Ploafmaster General

Sunday morning my wife and I will head off to St. Martin in the Caribbean for a week vacation with her mom and sister. My hope is to hit up some WiFi action and blog the crap out of my vacation. I'll have my digital camera and tripod with me as well, and I just bought a 2 gig memory card, so I hope to be snapping pictures by the hundred.

One day in particular should be interesting. The popular photo site, Flickr, created a special group called 24 hours of Flickr in which the members are to document their day on May 5th with photographs. The members will then select what they feel is the best photo of their day and submit it to the group. My hope is that this day alone will provide me with dozens of pictures to add to my library, especially since I'll be in such an idyllic location.

The end of this week can't come soon enough!!!

VIRBº finally rolled out the blog import feature.

Thanks to Joshua Blankenship for the heads up. Now I'll finally have some content on my profile page since I write on my own site with reasonable frequency.

McSweeney's has a hilarious piece up about Democratic Presidential candidates.

Clay Risen writes a response for The Morning News' "The Non-Expert" this week about modeling. Check it out and laugh your $400 jeans off.

Once again...this exemplifies why Ask Dan never had a fighting chance :-)

Alright...hopefully the final theme change before I rebuild my site.

I found this slick theme today, and I think it demonstrates my Apple nerdiness. You can collapse elements in the sidebar if you want, and rearrange them, too.

Enjoy, or if your Mugs, complain :-)

So you can probably see that I've changed themes...again.

I just updated to the latest version of WordPress (for security reasons), but it broke the VeryPlainText theme. So here we are.

Just biding my time with this anyway while I roll my own blog app...

I read an article on CNN's site today (which I cannot seem to relocate here at home for the life of me) that highlights ABC.com's move from flash-based online video to a new format.

This new technology requires the installation of a small plugin which is definitely available for Firefox, and works in both Windows and OS X.

The essential benefit of this switch is fast-loading, high quality streaming video that's playable "full-screen" (it only filled half the screen on my Macbook Pro). I have to say the quality is impressive. The load time is extremely fast, and you're only interrupted periodically by 30 second ads - less advertising than a regular TV program over all.

It may just be the thing to introduce me to a few ABC programs.

w00t!

I finally got the post categorization functionality to work on my work-in-progress blog app!

I think I'll spend the next hour or so detailing the functions I want, and what I want each function to do. I figure I should outline my goals a little better before I get too ahead of myself and forget to take care of certain things.

I'm just glad to finally build something of my own from scratch, and each small victory is motivation to keep going.

I'm still pluggin' away at my new blog application built in Ruby on Rails, and tonight I managed to get the Post functionality up and running...at least listing and adding.

Once I get a chance I plan to put up a test database on this site and post the blog in progress with frequent updates so I can show you how it's coming along.

Be forewarned, however...I'm working on functionality first - looks last. I already know how I plan to style it, but I have to have the frame before I can add the facade.

This is nerdy, yes, but it's a step in the right direction for my personal development work. Building an app from scratch is enabling me to truly see how this stuff works, after which I'll feel confident enough to offer my services to other people. Rock on!

Dang...there's a lot of crazy web apps out there intended to "connect" people together.

There's the reprehensible MySpace. I tried it out hoping to drive more traffic here. Didn't really work, but I did get in touch with a few folks I hadn't heard from since high school. That was kinda neat. Now my profile lays dormant with a message pointing people to a different service...

I also tried Facebook (and still sorta use it), but while I gathered "friends" rather quickly, it seems mostly like a way for people to post a few inane messages on the profiles of those folks they don't see too often.

There's del.icio.us, the so-called "social bookmarking" action. I essentially created a profile there for two reasons: 1. Universally accessible bookmarks, and 2. Topical RSS feeds. I don't usually get around to putting much in there, but then I don't suppose I often consider much of my web-reading to be bookmark-worthy.

My neglected Myspace profile now directs people to my presence on VIRBº - a slick new profile/friends/music/etc. site that allows for truly beautiful customization (and naturally the hideous is pretty easy, too). I check that frequently, but most of my real-world friends that use any sites of this nature are still stuck on MySpace or Facebook. So I don't see a lot of activity on my profile.

Finally, there's the new Twitter app. I've already said most of what I can about it for now. I use that pretty heavily, just because it's kinda fun to play around with. And the BBC World updates are quite useful. Again, only a few people I really know use it, so it's not as cool as it could be.

I can't imagine what other forms of Social Networking are around the corner. AOL's Ficlet's looks promising and fun, but trying to keep up with one more thing is onerous and ridiculous at this point. Maybe I'll drop MySpace forever. It's about time. And Facebook? I'm already tiring of it.

There are too many distractions, and I suppose I'm still old-fashioned enough that I prefer to interact with my friends over a sandwich at a local restaurant instead of teh interwebs.

Looks like a gentleman in London has created a host of "Twitter bots" that essentially auto-update with the headline ticker from BBC News' website.

I'm totally digging the BBC World bot, and follow it on Twitter. It's like a free RSS feed reader that auto-updates, and provides a link at the end of each "tweet" to the full story.

So there's a practical use for Twitter.

Alright, so I'm getting sucked in.

Call it inane. Call it a waste. I think it's fun, at least for now. Go check out Twitter, and then look me up.

UPDATE: Okay, so the Twitter site is slow as molasses on a cold day. It's kinda cool, but as I've mentioned in some of my notes on the app, I feel like it's reaching critical mass. Following SXSW it appears to be grinding slowly along. These folks will need to do something about their bandwidth soon or else a potentially good thing will collapse under its own weight.

Cool essay about an interesting musical context by Sufjan Stevens.

Holy Cow. 200 mpg, reasonable cruising speed, and spaceship looks to boot? And they want to try selling 'em for 20 large? SIGN ME UP!

Hilarious inclusion of George Bush in the Teletubbies intro:
[youtube [www.youtube.com/watch](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DFBwD2b5nz8&w=425&h=350])

As much as I prefer the local cafe, I just read an interesting memo from Starbucks' chairman Howard Schultz lamenting the loss of his company's "soul" over the years.

The memo, and the article in Slate in which I read it, are worth a look.

Holycrapitstoofunnyformenottolaugh:
http://eeuauaughhhuauaahh.ytmnd.com/

It's Friday, which means I'm noodling around more than working at my office. I figure I'll start off by posting a vid of an AWESOME cover of Outkast's "Hey Ya" performed by one fella, his voice, and some guitars. My buddy Nate pointed me to this, and I have to say, it's actually really pleasant and melancholy. Check it:
[youtube [www.youtube.com/watch](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8-8nkkOA_AM&w=425&h=350])

I know I only have a few readers, and I know of those, none of you really listen to Radio Paradise (though I know Mugs has before). But PLEASE take a minute to read this clearly articulated description of the crisis now facing all internet broadcasters.

I know using a word like "crisis" is a bit dramatic, but consider the creativity, flexibility, and freedom that comes from being able to run your own low-cost broadcast station, and the choice that provides to music lovers everywhere: niche stations with no commercials, rare music otherwise unheard of, and creative DJs who favor intricately crafted play lists over the latest top 40 drivel.

Though I'm not entirely surprised that our government has favored business interests over the arts and fair use, I'm still really pissed off that the Copyright Royalty Board essentially ignored other opinions and went right along with the requests of the abominable RIAA. Screw those guys.

I don't know why it took me so long to find it and start watching it, but I've been hooked on Ze Frank's, "The Show."

It's always witty, often hilarious, and quite intelligent. Go watch it before he stops producing it in mid-March.

Wow, Mugs. Great job.

My brother has redesigned his website, and I have to say it's lookin' pretty slick in all its minimalist glory.

Go check it out...Pickles...

Slate has a hilarious article up about Ultimate Fighting...

So this past weekend, of course, I was in Tallahassee to see my sister-in-law, Elizabeth, perform her senior violin recital.

As the lighting was too low to allow for photographing a musician-in-motion, I decided to try making a little video clip with my digital camera. So here it is, with poor sound quality and all (but still a good showcase of Elizabeth's talent):
[youtube [www.youtube.com/watch](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dkVTRQEoKNE&w=425&h=350])