rickshangle.com

In my standard/excellent style of getting on “deck” with things a year or five behind the wavefront, I recently became aware of 5ives. If your A.D.D. prohibits you from getting all the way to 1 (or 3) on any given top-ten list, check it out and, at last, get your satisfaction.

That looks like fun. Let’s kick off the party right, six-style:

Six Things that Should Be Nuked from Orbit, no order, 12-16-2006:

1. Oasis albums after “Be Here Now”[1].
2. Any Fanninghive-related organism.
3. Noise-canceling headphones sold by Brookstone.
4. The xenomorph-infested atmospheric engineering facility residing on LV-426.
5. The TV Mini Series Event The Lost Room. I know life’s not f-ing fair, Peter Krause. Neither is the fact that this show sucks in a most intense and onerous way, except for the presence of Julianna Margulies… which was only a passing fancy/distraction once Kelley told me she saw JM in a sushi place in NYC once, and that (on that particular night) she has a freakishly huge head in proportion to her body. Instant downgrade from “stone fox on the career rebound distracting me from the belief that The Lost Room was being written as it was being filmed” to “new-style Burger King commecial freakism”.[0]
6. Not being able to think of six things that should be nuked from orbit, due to a general sort of malaise/torpor/vapor filling the room this evening. But wait, I got it…
6.1: Malaise vapors!
7. (bonus) The Burger King commercial Burger King.

[0] I’m all about making friends in Hollywood.
[1] Be Here Now should also possibly be nuked from orbit. If a half-yield, sort of 1 kiloton nuke is possible, I’d consider it. But then again, do you want the target destroyed or not? Of course the answer is “you want it vaporized”. Be Here Now, mon amore.

I am acquainted with this guy, Jeffrey T. Meyer, who does a podcast out of Muncie, Indiana called Good Beer Show, and if you like good beer and local music, you should check it out. Not to mention that JT is a good guy.

Jeff and his friends basically sit around a large beer house caller the Heorot, drink and discuss good beer (i.e. not Miller Lite aka “Football Beer”) without pretense, and and listen/talk to local bands. The podcast’s gone from standing still to essentially national phenomenon (in the podcasting world) in around 18 months, so that’s all good.

PodCastAwards.com is having it’s 2nd (3rd? whatever) annual award thing, and Good Beer Show is again nominated in the food/drink category (they won last year).

Go out there every day from July 28th through August 11th and vote for the Good Beer Show. If you don’t feel good about that, how about going and getting the g.d. podcasts, listening to a few, and then voting? While you’re out there, vote for some other shows. Don’t listen to podcasts? No problem… pick a few names at random that sound cool.

Anyway - you’d be doing yourself a favor (if you like indie music and beer and people shooting s**t) to listen to Good Beer Show, but barring that, you’d be doing JT a favor with your vote. DO IT!

Good Beer Show on About.com, so you can get a quick feel that jt and co do not support devilry (any more than the standard person)…

I’ve reached the point where I won’t use more than one web browser on a regular basis, and that has led to some switching in the last year or so.

why? because i find the idea of running more than one app that does the same thing, due to one having some feature/support the other one doesn’t have, to be deeply offensive. given OS X’s profound appetite for memory[5], even moreso.

I’m assuming each step of this switch is driven in part by JavaScript being great/marginal/incomplete on various platforms, but it’s not in my nature to know precisely why I’m making the move, just whether I’ve stopped moving, or not.

In the age of del.icio.us and outsourcing all of my mail and calender functions to Google, moving around between browsers isn’t such a big deal… except for the fact that I need to keep doing it.

What I’d ideally like to be using: Safari
Because: Integrated RSS, fast, the shiny Apple logo on it, et al.
But it doesn’t: Work with Gcal

I also wouldn’t mind: Camino
Because: It puts Safari’s speed/crack-gnomes to shame, imo. It’s very fast and very basic.
But it doesn’t: Support job’s web portal.

What I am using: Firefox
Because: It works with g*, my bank, my preferred pr0n sites, and now my company’s web/collab/community portal
But it doesn’t: Respond very fast. Feels as bloated as I am.
Forces me to: Use Google Lab’s G-reader or whatever it’s called for news, which isn’t a bad thing. g-readermachino’s sharing functions need some work.

We’ll see how many more shifts I make before 10.5.

[5] Ok… all applications, on all OSes, are hungry for memory.

It’s telling that I think quizzes like this one mapping your personality to superheros are dumb… yet I find them endlessly enjoyable.

I’m the Hulk, 70%. Wolverine does not appear on my list at all.

## important update!

Check it.

This was very exciting to me until I noticed that I’m characterlstically separated between “Yoda” and “an Ewok” by only 11%.

I’ve been getting some of this recently, in the last few days:

Coupled with the periodic “Whoops! I can’t send your mail right now! Try again shortly!” dialogue.[0]

I won’t say I’m getting it a lot, but the fact that I’m getting it at all (since I’ve never experienced anything even remotely resembling lack of 100% availability from the Google apps I use[1]) is notable, although I don’t know what it means.

[0] I realize this assertion would be more credible if I had a screenshot of said dialogue.
[1] gmail, search, cal, spreadsheet[2], newsreader.
[2] 24×7, I’m using spreadsheet.

update

this post contains links to sound and video and stuff, but (as far as I know) no porn. Unfortunately. Maybe next time.

In my standard excellent style, I’ve fallen into the YouTube k-hole hard in the past week, what… 12 months behind the masses? 24 months? Five years? Who knows. No one knows.

So, for the benefit of the one other person out there who a) is logged in 24×7xOO but b) doesn’t know, YouTube is a video networking site. Post a video, it goes to their server, and gets streamed on demand. Rate it, talk about it, have fun. Make playlists. Like Google Video, but better as far as I can tell… and without pay content.

Well, it was better… when there was a ton of copyrighted content out there to watch for free, and (at the time, inexplicably) no one (i.e. the copyright holders) seemed to be doing anything about it.

There is a s*itload of clearly copyrighted content on YouTube, such as this immortal ruby from Bob and David[1]:

It did make me wonder, how the hell are people getting away with posting this stuff?

Well, I guess not everyone is… given the amount of ripped SNL content available last week (quite a bit) versus this week (one, that I could find in five minutes of searching; of course, it’s a bit so powerful that it will really make you, you know, explore the space)[3].

Which leads us to this truly puzzling specimen.

Which means YouTube is probably not going to be as great next week as it was last week.

Which really brings me back to the number five, and the fact that everyone[2] clearly discovered YouTube last week. So maybe I’m not behind the curve after all. I am using Google Calendar, people.

Anyway, re: YouTube… you can still search on wardrobe malfunction and get some hits, so the ball is still in play.

rds

[1] Bob Odenkirk and David Cross, formerly of HBO’s Mr. Show with Bob and David are the demiurge of modern comedy and I respect them tremendously, despite me kind of screwing them over by posting this link to content they’d, I’m sure, rather be selling on a DVD. But come’on - the Story of the Greatest Story Ever Told is so great, so tremendous, it should be in the public domain, for the good of humanity. Also, Monsters of Megaphone. Sports bra, sports bra, lifts and separates. Sports bra, baby won’t giggle around. Now she’s running all over towne. Thank you!”

[2] Namely people who have copyrights on their intellectual property and are willing to fight for it.

[3] And NBC clearly hasn’t found it yet.

[4] And yes, I know [4] isn’t anchored by anything, but if you don’t know who David Cross is, that’s ok, I won’t shame you, but it’s a situation that needs to be fixed. Perhaps a topic for another time. Or, if you don’t want to wait for that other time [5] you can read this(profane; brilliant). Also, he dated Chloe from 24.

[5] Which will probably never come.

## Update

RIAA gets on deck v. Google Video / YouTube. Takedown.

re: two new Google datacenters in Oregon.

Hiding in Plain Sight, Google Seeks More Power - New York Times

Discussion on Slashdot.

Dam that may (or may not) have a hand in controlling water level in the river running alongside said datacenters.

image source

## update 06.27.2006

Chicago Sun Times: Student faces expulsion for Web post

Either something relative to this situation is not being reported/discussed, or I’m an idiot, because I’m failing to see what this kid did and why it deserves expulsion.

Big discussion on topic at Slashdot.

I’ve not been successful in finding the full text of the kid’s original post, which I feel is essential to understanding this.

Caveats: I’m not in high school, but I did graduate from a public one (four years prior to the web exploding), and from what I remember it was a low grade fascist regime. Also, I don’t have a kid in high school.

Or, I finally give last.fm a full-on try. My iTunes Library is backed up.

… read the following with the acknowledgement that I don’t really understand exactly what last.fm does for me… stay tuned and I’ll let you know. Because I’ve never let my complete lack of understanding surrounding a technology stop me from early and rapid adoption, often with associated destruction of my or someone else’s data/hard disk.
Last.fm, at least it has a cool name.
I stumbled onto it last (haha!) November, but multiple threads on various discussion boards indicated that iScrabble or iScrivener or iScabby or whatever the OS X what-music-you’re-playing-brain-sucker-client is called wasn’t quite ready for prime time kept me from locking in full-metal. Specifically the references to iMiniverShevy eating the iTunes Library file left me feeling sick and dry.

Well… by all appearances it’s still not quite ready for prime time (iScripeneyer been going out to lunch on my G5 PowerMac nearly constantly since I loaded it), but it wakes up from its coma on rare occasion and appears to do something. With what reliability still remains to be seen.

Sometimes when I reload my blog page containing my “last.fm now playing links!” they render… and sometimes they don’t! At the moment I write this it does render, but appears to be about 1-2 hours behind in my playlist. Whether this is due to the rendering, something puking in iShatner (which has been “red note” as opposed to “green note” for at least an hour) or the ubiqutous Other Cause is unknown. I’m not in Troubleshooting Mode at the moment; I’m in Let This Run Overnight And See If It’s Still Beating In the Morning Mode. And yes, I have backups.

And about half an hour ago, the last.fm site was unavailable… for about half an hour.

These are all to be expected, though. We’re just getting the party started.

Beyond the social/good-of-music-taste[1] humanity networking elements of last.fm, the primarily selfish motivation of getting rid of Now Playing, which went from sort-of-reliable to completely useless in about two releases (and whose developer hasn’t done new OS X versions recently).

So… I’ve read it takes about 300 songs of brain-sucking before the power really starts to kick in. Allright, God, let me have it!

rds

rds @ last.fm

ps. ok, I’m a simple creature… ditching Now Playing was half my motivation for finally trying last.fm… and the fact that Malloreigh Suicide[Girl] is part of why-don’t-you-sign-up? marketing kit was probably the other half. Good work, somebody. Check it!

[1] Way too many people (or robots) here apparantly hold Coldplay in way too high regard.

Commentary and brilliant graphic of Sun’s revised corporate plan for the post-McNealy era @ ars technica.

Just the strategy graphic, for those who are lazy/cool:

Jeremy Reimer / ars technica

rds