That Not So Fresh Feeling

Hey! I just finished this. It’s only 10 months late. Come listen to my favorite songs of last year and wonder why it took me 10 months to finish and publish this.

Some hints: 2 British bands, 2 Boston bands, 3 other American bands, 3 Canadian bands.

 

 PTBNL: Episode 4: Top 10 Songs of 2007 [44:46m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

Around Wednesday I started feeling sore — an achy back and neck. It got progessively worse (from handleable to requiring a few Advil every couple of hours) until Saturday when I had a fever, headache, and even worse back pain. It was a fantastic way to start a long weekend.

So, given that I was going to be spending a majority of my time on the couch or in bed, most of it was going to be consuming a bunch of the media that had been collecting over the past few weeks. 10 or 12 podcasts, 3 Netflix DVDs, and a whole bunch of season finales on my DVR (Heroes, Lost, Veronica Mars). With work and the generally nicer weather, a variety of things have been building up across my network.

It’s an odd feeling to be anxious about the things building up on your “convenience” devices (DVRs, iPods, DVDs-by-mail). The whole point of these tools is to make life more convenient (which they do!), but the downside is that from time to time, when you’ve been really enjoying the convenience, you get to a point where you’re not sure how you’re going to get through all of the media you’ve saved up. It’s an oddly daunting feeling.

It’s the downside (if you can call it that) of the “digital-content-at-your-convenience-era”. Media overload.

After spending a whole bunch of time on the couch, I’ve made it through most of the TV on my DVR. I’ve still got 7 or 8 hours of podcasts to get through, but I’ll make up that time at work (just one of the benefits of working at a computer). Hopefully, I’ll get through one more DVD, too, which would make this little bout with what seems to be the flu about as successful as it could be (minus the night sweats, fever, and inability to sleep).

Finally, Episode 3 of the Podcast To Be Named Later. The sound quality is craptastic since I used the mic built into my MacBook.

However, you’ll hear some awesome music by:
Hallelujah the Hills

Taxpayer

and …

Dear Leader.

Mostly Dear Leader. Like a lot of Dear Leader.

I’ll put up a full track listing later.

 

 PTBNL Episode 3 [32:20m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

I got a decent response to the first podcast, so here it is, the “long awaited” second episode of the podcast still yet to be named where I bring you music that has caught my ear in the past week or so.

This week you’ll hear an artist I mentioned in passing last week who may have my favorite pop song of 2006, a band with what I think is the album of the 2006 (so far), a band that will be releasing a contender for album of 2006 in a couple of weeks, a guy who played in Boston just a couple of days ago, and a pint-sized MC who might have the single of 2006. Sure, it’s two months early to be naming off the top anything of the year, but it’s a theme and everything needs a theme.

Speaking of themes, Brett’s got a pretty cool theme on his podcast over at the Wicked Pissa Podcast. And he threw me a link, so how can I not return the love?

On this episode, you’ll hear:

• Ain’t No Other Man — Christina Aguilera, Back to Basics
• Yankee Bayonet (I Will Be Home Then) — The Decemberists, The Crane Wife
• Nightmare Alleys — Dear Leader, The Alarmist
• Commerce, TX — Ben Kweller, Sha Sha
• Love Me or Hate Me — Lady Sovereign, Public Warning

That’s it. 5 songs. A few minutes of me rambling.

Get the feed from here or from iTunes. Yes, I’m in iTunes.

 

 PTBNL: Episode 2 [25:17m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

I use my RSS reader a lot. Currently, I use RSS Bandit, which I like a good bit. It does RSS very well, and doesn’t try to do too much more, i.e. it does exactly what I need. I don’t need podcatching abilities (though they’ll be there in the next version) since I use an iPod and iTunes does an OK enough job.

It even allows me to do some manual syncing of my home computer with work, by FTPing the data files up to my FTP site, then downloading in the new location. So, I can keep my RSS/information habit under control by checking my feeds every few hours at work and at home, and never get overloaded. It’s crude, but it works well.

Now, one of the things that popped up in my feeds the past week was about the interface and functionality improvements in Google Reader, Google’s online feed reader tool. So, given that I use GMail and GCal, I figured I’d give Reader another shot. I’d tried it when it first came out and found it to be a complete abomination.

I exported my OPML feedlist from RSS Bandit, imported it into Reader, and off I went. The “River of News” view (all stories are sort of thrown together in one long column of news and you scroll through it), which is a view people swear by, but I’ve found cumbersome in every tool I’ve ever used. It’s perfect in Google Reader. Literally, perfect. I had a few hundred items to read when I imported my feedlist, and I just scrolled through them. It marked them as read as I scrolled past. See something interesting? Stop and read it more closely. It works remarkably well and immediately made me realize I could probably add more feeds to my feedlist and move through them more quickly than I do through RSS Bandit. This shouldn’t be construed as a knock on RSS Bandit — I just think that the Google Reader team has nailed the interface. I’m probably going to spend next week only in Reader and see if I like it enough to switch permanently.
Oh, and, like GMail, you can use it from your mobile device (i.e. your cell phone). Again, it just sort of works the way you’d expect, and gives me something to read when I’m grabbing a meal or waiting in line.

Of course, since it’s web-based, I can view my feeds from anywhere. No cumbersome syncing. That’s handy.

The only knock on it, at least so far in a few days of use, is that it’s not nicely integrated into the Google interface, I’ll say. I don’t use the Google Personalized homepage that much (I generally search right out of the search toolbar in Firefox). It’s not part of the upper left nav in GMail or Google Calendar. I know Google Reader is technically still part of Labs, but I’d love if I could customize the Google upper left nav and add/replace links there. A real integration, just as a link there, would make it much easier for me to pop open the 3 Google apps I use.

Hopefully, I’ll check back next week to update on how my switch to Reader has worked. I haven’t even scratched the surface of some of the functionality — like reading lists, where you can mark something you’ve read to share and then publish your reading list (as HTML or as a feed), which is kinda like del.icio.us without tagging. It’s the old link-blog model, but done in a really really easy way.

On to other topics …

I’ve been on vacation this week, with the last few days spent with some friends who came up to visit (and go to a football game that shall not be mentioned). Stories forthcoming. However, it sort of caused me to fall behind on my podcast listening. My RSS-based information consuming habit is sort of overbearing at times, but I’m becoming very good at skimming and not needing to check everything out.

I open iTunes, find 10 podcasts to listen to, and notice that 5 of them are the new Gillmor Gang episode. The show has already started testing my patience with it’s 4.5 minutes of ads to start the show, and another 30 seconds at the end. Sure, I can skip through it with my iPod or iTunes (and I do), but it means that each individual episode is about 20-22 minutes of real audio, broken up into 4 or 5 chunks, and I just find it terribly annoying. On top of that, I’ve just found the content utterly lacking in anything meaningful for probably the past few months. It’s not the Gang of old, with Jon Udell and nice guests talking about identity or groupware. You know, interesting technology discussion driven by the technology and accentuated by the knowledge and personalities of the participants.

Since the move to Podshow, the Gillmor Gang has been pretty much unlistenable and a general waste of time. There’s little insight to be found, as it’s simply a platform for the participants to bitch or proselytize for their meme of the day. I’ve stuck with it, hoping that it would eventually veer back into what made the show great. It hasn’t, and after listening to one chunk of the latest show, I’ve decided I’m done. It’s like 24. I gave it two years and gave up.

Now, what that has done, is reminded me that I most enjoyed the work of Jon Udell on the show. Fittingly, he had left the Gang a while back, and the show lacked his ability to take a new technology and immediately make real world sense of it. It was his explanation (and demo) of del.icio.us that made me go “a-ha” and realize what it was all about. Well, he’s got a weekly podcast that much closer to what the Gillmor Gang used to be, and I’ve dropped the Gang in favor of his show, and I’m smarter for it.

Finally …

For those of you who missed it, I’m trying the podcasting thing. Check out my last post for the details and give it a listen. I realized today that I hadn’t included and obvious link to the podcast feed to add it to your iTunes or your podcatcher of choice, so that’s now linked there. I’ve also submitted it for inclusion in iTunes, so we’ll see how that goes.

I’m so funny. Episode 1: The Phantom Menace. Timely, and amusing.

Yes, I made a podcast. I’ve been fooling around with it for a while, never really zeroing in on what to do. Some folks were encouraging me to do a basketball podcast (which still might happen). But, I realized that I spend the bulk of my time here writing about the music I’m listening to and shows I go to, but I don’t really expose anyone to that music, other than a few mp3s or links here and there.

So now I can force my music upon the four or five people who actually come to the site.

For now, I think the podcast will live as an off-shoot of my blog. If I keep it up, or people like it, maybe it’ll get its own place to live. Or, maybe I’ll get a cease and desist long before that happens.

On this show:

• Old Hat — Harvey Danger, Where Have All The Merrymakers Gone?
• Carousel — Harris, The Light Is Seeping Through The Cracks
• Meetings With the Remarkable Men — Harvey Danger, King James Version
• Progress — So Many Dynamos, Flashlights
• Moral Centralia — Harvey Danger, Little By Little

Here’s the feed to just the podcast (in case you don’t care about my ramblings).

In the interest of full disclosure, I’ve setup a little Amazon affiliate thing so if you like a song and go buy the CD from Amazon, I get like 5 cents.

 

 Podcast To Be Named Later: Episode 1 [25:40m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

I went out after work a couple of nights this week. Good times.

Then I came home.

• 3 movies from Netflix.
• 13+ hours of new stuff to watch on the DVR/TiVo.
• 450+ items in my feed reader.
• 10+ hours of podcasts in iTunes.

I’m slowly working through it all. Thankfully, looks like the weather will cooperate and this will be a nice weekend to catch up on some TV and movies. I get weirdly stressed when this happens. But then I just browse through it, remind myself I’m not really missing out on anything, and I feel better about things. I lead a somewhat puzzling (lame, boring, ridiculously stupid) life.

I’m taking a couple days off from work and heading up to the beach for the day with some folks. Should be a nice break from the ColdFusion-rich days I’ve been spending at work. We’re working on a project to take ColdFusion users from being spread out across our Windows servers and move them to their own Windows servers, where poorly written code can’t take down other, non-ColdFusion pages.

I’m not a big fan of ColdFusion. I can understand why people would use it if they’re not particularly skilled developers, but once you know enough to use ColdFusion well, it seems like you’d want to use ASP, Perl, Python, Ruby, PHP … something …. anything else. ColdFusion runs through Java, so it tends to be slow when you’re running it through IIS. Making things worse, we’ve discovered that ColdFusion’s default JDBC-ODBC bridge is pretty much crap. When you get 12 concurrent database queries, the ColdFusion ODBC service dies. But not gracefully, it gets stuck in a state where it can’t be stopped or started. The box has to be rebooted.

Why does this suck royally? First, because ColdFusion users (at least those using our service) tend to write really crappy code without closing their queries and sometimes running queries within queries, and they can hit that 12 concurrent database queries pretty quickly. But the bigger gotcha, the bigger kick in the junk, is that ColdFusion is installed as a wildcard script map in IIS. That is every single page request, ColdFusion or not, goes through ColdFusion for ColdFusion to decide whether or not it wants to handle it. So when ColdFusion dies, NO PAGES GET SERVED FROM THAT BOX AT ALL. It’s really quite annoying.

Yes, there are some things we could do to mitigate it. The logical one would be to remove the wildcard script map, but that actually breaks ColdFusion (some wonderful work you’ve done their, Macromedia/Adobe).

So, we’ve actually decided to segment ColdFusion users and use a native JDBC driver rather than the ColdFusion JDBC-ODBC bridge. I’ve spent the last few weeks of my life on this, moving customer sites, testing, writing Perl code to automate the process. It’s been fun taking existing ColdFusion DSNs and recreating them in the new format. It’s been more fun finding out the various little things that the new JDBC Microsoft Access driver doesn’t support that the traditional ODBC driver does. (Hey, for some ridiculous reason you’ve got an Access replicated table? Fantastic, the JDBC driver won’t read it. Hey, you’re using RND in your query? Fantastic, the JDBC driver doesn’t support it. Hey, you’re using a raw ‘Yes’ in your query to match a checkbox column. Fantastic, change your query to != 0 to pick up the positive values.)

It’s been a long few weeks, but it’s gone pretty smoothly, all things considered. But I hate ColdFusion, and I hate Access.

Thus, I’m off to the beach. Where there will be no ColdFusion. And no Access. Just my iPod, newly loaded up with all of the episodes of the Band in Boston podcast, as pointed out by Bostonist. I’ll be back soon feeling refreshed and ready to deal with more ColdFusion fun.

My friend Greg Joyce made a movie a few years ago when we were working together. It’s a little indie romantic comedy called Working Stiff.

It’s quite funny.

However, being that Greg is neither a Hollywood bigwig, nor related to one, he busted his ass to get as many people to see it as he could. Local film festivals, showings at theaters in Belmont, Arlington, and Newton, and DVDs. The movie was well received and pretty much enjoyed by everyone, but still, if you didn’t know someone, or stumble into the theater on one of the nights it was showing, you never got a chance to see it.

Now you have that chance.

Greg has just opened up Project: Working Stiff, his website/blog devoted to getting the word out …. and letting you watch the movie. The movie is going to be released in bite size chunks via an RSS feed–a video podcast, in other words. Even better, it’s all nicely formatted for the iPod Video. You can also watch it right there on the web page. Brilliant. Flat out brilliant.

Go check it out. Check out the trailer. Go post comments on the blog. Mostly, just go check it out because the movie is worth seeing.

I just finished watching Season One of The Adventures of Pete and Pete which arrived from Netflix a week or so ago. If you’ve never seen Pete and Pete, it’s a show that aired on Nickelodeon in the early-to-mid 90s about two brothers named … Pete. The show started out as some 60 second shorts, which were popular, so Nick said “here’s more money, make some 30 minute specials,” which were more popular, which lead to Nick saying “just make us lots of shows.” And they did, and it rocked.

It rocked because it was this surrealist, absurdist kid’s show, teaching a moral in each episode, but doing it in a style that was edgy for the time (and holds up surprisingly well 10 years later). Topping it off, the creators/writers (who’ve gone onto stuff like Newsradio, Shrek, King of the Hill, and Buffy) worked in as many pop culture references and jokes as they could. What other show would have Juliana Hatfield as a cafeteria worker, Steve Buscemi as a nerdy dad, and Iggy Pop with a recurring role as a dad who acts remarkably like Iggy Pop. It’s the type of show where the family finds a car buried at the sand in the beach, uncovers it, and drives it home … like it’s completely normal.

Watching it now it reminds me a lot of Scrubs. So much so that I don’t think it’s possible to say that Scrubs wasn’t at least partially influenced by Pete and Pete. Both shows about a nerdy character who narrates the show, with a dizzying array of transitions into fantasy/surreal situations, that play as if they’re completely common place. Both shows featuring a soundtrack of the “indie” rock sound of the time, and playing basically with the single camera format.
All of this made me think about how cool it is that a show like this can survive and live on in DVD format. Poking around this weekend, I found that there’s two really cool video podcasts on iTunes that send out an old cartoon that has entered the public domain a few times a week. The coolest one is ReFrederator. A few times a week you download a 5-10 minute cartoon of Bugs or Daffy or Mighty Mouse. It’s insanely cool and a wonderful way to keep those old cartoons fresh. The same idea is done by Vintage Tooncast, though they seem to be focused more on showing things that you wouldn’t see today (because of the racial and cultural sterotypes that were so pervasive). It’s an ingenious use of syndication technology.
It also made me think about how cool it would be if networks did this with more content. Sure, the big networks are putting there shows on iTunes for 99 cents a pop. And Fox has talked about putting shows online with ads for free. All fantastic stuff. However, wouldn’t it be great if networks (especially networks that own most of their own content) put up old shows on iTunes? NBC has done this with some stuff, but I’d love if Nickelodeon let me grab an episode of Welcome Freshmen or Disney let me grab an episode of Duck Tales at my leisure. Pay them $30 and get a weekly podcast of shows automagically downloaded to your computer until they ran out of shows. Or pay the 99 cents to get the ones you want.

Outside of content clearances and figuring out how royalties and whatnot are paid out, there’s not a legitimate reason not to do this. Well, other than fracturing an already fragile television landscape. The first network to really embrace this is going to make lots of money (assuming they do it right).