infobong.com

flexible channel management

Steev points to Broadcast Machine, a content management system for distributing video. It provides a front-end for uploading videos and creates Bittorrent seeds of the video. It's also buzz-word compliant with RSS syndication and folksonomic tagging features.

I would say this would be nice to have on the ACTLab server if Sandy & Co. weren't already developing ACTLabTV. I do think that the amount of new software users need to install - a downloading client and a media player - may limit the use of ACTLabTV.

center of time

If I were more clever, I'd draw some comparison between the bomber in Joseph Conrad's The Secret Agent and this proposal from the US to abolish leap-seconds, so I'll just say if we base our clocks on the rotation of the earth, the terrorists will have already won. Who needs the sun? We must protect our proud American traditions, like the 24-hour day.

blurry photos of cops

Here's a good piece critical of Indymedia by professional writerr Jennifer Whitney. Whitney has a strong grasp of Indymedia's goals and practices and seems to genuinely want Indymedia to succeed. I agree with many of her criticisms, like too many stories are appropriated from other media outlets and that the flame wars on the site may alienate many progressives. In particular, I agree with her criticism of the quality of original work:

Whitney does a good job of explaining why developing technique should be regarded as an asset by Indymedia activists, while not falling into the trap of defending professionalism. Because one of Indymedia's primary goals is to make media-making accessible to anyone, it privileges participation over skills. I applaud the efforts to resist elitism, but too many pieces could use better story-telling and organization. These seem to be similar issues to the ones Larry Sanger raises about Wikipedia. Although Wikipedia and Indymedia work from a different set of principles and have different editorial goals, the tension between quality and open participation seems to be a source of both projects' problems.

Although Whitney doesn't try to assert the legitimacy of professional journalism, it does seem that Indymedia and Wikipedia make an easy case for professional writers who do want to assert that their work is more legitimate than the work of amateurs. I'm not sure it's entirely wise to valorize open participation as an alternative to professionalism. Instead we need to rethink the categories of "amateur" and "professional" and concentrate on making fair and engaging media.

dye the pool water

Today I pointed my old boss Scott to this column by Neal Pollack from a few weeks back. In the column, Pollack describes how his local 24 Hour Fitness gym has been transmogrified into a Lance Armstrong shrine. Like Scott, I thought this was the most amusing passage in the piece:

While I agree that Willie is probably more apt to inspire a bout of herbal relaxation than a fitness kick, I've apparently internalized Austin culture to the extent that I immediately thought of the cover of his Old Friends record, where the "Crazy" songwriter appears in a New Balance singlet and running shoes. Perhaps a Willie Nelson 24 Hour Fitness isn't as far-fetched as it seems. Of course, Willie is far from silent here in Austin; lately he's been lending his voice as a spokesperson for the Capital Metro bus service,

squelching alien territory

Here's a documentary about the history of the Roland TB-303 bass generator. I frankly didn't understand the first few minutes of the clip, but I learned some interesting facts about the evolution of electronic dance music. I do like the discussion toward the end about using technology to simulate older technologies.

withdraw standard support

A few days ago, I was surprised to see IBM's announcement it would it would stop selling OS/2 and only offer support by contract. I was not surprised, mind you, because I thought OS/2 was a vital, growing platform, but because I thought the operating system had died about ten years ago. I wonder about who is still using OS/2, if IBM had sold a lot of big contracts to companies that don't frequently upgrade their systems. I think at one time OS/2 was a popular platform for ATMs, and I could imagine there are plenty of older ATM machines floating around.

Seeing this piece tonight, it struck me as funny that IBM in the business of supporting a lot of funky old platforms. I can understand why customers would want to stick with a proven platform like the AS/400 minicomputer, and why a company would want to keep making money by selling services and support, but IBM's business seems to be structured around a number of different platforms and selling middleware to connect the platforms. I suppose this is one reason IBM has invested heavily in Linux and other open source projects, in order to pave the way for future compatibility, and allow users to maintain their code.

alert our passengers

Yikes, New York police will begin random searches of bags on subways, busses, and commuter trains. This seems like a substantial curtailing of civil liberites, since, once searches are in place, police won't simply be looking for explosives. Fortunately, the article notes "officials said they would take pains to avoid racial and ethnic profiling."

The article notes that New York is the first city to be taking these steps. London, which has been the target of recent bomb attacks, does not systematically search bags, so these steps seem more as attempt to give law enforcement more power, rather than avert attacks in the city.

New York police commissioner Raymond W. Kelly said at the announcement, "It's a safety issue. People don't consider any measures that you take for safety to be an inconvenience. This is New York City." I suspect that Kelly maybe not be describing the attitudes of New Yorkers accurately, but it's interesting how he invokes civic pride to suggest that ideal New Yorkers acquiesce to random searches. It seems like a quasi-nationalism, asking people to be loyal to the city.

faddish faux-bohemian kitsch

This NYTimes fashion column about Target critiques the chain with an elitist tone. Although the piece was written for "members of the middle- and upper-income brackets who view discount shopping as a socioeconomic field trip," it raises some interesting questions. The author notes she found, "an ergonomic paper shredder in the Graves half-aisle beneath a picture of a woman who looked like the actress Felicity Huffman and the words "I like to coordinate my keyboard with my toaster."

Considering I use a chair for storing books, I am not terribly attuned to interior decoration, but coordinating your toaster and keyboard strikes me as compulsive or absurd. Is this Target's effort at irony?

The article also notes:

I think the author might be trying to make a quasi-liberal political point, that values seem to be misplaced when a single coffee can cost more than shoes. But I doubt she's pointing out that the labor that makes a Frappuccino behind the counter stateside is more expensive than the sweatshop labor that produced the shoes in some faraway land.

red paint

I'm pretty bummed that a bunch of images are missing from this site. I suspect I deleted a directory by accident. I'm not terribly fastidious about backing up my work, so, if they're not gone for good, they'll be gone for a good while.

sought-after demographic target

I don't know how I missed this when I was blogging about Help! Mom! There are Liberals Under My Bed, but here's another kid's book from the greener side of the political spectrum. I am a little concerned, however, that kids might lose interest in Hey Kidz! Buy This Book A Radical Primer on Corporate and Governmental Propaganda and Artistic Activism for Short People before finishing the title. The description of the book sounds like the authors are making an effort to reach older kids by combining media literacy and communications strategy with real-world advice like "easy-to-follow directions for performing basic activist functions, such as holding meetings, making salsa, designing flyers and posters, hooking up a PA, and working effectively with others." I suspect that media literacy programs in Texas won't be adopting this text any time soon, but this seems like a book I would have loved as a young geek. I remember reading about the green futures presented in The Kids Whole Future Catalog and dreamed of growing vegetables in windows and riding public transportation.

crawl or a crash

NYTimes has a story about computer users who simply purchase new computers to fix their spyware problems. The story cites a Pew study reporting about how many computer users have had problems with spyware, but its evidence for the computer disposal trend is all anecdotal.

The anecdotes are fairly interesting. Two persons interviewed hold PhDs in computer science who tossed their machines after losing performance to spyware. The article doesn't note whether the infected computers were at the end of their lifecycle; perhaps these cases were simply early upgrades. The story also doesn't mention the environmental hazards improper computer disposal presents.

fragile and ultimately frightening

Although I attended Flaming Lips parking lot and boombox experiments in the late nineties, I still regret not attending the Zaireeka midnight release party at Norman's late, lamented Shadowplay records. It was probably my best chance to listen to the album the way it was meant to heard, with all four discs playing at the same time.

That is, until now. I just saw that the Alamo Drafthouse is staging an outdoor "screening" of the audio project later this month. The Web site says the folks from the downtown theater are "setting up a massive quadraphonic sound system with which to broadcast the album." I know this is splitting hairs, but if the album has four discs, doesn't it have eight channels of audio? Shouldn't that be an octophonic soundsystem? Perhaps they're mixing down each disc into a single channel.

A few years back, I kept hearing rumors that the Lips were working on a 5.1 mix of Zaireeka, which seems to be a much better format for home listening. Of course the idea of playing four CD players at home simultaneously is a little preposterous. However, I don't know whatever came of that project.

valuable lessons of conservatism

A few days ago, Nigel pointed to a children's book "Help! Mom! There are Liberals Under My Bed," which ostensibly teaches children about the evils of liberalism. Comparing it to the other side of the spectrum, I'm not sure if it's like the George W. Bush Coloring Book , which I suspect is mostly read by adults, or a book parents might actually use to teach their values to their children like Girls Will Be Boys Will Be Girls.

Looking at this pdf of sample pages from Help!, it does seem like the author is trying to get kids excited about free-market ideology. The primary antagonists in the story are "churlish" liberals who try to mandate vegetable consumption. When two children open a lemonade stand, the liberals first require the kids to serve broccoli with each glass and finally take over the lemonade stand. I'm struck by the negativity of this book. While Girls encourages children to act on their freedom, Help! only promotes free market ideology by naturalizing it. Girls"pokes fun at the tired constraints of gender normativity," while Help! vilifies persons with another point of view.

concrete cultural practices

A few days ago, I picked up what I thought was the latest issue of Afterimage, which is a journal about media arts. I used to read it back when I thought I was going into the media arts field, but I found it interesting, but a little disappointing. It focused a little too heavily on the nuts-and-bolts of working in the arts.

This issue was different. Flipping through at the newstand, I found many more articles about politics and issues in art, so I picked it up. The editors note said that the magazine was relaunching to provide more coverage on issues like media literacy, video art, new technologies, and "the intersections of text and image." The product is a pretty good magazine for someone like me with interests in both media studies and media-making.

In particular, I enjoyed the interview with Steve Kurtz, the cofounder of Critical Art Ensemble and SUNY-Buffalo prof facing federal charges for keeping biomaterials he was using in a piece. (Prentiss and I saw Kurtz speak at last year's Parallax View, and I quite enjoyed his talk.) In the interview, Kurtz talks about his background and the formation of CAE. I found one description of his experience of graduate school thought-provoking:

The words "concrete cultural practices" stood out in my mind, and I think helped me clarify some of my frustrations with graduate school. I really enjoy discussing and critiquing media and its influence on culture, but I do feel like I would engage in more concrete cultural practices, making art or media or trouble. This is hardly an original thought, but writing for professors and peers hardly seems like an effective or, at least, efficient means of acting on my interests. It does seem, too, that either academic culture or my particular situation discourages praxis. I had to choose between doing research and doing art, and the compartmentalization between cultural studies and cultural production limits crossover.

wishes to tuss

I'm not sure what to make of this site, "The Big Fun Glossary." I found it through a discussion about the risks and advantages of blogging for folks on the academic job market. It purports to be an account of a party house in Charlottesville, Virginia, but I can't tell to what extent it's documentary and what it's fictional. I assume that's there's some level of neo-realism either way.

I rolled with laughter reading glossary entry on Tussin DM and related slang terms. By far, the most popular entry on this blog is a never-ending discussion about DXM abuse, so perhaps I'm particularly inclined to find this funny. Regarless, I think there's a little humor for everyone. For example, here is the entry for "Tussin City":

The site also includes photographic documentation of a tussin party, including an animated gif showing a young woman freaking out on tussin. Regardless of the level of fiction in this project, it's certainly seems intended as a creative project. Browsing this site made me nostalgic for when I regarded making a Web site as a creative endeavor. I don't know if a larger slice of people have Web-publishing skills since, say, 1998, but certainly the tools have changed. On one hand Web-based software like MySpace or LiveJournal make it trivial to create a presence on the Web, and, on the other hand, sophisticated tools like Flash and After Effects have become more accessible, so geekier creative folks have more powerful authoring tools at their disposal, making Web publishing routine and unsexy.

contents may change

Street Tech points to the Wikipedia entry on today's transit bombings in London. It's already a very long entry by Wikipedia standards, and has seen thousands of edits. I'm guessing Wikipedia uses Greenwich Mean Time, and the first entry on the topic was posted at 9:18 this morning, so users would have been editing as the story first unfolded.

It's clear that a lot of data is being uploaded to be revised later, but it does give me an appreciation for the ways news organizations are able to collect and present data in a way that give readers an instant impression of what happened in a complex event. I understand why users would want to add to an entry, but isn't this a better case for WikiNews? Is it possible users are moving to fast, trying to create a definitive account before all the facts are in?

rainforest algebra

A post at Political Animal quotes my former boss Frank Wang. OK, he was the CEO of Saxon Publishers while I was a lowly part-time proofreader. Although the greatest responsibility I had was writing the answers in the back of the Algebra II textbook, I did come into contact with him from time to time.

Drum cites Mr. Wang to describe "the Math Wars," or a battle between educators who advocate a more heuristic approach to teaching math and conservative groups led by parents who advocate a "back-to-basics" approach that emphasizes drilling and rote memorization. (I've already blogged about Saxon here.) Philosophically, I tend to agree with the new math folks - I mean, how are kids ever going to understand Derrida if they don't learn set theory in grade school? - but my major objection to back-to-basics math education is more pragmatic. The Saxon method is boring, and more apt to turn students off to math than to give them mathematical competence.

understates the case

John Darnielle of the Mountain Goats offers a wonderful, if contrarian, insight into Podcasting on his blog, Last Plane to Jakarta:

Although this may be a little too harsh, I tend to agree. Another problem I often see with Podcasts is people who don't set their audio levels properly, and the sound is too low to easily here or painfully clipped.

habits of thinking

Last night, Matthew and I went to a screening of Slacker at the Harry Ransom Center. I had been having random thoughts about Eno's Oblique Strategies for a week or so, and a couple scenes in the movie feature the use of an Oblique Strategies deck. It seems like I should start using them for generating thoughts. One of the first interesting interactive things I found on the Web was an Oblique Strategies generator, so I decided to hunt around to see what the Web has to offer. I'm pretty sure the generator I saw in college was this one at Hyperreal, but online generators abound.

I thought to myself, this would be a perfect for a Dashboard widget! It would nicely complement the Terror Alert widget I have installed, but provide a little more utility. Lo and behold, there is a widget for generating Oblique Strategies. Now I can get a worthwhile dilemma just by punching F8!

It's interesting to note that this capsule review of Slacker quotes Oblique Strategies, but credits it to a character.