infobong.com the absurd courts the vulgar

Tonight I turned on the radio in my truck and heard this anti-marijuana and anti-indie rock PSA on KVRX, UT’s painfully indie student radio station. I thought to myself, “Why in the Sam Hill is KVRX running this?” After the spot, my fellow grad student Phil came on the air and ranted about how the government is targeting indie rock in its marketing campaigns. He later gave this blog props for pointing him to the spot.

As I was driving to school, I decided to stop by the studio to see what was going on. Phil put me on the air and complained a bit about the colors I use for my links. (I know, they really do need to change.) His co-host suggested I might have a Java problem, and as I tried to explain that I used stylesheets for the the colors, Phil seemed to be confused about how Java came up. He looked around the room and asked each person, “Did you say Java?” To further derail the conversation, I said, “It was me, but I said Jawa. You see I don’t actually write my blog. I have a sweatshop of Jawas writing it for me.”

In case any readers were actually listening to KVRX, I want to explain that comment was, in fact, a joke. We take a strong anti-sweatshop stance here at infobong.com, and the idea of blogging Jawas is simply ludicrous. I’m not even sure if Jawas can type.

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I just checked my del.icio.us to see how many posts will be dumped into this here blog today, and I noticed that I have 666 bookmarks posted today. It’s odd enough to notice the sign of the beast on your bookmarks page, but seeing it on Halloween is just plain spooky. Wooooo.

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I want to get a post up today, so this blog doesn’t descend into nothing but del.icio.us linkdumps. Unfortunately, I’ve got a lot going on with school right now, and few things seem to deserve much of my bloggy attention when I have two papers due this week and a class to manage. So, I’m going to drop an unordered list of thoughts that I don’t care to defend.

• I agree with Mark Cuban that Google’s acquisition seems kind of foolish. Yeah, YouTube attracts a lot of eyeballs, but Google already has a video-sharing service, and, if Google keeps YouTube as a separate business unit, as some observers speculate, they’re not exactly buying engineers to improve the Google Video experience.
• I forget how different the Web experience is for people who have desk-jobs than it is for grad students or freelancers. I try to plow through my RSS feeds and bookmarks as efficiently as possible, but conversations with old friends are reminding me of clock-watching browsing.
• WordPress templates suck. I’m OK with the PHP-hacking paradigm, but the way that CSS is used in nearly every single one I’ve used makes them brittle and difficult to read. When I started hacking this template, I wanted to create a nice, clean implementation without any unnecessary styles or tags, but I haven’t found the time and I’ve lost the motivation.
• Kubrick, the default WordPress template, is poorly organized and uses a lot of brittle type sizes and ugly fonts. It looks nice if you only change the banner image and don’t mind Microsoft fonts, but if you start changing around the CSS, you’re giving yourself some headaches. WordPress tries hard to make the server adminstration side easy with their “five-minute installation.” It’s too bad they can’t do the same for customizing the presentation.
• Ugh, this is one of those weeks when getting everything done seems impossible.

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…in lieu of a real post, here’s the Stephen Colbert “On Notice” board generator.

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This semester I’m teaching an upper-division class I’ve titled “Making Alternative Media,” which takes a hands-on approach to learning about media activism. I’m assigning the students projects like making ‘zines and blogs in an effort to learn some low-cost media-making skills and historically situate personal publishing on the internet. (If you’re curious, the class blog is here.) I’m a little disappointed because I thought the class might attract some committed activists types or underground culture vultures, but the students started out largely indifferent to subject matter.

To jump-start discussion for today’s class, I told the students to spend 20-30 minutes looking at a non-commercial blog to find out who was behind the blog, the intentions behind the project, and what kinds of issues the blog treated. Most of the students did their homework, and we had a pretty good discussion today. One student, however, couldn’t remember what blog he browsed. Although I demonstrated Technorati on Friday and suggested using it as a tool for finding blogs, this student said he just queried Google for “blog” and looked at a result in the top ten results.

Out of sheer curiousity, I did a Google search for “blog” in front of the class to see what would be the top results. Unsurprisingly, the top result is Wikipedia’s entry for “blog,” followed by some blogging services like Blogger. What I was interested to know, however, was what was the top personal blog. It turns out it’s Larry Lessig’s blog, which I find a little surprising, since he’s not a particularly regular blogger. Obviously, he has a high profile among bloggers and cyber-hipsters, so I can see how he might have the highest PageRank. Mark Cuban comes in next, and he’s an even less prolific blogger. It’s interesting that these figures earned reputations for things outside of blogging, yet have the top results for “blog.” The blog the student examined, was Blog for America, which I wasn’t even aware of.

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It looks like Bloglines has finally updated its DNS information for my feeds, since I just refreshed the site, and a bunch of posts popped up. It’s been a month since I switched hosts, and I’ve been frustrated that my posts weren’t showing up in the Web-based RSS reader. I didn’t think there was much I could do about it.

Anyway, if you’re a Bloglines user and you thought this blog had gone dark, I’m sorry. I’ve posted plenty of content in the past few weeks if you care to check out the archives.

Also, people have told me they have had a hard time either registering or posting comments to entries. I registered a test user and posted a test comment. I didn’t seem to have any problems. I know it’s a hassle to register, but it keeps spam down to nearly zero, and, when I had this blog on Movable Type, I only rarely got comments from a few usual suspects, so I don’t think I’m losing that many comments. Anyway, if you have a hard time with comments email me at chris -at- infobong -dot- com.

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Wow, that was pretty much painless. Dreamhost conveniently offers a “one-click install” of WordPress, which eliminated a half-hour or more of futzing around with the software and getting frustrated with the database. I hope somebody enjoyed the placeholder screen I had up for a day or so.

Now that I have more space, I may launch a second blog-like Webproject, but you’ll just have to wait and see.

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Are either of my readers engaged in home brewing? I left a comment on Weblogsky wondering if the proliferation of “craft beers” and “microbrews” have created a “Long Tail” of beers. It occurred to me that someone - if not a brewpub, a home brewer - should make a short run called “Long Tail Ale” and perhaps a batch of “Blogger Lager.” We could imbibe it at an Austin Bloggers get-together.

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The story that Word 2007 will built-in blogging has been floating around. Ars Technica says the program manager decided to include the feature because he was frustrated with the lack of AutoCorrect in Web-based blog editors. I wonder if while writing a post, Clippy will pop up and say, “It looking like you’re Fisking a story,” while turning on an auto-blockquote feature.

This isn’t so dumb, client-side blog editors like Ecto and MarsEdit are nice for composing blog posts offline or in a richer environment. Having this functionality built into Word will just eliminate the need for another editor. If blogging through Word catches on maybe we’ll see a reduction in teh amount of typos online.

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The US Post Office’s rate change caught me off guard this year. I bought a whole sheet of commermorative stamps that arrived just as the rates went up. Rather than mess around with two-cent stamps, I decided to just hang on the sheet of Buckminster Fuller stamps for my collection and grab some thirty-nine-cent stamps. I pay most of my bills online, so I need stamps only rarely. I’ve going to the post office to buy stamps from a machine, but the machine has been down. I’m a bit of a stamp geek, so I won’t settle for just any lame US Flag stamp (besides, flags are a little too nationalistic for me at this time in history) but I don’t want to hassle the civil servants at University Station with showing me the commemoratives.

This morning I noticed that Flickr has partnered with a service that allows you have stamps made that feature your own photos. I could get custom-made stamps featuring these thistles in Purcell or this fence dog that has since been replaced by a parking lot. I’d expect there would a be a surcharge for custom stamps like these, but I got sticker shock when I looked at the prices. Zazzle charges $16.99 for a sheet of 20 stamps, which works out to about 85 cents a stamp, more than double the price of postage. If I were sending out wedding invitations or thank-you notes, perhaps I would consider buying these custom stamps, but these are way too expensive for my grad-student budget. I think I’ll settle for these “Crops of the Americas” definitive issues, which avoids too much nationalism and nods toward the indigenous peoples of America.

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