Everything that does not have a home, just a big old stinking pile of posts.
I love photos and I love maps, but I’ve not been the best at doing both together. I almost never remember to go back to flickr and place my photos on the map, so less than 10% of my photos are geotagged. I really want the process to be automatic, the best I do is […]
cc licensed flickr photo shared by ·Music Moves My Feet·
I will definitely show my age era here.
Yes, you kids with your “digital buy a song for 99 cents mix it up on your pod” may have something special you will blog about in 20 years. But for me, in many ways, there was nothing like the music that defined the Album Rock period that ushered me through those teen years.
It’s one thing to have a good song, but an Album, for many musicians, was a concept, a whole, and there was not only the music, but the art on the cover, the liner notes, the stamp on the disc… it was a feast. What do you get in an iTunes download?
Just bits.
So I had a hankering to come up with a list of ten albums that were formative to me- not the ten best albums nor the most important, but actually, ten I could recall because of when they occurred in my life. Ten stories.
cc licensed flickr photo shared by Scoobay
But first, I was a little inspired by this book, 1,000 Recordings To Hear Before You Die. I had thumbed through it last April when I was on my sister’s boat, and it was a nice surprise when she sent me a copy as a gift.
It’s a book you can just pick up and thumb through anywhere, it is arranged alphabetically by artist/group, crossing classical to rock to show tunes to punk to opera to world music. You go from Héctor Lavoe to Leadbelly to Ernesto Leeuono to Led Zeppelin to Peggy Lee to Michael Legran. Author Tom Moon offers clear, non snooty critic like commentary, but it is opinion (how can it not be?).
There’s a neat little bit of linkage at the end of each section, almost like hypertext in an old style book. For each album, the author lists “key tracks” from the album; then “Catalog Choices”, like a “see also” meaning another album by the same artist; then “next stop” which is something similar by a different artist, and last is “After That” something less related, that might help you branch out in musical style. This is all accomplished in about an inch of print, and it leads to discovery.
So here are my Ten Formative Albums…
cc licensed flickr photo shared by myoldpostcards It’s hard to stay shiny. A few weeks since moving to Chrome for my primary browsing, a few dents: Lack of Java. Not supported. Just means I have to launch Safari to sit in an Elluminate webinar. Very minor damage, just an annoyance. Irregular frame targeting. Some of […]
cc licensed flickr photo shared by ooki_op iPad. That’s it. iPad! Yep. iPad. Got one? iPad… Nope. I sit on the sidelines taking in the iPad frenzy. Over the last few months, rarely have so many firm opinions been founded on so much lack of actual information. but now that changes. A bit. I have […]
cc licensed flickr photo shared by Luca Zappa This is more of a narrowly constructed and certainly not data-driven observation, and I admit at the front that I am just as much a part of the problem as the next node, but I am seeing in my own streams of communications more dropped connections all […]
Nothing is more fun on the internet then playing smack down with Jim Groom. He is relentless, but like a good tussle with that rubber stretch toy, I wont give in easily. Over the last few days, though, poor bava boy Jim was been shrinking in stature.
It started out when his endless twitter stream of “iHate iPad Lovers” compelled me to conjure up from the archives this damning piece of evidence:
cc licensed flickr photo shared by cogdogblog
It’s his insane tirade of false superiority for being on the same lame WordPress template he stumped across (let’s not even dissect his mangled use of language claim of being “themogamous” — when really he is “monothematic”) and constant taunting me for the current theme I put in place recently that hatched an evil plan.
What got me inspired about the HoPE theme I use here is the dynamic top right image pane, which pulls recent images from my flickr account, the default being the first of the last batch of images added.
And I got this idea (cue maniacal laughter).. if I took a screen shot of the entire header including the image above, then in an hour it would appear like one of those infinite barbershop mirror illusions. So I repeated the cycle several times, upload a screenshot of the header to flickr, wait til it appeared in the blog header, lather, rise, repeat, laugh.
Honey, I shrunk the Bava!
I was thumbing through the current issue of Wired Magazine (yes, my analog, arrived in snail mail, maybe delivered by Pony Express version). In very small print on the table of contents, under “New Media” was an interesting note. We’ve collaborated with Adobe to develop the Wired Reader, which will run on pretty much any […]
cc licensed flickr photo shared by theilr
It’s been a while since I did some WordPress hacking, and today I think it showed. Like a good bone I could not let go of a niggling little problem, and then after going around in circles, I found an obvious way that was much more simpler than where I was headed.
But there are things even learned in a few trips around the roundabout.
Here’s where I drove around in circles today… for a while, I have been publishing web versions of the NMC Horizon Reports in CommentPress format at http://wp.nmc.org — this is very useful for publications since it allows comments to be attached to individual paragraphs, so they are tied at a more micro level to the content. (Yeah they are in the old CommentPress mode, I know I should be using the newer digress.it and am ready to publish the new one there this week).
Since Mobiles have been part of the Horizon Reports since like 1776, and there is the nifty WPtouch plugin that elegantly makes WordPress sites display cleanly on not just iPhones, but other mobile platforms (my first play was last year and I have rolled into most of my WordPress sites).
I am not a happy pup. The volume of blog comment spam coming into my quiet little dog house is has reached DEFCON 4 on the scale of annoyance. So I am taking action against one company, Ubiquity Server Solutions which coddles spammers (see the updates and comments below- I cannot stand by this initial […]
cc licensed flickr photo shared by ice.bluess This week’s reading for Gardner Campbell’s New Media Faculty Seminar was video artist Bill Viola’s “Will There Be Condominiums in Data Space?” a title that intrigued me and, even as Gardner explained it on our podcast, I’m still circling around its meaning. For whatever reason, I keep coming […]
