Sometimes when Google updates one of their apps it takes a few days for the significance of the new functionality to sink in. Please note the little “Shared Links” badge over in the right column of this site. It automatically pulls items from my “Shared” feed over at Google Reader. Also note the “links for 2008-05-05″ posts that appear on this page from time to time. These are automatically pulled from my del.icio.us feed via some wanky script that runs every morning at 4am.
Now Google Reader has always been a pretty sweet RSS aggregator, but I never got much out of the sharing functionality on there, mainly because the only thing I could “share” were specific RSS feed items e.g. individual blog posts. Furthermore, I already had to be *subscribed* to the blog in question before I could share it. The del.icio.us script on the other hand could share anything with a URL… Blog posts, Entire sites, links to specific img links and so on. The script for sharing these links, as I mentioned, was a little wanky, but the broad functionality made using it worthwhile. Recently, Google quietly slipped a “Notes” tool into Reader which mirrors the del.icio.us functionality, as well as letting me post links to (get this) nothing! (a.k.a. Facebook “status” updates).
So anyway, if you would do me the favor of occasionally directing your attention to the small grey box to your right, then I can discontinue the use of the del.icio.us “links for today” script, and theoretically del.icio.us itself. (Or more likely I can go back to using del.icio.us for keeping track of links that I *don’t* see any need to wave around in people’s faces, at least until Google de-suck-ifies and/or integrates their Notebook app into Reader anyway! =P)
[Addendum] If you would like to see some additional context & any associated audio/video assets for my “Shared Links” and/or you like cartoon pictures of ninjas, then by all means check out the full-page interface for my Google Reader shared items page (which is also accessible by clicking “Read more…” on the badge).
People who know me know that I don’t often hold grudges. But there is one grudge that I’ve held for over 20 years and it’s against having to get out of bed in the morning before I damn well feel like it. It’s not that I’m not a morning person. Given the choice I’d probably wake up around 8 or 9 most days, read in bed for an hour or so until I’m well adjusted to the idea of being awake and then shuffle over to my computer with some coffee and be productive as hell for the next 5 or 6 hours! By the time 3 or 4 in the afternoon rolls around and I’ve had enough of sitting down I would most likely find some errand to run or just any excuse to go outside and drive/bike around for awhile before it gets dark. But in general that period between 10AM & 3PM is absolutely when I get the most work done. So that’s not the problem… The problem is the period between 7 & 10AM, which in contrast to the period directly following it is easily the worst part of my day. I don’t know why those few hours make such a big difference in my mood & productivity, and I’m sure getting to bed a little earlier would help, but dammit I’m a moaner and a lazy bastard and I’d rather just lament my situation and do ridiculous stuff like the following:
Upon waking and realizing that you’ve already slept through the first 2 alarms, make an agreement with yourself that you’ll get out of bed after just 15 more seconds of warmth and comfort. Begin counting backwards from 15. After you get to one, begin to cheat by halving the distance to zero. One-half, one-fourth, one-eighth… and so on. Repeat this until you can no longer accurately calculate the next number in the sequence. Admit defeat. Get of bed.
I find this also works with regards to getting out of the shower. I figured that after awhile I’d get better at this and be able to delay getting up even longer, but I keep getting stuck on one-eight-thousand-one-hundred-and-ninety-second. Possibly because I’m so lazy.
So you can buy TV commercials in $150 minimum bundles via Google AdWords now. Given the current state of TV as an advertising medium this is probably not as revolutionary as it might have been 5 or 6 years ago, but it still seems like kind of a big deal if for no other reason than that it will hopefully lead to a resurgence in the kind of cheesy, local commercials that make life worth living. You know the ones I mean:
…and so on. Also, if there are any “V for Vendetta” types out there with a lot of money to spend and time to kill, I could imagine a number of fun and exciting ways you could make use of this service. Personally, I can think of 7 or 8 things other than buying soft-core porno videos & applying to technical schools that I’d rather persuade the millions of unemployed, pissed off young people of our country to be doing. But maybe I’m just an idealist…
Thanks to hobnox.com and their audiotool demo for the cool 303 & 909 emulators & to Radio Shack for the dumb RCA cables & mic mixer I had to use to loop the audio out of my laptop & back in again to record it because apparently “Stereo Mix” recording doesn’t work on laptops. Whatever! Regardless, this recording sounds better than the last few because it was recorded on separate tracks (sort of) and not using the built-in mic on a webcam.
So I got my first YouTube video pulled on account of “Copyright Infringement” the other day, and while I’ll freely admit that I uploaded infringing content, I find the specifics of the situation rather humorous, so I wanted to share them with people. So there was a discussion taking place on the forum for the company I work at, and in the course of the thread, somebody posted a link to this classic “Learn to Make Games” TV commercial which is fairly well known & amusing to people who work in the games industry. In a (perhaps failed) attempt at making a witty response to this post, I uploaded one of my favorite Simpsons clips to YouTube & posted that as a reply. Several hours later I noticed that the video was no longer present on YouTube and shortly after that I got an email warning from them about the alleged infringement.
A few things:
There is this thing called fair use. Unless I am misunderstanding the concept, it allows the quotation of “reasonable” amounts of copyrighted material to be used as part of a review, debate or other types of cultural discussion. The clip I posted was 23 seconds long. Was that unreasonable?
The clip that I posted was ITSELF an example of fair use reference, in this case of Homer Simpson performing a humorous version of a song (”Tighten Up”) by Archie Bell & the Drells! So… What’s their excuse?
I saw an AMAZING commercial for the Discovery Channel on YouTube the other day & my first instinct was to post *another* of my favorite Simpsons clips (”Ladies and gentlemen, `Hooray for Everything’ invites you to join them in a salute to the greatest hemisphere on earth, the Western Hemisphere! The dancingest hemisphere of all!”) in response, but now… I guess I won’t.
Attention Simpsons copyright holders: Have you seen South Park Studios?? It allows random access to every single full-length episode of the show along with tagged and categorized access to hundreds of clips! Do you know how often I have wished for this exact same type of access to the entire Simpsons series? I spent the better part of 5 years of my life speaking pretty much entirely in Simpsons references! Books have been written about the cultural significance of the Simpsons! WHYYYYYYYYYY are you so intent on building a wall around this content that wants so desperately to be converted more freely into cultural currency & make you even MORE money than you already have? This is GOING to happen, you jack-asses, it’s just a question of whether you’re in on the profit share between now and when it does.
Back when I used Movable Type on this site all the URLs for individual posts were in the form of 0000322.shtml or whatever & when I migrated to WordPress these changed into text based links i.e. /a-post-about-whatever. Anyway, it updated most of the internal links during the migration process, but any external ones that pointed at the numerical URLs ended up with a 404 error in the new system. After being annoyed about this for awhile I finally found a good plug-in to help resolve the issue today. Basically it lets me change any 404 error into a 301 redirect and point visitors at the appropriate new URL. Better yet, it keeps track of any 404 errors as they happen, so I don’t even have to go hunting around for broken links, I can just wait for them to show up in the log and take care of it at my leisure. (Of course I do have a complete list of broken links thanks to Google’s Webmaster Tools, but there are like 55 of them and I don’t feel like fixing them all at the moment, particularly since I’m sure nobody clicks on like 99% of them). As an added byproduct I think I will also be able to see if people are typing weird nonsense URLs like antinomian.com/secretpassword or whatever into my site. If any particularly funny ones come up, I’ll be sure to share them…
If you listen to broadcast radio you’ll notice that they keep playing the same songs over and over again for a month before moving on to another set of songs that they play over and over again and so on. I suppose it’s de rigueur to complain about this, but given the way that “popular” culture works I feel like it might be more interesting to speculate on whether a net radio service could save on bandwidth costs by caching the top 100 tracks on the client side each month. Or maybe bandwidth is so cheap that this isn’t even an issue anymore. (Though if this is the case then why are internet providers always bitching & moaning about it?) At any rate, it’s probably not even worth trying to pitch music labels on this, since they’d just assume you were trying to bullshit them.
