Internets

I didn’t even realize I’d been thinking about it, but I guess I was, over these last, umm… months since my last update.  Well, I’ve decided.  Clapboard lives.  It gets updates again because despite the splintering of my attention into a million pieces, despite the lack of easy options for posting photos and such that benefit Twitter, Facebook and so many others, despite the fact that it just isn’t cool, Clapboard is mine, and that’s good enough for now.

I’m off to look into ways to post things.  Maybe it’s even the right answer to change the underlying software (gasp?!).  Whatever it is, it’ll get some attention from me while I’m doing normal updates again.  My computer works (although I did just realize I lost a few folders of pictures – nothing heartbreaking, but I’m still rattled all the same), my phone works, my camera works… I can update. And I shall.

So hi.

I know this is like trying to draw attention to a rock concert by sitting in the stands and whistling, but I really dig Randall’s work on XKCD from Monday:

http://xkcd.com/1331/

That is all.

Over the years, I’ve accumulated a lot of hosted domains on my VPS, and this is the morning where I finally cull the herd and drop the dozens of addresses no longer using my services, no longer paying JVS, or just that have dropped off the face of the earth.  It’s taking a surprisingly long time.  It’s also bringing up a raft of memories and ghosts of dead projects that’s making me a little sad, even though they weren’t generally my projects in the first place.  Then again, maybe it’s a tribute to the endless creativity of my friends and the people I know that they’re always coming up with new things.

Either way, this has been on my “When I get Home…” list for a long time.  Then back to cataloging wine even though I don’t want to.

And I’m going to start updating again.

Okay, so Google has a lot of services and I’m using Google for a lot of my domains.

I am opposed to SOPA & PIPA.

I recognize that the government has outsourced the writing of laws to the highest bidder, and I recognize that music and movie execs are a bunch of half-human oafs with their heads too far up their collective asses for them to be scientifically still alive (a medical miracle!), but I still believe that an outcry from regular people can make a difference.

Every sentient American opposes these two bills.  Every one.

From the oft-brilliant Oatmeal:

I’m looking into leaving Time Warner for our Cable internet, and decided to check on my speeds over at speedtest.net. Turns out not to have sucked too much, really.  Faster than 72% of the US using “Road Runner Turbo” is okay.  I’d like to be in the 90th percentile, though.

This comes under the heading of embarrassing, but funny enough to post.  Back at the beginning of October, I got in a fight on Twitter with this dumb bitch who took issue with me calling out Chick-Fil-A for being a company run by hateful asshats.  I posted this to twitter:

I’m not into politics, really, but I do think it’s a shame when companies use their fat wads of cash to screw over regular folks (through buying legislation or supporting hate groups or whatever else – it’s all the same to me).  So I mentioned it.    Chick-Fil-A had just opened a Hollywood location and I wanted to try their food again (it was probably 1994 last time I ate there).  No big deal.  I mean, plenty of people still shop at Target, right?

Anyway, on the morning of the 2nd, after coming out of Bootie, I saw that someone had replied to my Chick-Fil-A post.  Below is the whole stupid story.  I don’t even want to write any more till you’ve read it.

You may not have known it was broken, but the broken search was something that had been bothering me for a long time. For awhile it had been co-opted by the forum, but then it was just broken.  Now it’s fixed, in that when you search for something, you get results.  Or you get results if you search for something I’ve written about.

That is all.  Show day today in hot-ass Athens.

I’ve been working, believe it or not.

With my impending departure for South America with Bon Jovi looming, I’m looking at a foreshortened timeline and thinking about how I can get work completed for MWS before I go. It’s a short-ish timeline, given the back-and-forth that has to happen, but still, it’s doable.  Then, through Priscilla, I booked a gig working on the practically-abandoned non-profit website CAN-DO.org.

The founders live across the yard at the moment, and Eric just left for Haiti, so it’s a time crunch to get everything updated and working.  The site isn’t a CMS, but instead was written in Dreamweaver (I can only assume) and the pages that I have are all a disaster.  Totally unnecessary nested tables within more and more tables, no real patterns (each box is slightly different from the rest, or boxes within sections have different problems), and almost no CSS.  Each page has some random CSS generated by Dreamweaver at the top, and the stylesheet is an amalgam of overlapping styles and mess.

Long story short, I now have more work than I can handle.  Or almost more work than I can handle.  I’m writing this blog post, for example, while I await replies to two emails and rest my eyes from staring at the code, wondering why the site works so radically differently on IE than on Firefox (and, indeed, everything else).  At least I’m building karma on this one, right?  My rate is slashed and I’ll be able to claim some tax advantage at the end of the year, supposedly.

Google has changed their underlying code for maps so many times that this no longer even remotely worked, sadly.  Remember, kids, ALL CONTENT YOU DON’T HOST YOURSELF WILL ALWAYS GO AWAY.  ALL OF IT. ALWAYS.
(…MO 2016_0810)

So Woot got bought by Amazon.

What’s the business end of this deal? I’ve read the Blog Post, I’ve seen the video, and I’m still a little confused, or at least in the dark, about how something like this works.  Like, who gets what?  Presumably, Amazon paid something for Woot.  They weren’t a public company, so it didn’t happen by stock purchses, right?  No.  So they just put up a certain amount of money and, boom, they now get the profits?  Everyone gets the same salary and job description as before, just the ownership changed hands?

I guess, if I owned Woot and Amazon came along and gave me, in cash, the value of the profit I expected to make over the next three years (ten years?) and let me stay on as CEO with the same salary, etc., then I might do it, too.  Especially if I had another idea that I wanted to exploit.  Hmm.

Anyway, anyone who has a real clue about how this sort of thing goes down, I’d be interested in your take.

Over the last week or so, there’s been a change in the way my reader looks – all Gawker Media sites changed their full-text feeds to partial-text, AKA click-to-our-site-so-we-can-make-money-off-you feeds.

Not likely.

There are other options out there, and/or the info I get from them isn’t that important.  I can drop Giz and only read Engadget.  I barely skim Jalopnik anyway, and the porn blog?  Pure tourism – no loss to lose it, really.  Fewer tits in my day probably means more productivity.  Besides, there’s always Tumblr.  So I’m on the hunt for new places to read on a regular basis if you’re in the mood to recommend.

Ironically, at the same time (conspiracy?!), Slashdot just expanded their feed offering to show me selected comments – amazing.  I’m not sure I even need all that information (and they provided a link to change the feed back that I haven’t explored yet), but it’s nice that they offer it.

Now, I’m not a particularly “valuable” reader from a demographics standpoint.  I’m over 30, basically ad-blind to the ads that I don’t automatically block and I rarely comment.  So they don’t care about losing me.  But if they feel that way about everyone who’s just like me (and anecdotal evidence suggests that we are legion), Gawker Media is losing a big chunk of their readership.  Ah well.

Thanks to Mike Masnick at Techdirt for the article that pointed this out and prompted me to act.

edit: I *am* sad about losing Lifehacker, but a stand’s a stand, and i’m sure I can find other places to read.

This is not news in any way, but I just wanted to mention that I’m no longer on myspace, officially.  I’d sort of like to focus my presence online, and I think by removing my MySpace (and LinkedIn, probably) profiles, I’ll have a little less online baggage.  These were sites that tried, and succeeded, to a certain extent, but for me, at least, they’ve passed their expiration dates.

Two PCW gigs tomorrow – one with Bon Jovi and one with a video production unit in LA.   Fun times.  Gotta keep that bandwagon going, as the MWS bandwagon is coasting to a halt.  I’d like to jumpstart that one to keep it going, too, but honestly, it’s been dying for a year.  Lots of little things (no more invitations to NYC, the hiring of multiple overlapping consultants, etc.) have been happening, so I just need to do the best I can with what I’ve got and maybe that’ll be enough.  Maybe it won’t, but I’ll do what I can.

Also, I’m tired.

As I sit here alone at Dragonfish, a swank sushi joint across from my hotel, I wonder how i’ll act on my next visit. The fact that i’m thinking about it outside of the weird, geeky confines of my “internet time” definitely means that the site has hit a nerve – I certainly never think “this will be great on Facebook” and rarely think to update my twitter profile except when i’m bored (a fact made abundantly clear by my updates, i’m sure), but this one is different. It’s got human-style interaction, sort of. It’s got that anonymity that brings us back to the old days of the pre-commerce web. It’s got erections.
Shitloads of erections.

enough bullshit – if you don’t already know what i’m talking about, you should. The site in question is ChatRoulette, and it’s amazing.

The thing about ChatRoulette is that it’s weird. Really weird.  There are quite a few erections on it, but that’s not all there is. There’s an amazing variety of people on here, probably averaging 25,000 at any given time.  Tonight, I’ve seen military guys, couples, tons of asians, groups of people sitting around, parties, lots of creepy guys (I’m probably one of those, given that I’m old and alone on here), and even a few girls.  The thing about it is that you can be anyone you want (like what you told yourself before you went off to college, only in 3-second bursts) – and people really are.  Apparently, a lot of them want to be watched as they jack off.  How are these folks so on top of things?  Like, they’re just waiting for new ways to expose themselves, and get the memo before the normal people do, somehow.  Anyway, it doesn’t matter, because you, too, can masturbate for strangers’ amusement, too.  You can also practice your one-liners, your funny faces or voices, your crazy lies – whatever you want, because you can’t find those people again and they can’t find you.  Yet.  Also, you’ve gotta do it quick, because the denizens of CR are fucking FAST on the “Next” button.

This post has already taken three sittings and two days to complete, partially because ChatRoulette is so ineffable.  The other part is because I’ve been at work, but that shouldn’t be an excuse.  Anyway, check it out.

I’m deleting like 5 or 10 new spam accounts on here per day these days.

So I’ve arrived in NYC, and I’m sitting at Starbucks, but I’m not using their WiFi.

This is kinda fun, in a giggle-alone-at-your-computer sort of way.

It’s a website that translates your phrase from English to Japanese back and forth until the results can’t be distilled anymore.