I am … unhindered by talent

2 Apr 2005: Matt has posted a very nice response to the concerns and taken all the weird stuff down. That still leaves him/them with the questions of how to pay the bills, but it seems clear that future steps will be more community involved, which is a good thing.

As reported on Waxy.org (with some corrections by jluster), WordPress.org has been doing this weird deal with Hot Nacho where they’re hosting a nearly 200K “hidden” articles whose sole purpose is to pull in search engines and generate advertising revenue for other folks. WordPress.org (clearly a most worthy cause) gets a cut, which helps defray web site and development costs.

Now I’m all for supporting WordPress. I think it’s a great tool, and we’re using it for our family blogs and for a community group working to support our schools. I’d gladly contribute to a pot that helps keep these folks cranking this thing out. I’ve made sure that it’s quite clear that we’re using WordPress and that the links to WordPress.org are front and center. If having those links to WordPress.org help keep the project alive, then they can count on us.

But gaming search engines is frankly pretty icky, and I’m not so keen. I’d much rather put a ten spot in the hat as it goes by than indirectly support deliberate attempts at manipulating the perceived value of web sites. (I realize that this will happen regardless, but I don’t have to be an active part of it.) I would also much rather have something like Google AdSense ads on WordPress.org which our links would help (in a very small way) increase in value than be part of this strange backdoor game. If WordPress.org has value, and that value can be used to help fund a worthwhile project in a way that the involved parties can agree on, let’s be explicit and up front about it.

It’ll be interesting to see how this plays out.

Currently listenting to: “Long black veil” from Charming Hostess’s truly spiffy album Punch. This is a quite splendid new release from ReR and is probably my favoritestest album at the moment. Even Sub-Evil Boy likes it!

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We just got back from a very energizing School Board meeting where a number of people did an excellent job of making it clear that the kind of cuts being consider would really hurt, and making a strong case for alternatives (like increasing our levy).

Of the many people who spoke eloquently for this vital cause, stand-outs for me were Greg Thorson, Arne Kildegaard, and Dave Erickson for the MARQS group, and Dave Johnson and Dot Vick on behalf of the teachers. Greg, Arne, and Dave E. made it clear that the community realized how serious and difficult the problem was, but that there were options other than deep cuts (e.g., increasing the levy), and that there was significant support for exploring such alternatives.

Dave J. and Dot did a great job (in very different ways) of pointing out what would be lost on the arts side if the proposed cuts went through. Dot used the names of the various kids of the School Board members that had been, were, or might be involved in the music program as a great way of really bringing the message home to the Board and got a great round of applause.

There were also two very well spoken students (don’t remember their names, I’m afraid) and Athena Kildegaard on the importance of the arts for students, and a group of bus drivers who expressed significant concerns regarding the possible privatization of the school bus system.

A number of other people who spoke on behalf of not gutting important programs, and dozens of people (like us) who were there to clap and cheer at appropriate moments but didn’t actually speak. I was really impressed by the turn out, and I think the applause at various moments really helped emphasize the broad support for the message.

Pumped by all that, WeatherGirl and I worked up a MARQS logo that I dreamt up (literally - maybe more on that later). We’re thinking t-shirts, bumper stickers, etc., maybe from CafePress. I also should get it plugged in to the MARQS web site, but CSS continues to drive me crazy. I really need to just get a book and learn the rules instead of guessing and flailing :-(.

Heading to my wish list, Perfect tracks on Blue Note. It’s featured on the cover of the latest Electric Fetus catalogue, and it sounds very cool.

Currently listening to: The brilliant “Mercury blues” from David Lindley’s El-rayo X.

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Last night was the monthly CAC Concerts Open Mic Night. Sub-Evil Boy was able to join me because he didn’t have school today (Good Friday, or Spring Break in more religiously neutral terms), which was a lot of fun.

Eagan MC’ed this time and did a very nice job. I really liked his opening set of songs, including an fine rendition of the classic “Drunkard’s special”. Later (after very nice pieces by Grace and a woman who does English folks songs on the recorder, penny whistle, etc.) John H. did a duet with Huck on “The William” (or two of them more accurately) which was pretty crazy and totally fun.

John and I then sang “An American folk song”, which was two instrumental verses through of Guthrie’s “This land is your land” (John on guitar and me on harmonica) ending with us singing the one verse about private property that no one ever sings. (Guthrie himself rarely sang it on recorded versions of the song; I have four different recordings of him singing this song, and only one has that verse.) The instrumental part went really well, but the mic levels were pretty whack when we got to the vocal part and I think our vocals came out as distorted mud (and not in a way that was intended or necessarily desirable). Sigh.

Joey then did a couple of songs which Sub-Evil Boy really liked. The (new?) one about the ghost of his great-great-great-grandfather making calls on his cell phone was really cool - one of his best in my opinion. He’s going to be performing live on KUMM tonight somewhere between 9pm and midnight, which should be cool.

Sub-Evil and I were right after Joey. Sub-Evil had been nearly asleep in the back, so I was a little worried, but he totally came alive when we got “on stage”. It’s quite amazing (and wonderful) how powerfully he responds to an opportunity to perform in public.

We did two songs that we’d written together last year: “Phantom, the Three Neuron Dog” and “Hey, hey, fat fly”. “Phantom, the Three Neuron Dog” was for my sister when her wonderful dog Phantom died last December, and as such required a certain amount of introduction (who are Julian and Turq, for example?). We’ve never performed it in public before, and it went over really well (esp. for a song that’s very specific to our family), with several nice laughs from the audience. When we were rehersing last night Sub-Evil Boy broke into a can-can dance during the chorus after the 4th verse, and WeatherGirl and I thought it was really funny so he did it again at the performance. The floor in that space is flat and (despite the huge growth spurt he’s in) Sub-Evil Boy isn’t yet 6 foot 2, and it was fun watching the people in the back bobbing and weaving to see what everyone in the front was giggling about.

Phantom lives!

Sub-Evil and I also did “Hey, hey, fat fly”, which we wrote last summer for a community theater project. I’d sung it at the open mic night two months ago to good response, but had never sung it in public with Sub-Evil before, as I was in NYC at the ConBio conference with my sister when the group performed it in August. Earlier in the evening he’d been pretty lukewarm about performing it with me, but once he got on the stage and the energy kicked in and he was totally good to go. I flubbed the third verse (left out a line, and ended up running out of words before I ran out of music), but we recovered well and headed off to the next chorus. The audience response was really nice, but who wouldn’t love a 5th grader singing goofy songs in public?

We stayed for Huck’s set, which included a great song about wanting to be a rock star. I’m not sure if it’s a cover or an original, but either way it was a total hoot.

Sub-Evil was dying by then (it was 11pm) so we bailed and headed home. Who knows what wonderful stuff we missed after that?

I really enjoyed performing with Sub-Evil and hope that we get to do more of that in the future!

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As I reported earlier, MusicMobs is this potentially cool way for people to share preferences about music, but it didn’t work for me. (Presumably my iTunes library was just too big for it to handle.)

Those crazy people keep slogging away, however, and a new re-write of the system that takes people’s library info has recently gone live. My library now loads successfully, and almost instantaneously - huuuzzaaaaah!

There’s a great quote from the news item announcing the update:

There is a 20,000 song limit to processing, so if you have a super massive library export your top played 20k songs to get it to work.

I have about 5,400 songs in my library at the office, so I’m well away from that. I suspect if we ripped every single CD we owned, we might get close to (or even slightly exceed) 20K songs, but that’s not going to happen any time soon, so I think I’m safe for a while :-).

They also have a “Top Listeners” list on the front page, and I’m not even close to making the top 200 or so that they list. The highest is over 135K listens, and the bottom of their top 200 list is over 22K songs listened to. I’m at a bit over 18K, and I’m guessing that the list is pretty dense between 18K and 22K. That really surprised me, as I listen at the office pretty much all day every day, which suggests that there must be people who’s iTunes history goes way back without interruption, and who leave their computers playing music pretty close to 24/7.

Anyway, I’m quite glad that it works. Any system that can connect Charming Hostess (and here) with both The Science Group and Bob Wills is worth having in this world.

Currently listening to: The title track from Chris Cutler’s Twice around the Earth (again, still, etc.).

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One of Microsoft’s major strategies in recent years has been to take control of or subvert standards and licensing mechanisms in ways that ensure that they can throw their considerable weight around in ways that will continue to make life difficult for those in the open source universe.

One of their most successful arenas has been in office documents, where their Microsoft Office formats (esp. Microsoft Word) have become de facto “standards”, typically without the (many, many) people involved thinking once (much less twice) about the implications thereof. Being someone who deliberately doesn’t run any Microsoft software on my computers, I’m particularly aware of just how many Word documents I get as attachments, and often rant about the many problems that can generate.

The state of Massachusetts is engaged in what could be a very important battle to change this trend. They have an Open Standards Policy that recognizes that there is a powerful public interest in ensuring that the discussion and ideas that drive and define our government, policies, and ideals can’t be lost or locked up because they’re written, distributed, or stored using closed, proprietary file formats. They are consequently requiring that at least the final “official” version of government documents be in a form taken from a list of approved, open formats. It’s all quite wonderful stuff, and I wish them all the success in the world in this important endeavor.

At the moment, however, Massachusetts officials and Microsoft are involved in key negotiations about how and whether Microsofts Office XML is an “open standard”. At first it seemed that it wasn’t going to be, but now the state says that Microsoft is willing to change some of their policies in a way that would make it acceptable. There are doubts, however, and the devil is always in the details.

Massachusetts is taking open comments through the end of March, and I think it’s of enormous importance to all Americans (and no doubt far beyond) how this turns out. If Massachusetts gets this right, along with even a handful of other states (not to mention countries - the EU is engaged in similar discussions), then it could have an incredibly powerful positive effect.

Currently listening to: the title track from Chris Cutler’s very cool new album Twice around the earth

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You definitely should check out WeatherGirl’s piece on “The U.S. Patriot Act, protecting Americans from ROTH-IRA investing Brits and Extra Strong Mints”. In my wildly biased opinion, I think it’s her best piece of blogging to date!

Another open mic night tomorrow, and I think Sub-Evil Boy is going to join me in song and merriment, which should be fun. Jon H. and I practiced our nifty duet this afternoon, and it’s sounding quite good (esp. given that we hadn’t practiced in a month). I’m rather excited.

WeatherGirl and I were at a meeting of concerned community members last night regarding the $620K deficit the Morris school system is working to deal with (see MorrisQualitySchools.org) that ran some three hours. I think that we’ll be able to pass a levy that will be a big help in the long run, and help soften (but not eliminate) the short term blow. There’s a lot of work to still be done, though.

Currently listening to: “Yeah” from Bob Drake’s weird (in the best possible way) new album The shunned country. Cool concept, but I haven’t quite made up my mind about the whole thing, yet.

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Wow…

Pitchfork reports that The Fall is set to release a 6 disc set of their Peel sessions in late April on Sanctuary Records. The Fall were perennial faves of Peel (he frequently referred to them as “The Mighty Fall” in a sort of “God is speaking to you” voice), and did the most session recordings for him. The set runs in chronological order with material from ‘78 to ‘04 and looks like it’s got lots of cool stuff.

Is that the sound of it flying off to my wish list :-)?

Currently listening to: Punch by Charming Hostess

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WeatherGirl’s been busy recently and caught up on some film and event reviews. I’d been meaning to say something about some of these and haven’t had time, so I’ll point you to her excellent words instead!

• Sideways: I think I liked the film more than she did, but not so much as to explain the enormous buzz (critical and Oscar), especially when Kinsey got so much less attention.
• King Arthur (on DVD): So much possibility, too much unrealized. Kera Knightly is so cool, as is the battle on the frozen lake.
• Hide and seek: I figured out even less than WeatherGirl (although I felt like I should have figured it out) and was thoroughly creeped out. Not as good a film as, say Sixth sense, but very high on the raw scary meter.
• Kinsey: I could write a book about this, but won’t. Really good film about a very important person, and powerful portrait of the kind of passion and commitment (and accompanying myopia) that is involved in seeing a major (and controversial) project like that through.
• Turn of the screw: Very cool play nicely done. Remarkable how much breadth and depth they got from such a simple setting and a fine two-person cast. Kudos to The Acting Company for a truly fine production, and to PAC for bringing it to Morris!

Thanks to WeatherGirl! (Even if she drags me to creepy movies like Hide and seek which clearly shorten my life expectancy :-).)

Currently listening to: The shunned country by Bob Drake

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I ran across this fine rant on Bill Tozier’s Notional Slurry (which looks like an fascinating blog - I look forward to reading more) on Open Space conferences/meetings. I’ll have to think this through some more, but I am naturally drawn to the idea. Lord knows I’ve shared many of the frustrations Bill mentions in his piece. I think it’s interesting that at a big conference like GECCO, where you have so much to attend/listen to, there’s so much inclination to skip it all and talk in the halls or go grab a bite and write science on a napkin.

All that said, I know as a speaker how hard it can be to pass up the opportunity to nail those poor suckers to their chairs and force feed them your (no doubt brilliant) slides ideas. The trick, though is whether that’s really a very efficient way to get your ideas out there. Are the people you really want actually in the audience? Are they paying attention? Is your presentation in a context where people are thinking about the right sorts of things?

At a workshop like GPTP there’s no real reason we couldn’t all read the papers before hand, skip most of the “formal” presentations, and instead focus on some really excellent discussions.

Really, why not?

An hour or so later…

After thinking about this some in the shower, I thought of one potential weakness with this approach. One of the strengths of a well organized event is being exposed to cool things that you probably wouldn’t have gone to/read/heard of otherwise. If everyone gets to self-organize, it seems that there might be much less of that.

One option might be to combine the Open Space Conference idea with something like the Dagstuhl approach to organizing tables at meals. There the workshop participants are randomized at each lunch and dinner, so over the course of the week you eat with pretty much everyone at least once or twice.

It seems that something similar could be done at a larger conference as well, and it might encourage more cross fertilization between groups that might not otherwise interact.

Could be a good thing…

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It was a long few days, but the paper is in a reasonable state and submitted. There was some pretty tired and harried editing at the end, so I’m sure we’ll see all kinds of annoying things after we’ve had some sleep and come back to it, but I still think it’s pretty good stuff.

We’re managed to cut from 21 pages down to 18, but we’re still not at the required 16. Please let us have two extra pages…please… :-)

Now we’ll have to see what the reviewers think.

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