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Really Simple Syndication

Thursday, December 29, 2005

I found a link to this article "Analyzing the New Yahoo! RSS Report" on the Airbag Industries site this morning, which is ironic, being as the few times i've tried using the rss feed to Airbag's "longboard" it has not worked. (To be accurate, his link actually went to a "reprint" of the article on another site. As far as i can tell, the link above is the original source. )

The thing that strikes me as odd is that they seem to refer to using browser-based RSS reading as an inferior use of the technology:
"Even tech-savvy 'Aware RSS Users' prefer to access RSS feeds via user-friendly, browser-based experiences (e.g., My Yahoo!, Firefox, My MSN)."
As opposed to using Feed Readers like they "should"? Like it's supposed to be? I personally think that browser-based RSS applications, especially in combination with tabbed-browsing, are the best possible use of site feeds. I've been using google for my homepage for years. Before that i used CNN, but i gave up on CNN for two reasons: as a homepage it was too "heavy" a site, k-size wise; CNN is less news and more of a news tabloid. As much as i get sick of politics, it's even worse when it's sensationalized. When google introduced the google homepage a few months or so ago, not long after i'd started using my gmail account in earnest, it was an easy transition for me to begin using the customized homepage. It remains entirely text-based, so it's still an almost instantaneous download, it gives me quick, easy access to my gmail account, and i can plaster links from RSS feeds all over it.


(Comer, if you look closely, you'll see CatchingOn toward the bottom of the right column!)

For me the attraction to RSS is pretty simple: it's a means in which to have my browser present me with articles and items of interest. It changes the web from solely a medium of search to a delivery mechanism as well. They make a good point about RSS promotion needing to be more thorough, but I honestly don't think that it should be the responsibility of every site to explain in depth what RSS is and how to use it. That said, i think that relying on services like My Yahoo and the Google Homepage to disseminate the widespread use of RSS, and more, RSS awareness, is pretty unlikely. It's no wonder that major news outlets dominate in site feed usage. When you click that buttom to customize your homepage, to what extent are the feed reader sites educating the users and to what extent are they just providing an interface to add content from their pre-prescribed feeds? And what should the middle ground be?

One of the things i always hated most about AOL was this insular little world they seemed to create based on their own content, seemingly in an effort to keep their users within their own limited network and, to some extent, ignorant of the web-at-large. Most AOL users i've talked to aren't even aware of what a web browser is or that the web exists as an "entity" that is accessible outside of the confines of AOL. It would be a shame to see services like My Yahoo become basically the same thing for the "unaware users" of RSS.


Yahoo's whitepaper (i hate the term "whitepaper"), RSS--Crossing into the Mainstream. (It's a PDF)

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elli and the graham


My 4 year old daughter, elise.


I put up a new post on my kids' site tonight, the first in quite a while. It's hard to keep up with, but much less so now that i'm not doing the whole thing by hand. I have yet to put captions on the pictures, but there's lots of cuteness going on.

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death to old keyboards

Wednesday, December 28, 2005

i think i'm going to have to kill my laptop. the keyboard is pretty much useless at this point; the pounding required to get the keys to work exceeded its physical limitations. apparently old dell latitudes are known for having keyboard problems, but this keyboard in particular is getting hard to come by. all i could find on ebay are ones going for $45 because they're a "hard to find item." I wonder why.

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pics of home

Friday, December 23, 2005

My mom sent me a bunch of pictures from New Orleans in the mail. This is the first i've seen of the street i lived on during my teenage years. It's hard to know what to expect until you see it. I knew it wasn't going to be pretty, but I also knew that it wasn't nearly as bad as other places in the city. As my mom said, "New Orleans East is MUCH worse than this, St. Bernard is MUCH worse than New Orleans East, and the 9th Ward is no ward at all." These pictures are all pretty small so there's not a lot of detail to be seen, but i'll try to upload larger versions and link to them soon. For now:



This is taken from the sidewalk in front of my grandma's house. That is her car, covered in nastiness, and the pink house caty-corner is the house that I lived in from about age 12 on. It was a blessing to live so close to my grandma all of those years. I literally spent hours sitting with her in her kitchen talking every evening.




Grandma's house on Lafaye St. (Now you know where the name of my song came from.) Being up on that slight hill, and raised off of the ground, her house faired pretty well...



...except for the basement, where my grandpa's books and whatnot all got trashed.



This is looking into my grandma's backyard, standing alongside the house. There used to be a fence that ran parallel to the street, at the top of the incline in the grass running almost straight down the center of the picture. It was blown down. Looks like it's covered by the dibris from the basement.




My mom's comment "Who knows where this is? It all looks like this."




my 4 y/o daughter elli and i were looking at these when they came in the mail, and i was trying to place this picture. i realized it was the gas station 2 blocks from my house when i was a kid and pointed to elli that my house was "back there," pointing down the street. she put her arm around me and said "i'm sorry that your house got flooded, daddy."




Grandma's backyard without the debris...




...and with the debris.




The small shop on the right is a place called The Bakery. I don't think I even had a po-boy from any place beside the bakery until i was at least 10. As a kid my grandma would take us there to buy candy from the glass case @ the cashier's counter. I always got Rainblo gum and a little pack of redhots. The Bakery's sandwiches were really good, with excellent french bread. Mmmph.




Ferrara's Super Market on Robert E. Lee and Elysian Fields. (What, you thought New Orleans was gonna name its streets after Union officers?)




My grandparent's neighbor's shed. Or it was.




It's crazy how all of the grass is dead. New Orleans is such a green city, it's one of the things that makes nola beautiful, but right now everything looks so dead.



Teddy's Grill on Franklin Ave. I wonder if the kitchen sink is in there too.

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12:04am is coming quick

Tuesday, December 20, 2005

Tomorrow begins my Christmas mini-vacation: tomorrow is my birthday, we have friday and monday off of work, so i'm taking off thursday too. Officially i turn 31 at 12:04am tonight. For my birthday i would like a springer spaniel and a warm environment to house train her (it's got to be a female) in. Having to take a dog out at 3am in single-digit weather is a horrible task. I never really do much for my birthday, though i do tend to go out the night of the 20th so that i can officially be in "celebration" mode when the clock hits 12:04. It's a tradition of sorts that i began when i was old enough to, you know, go out... But celebration mode at this point for me generally consists of watching movies with Kim or playing video games/chess/tien len (a Vietnamese card game) with mr. chet and adny. Kim is taking wednesday off and we'll have cake and i'll get a gift or two, but for the most part my birthdays pass without much fanfare. Maybe this year i'll buy a gun and fire some shots into the air. But no, it's too late on that 3-day waiting period. I wonder if you have to wait three days to buy a shotgun from walmart.

You know, i never really had any reservations about entering my thirties until i was 29 1/2. That was the point at which i started noticing changes. I used to really wonder when it was that i would truly feel like an adult. I always looked young for my age (even though i was always younger than my classmates, etc, to begin with). I've managed to get a very "freeform" job with a small company, working with a group of guys that were mostly even younger than me. My wife looks less her age than I do... and i've always just felt rather young. But then recently i realize that i've stopped wondering when i'd feel like an adult, which means i think it's finally set in. I think it probably coincides with Graham being born and moving into our house. More specifically, i think it's all because of the loss of my basketball goal. There's no where to put one on my corner lot! All rebounds would bounce into a busy street. My neighbor used to joke that he'd never seen someone miss so many shots but, as i told him, the whole point was just to keep me moving, running around. When elise was little she and i played in the backyard everyday. She would collect rocks or play in her little sandbox. I would play a game called jump ball in which you shoot the ball and, assuming you miss, you have one bounce, then have to jump and grab the rebound and shoot before you hit the ground. It's meant to be a two player game, but i don't know anyone else that is willing to get off their ass enough to do anything that requires significant amounts of physical exertion (with the exception of hiking when the weather permits and Kim is willing to bear the burden of parenthood alone for a 6-7 hour stretch, which may happen at most a dozen times a year). Although! Chet is getting back into school, supposedly, in January, which means we will have access to racquetball courts at UWM. I need exercise. I should've been able to stay in my mid-twenties a bit longer.

I also have to renew my driver's license tomorrow which, being a wednesday might not be too bad, but it'll still be bad.

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JazzFest Live Meters Reunion

Monday, December 19, 2005



I found this site that offers CDs and MP3 downloads of shows from the Jazz Fest available from a company called MunckMix.
The recordings are multi-track recordings where MunckMix engineers take a combination of instrument and microphone stage feeds, stereo soundboard mix, and audience microphones to render a high quality recording with a "live" feel. The multi track recording is then mixed and mastered in MunckMix' mobile studio rig, or at its studios in Chicago, before being transferred to CDs and posted as downloads.
They have The Original Meters Reunion set from Jazz Fest '05, a 2 CD set, which i'm very tempted to order. You can even preview the tracks on the CD on the site, though a bunch of the previews wind up just being them talking, introducing the next song. From what i can tell, though, it sounds really good.

Here's the track list from the downloadable CD Inserts:

DISC 1
1. Intro (by Quint Davis) (2:45) 2. Fayo On The Bayou1 (7:34) 3. People Say (10:49) 4. He Bite Me1 (5:42) 5. Funky Miracle> (2:52) 6. Cardova> Look-Ka Py Py> (6:11) 7. Hand Clapping Song1 (4:55) 8. Africa1 (8:10)

DISC 2
1. Stage banter (0:38) 2. Song intro (1:24) 3. Be My Lady1 (7:26) 4. The World> (7:23) 5. Welcome To New Orleans2 (4:12) 6. Stage banter (0:39) 7. It Ain't No Use> (6:35) 8. Drum solo> (2:07) 9. Jam (4:19) 10. Announcements (2:09) 11. Encore intro (0:24) 12. Cissy Strut> (4:01) 13. Hey, Pocky Way1 (6:20)


For what it's worth, there's also a freely available Original Meters show from Vegoose from October 30th, '05, but from what i can tell it's not as good. It's not bad, not at all, but the clips from the Jazz Fest show sound like they have a bit more of that minimal sound that The Meters used so well 30 years ago. etree also has a few Funky Meters shows, which are worth hearing, but it's not quite the same.

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a funeral for a friend

Thursday, December 15, 2005

A friend of Kim's and mine died this week from complications in surgery. He had an aneurysm in his stomach/torso, i'm not exactly sure where. He was a pretty heavy guy which made the surgery difficult to perform and i think also difficult for his body to recover from. I don't want to go into the details because they aren't mine to share, but it's been pretty upsetting to kim and i to see.

Kim went to see his wife and spend some time with her in the waiting room in the early hours of the surgery and everything seemed pretty upbeat. I think they were pretty aware of the possible outcome of the surgery, but i dont think anyone truly expected him not to make it. It's odd because these aren't people that we know THAT well. We met them at the church that we'd been going to, but they stopped going some time ago for their own reasons. Kim kept in touch with the wife, though, and feels very close to her despite not having spent much time together. Likewise, though he was much older than me, i really liked him and felt like he was the one person in the church i had met that i could relate to at all. He was from New York and had grown up in somewhat rough circumstances. He was a smart, hard-working guy, and had obviously spent a lot of time on the streets and had gained a lot of wisdom from it, i think.

One evening, probably about a year ago, they came to our house to drop some things off to us and stayed to visit for a while. It was on a Friday night, which is generally my night to get out of the house, but I postponed my plans for a while to sit and chat with them and was glad i did. Part of the ideology of the church we attended was evangelism: to spread your faith and beliefs to those around you. I personally have had a hard time with that, as I never believed it was my right to tell others what to believe, nor am I very receptive to being told so. He was different, though. He sat and told us stories of his life, not "you should think this" and "you should believe that," but stories about the ways in which he felt God had made himself known to him and how he'd responded.

When I decided to stop going to the church I considered calling him... in a way just to help me clarify my position. I never did, though, and part of me feels like i missed an opportunity in not. Of all the people I met there, he was the one person i felt i could relate to on a personal level regardless of the fact that he was twice my age. Him being from NY, I felt like he'd had similar experiences growing up to mine and could understand my point of view more than many of the people who grew up in the cold, insular state of Wisconsin.

I did manage to have one last chance to talk to him last week. I called to help with a problem they were having with their new computer, and he and i wound up talking for a while. I told him about my new stairs and he started telling me about all the projects he had going on in his house. He told me that he was feeling ok and didn't seem at all perturbed by the upcoming surgery. It really strikes me how much he had planned, all of the different ways that it seems he had no intention of dying now.

Tomorrow evening we'll go to the funeral-- at our old church. It's somewhat ironic that it's going to be there. I don't think his wife feels particularly comfortable with it, but they hadn't found a new church which kind of made it the default. She subtly asked me to say something at the funeral, "testimony" style, which is rather out of character for me, but perhaps i'll have gotten a little practice now, having written my thoughts out already. I'm hoping it doesn't turn out to be too uncomfortable being there. I've been trying to figure out in my head what to say when someone asks me why we've stopped coming. It's obviously not something that i'll want to get into, but I should be prepared.

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new music & ideas

Friday, December 09, 2005

When I started working on the room upstairs I decided that i wasn't going to work on any music until i was done. It was probably a big mistake, but working on music is a LOT of work. That room was a lot of work as well, so the logic was that there wouldn't be time for both. Problem was, I didn't really want to work on the room at night after Kim gets home, i'm too tired and just want to sit down. Of course, it made the progress of remodeling quite slow, which in turn means i haven't recorded any music in almost a year, with the exception of one drum beat which will probably become the basis of my next project. I had this idea long ago that it'd be interesting to post mp3s of a song and it's individual parts as it progressed, detailing the production and kind of illustrating the process. Or at least my process.

This reminds me of something that i read in a recent Broken Social Scene interview where Dave Newfeld was talking about how they'd have all of these great parts, but that as a song comes together, sometimes the parts get lost in the whole. I have this tendency to over-layer things at times, especially in Esplanade, so there are definately things that get lost. It's a struggle between wanting things to be heard, and wanting things to be hidden. I tend to think of good art as being something that is challenging to the audience, probably because i personally find artwork more interesting if i have to search for things. I like the idea of hearing a familiar song and still hearing new parts come in, or noticing the play in the timing of two instruments that i'd never noticed before. I know that I tend to over-saturate sometimes. But the last few songs i've done, the nola songs, are kinda meant to have this marching band sound to them; the number of sounds going is a product of that.

By posting the individual parts as i go, I think it might provide a bit more insight into the individual parts and their strengths and weaknesses when taken out of the context of the whole.

Of course, this all necessitates me getting my equipment set back up and doing some work on a new bassline. I sure do love a good bassline. I may be handing off the bass and drums to my friend Chet to do some guitar work, but i don't know that he'll be able to escape the folky singer/song-writer mindset. I gave him some Meters to listen to to get in the right frame of mind, but maybe i should give him some M. Ward too, to kind of balance out what i'm going for with what his natural disposition is. Anyone else that's interested in doing a bit of improv guitar work for me should let me know.

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remodeling upstairs

Wednesday, December 07, 2005

I finally got the walls to my upstairs bedroom done about two weeks ago. The following weekend I ripped out the stairs and this past weekend we had a contractor come to the house and rebuild them. Of course now i think "i should have taken a picture of the old stairs," just like i realized i didn't take a picture of the completed drywall until all of the primer was on the walls. (Maybe i got a pic of the drywall before all the mudding was done, though...) There's a line of unpainted wall where the old stairs were, though, so you can see the drastic change. The old stairs were extremely steep, so much so that we were afraid when we eventually sell the house, the stairs alone would scare off potential buyers.

The upstairs room is built into what used to be the attic, which is pretty common for "1.5 story cape cods." When the previous owners converted it to a bedroom, though, they left the old staircase which was obviously not meant for daily use. On top of that, they built the walls out of 2x2s and paneling instead of 2x4s and drywall. I didn't even realize the framing was 2x2s until i started ripping the walls apart. Because the walls were made of paneling, the room didn't hold heat at all -- there was nothing sealing the joints. I pulled out all of the old insulation and replaced it, and removed the paneling and put up drywall.

So the other day i was up there, getting things ready for the contractor to come back Tuesday to finish the stairs. I opened the door to the bit of space that is still legitimate attic space, and as soon as i walked in I noticed a big drop in temperature between the bedroom and the storage space. That was the moment when I finally felt like all of the work i've put into remodeling the room has been worth it. Now the upstairs room is the warmest room in the house.


I'll try to post of few pics of it when i get some of the mess from ripping the old stairs apart cleaned up.

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web portfolio

Friday, December 02, 2005



I've been working on my Web Portfolio for the last week or so, trying to get it updated and cleaned up, and working on the presentation a bit. It's finally done which should hopefully provide the impetus for me to start looking for more freelance/contract work. Take a look and let me know what you think.

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Dragonfly TV

Thursday, December 01, 2005



My daughter loves the PBS Kids website, so the other day we were looking around the site trying to find some new games for her to play. I don't think this show, Dragonfly TV, comes on in milwaukee, but the games on their site are awesome. It seems to be a science show for kids older than elise but she doesn't let that stop her.

Weebit World is this game with these little creatures called Weebits that eat plants and multiply (or starve and die). Your job is to regulate the rain fall, which kind of plants you want most of, and place the plants around the board for the Weebits to eat. It's kind of like a fast action Sim type of game and it's surprisingly fun-- for me. I'm surprised at how well elli's picked it up, but she loves watching the Weebits divide like little cells with faces and feet. One hint: plants take a minute to grow. If you put them too close to a hungry Weebit he'll gobble it all up. Give it a little room to grow and it can keep growing back to feed more than one.



Try not to get too upset when one of your Weebits turns gray and dies, it's all a part of life.


Underwater ROV is pretty fun too. The point is to take underwater pictures of fish spread throughout several different locations (depths) on a map. Elise really likes it... i like the look of it. It reminds me of old Johnny Quest cartoons.




Mechanical Madness reminds me of something i was thinking about doing after watching that blue ball machine-- creating mini machines that could be linked together to form bigger machines. This game is a variation on that idea... the machines have to be placed in specific spots on the board to get a single ball from point A to point B. It was definately a nice little flash game. When i finished level 3 i would have liked to have a level 4 to play.




You can also breed dogs using certain genes to get certain traits, fly around space fixing a space station, or hurtle objects through different planet's varying levels of gravity to SAVE THE DAY! You know you want to save the day.

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