusual, thought-provoking, or interesting of the lot. In my opinion, of course. Kinda interesting (depressing?) to note the trends of topics that capture my attention over time.*
(As a sidenote, if you're not receiving these links in your subscription to Ascent Stage add this feed here. It combines the main posts with the links. For you site-visitors the links are called Marginalia and are over in the right gutter. All links historically live at del.icio.us.)
Mindstorms Autofabrik
LEGO robots that build LEGOs. How Skynet began.
How to Speak a Book
Richard Powers on writing fiction by dictation. I knew there was something different about the style of his latest novel.
100 Years of the DJ
From "music waiter" to international superstar. A great audio-annotated timeline.
Vintage Charleston video set to Daft Punk
I enjoy watching this very much. The moves at the end are approximately 60 years ahead of their time.
No ducking foie gras law
Doug Sohn, mastermind behind the greatest hot dog joint in Chicago, takes a stand against an asinine law.
Spaceport Sheboygan
Bratwurst Capital of the World and ... the Midwest's only licensed space launch facility? What the hell?
wikisky.org
Space. Annotated.
One Picture, 1,000 Tags
Museums begin to understand the value of user-created descriptive taxonomies. Says the Met: “There’s a huge semantic gap between museums and the public.” Well, yes.
Wrigley Beer Vendors
Trading cards for the most important people in the ballpark. Fantastic.
Music textile
A fabric-based MIDI controller that is interesting because it raises the possibility of a music score itself acting as the instrument.
How to Turn a Book Into a Picture Frame
Creative. Try matching book themes to photo subjects.
The Alameda-Weehawken Burrito Tunnel
Hilarious recounting of America's greatest engineering accomplishment. Viva Maciej.
Forget team-building, shoot an after-work music video
This made my day, maybe my week. Apparently these co-workers did this in one take. Watch 'til the end.
Best Venn diagram ever
So, so true. I am not truly happy right now.
a.placebetween.us
Plot a point between two people. Want to find a bar to meet your mate equidistant from you both? This is your app.
Baseball Geography and Transportation
Alex Reisner explains the impact of changing modes of transportation on player culture and ballpark symmetry. Very well done.
reCAPTCHA
OK, this is currently the most brilliant thing I've come across in 2007. Simple, beautiful.
Serial Port: A Brief History of Laptop Music
Serious, thoughtful primer on the laptop as more than just a digital turntable.
Incredible! Why Roger Federer may be the most amazing athlete ever
This is not new, but I never tire of watching it. Kudos to Roddick on his sense of humor too.
Friends of the Bloomingdale Trail
A High Line-type project to convert an abandoned elevated rail line into a linear park through Chicago.
Baby monitor in Illinois picks up live video from NASA mission
See also, how John would be arrested for parental negligence.
If Real Life were like Second Life
Giggle. (Love the away person.)
Dunning-Kruger effect
"The phenomenon whereby people who have little knowledge systematically think that they know more than others who have much more knowledge." I have an in-law who suffers from this. Or rather, the rest of the family suffers from it.
Thousands of rubber ducks to land on British shores after 15 year journey
Amazing story of bath toys washed overboard in the Pacific that have made their way to the Atlantic.
Bud Light Swear Jar
One of the commercials that didn't air. By far the funniest. I was crying at "Doesn't count."
Man(y) With a Movie Camera
Very cool idea for a "remake" of Vertov's classic with user-submitted clips.
Watch the World(s)
My god. This is wonderful, gorgeous. Vincent would be proud.
People are reading more in the UK than they were in the 1970s
Interestingly counter-intuitive theory: "Books are ideal to fill gaps in people's schedules - and with busier lives there are more gaps."
The Manualist
Hand-fart soloist. (Thank you, Internets. Thank you.)
An entire prison does the Thriller dance
Not sure what to say about this except to wonder how many death threats the choreographer got. Impressive organization.
Barry Bonds surpasses Ty Cobb as the Biggest Asshole in Baseball History
Some contest: “Bonds’ Assholery has been enhanced by illegal drug use. Chemically induced “roid-rage” has artificially inflated his numbers. Ty Cobb established his record fueled by nothing more than bourbon and cold, steely hate."
Somewhere Nearby is Colossal Cave: Examining Will Crowther's Original "Adventure" in Code and in Kentucky
And you thought all English professors did was explain iambic pentameter, eh?
Flickr timeline with Simile
Rob Smart answers my call for a simple timeline view of your Flickr photos. Well done!
Venice charges rude tourists extra
I don't disagree with this, though it might be nice to have the rudeness quotient work both ways, i.e. a rude shopkeeper discount as well.
Sara and I just got engaged!
Did YOU laser-cut foam core as part of your marriage proposal? No, I didn't think so.
The immaturity of consumers (or “I want a refund!”)
Glad I am not the only one who thinks that the whining about the iPhone price drop is ridiculous. If you did not think it was worth $600 why did you buy it? ('Course I'm not going to say no to the $100 rebate.)
x is the new y 2007
Roo Reynolds plots the permutations of x is the new y (e.g., "white is the new black") based on Google results. Impressive and humorous.
Soundtracker
Fellow baldy Darren Shaw creates a Last.fm for playlists.
Seth's Blog: Thinking about this war
The War on Terror as a marketing problem.
The Virtual And The Far Away
Gorgeously deserted, compellingly human. From my work pal Jeff Berg.
someecards.com
ecards for when you care enough to hit send
Amazon MP3
Whoa. Millions of songs. Not an iota of rights-management. Your move, Apple.
The Open Workspace Environment: "Where a human becomes a human resource"
Including tips on limiting your odor waft radii, abolishing prairie dogging, comparisons with prison cell square footage, and more.
DOT Unveils Sidewalk Compass Markings
What a great idea. Chicagoans, don't get your hopes up. The first compass needed by the CTA is to direct it in removing its head from its ass.
Reverse Graffiti
Brilliant. Subtracting grime from walls to create art. But be warned: cleaning a wall may get you arrested.
"The half-life of an irregular verb scales as the square root of its usage frequency."
That is, the more frequently an irregular verb (to be, to have, etc) is used the less likely it is to evolve into a regular verb (e.g., the past tense of "chide" has become "chided" where in the past it was -- wait for it -- "chode".
The Moby Quotient
A handy formula to determine "the degree to which artists besmirch their reputations when they lend their music to hawk products or companies."
The Future of the Music Business
Hint: one genre of music already provides the model.
Make a Mixa
Forget CD's. Put your next mix on a cassette tape USB drive. Love it!
Using McDonalds’ As Pizza Toppings
And I thought the Goblin Cock was innovative. As described: "a culinary Frankenstein cooked by Bizarro, a crude combination of deliciousness into an artery-jamming fatty Voltron."
NeoVictorian Computing
Mark Bernstein's insights into the software developer as artisan. A good read.
The wisdom of clouds
Cumul.us is a merger of multiple weather feeds, user predictions, and suggestions on what to wear (and buy) to combat the elements. An excellent idea.
This salad container topographic map is genius.
Yes, I would have to say it is.
The Future of Reading (A Play in Six Acts)
Great exposition on the new e-reader from Amazon that people are ga-ga about.
Japan's melody roads play music as you drive
This is so great. I have often thought that the sound of changing pavement is a lot like half the stuff in my music library. And that's a good thing.
Forgotten Chicago
Bookmarked so I don't, you know, forget.
An Open Letter to a Guy I Work With Who Always Comes Into My Office to Tell Me He Sent Me an E-mail Right After He Sends Me an E-mail.
I'd like to append my name to this letter. I HATE when people do this.
Electronic Music Writing Guide
Need to write an electronica review? Here's your cheat sheet. I particularly like "an arduous slab of Powerbook abstraction."
The Worst Band Names Of '07
Worst? I think not! Deny the creativity of this sampling, just try: The Asbestos Tampons, Harmonica Lewinsky, Slut Barf, Coach Said Not To, Bi Furious. And yes, they all have MySpace pages.
Our Dumb World | The Onion
Now an annotated Google Map and Earth layer. A new country is "featured" each week. Hilarious.
You know those computers you see in the movies...
Most of the "fictional interfaces" you see are designed by this guy. What an awesome job to have.
Update:: And here are a few I liked from my stint as Guest Editor of Coudal's Fresh Signals.
Dopa, funkadelico, scratchare, and suckeroni. Hip Hop Italiano blends American slang and dialect from the bottom of the boot. Viva comic opera.
Zombies vs. Robots, a new comic so conceptually sound it is self-evidently perfect.
Intimate Exchanges is a "multi-play" where two actors make decisions Choose-Your-Own-Adventure-style, cycling through 10 characters and 8 different plays. It can be perplexing, but each show is a new experience. Here's the decision tree.
If you can't describe it in 17 syllables, perhaps you shouldn't be drinking it.
This bed sheet with printed rulers should finally give you the data you need to protect your territory.
Underpass as Photoshop. View Layers.
Tom Phillips selectively draws right onto the pages of a Victorian novel. Brian Dettmer takes it a step further and carves into the z-axis of a book. It's all about layers, you see.
Vader's labored breathing? Just pausing between sets.
Peter Feigenbaum's gorgeous model railroad slums.
* Top tags for my links: music, chicago, humor, space, design, art, maps, tools, language, travel, video, visualization, china, secondlife, photography, nasa, google, lego, mashup, ibm, architecture, mac, museum, blog, books, cubs, map, audio, baseball, flickr, ipod, history, web2.0, baby, film, parenting, social, web, gadget, itunes. Yep, that's pretty much me.
Posted at 8:43 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)
December 30, 2007
Favorite posts of 2007
Personal blogging is by definition a bit narcissistic. Compiling a list of your own favorite posts of the year, well, that's downright solipsistic. But so it is. Here's the best of this year, in easy-to-digest narrative format.
I started 2007 strong by challenging a MacArthur Genius and getting it handed right back to me. Beaten, I went to Russia and contemplated empire. Not content with the glories of the past, I experienced our glorious future of levitating trains in Shanghai.
Full of the future, I discoursed on how to change the world in the here and now, remembering our human knack for figuring out how to destroy the planet utterly. I started local, though, helping envision a better sewer.
But that was all so deep. So I got drunk on a rooftop and focused on the people who really matter, including those I never had a chance to meet. This all led to the meaning of life, naturally.
Now enlightened, I was able to pull back into my iPod-shell and dream of random things. Then I took my parents to Italy on a journey that was both wonderful and harrowing and learned how nothing is ever really random. Like Star Wars, just one story in a much larger universe.
So I relaxed by shooting rockets at friends and, ahem, aiming for the cornhole. Too much of a good thing, but of course nature has a way of balancing things out.
I shook my fist at the natural world and turned to man-machine interfaces and technological humanism. Take that!
But I was too bold. The long arm of the law, aided by border paranoia and Big Business, nearly got me for the love of artisanal fakery.
Nothing left to do at this point but have fun, so thelovelywife and I organized a small get-together.
And that, friends, was 2007.
Here's last year's best-of. For god's sake, is anything improving around here?
Posted at 3:47 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)
August 10, 2007
Next to godliness
Managing hard drive space (yes, settle in folks, this post is pure fun) is a constant problem in my home. Recent smiting from Olympus notwithstanding, keeping up with the onslaught of music, video, photos and work files is a challenge.
Recently I've come across a few apps worth mentioning for keeping tabs on just what is bloating my Macs.
I have a Smart Folder set up that only lists files over 100MB. This is useful for pruning big-ass files, the easy marks. But, other than mail archives and video rips this is a small folder indeed.
Enter Grand Perspective.
This (free) app seems like eye candy, but it is a lot more than that. It gives you a visual tapestry of your file system (though it sorta looks like a map of drive clusters, which it is not). Mousing over the map shows you collections of files, grouped by color and outlined together. This is super-useful as it highlights groupings that may be huge even if the individual sizes of the files may be small. For instance, Grand Perspective helped me move nearly 10GB of support files for LiveType onto an external drive. I would never have known all that crap was in there.
A nice complement to Grand Perspective is WhatSize, a more traditional listing of every file on your machine by size. Also free. WhatSize retains folder organization so you can see at a glance what should get the heave-ho.
Lastly, Hazel (US$21.95), an app that I have had in trial mode on my machine for a while but which, like Quicksilver, I needed a kick in the pants to get really using. Hazel is a bit like Smart Folders except that you can set up rules for nearly any kind of file. It can do just about anything to a file, especially in conjunction with Automator actions. For example, Hazel constantly monitors my drive for duplicate files, segregrates PC-only attachments I receive (for purgation in the holy fires of iWork) and automatically prompts me to remove support files when I nuke an app.
While I'm at it I might as well list a few apps that I am very fond of lately. All Mac, unless otherwise noted.
DropCopy - Opens a little wormhole on your desktop for dragging files to other machines. Unlike a folder alias it can have multiple destinations.
iPhone Remote - Access your Mac from your iPhone. You can use it as an iTunes Remote, PervCam remote viewer for the iSight, file browser, or to stream files to.
Coda - Superb single-window web coding app. Dreamweaver cowers in the corner.
Mouseposé - Nifty app that turns your pointer into a spotlight for highlighting things during presentations. Also has a keystroke mode where your typing is highlighted in big letters onscreen.
Flickr Export for iPhoto - If you manage photos in iPhoto and post some to Flickr this is indispensable. You can do everything to the photo pre-upload but geolocate it. Really solid. There's also an Aperture version.
NetNewsWire - The latest version of this newsreader adds a few great touches like iTunes-style “cover art” for the site your feed is being pulled from and great handling of embedded media and microformats. Also synchs with online version, PC app NewsGator, and an iPhone web app!
Earth Addresser - Yanks all the addresses from OSX Address Book and plots them as a layer on Google Earth. Interesting at-a-glance view of the folks you know.
HandBrake - The latest version of this DVD rip ... er, backup program has defaults for AppleTV and the iPod/iPhone. Handy. There is a PC version but it rather blows.
iStat Pro - Puts the dashboard in Dashboard. Highly configurable system status widget.
Dashalytics - If you use Google Analytics to track website traffic, this is a great window into the data. Also a Dashboard widget.
Weather Underground Dashboard Widget - Like the site it is a visual fiasco, but it displays great info. Way better than the default weather widget.
And lastly, apps that I desperately want to like, but just don't yet. (There's hope. I went through this with Quicksilver and Hazel.)
Tinderbox - Eastgate's hypertextual note-taking system-cum-personal CMS. Their Storyspace changed my life. I guess I'm expecting this to do so as well. Perhaps I should set my expectations lower for a piece of software.
Joost - Remind me why I want to watch full-screen TV on my laptop?
iPhoto '08 - Permit me to step out of the RDF for a moment, but isn't an Event just a smart folder by date?
Slife - A very cool idea for tracking and visualizing app usage over time, but it is a serious resource hog and supports apps inconsistently.
Now, go be productive.
Tags: apps, filemanagement
Posted at 4:47 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)
May 12, 2007
Travelogue
Just a short note to let readers know that there's a new site section ready in advance of my trip to Italy this summer. Actually it is just a dressed up category archive, but well-dressed I must say. The Return to Barile subsite will collect all my posts on the homecoming (and there are many already queued). It also includes some background on the whole thing, an interactive map, and links to photos and such. These extras of course are only available on the site. Sorry, feedreaders! Obviously it will fill up quite a bit more as the trip nears and proceeds.
Enjoy: Return to Barile.
Tags: barile, italy, travelogue
Posted at 11:38 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)
May 6, 2007
29 bulbs
Today was the first day in months that my calendar had not a single colored box on it. Nothing. Zip. Not a single thing to do. A good thing, too, since I got home at 4:30 this morning after a day I wasn't sure I would live through.
Start with a friend's annual Kentucky Derby party early in the afternoon, add a Cubs home win (.500 baby!), season with Cinco de Mayo cheer and a frozen margarita machine, then cap off with a concert that started at 1 AM at the Metro. (Amon Tobin. Mixed live in 5.1 surround. Sick sick beats. My mouth was agape half the show.)
So needless to say I woke late, way late. Had lunch with my saintly wife and the three kids who she mercifully steered clear of me. (Mercy for them, I am sure. I was no role model.) Then, of course, nap time for all. So, essentially my day began at 3:30 PM today. And then I started to feel guilty about wasting a completely open day. You know, the guilt of a thousand to do's paired with an empty calendar.
Why not enjoy the free day, you say? Well, I did an inventory of home tasks and here's what the list read:
Rear screen door is permanently locked from a particularly hard wind-slam. We've removed the glass pane for exit, but my kids have biffed over the door frame so many times that it seems parentally negligent not to remove the whole thing from the threshold.
Grill on the deck is rotting from the inside-out. Not that we didn't cook dinner on it tonight, but it is a serious fire hazard. Basically it is no longer a grill. It is a open gas line where one may prop foodstuffs upon several layers of carbonized former foods for cooking.
Car with expired temporary tags and plates that simply need to be affixed. You'd think I would have gotten to this after the latest ticket. Sigh.
But here's the kicker. There are 29 burnt-out lights in this house. Yes, 29. Can bulbs, regular bulbs, vanity bulbs, chandelier bulbs, outdoor floods. This place is a like a medieval scriptorium.
How did it get to this point? Not entirely sure. I kinda exhausted myself inventorying all the burnt out bulbs so now I'm on the couch catching up on Lost episodes with thelovelywife. I guess it'll all have to wait until the next empty calendar day.
UPDATE: Wife reports that the oven light is burnt out. That should be nice and dangerous to replace. Total: 30.
Posted at 8:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)
April 13, 2007
Nano is the new micro
Long time readers of this blog (hello, you two) might remember the micropost. It was a little area for blurbs too small to be full posts. I discontinued it in June 2005 for the simple reason that it was too difficult. I had to edit the homepage Movable Type template each time.
But now comes Twitter, a service built around microposting or nanoblogging, as I like to call it. So, like the marginalia, music playlist, bookshelf, and photostream (all powered by sites elsewhere and excerpted here) the micropost now surfaces on the blog via Twitter. An experiment -- as everything on this blog is, but one that I think might have staying power because of the administrative simplicity.
Feed readers: the micropost lives in the upper right of the blog home page. For now it a little bonus for coming to the actual webpage (until Feedburner supports Twitter, that is). You can subscribe to the microposts separately, though.
For nostalgists here are all the microposts prior to me canning them the first time.
Wired loves this little stuff.
Tags: twitter
Posted at 7:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)
March 17, 2007
Spring dust-off
Except it isn't spring in these parts for about two more months.
For those of you who follow Ascent Stage in a feed reader, I have changed the blended feed for the main posts and marginalia to http://feeds.feedburner.com/AscentStage. This feed appends [del.icio.us] to all Marginalia links to ease the distress of clicking on a link only to learn it is merely a link and not a meaty post. You know who you are. The old feed should still work properly. And if you're not subscribing to the blended feed, why not? By the way, the margin links are not ads. They're other places in the tubosphere that I find interesting.
MediaLoom, that dinosaur project that I'm still rather fond of, has been moved into the Ascent Stage empire. Nostalgic for Macromedia Director and platform incompatibility? Click here!
Many busted links fixed. Not all, certainly. But many.
That is all.
Posted at 10:05 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)
January 15, 2007
Forward with backup
Is there any subject as thrilling as backup? Many-- nay, most -- in fact. But lately it seems like I spend at least as much time worrying about how to preserve my data as I do creating it.
I could create a rather interesting map mashup of all the places and ways my laptops have decided to crap out, so I'm more than normally concerned about comprehensive backup. But recently over the holidays I entered a whole new stratum of data management. I thought, gee, it would be nice finally to digitize all the family video we've had laying around since my first son was born in 2001. We've not been obsessive about videotaping family gatherings; we had only 20 tapes -- few full -- in six years. I thought, I'll just whip up a quick DVD as a stocking stuffer for the wife. Idiot me. A full week later of nearly nonstop chip-searing rendering I had produced five full DVD's of video. (And if I had heard another rendition of “Happy Birthday To You” I would have lost it.) It turned out well, though the data it produced was both priceless and ginormous.
So this added to a few of my backup needs, detailed here. Ideally I need to:
- Backup my main work laptop daily such that in the event of catastrophe I can boot from the backup image and resume work immediately.
- Backup two other essential machines in the house.
- Synchronize the main work laptop and a secondary work laptop. Oh, one is Mac OS the other is XP.
- Establish a schedule that includes local, accessible backup and offsite storage in the event of real catastrophe. (“Fire! Grab the kids ... and the drives!”)
- Deal with the a massive music library and new half-terabyte of digitized video -- offsite.
I've worked almost all of it out. For nightly backup I use SuperDuper! -- a great app -- to dump changes to a perfect image of my work laptop (a MacBook Pro) to an external, bootable Firewire drive.
The other machines in the house backup monthly to a networked Lacie drive.
I synchronize the MBP and ThinkPad using Apple's smart folders, just copying over files from a Modified Since Last Backup folder to the ThinkPad. If you've ever used iTunes smart playlists you know how easy this is to set up. I suppose I could create an Automator action to do this automatically too, now that I think of it.
The last two present the problem. And this where I need your help. All told I have about a half terabyte of data to backup offsite, in case the shit really hits the fan. Time was, I'd just burn DVD's and shuttle them to friends, family, or work. But I've surpassed the feasibility of burning DVD-R's, HD-DVD storage is a a very rare thing these days, and the feasibility of online storage is hampered by cost and upload bandwidth. You'll say, buy another external drive and move it offsite monthlyl! But I loathe to buy a fourth external drive in a calendar year. What to do?
The real problem is more philosophical. Backup to another device is relatively easy -- and it is where most backup people do (if at all) stops. But to be truly comprehensive about it you need your backups in two different physical locations. Things happen. Robbery, fire, flooding. And this is where I am stuck. Help me, won't you?Posted at 5:45 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)
December 27, 2006
Favorite posts of 2006
Lists. That's what the end of the year is about.
It was a slower year on Ascent Stage than last, but as I've said I think the quality went up a notch. As the primary (sometimes sole) reader of this blog, I offer you my favorite posts of 2006.
“Mama, I gotta make my guitar louder”
"Today one of my colleagues noted that he was going to devote the next few years of his life to becoming as young as Les Paul. To this Les, in a room full of academics and museum-types, leaned back on his chair and mimicked taking a long drag from a joint. This man is 90 years old."
City of the Dead
"On this gray day nearly every mausoleum was stained about four feet off the ground with the puke-green demarcation of high water — a grim reminder that most of the bodies of loved ones were submerged during the weeks before the floodwaters receded."
Turkish delight
"This is no massage. For one, you’re on hard marble. For another, these gentlemen are probably former interrogators from the Turkish military. Despite the presence of soap and a loofah glove the whole thing is like a wrestling match where you’re not allowed to fight back."
Scissorhands
"See, five blades does give a nice shave on the open fields of ones cheeks, but for actual styling or for navigating any kind of variance in facial topography it is simply too big. I have a goatee, so getting close in to the beard is key. If I don’t I look like a hick meth addict festooned with different lengths of hair around my mouth."
Regeneration
"Only a specialist could point to what is original to the hall’s 1406 construction and what parts are copies installed since. This happens in the West too, of course, but the difference as I’ve experienced it in China is that it doesn’t matter. The originality of the building is the idea of it, what it represents."
In which I offer a series of exciting thoughts about punctuation in the 21st century
"What it comes down to is only this: I am getting to the point where I don’t trust online writing that does not contain links. Just like you’re wary of the grocer who sells “apple’s” or the the writer whose sentences run on for miles without a period, I’m increasingly uncomfortable with writing that’s link-free."
Bathroom ethnography
"The Stall Jiggler - This is the guy who won’t take no for an answer when he encounters a locked stall door."
Urban scar tissue
"We were driving posts into the dirt for a fence on an irregular diagonal property border when we hit something solid that turned out to be a railroad tie. We later learned that the screwy lot line was the result of surface train tracks that once cut through the area, the remains of which we had dug up."
Culinary turntablism
"What would this meal sound like if the zhuan pan were a recording?"
The Forbidden City: Beyond Space and Time
"System design verges on science fiction here as we move through the implications of a community space that exists on different timelines. For example what happens to the field trip group when some of your classmates decide to peel off for the 16th century?"
How to create a LEGO mosaic
"My daughter was born a few weeks ago and so naturally I went back to the Brick-o-lizer to create her mosaic. Imagine my horror to find out that it isn’t available anymore. How could I deprive my baby girl of her LEGO mosaic? Well. Obviously. I couldn’t."
Zodiac desktops
"Not sure who first said 'wallpaper makes bad stationery,' but it was my guiding principle. Backgrounds need to be easy to work against, contrasting highly with the folders and files that live on it. Photos of children, hot rods, and (sigh) rocket ships generally don’t offer this."
Wired up in my capsule to the moon
"A few weeks ago I went back to the tanks armed with a heartrate monitor in addition to the waterproof iPod. In I went, on came the album, and the simple EKG started logging."
Ore consequences
"I struggle to list a hazard that this mine doesn’t contain so in the interest of having something to blog about I’ll here detail those that it does."
Nike plus iPod minus Nike
"But I hate Nike running shoes. I think most people hate Nike running shoes. Well, this sucks. It’s like … Nike is locking people in to proprietary hardware just like … Apple."
All it takes is one bad apple
"At one point in this process my wife asked nonchalantly 'Is there any possibility that this will kill us when we drink it?'"
When the metaverse is your town hall
"You just try corralling talented, curious, script-wielding colleagues in Second Life to serve as virtual extras. It is like arranging toddlers for a photo shoot. Everyone wants to show off their latest set of wings or ability to make it rain."
Party as a verb
"We were worried about the fire marshal and the ATF. The first because we invited way too many people and we don’t have a gigantic space. The second because, well, let’s just say the freeze-distillation of the homemade apple cider succeeded."
Posted at 11:15 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)
November 7, 2006
Terrible Twos
On Oct. 1 Ascent Stage turned two. True to form the blog is behaving like a toddler: less predictable, more prone to outbursts, and frankly stinkier.
But let's have a look at this objectively.
Since inception there have been 458 posts, but only 142 posts in its second year. Way behind year one pace. In fact, I'd have to exceed the number of posts year-to-date in the last two months of this year to equal last year.
There have been 303 comments to date. The most commented posts almost perfectly correspond to the most viewed pages (which makes sense). Here are the top three most visited pages:
How To Build a Lego Mosaic
Ascent Stage Home Page
Tonsiloliths
These three pages account for almost two-thirds of all content views. Even more striking is that the two actual posts minus the home page account for 44% of all site traffic. That's kinda depressing. Almost half of traffic for two lousy posts? Clearly Howto's and obscure medical phenomema are key to Google-derived traffic nirvana.
Rounding out the top ten, but far, far distant from the top three are:
The Genographic Project
The Forbidden City: Beyond Space and Time
Outlook Detox
The topic category Science/Tech
Nike plus iPod minus Nike
The topic category Music
Deprivation and Focus
Most of the top posts came from this year. Quality not quantity, baby. Strangely missing from the top ten is Satisfying Inconvenience, the most commented-on post ever.
I've posted 865 marginalia links on del.icio.us since inception. That, at least, exceeds one a day.
Browser stats:
Internet Explorer: 57%
Firefox: 34%
Safari: 7%
The IE numbers are dead on for the Internet average while Firefox is slightly higher than the norm. I guess I've pissed off Opera users somewhere along the way.
And the platform breakdown:
Windows: 85%
Mac: 14%
Linux: <1%
That's about 10% higher for Mac users than the Internet norm. Does this mean I'm cool?
Happy birthday, Ascent Stage.
Posted at 7:28 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)
September 4, 2006
2.1
Blogchores. Nothing but blogchores on this Labor Day.
Some housekeeping notes:
- The main page has been tidied up a bit.
- Gone is the blogroll (it's not you, it's me).
- Search, feed subscriptions, and links to topics by date and by category live only on the archive page now.
- The photo sidebar now shows the five latest Flickr pics rather than a random one.
- The very bottom of the sidebar lists upcoming events, usually conferences I'll be attending.
- Comments no longer need approval. Taking a gamble on this one, but with spam mostly curbed (thanks to this) it'll be easier. Wish I could turn trackbacks back on, though. Sigh.
- Post titles in the title bar. I know, I know. Curb your urge to leap skyward in joy.
- Upgrade to Movable Type 3.32. This means virtually nothing to you, the reader, but it makes things a tad easier for me. Support for tags (about time), widgets (basically scriptable includes), and tighter external feed integration (promising but very 1.0) may lead to new functionality later on.
If you've made it this far, you clearly care way too much about my blog so ... I have a question for you (way down below). You know the marginalia links, yes? Well they are powered by del.icio.us. It couldn't be easier for me. But there are some drawbacks. The one that most irritates is that apostrophes (single quotes) get stripped out of the feed, presumably by the Javascript required to include it. Escaping the ' doesn't work. Using the numeric code for the ' does work but makes the actual entries on del.icio.us and associated RSS look awful. Sucking the feed in using MT's new feed integration doesn't include the link notes.
Witness the marginalia, denuded of the single quote (thrice)! Top is del.icio.us, bottom is the sidebar run through the Javascript shucker.
I can't abide this. Even the loss of one type of punctuation gets my dander up.
As I see it, I have three options.- Live with the lack of apostrophe, losing my footing on the slippery path that leads to complete punctutaion anarchy.
- Use the del.icio.us blog function that posts recent additions once daily (like this). I don't like this so much because, well, because it only happens once daily.
- Really drop the hammer by dumping del.icio.us and integrating links as quasi-posts right in the body, all Kottke remaindered links-like. The big advantage here is a more flexible format than linked title + short link-free description. But crap it is a lot of work to implement.
Thoughts?
Posted at 7:20 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)
March 9, 2006
Those who dwell in the gutter
Lots of travel these days which ironically provides the best blog material and the least time to write about it. More soon.
Since the time I have for composting the blogosphere is also a bit limited these days I've asked my pal Chris to man the marginalia link farm for a bit. Hope you enjoy his unique approach to agribusiness.
Posted at 9:04 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)
January 16, 2006
Get in here before we both starve!
In all the RSS retooling I forgot to mention that the original site feed (no comments, no marginalia) has changed. If you follow Ascent Stage in a newsreader and you want this feed please make sure to subscribe to http://www.ascentstage.com/atom.xml. All other feeds are at the bottom of the home page.
Posted at 10:40 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)
January 7, 2006
Feedbag
Turns out the new blog + marginalia feed was not updating. Should be fine now. Also, by popular request I have added a feed that contains blog posts plus reader comments. Happy feeding.
Posted at 2:19 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)
December 31, 2005
Two-Oh
It may not look like much, but Ascent Stage has undergone a major revision this past week. I only just got around to addressing the corrupt database issue from a while back and in the process took care of just about everything else that was bugging me about the site this whole year. So, in no particular order, here's what's new:
- Browse by Topic category is back from the dead (the corrupt db killed it).
- Browse by Date no longer sucks (as bad).
- Movable Type has been upgraded to 3.2 -- there are more features, of course, but the best is what seems to me to be faster rebuilds.
- Trackbacks are off for the time-being -- still searching for a way to prevent trackback spam as I have done with comments (which remain open). Ideas?
- There is now a merged RSS feed for the main blog and the marginalia, thanks to Feed Digest.
- My account at Last.fm, the site which catalogs my music played and powers the sidebar, has been upgraded. Those of you who listen to the streaming radio from Last.fm (which would be -- checking -- exactly no one to date) can expect it to be faster now.
- There is now an actual error page for 404 Not Found.
It is not properly catching errors yet, but it does exist.See. - There is now a consolidated Archives page as well as a single page listing every post to date.
- Site code has been cleaned and modularized. You care not at all, I know. But the general de-crufting makes me feel good.
- Search results and comment previewing are (finally) formatted properly.
- I am using Library Thing to catalog my recent reading in the sidebar. Eventually I'd like to write reviews for the books that end up in the margin, but for now I am still cataloging my library.
- For you usability folks, I've changed link colors slightly to better differentiate visited from unvisited.
- I added the now-standard RSS feed icon to denote subscribable feeds.
- Lots of other stuff that would bore you even more than the above, if that is possible.
There are some deep links that are broken still and I've not fully tested in IE or Safari, but for the most part the ship is seaworthy.
So, enough with the housekeeping. Time for 2006 content.
Posted at 1:58 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)
December 10, 2005
Cleaning up the gutter
Quick note of thanks to Jeff for manning the marginalia links this past week. Good stuff. Just one question: how do you really feel about religion?
I've got a backlog of links to post so expect a dumping.
That is all.
Posted at 9:37 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)
December 2, 2005
Guests in the margin
An experiment in perspective for the next week, Ascent Stage will cede control of the margin links to Jeff Greer, fellow geek, avid connoisseur of web goodness, and pal. Hopefully he'll have some unique nuggets for us. Don't let my broad readership down, Greer.
By the way, if you're in a newsreader you'll need to subscribe to the marginalia feed seperately to see it.
Posted at 6:53 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)
November 14, 2005
More junk for your inbox
Those of you don't use newsreaders and who hate coming to the site only to find it looking exactly like it did last time you checked may be interested in the e-mail subscription option I've added at the very bottom of the page. For the exceptionally lazy, you can avoid scrolling and subscribe here.
Check your junk e-mail folder for my upcoming posts on Viagra, mortgage deals, brazen teen nymphomaniacs, and East African investment opportunities.
Posted at 1:24 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)
October 19, 2005
Please standby
Seems the blog's database is corrupt -- which has screwed up rebuilds, feeds, and search. Movable Type recommends upgrading to 3.2 and starting from a fresh db instance. Ugh.
So buckle up. It'll be a bit bumpy around here for a while.
Posted at 8:38 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)
October 17, 2005
Older blog entries
Talk about age discrimination. Older posts are the bane of blogs because (1) they virtually become invisible when they move off the home page and (2) they are the targets of almost all comment and trackback spam. And yet, and yet, we love them. We need to link back to them and bring them into more current discussions.
So, I appeal to you, blog readers, to help me with something that should be simple. I want to create an "Older Entries" link at the bottom of the home page that takes you back a few weeks sequentially so that you can continue reading after the cutoff point for posts on the main page. On these pages you could conceivably go "forward" again in time. I've seen this functionality on various blogs but I'm not sure how to do it in Movable Type. Gotta be a simple tag, archive template, or plugin, no?
Posted at 10:51 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)
October 1, 2005
Happy birthday, Ascent Stage!
Plink! One year ago today I added a single drop to the ocean of blogs. 255 posts and 397 sidebar links later I 'm still enjoying it. If reading this blog is 1/100th as pleasurable as writing it then maybe the audience will come back for year two.
In honor of this milestone I'm performing a few upgrades which I'll roll out this week.
Thanks for reading, everybody!
Posted at 8:47 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)
August 27, 2005
More than marginally better
Quick housekeeping note. I'm no longer fetching the marginalia links sidebar via a third-party RSS reformater. Instead, the front page now pulls straight from my del.icio.us account. Del.icio.us calls these Linkrolls and they are mighty speedy. Recommended.
Posted at 2:16 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)
June 10, 2005
No one calls them microcomputers anymore either
Well the micropost experiment failed miserably. Culprit: time. Rather, lack thereof. I never got around to integrating microposting into the posting mechanism or the RSS feed/archives. So it was a manual process from start to finish. From now on all tiny posts will happen as regular blog entries. Better that way.
For the record, here are all the microposts to date.
++++++
My health club is promoting a kung fu class for three-year-olds. Short of an intro to electrical re-wiring I'm unable to think of a worse form of recreation for my child. Hee-yaa!
"Install a dashboard funtion which controls the speed of the wipers so that they keep time with the stereo." from Idea-A-Day
My son is having trouble eating a hot dog. Wife thinks fast. Carves top of frank into a cone. Slits ends, inserts potato chips as foils/stabilizers. Presents to son as as rocket ship. Fascinated, he eats the whole thing in between blast-off noises. Brilliant!
How hard is it to get NASA back on track? Perhaps it requires a rocket scientist.
Yearn for a simpler time, Lego block spacegeeks? Can’t stand specialized bricks that can only be used to build one damn thing? The Classic Space forum is for you (and me, obviously).
Today’s philosophically-profound spam: “Anyone who considers arithmetical methods of producing random digits is, of course, in a state of sin.”
Last week I installed a great snippet of code for the input forms on this site and have not had a single piece of comment spam since. I’m in a bit of awe at this hack and wish there were one for trackbacks too. And no, I am not telling you what it is, you crazed Nigerian Viagra-addled Texas Hold ‘Em Freak.
What do you get when you mix a Kraftwerkian vocoder, disco grooves, and an earnest profusion of power chords? Why, Robot Rock, of course!
The WSJ has a great article on “Rock's Oldest Joke: Yelling 'Freebird!' In a Crowded Theater: For his part, Mr. Doughty suggests that musicians make a pact: Whenever anyone calls for "Freebird," play it in its entirety -- and if someone calls for it again, play it again. "That would put a stop to 'Freebird,' I think," he says. "It would be a bad couple of years, but it might be worth it."
iTunes as social icebreaker is an interesting idea. “Hi there, I noticed your taste in music is awful. May I buy you a drink?”
Note to person dumping the room service trays outside my door. If you are doing so out of compassion because you think I am hungry, thank you, but a knock would be helpful since I don't really care for half-day-soggy cereal. If you are doing so because you don't want it to clutter your slice of hallway, please stop. I have almost stepped into your breakfast wreckage twice now. Oh, and eat your strawberries or you'll get scurvy.
Fugitive Haiku
Poet-of-the-month
No background check required
Please keep the award.
The plural of the word 'mail' is simply 'mail' so why do people consider 'e-mails' the plural of 'e-mail'? This bugs me way more than it should.
There's a guy who works out at my health club who uses the pay phone every time he is there. But he also has a cell phone. I see him on it all the time. This can only mean one thing, right? He's having an affair. Has to be.
Note to interior designers. If we ask you to come over for a consultation on how to redesign/expand our home don't ask me if I really need all the computers I have on my desk. This will not win you business.
Naples, Italy is on the peninsula's southwest coast. Naples, Florida is on that peninsula's southwest coast. Is this a coincidence?
If one were not careful overhearing others' conversations in restaurants one could surmise that there is an entire stratum of society whose perception of Christianity is solely informed by The Da Vinci Code. This would be unfortunate.
I heard today that 6% of Americans have passports. Surely this will increase now that Canada requires a passport to cross the border, but good golly that seems suprisingly low. And I'm from the flyover states.
On a flight recently the pilot left the cockpit for coffee and a lav break, but not until a burly flight attendant -- the burliest they had around, that is -- positioned a metal drink cart perpendicular to the aisle as a rampart blocking access to the entire forward galley area. He just stood there with arms crossed glaring down the aisle. I'd never seen that before. You'd think a lockable door separating the main cabin from the cockpit/gallery/lavatory would do the trick, but clearly there are problems blocking passengers from emergency egress.
"Don't sweat the small stuff. And don't pet the sweaty stuff." Written on a Vancouver pub window.
"Yeehaw!" is not a foreign policy. Not new, but this bumper sticker made me laugh.
"You know it is spring in Chicago if you are cold at Wrigley Field. When you are no longer cold, it is summer." - LG
You don't have it this bad, but you can probably relate. Prepare to waste a good a good half-day.
Why have the voicemail menu options always recently changed? And why won't you tell me what has changed about them? Press 1 for recent changes. Would that be so bad?
Forgot this one on the friends-who-sell-stuff post. Actually, didn't know about it. High school pal Diana Jacklich (now Hamann) is the Wine Goddess. Quite an appellation.
One of my favorite authors, Steven Johnson, is on The Daily Show tonight talking about his new book Everything Bad Is Good For You, a piece of tinder that has the blogosphere alight.
Posted at 9:29 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)
April 25, 2005
Stabbed in the trackback
A while ago I installed a small script that disallows comments on this blog that are not actually typed in. That is, it looks for multiple keystrokes as opposed to one single dump of text -- the behavior of a spambot (or someone who copies-and-pastes comments wholesale). It has stopped 100% of the spam I used to deal with daily.
Alas, the scourge of trackback spam persists. Does anyone know of anything that will effectively block trackback spam? Ideally it too would be a keystroke-based defense, but anything that really works would do. I'd hate to have to shut off trackbacks as they are one of the most innovative things about blogs!
Help?
Posted at 9:47 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)
March 6, 2005
In the gutter
I've been messing around on the right side of the blog alot lately. Here's what's new.
I've felt the need for some way to post blurbs that either have no relevant link or don't warrant the focus of the main flow. Thus, the micropost. Right now it is updated manually, but I am looking to automate. Gotta be an MT sideblog plugin or something, right?
The marginalia section is a del.icio.us-powered link farm. I'm not quite done tagging the links themselves, but when I am that'll start all kinds of fun. Like this.
Recently played tunes comes courtesy of the excellent Audioscrobbler service. If you have not checked this out yet, do. Basically, you install plugins for your audio programs (iTunes, etc.) and everything you listen to is logged at Audioscrobbler. Over time the site develops a very nuanced profile of your musical tastes. But the real value is in the social functions. You develop musical "neighbors" and can track musical "friends". Best of all your profile powers a customized radio stream called last.fm. Personalization and social computing done so right.
Two sidenotes on this section. First, like the marginalia, the recently played list is just an RSS feed formatted and served by RSS Digest, which I recommend. But the shortest refresh period is 30 minutes for RSS Digest and this really is not quick enough for the playlog feed. So I am exploring the MTRSSfeed plugin to take one step out of the process. Anyone had any luck with this?
Second, while Audioscrobbler has plugins for iTunes and syncs up with the recently played tracks on your iPod there was no "plugin" for the Audiotron networked audio device, the component that supplies music to the rest of my house. Not tracking the Audiotron would have meant radically skewing my listening profile since the genres I listen to throughout the house differ substantially from what I listen to in front of my computer. But, as happens so often on the web, as soon as you need something, it appears. Kelly Felkins posted a Perl script called Atronscrobbler for doing precisely what I needed. Not only that, but he was kind enough to make code revisions on-the-fly to get it to work for me. The script runs on a computer and just polls the Audiotron and pushes updates to Audioscrobbler. Now, with the exception of the kids' music that is skewing my profile, I am completely covered. Anyone else have the Audiotron-Audioscrobbler combo going? If so, there's a group devoted to it now.
The recommended music section is mostly the same, except that links to the iTunes Music Store now contain my affiliate code. If you don't want Apple to make a micropayment to me for the referral then you can skip this. But why would you deprive me of these penny fractions? Note that, where possible, album info links to discogs.com. Also, I will link to un-DRM'ed files, if they exist, rather than to iTMS.
The outbound links section is redone and powered by Blogrolling. I'm not sure it is working entirely properly yet.
Lastly, the GeoURL badge links to this blog's neighbors in meatspace.
There are other minor updates, but that's the bulk of 'em. Thanks for reading.
See also: Marginalia
Posted at 12:48 PM | Permalink | Comments (5)
February 19, 2005
Marginalia
I've been searching for a sideblog to post quick links to. I kinda knew it would have something to do with del.icio.us, so when I stumbled upon Veen's recommendation to use it with the superbly simple RSS Digest I knew I had it. Check out the Marginalia column at right for updated niceties throughout the day.
Posted at 8:30 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)
