So, I’ve had a billion things to post about over the last couple of days — I went to California for the first time last week (Mo, Tu, Wed) and experienced Hollywood proper. At the same time I was reading On the Road which is just the proper book when bouncing from coast-to-coast. Many thoughts which may become a singular entry at some point in the near future.

Second, I’ve been listening to Sleater-Kinney’s latest album The Woods OVER AND OVER. I’ve been a fan of them for many years, but not a huge fan. This album may very well upgrade my fan status. In the past I’ve found some of their music a bit too staccato or downright shrill for repeated listenings, but on The Woods they have really honed their rock skills to produce songs with awesome hooks and a lot of dynamic power. Get it now!

Finally, I highly recommend you Louisville-lovers out there to patronize the brand-new WHY Louisville (What-Have-You Louisville) store in the Highlands. Created by the same gents who brought you LebowskiFest, it is sub-titled as a “Fan Club for the City”. At the moment, they peddle a number of Louisville-related t-shirts and knick-knackery as well as the Lebowski-related materials. Personally, I picked up a “Louisville – It’s Not Kentucky!” t-shirt and a pair of fleur-de-lis vinyl stickers. Jason “Fluffy” Clark from krack.org tells me they’ll be expanding their inventory soon — they were rushing to open for the LebowskiFest 2005 ticket sales.

Podcasting. Perhaps you’ve heard of it, perhaps you haven’t. For the latter, here is a succinct definition: Podcasting is a way of publishing sound files to the Internet, allowing users to subscribe to a feed and receive new audio files automatically. (definition from the Wikipedia). Having been asked many times over the years to explain the mystery and voodoo that is the weblog, I offer to the humble reader this treatise on podcasting.

“Podcasting” — I’ve been hearing this term for some time, specifically starting with Warren Ellis’ Bad Signal list. Ellis, a prolific science-fiction/futurist/whatever writer is always on the lookout for the newest of the new trends in communications, and he picked up the term sometime last year. He had this to say about it:

“Podcasting is a very interesting idea.
You record your own little radio
show to mp3, release it off your
website as a RSS enclosure, and a
little bit of software like iPodder
sucks it on to your computer for
shunting into your mp3 player.
Podcasting is just a few months old,
and most of it is very bad — but
there weren’t any good blogs in
the first six months of blogging,
either. This could be very interesting.”

{more}

While the term podcasting is reasonably new (and while it’s usage has doubled/tripled as of late), and while it could have a very bright and interesting future, don’t be fooled: this technology and this very idea have been around almost since the dawn of the Internet — perhaps even time. It’s nothing new, but as much as anything on the Intarweb, you can sprinkle an idea with technology-dust, slap a new name on it and web-denizens will lap it up.

The analogues between podcasting and the now-debunked mystery of the weblog are many and similar. A weblog ain’t nothing but a diary, but on the Internet! It’s just as simple as that. Do not be fooled by the high-wizardry of the Internet. There is still some dude on his couch banging out his latest political commentary or his recipe for chicken sauce piquant. Anyone can do it. Back in the days before the glorious intarweb, this was limited to those with access either to a mailing list or the school newspaper. With barriers such as those, only the determined were published, and fewer were even read.

In the same way, podcasting has been around for years. In the days before there was an FCC, all you needed was a radio to get on the air. Crank up your spark-gap transmitter and read off your recipes and/or political commentary! The FCC decided that it was better to save the airwaves for emergencys, radio payola and advertisements, so away that went. How is a man to rouse rabble or read his manic break-up poetry now?! Tell me that, Uncle Sam! If only there was some medium with no boundaries or limits…

Well, along comes the Internet. Complete and total unfettered global access to any and all with a computer. Imagine it! A thousand thousand thousand political hacks, diary writers and wannabe Yeats’ publishing at the same time! Well, that future is here and now — we call it blogging. Take a vast and vastly mediocre group of publishers, and give them an infinite media, add splash of technology, and voila! Total information overload.

Whereas weblogs are nothing but words and the occassional picture, podcasting is the next natural step (just add audio). It’s not like you couldn’t cast a pod before, but now it’s just easier. Before there was such a thing as MP3 (compressed audio) it was unfeasable to put up a 30-minute 300 meg radio show on the web. Even then — did you really expect people to download and listen to your drivel whilst chained to their desks? But then — oh, then — the iPod! The portable, digital music vault! Combine small audio files, the increase in bandwidth for the average user, the availability of portable music devices, and man’s insatiable desire to be heard and there you have it — podcasting.

I really wish there was a word to describe the phenomenon of re-labeling something, but for the Internet. It was sort of done with the “e” and “i”, like “e-Commerce” and “i-Pod”, but “podcasting” and “weblog” are of a different sort. They are not technologies, per se, but really re-inventions of current, perhaps even mundane, activities. Prestiwebitating, perhaps, I don’t know. Perhaps I’m not looking far enough ahead. (What? You mean like vidblogging or holocasting? YES — that far!)

Do not fear the Internet. It is only there to confuse and annoy.

Further: Come One, Come All: The Rise of Podcasting at NPR.org. Also, the earliest mention of “podcast” on Google Groups appears to be October 2004, linked to this article. This American Life has been podcasting for years and years now, releasing each of it’s episodes (webisodes?) the week after they air on NPR. Finally, that photo of ex-MTV VJ Adam Curry up there is due to his involvement with the genesis of podcasting as a syndicatable/auto-updating thing (see his Adam Curry’s Wikipedia article).

Whilst looking for info on today’s All Things Considered (who, oddly enough are hosting the aforementioned The Decemberists), I happened to notice an article by NPR’s Ombudsman Jeffrey A. Dvorkin entitled “When Those Pesky Blogs Undermine NPR News“. The crux of the story is in regards to a Defense Department PDF obtained and posted by NPR detailing the unfortunate death of Italian agent Nicola Calipari due to US fire at a checkpoint in Iraq. Some “bloggers” downloaded this PDF, and using some publically known unredacting techniques, released a “clean” version of the document to the internet at large. The information revealed, among other things, the US service personnel involved in the shooting.

In light of that fiasco, it is understandable for Ombudsman Dvorkin to take offsense. That aside, Dvorkin seems, with his occassionally dismissive remarks regarding the “blogosphere” to have some thinly veiled contempt for bloggers and “amoral place with few rules” that they habitate. That underlying current is what originally seeded my interest in his column, and upon further research it would seem that he has just recently provided a “mea culpa” on the subject of blogs. So, perhaps my hunch was right. But, that salacious point is not really the reason I’m writing.

I think Dvorkin’s underlying (though admirably publically displayed) contempt/concern for bloggers’ journalistic meddle is understandable from someone in his position. However, I do believe that bloggers and their “misbehavior” are a necessary evil. For each unredacted piece of information that might “endanger lives”, there are a handful of blog entries with substantive opinion and fact that would not have come to light save for this “lawless West” (my words, not his). It’s not as black and white or as unchangeable as some may think.

The Internet, and the “blogosphere” as sub-universe is a frightfully organic beast by its very design, so Dvorkin’s statement that “bloggers tend not to care if they, and their readers conflate opinion and fact” is, I believe, uncharacteristically one-sided. For every loud, obnoxious, factsimile-spewing blogger, there is an equal and opposite blogger that does value the same journalistic ethics that he stands for. Being a living, breathing organism, the Internet does not just create new ideas, but also ingests them as well. The blogosphere has taken a cue from the sound-and-fury news channels of the world and makes blogs in that image. I imagine that anti-drug commercial from the 80s with the kid saying to his coked-up father “I learned it from watching you!”.

In the end of Dvorkin’s article, he concedes that the mainstream media may be “the King Canutes of latter-day media, hoping that we can order the tide to recede at our command”. I don’t think you can order this tide to recede, necessarily, but I do think that you can certainly make it work for you. I applaud Dvorkin for his frank remarks regarding the interaction between blogs and the mainstream media, but I truly hope they realize that the blogosphere is what you make it. After all, it isn’t a big machine sitting in a bunker 30 floors below sea-level — it’s people like you, me, Dvorkin and Drudge.

Also, just as an aside — Dvorkin reported back in January on emails received by NPR between mid-October 2004 and Janunary 2005, giving tallies by subject. “Criticisms of NPR as too leftwing”: 210. “Critiques that NPR is too rightwing”: 484. Heh.

There are some people I know – even some readers of this not-so-anonymous blog – who blog about any number of things that would normally be confined to either their subconscious or chatted over a neighbor’s fence (perhaps over a fabulous martini). In the case of work-related gossip, I would wager that if you are going to involve yourself in such an endeavor, it is best to do this anonymously. So, whilst trolling through MeFi earlier this morning, I happened upon a link to the Electronic Frontier Foundation‘s How to Blog Safely (About Work or Anything Else).

One thing they don’t mention here is that any traffic (read: email) that you send using your company’s email servers is their property and so you should not consider your work email “private”. That is what a Gmail account is for!

While they do mention “limiting the audience” of your blog, I have found that unless you restrict your readership manually, anyone and everyone you know will eventually stumble upon your blog. My furthest stretch has been the dairy farmer that lived down the country road in Botetourt County, Virginia, where my great-uncle Joe lives. He mentioned to my Uncle Joe that he had read a website about my and Kelly’s adventures in Eagle Rock, VA. This should underscore how important not giving away your particulars is when attempting to stay anonymous. The careful and intrepid information-seeker will no-doubt attempt to put together a sketch of you through the scraps of info they can find on the internet. For example — I once had a man keep calling my house and requesting that he speak with Pablo Escobar (the now-deceased Columbian druglord). After a pair of short calls, I decided to find out just who my caller was, only armed with his phone number. Thanks to reverse phone directories, Google, and some luck, I found his name, address, his AOL username (which could be contacted via AIM), his homepage, highschool, job history, etc, etc. That turned his next call into an hour-long tango of “I know more about you than you probably ever cared me to know”. I really just wanted the guy to quit calling the house at all hours, but I figured I might as well have fun with it.

So — take care out there on the Intarweb. It is a wild and wonderful place. But, as with most wild and wonderful places, you could be eaten by bears (and by eaten by bears, I mean your job or life could be mauled. Not by bears, but by people who just don’t get the joke).

“With super-powers comes super-responsibility”


– “The Amazing Strobe”

Well, I guess my blog has hit the big-time. Regular, observant visitors may have noticed some “SPAM” comments showing up recently on the “recent comments” over there to the right. Bankruptcy loans and Texas Hold-Em poker are the subjects du jour. Having done a little reasearch, I believe these comments to have been placed not by humans, but by robots. The mechanical bane of mankind, I say! Well, in an attempt to “nip [this problem] in the bud”, I have implemented ANTI-ROBOT MEASURES on the comment system. This system is know in the industry as a “CAPTCHA“.

What does CAPTCHA mean? Well, it stands for “Completely Automated Public Turing Test to Tell Computers and Humans Apart”. You know those little boxes with the squiggly letters and numbers you are asked to fill in before you can proceed with a form on the internet? That is a captcha. It’s used to prevent robots from crawling through, say, lists of available tickets on TicketMaster. The term “Turing Test” is a generic name for any test that is capable of determining if the subject being tested has the presence of mind or intelligence. (“Intelligence” in this case means being able to think on its own, and not have to follow a set of logic rules, as robots do).

Please give the comments system a run-through, and feel free to email me if you have any problems.

…I am in no way a white supremacist or a member of any Aryan group. Further, I would like to thank the intarweb at large for making me have to make statements like that.

It would seem that someone from the intarweb took my posting entitled “the pride of the species” to mean that I endorse Aryanism. Long story short on that posting was that the The Smoking Gun had posted a photo about the “scariest con ever”, and I had related that to my own overly-elaborate plan for the now-legendary “Goat House“, which is (of course) a reality TV-show wherein Death Row inmates battle it out each week in a bleek, unadorned house for a goat which is inserted (dropped through the ceiling) weekly.

You may notice comments from a “Callie” on the sidebar over there. Well, I also received a strange email from a one Calista Alvaraz, the contents are here exposed:

From: Calista Alvaraz

Date: 3/8/2005 5:42 PM

To: ben@XXXXXX

are you proud to be who you are?? i am in jail rite now… doin time for hate crimes are you about you skin as you put out???? let me know what is your deal.. pride power justice supremacy or what?? i am skin for life from a orginization called save our skins or S.O.S hit me up …

So – for the record – I don’t endorse such things, and frankly I don’t see how you could assume that I endorse Aryanism or any sort of white-power credo. I talked about putting him on a show called “Goat House” wherein death-row inmates battled it out for a goat a week for chrissakes. So, sorry, I gave at the office.

P.S. – If you should happen to make it to Death Row, please do contact me regarding “Ladies Goat House”

So, I sat down this morning to read through the
>Radio Controlled Soaring Exchange emails that I receive on a daily basis, and noted that there was an obit for a guy named Jef Raskin. His connection to soaring is that he was one of the first guys (perhaps the first) to kit an all-foam “slope-flyer” plane called the “Anabat” in the early 80s. Foam and tape planes are now extremely common in the hobby, and the Anabat was, up until a few years ago, still manufactured.

However, upon reading the press release on his passing I found that he also was an Apple employee (the 31st), and among other things, he invented the “click-and-drag” inteface that we now take for granted. He also apparently named the “Macintosh” after his favorite variety of apple (the McIntosh). Raskin also recently (2000) wrote a book called “The Humane Interface“, which has apparently been well-received as a textbook for interface designers.

Again, this hobby of mine never ceases to amaze me by the amazing people that it attracts. For a great article/interview with Raskin check this out: The Macintosh at 20: Interview with Jef Raskin, by Berkeley Groks, a weekly radio science program in Berkely, CA.

update: Forbes has a nice little article on Raskin — Who Can Really Take Credit For The Mac?, and here is a great link for all-things-Raskin: http://www.digibarn.com/friends/jef-raskin/index.html. That also includes a page on his model airplane designs. Early use of CAD!

further update: Geoff would like to mention that Raskin was also a HAM, as evidenced by this photo with a HF transceiver in the background. A man of many, many geeky hobbies!

I don’t know why I haven’t made mention of this sooner — but Geoff has released his newest Flash game onto the web. It’s entitled “Urban Chopper Rescue” and is somewhat like Choplifter, except you have to put out fires started by meteorites and save people from burning buildings. It’s rad (and I helped)! I made the chopper noises (we recorded them at his desk), helped out in the scoreboard area, and I did a lot of play-testing as you might imagine. Hence, my awesomely great high-score! Geoff really outdid himself this time. Go and give it a play, whydontcha?

The flight-model on the helicopter is kinda hard, but you’ll get used to it. Here’s a hint: fly fast, and put out as many fires and rescue as many people as possible in each round, but try to finish the round with at least half of the time remaining!

Let me tell you a little story. There was once a great website called TheSpark.com. It was really, really funny and was always popping with new hilarious projects like the “Stinky Meat Project” the “Fat Project” and the “Date My Sister Project”. Some seriously funny writing! Well, they also made a site called “SparkNotes” which had a boatload of handy notes for high school and college-level students. This appears to be the start of the end. TheSpark.com and SparkNotes.com were both bought up by iTurf.com (a teen-centric website with message boards, articles, etc, inexplicably headed by Delias.com, a clothing store). iTurf (and parent company Delias) was a little too heady with the Internet land-grab in 2000, and in November of 2000, Delias cut the cord, canned the staff of iTurf, and so affiliates like TheSpark and SparkNotes (among others) went into a little bit of a limbo. SparkNotes, however, had a relationship with Barnes & Noble to sell their SparkNotes study-guides (Cliff Notes, sorta). In March of 2001, TheSpark and SparkNotes is sold to Barnes & Noble for the paltry sum of $3,555 (according to this SEC filing).

So, from then on The Spark apparently becomes a bit of Bastard Child to Barnes & Noble. They focus more on SparkNotes, as that can produce revenue while, apparently, writing articles about decaying meat does not. I don’t know when Christian Rudder (the creator of TheSpark.com and SparkNotes.com) parted ways with TheB&NSpark, but it appears to be in early 2001 when Barnes & Noble bought TheSpark and SparkNotes from Delias. And now, as of June 2004, Barnes & Noble shut down TheSpark.com as we knew it, and put up a re-director from TheSpark to SparkNotes, which is minutely similar. I, among many, many others, were terribly dismayed to see this. Notsomuch the revival of SparkNotes.com (which I really didn’t visit that often), but for the complete and total scrapping of TheSpark.com and its content. It would have been one thing to shut down the site and swap it for something COMPLETLY different, but this is some sort of half-baked clownshoe attempt at melding SparkNotes with little tidbits of TheSpark.com. Why not just leave up an archive of TheSpark.com? Hard to say.

Now, for the bad news. According to the FAQ page on his latest web-venture, OKCupid.com, they sold all of their content to Barnes & Noble, and cannot get access to that old content (due to the deal I presume took place in 2001). I don’t pretend to know the particulars of that deal, but one must presume that Christian Rudder either A) got hosed/railroaded, B) took the money and ran or C) just washed his hands of what, on paper, seems like a great big implosion that TheSpark/SparkNotes was involved in. Also, hard to say.

If you want to read a cutesy history of SparkNotes, then read this. Perhaps I’ll dig a little further and flesh this out, but right now I’m just a little muddied with a feeling between fury and sadness.

For a while now, I’ve been mulling the idea of registering a couple of new domains for my own personal use. FUZZROLL.COM is one that you folks might have heard of, and I have duly registered it today. Also, I’ve been thinking for a while now that THELOCUST.ORG is a little tired and really doesn’t suit me like it used to. It’s a bit of a pain to spell and half the time when I tell someone to go to “thelocust.org”, they inevitably leave of “the”. I don’t know why — they just do. In any case, I was looking for a shorter, more phonetic name and found BENTO.US (.org, .com and .net were taken). I don’t have any plans at the moment to abandon THELOCUST.ORG, so don’t get all afearin’. I’m not sure what I’ll do with BENTO.ORG just yet, so stay tuned on that front. I also registered BENWILSON.ORG, which will most likely become a portfolio/resume site for me. I’ve had a 80% finished portfolio thing I whipped up a while back, and that will probably go there.

So, in short, keep an eye out. Developments might be underway.