re-run

The Difference Between Cats and Dogs

2008-07-24T20:11:46Z

A dog will be your friend even when it seems like nobody else will.

A cat will be your friend only when it seems like nobody else will.

It takes a bit of concentration/practice

2008-07-18T20:57:08Z

It takes a bit of concentration/practice, but during a meeting last week I used the bottle several times in the space of an hour without any chirping.

oh Dear God.

2008-06-17T15:40:18Z

what do you think about putting a little graphic up and a “sign” that says “Under Construction”? Something that looks like a little cartoon perhaps?

salmonella

2008-06-11T13:43:29Z

salmonella
oops, ha. meant to google that.

Free rating card artwork [2]

2008-05-22T21:09:08Z

I was annoyed that I couldn’t find any high-quality artwork for this movie / film / trailer / preview / rating card / green screen image anywhere online, so I recreated it (then I cleaned up the spacing and alignment a little).

If I were a screenwriter, I’d make a poster of this and hang it on my wall for inspiration.

Download the full version in glorious 1920 × 1080 PNG format.

Yeah. “Beautiful.” Sure. [1]

2008-05-21T13:14:56Z

The temperature has been in the High ’90s this week. This morning on the elevator ride up, Mr. Friendly Stranger wanted to talk to me, and he said, “It’s supposed to be a beautiful day, just like yesterday.”

So, one of the following has to be true. Either

a) I am at least ten degrees more sensitive to heat than everybody around me, because miserable weather starts at around 82°, or

b) everybody who lives in Dallas willingly is at least a little bit stupid.

Of course, the elevator is no place to have a disagreement with someone, especially someone who is just trying to be friendly, so I smiled and answered, “Let’s hope so.”

(I should say, since I didn’t before, that I am very proud of Texas for having a Spring that lasted through all of April. That was fantastic.)

At $9.95 per domain, failure doesn't cost that much

2008-05-12T18:31:30Z

This might be seen as somewhat embarrassing, but I thought it would be interesting to recap some of the domains I’ve registered over the years:

NJFilm.com

This was my very first domain, registered in 1997. It was supposed to be a community hang-out, idea-sharing site for independent filmmakers in New Jersey. It failed utterly, except for the parts where I got to practicing building Web pages.

ActuallyHappened.com

I think this is before I knew about Fray. I wanted a place for people to contribute true and unbelievable stories. It got zero submissions. Oh, well.

LifeAfterMTV.com

This was a meta-blog that aggregated (manually, of course) the blogs of people who were previously on MTV’s “The Real World” and “Road Rules”. It was extremely snarky, and pretty well received. I think the highlight was getting a link from somewhere in Yahoo!‘s entertainment division. I got bored with the topic after about a year.

AdGrinder.com

AdCritic.com was so great, and I wanted a place to store fan-made parodies of advertisements, which I had a few ideas for. Nobody really had any interest in contributing. I’m still proud of the header graphic.

Webgeek 0lympics

It was supposed to be an annual one-day competition with lots of various events that all related to Web design-y stuff. Besides getting together a great list of celebrity judges, almost nobody participated. I think some of that might be because in order to enter, you were supposed to send a trackback ping to a specific weblog entry. Nobody understood Trackbacks then, just as nobody understands them now. The other reason it didn’t work is probably because it was a dumb idea. But I had to try.

theynow.com

My first – and so far best – experiment with podcasting. Despite the infrequency of updates, I have more than a thousand listeners and the support of the rock band that I’m podcasting about. I’ve gotten to interview people like Jonathan Coulton and Common Rotation, and other high-profile podcasters have contributed to the show. I should really pay more attention to it.

coderwisdom.com

This was a total impulse buy, and did little more than translate inspirational quotes into various programming languages. It’s one of those things that you think is really funny and other people mostly don’t. Oh, well.

LunchCorp.com

Also soon to fade into archive-land, it’s a clearinghouse for ideas I’ve had that I wanted other people to pursue. In retrospect, I probably should have just kept them on re-run.

StopBeingBroken.com

I am having a great time making this (really, really) short show. Looking at it from the outside, I can see why someone might now know what to make of it. It’s not a news show, and it’s not strictly entertainment. Individual episodes get watched (as of this writing) about 300 times each, so I’m considering it a success. And every time I make a new show, I learn (or re-learn) something about lighting, camera placement, editing, etc., which feels really good.

DeepHub.com

Nobody was writing about the new age of entertainment distribution, so we have to. I think it’s fascinating, even if I’m not doing a lot of it myself.

There are a few sites that never got off the ground, like The Frightened Chef (don’t have a studio), Robot News Now (don’t want to do the news), The Songwriters Studio (don’t ask), and The Show Music Show (don’t want to pay licensing fees).

I’ve tried a lot of things over the past ten years. Most of it went badly, but each failure was worth every penny. I think the only regret I have is that I didn’t find someone to take over LifeAfterMTV.com. I must’ve tried, though. That sounds like something I would do.

Cobra Commander `08 [2]

2008-05-12T16:25:42Z

“Attack of the Show” is probably the most creative show that you aren’t watching.

Personal Information Waltz

2008-05-04T18:52:04Z

I really like making videos for spoken-word songs. Here’s the latest:

Warning: there is a single “bad” word used.

the chaos is terrified by the gleam of agenda in my eye.

2008-05-02T15:57:56Z

the chaos is terrified by the gleam of agenda in my eye.

Happy Birthday, Dad [2]

2008-05-02T14:16:16Z

Thanks for being awesome this whole time.

giant foam cowboy hat

2008-04-28T18:31:18Z

I guess what I’m saying is that some people hold their religion close to the vest, and some wear it like a giant foam cowboy hat.

my lawnmower broke.

2008-04-28T15:15:32Z

my lawnmower broke. So now I don’t have to mow the lawn anymore.

Help me name my socks.

2008-04-24T15:41:34Z

Help me name my socks.

Announcing Deep Hub [2]

2008-04-23T13:14:35Z

I’m spinning off another interest of mine into its own web site:

Deep Hub

Deep Hub is a weblog about creative people — authors, musicians, filmmakers — and how they get their works into the hands of the public without traditional distributors or labels.

If you have news along these lines, please let me know.

My "No Gravatar Yet" Icon [1]

2008-04-22T14:47:20Z

I really like Gravatars. They’re an evolution of the buddy icon that you see just about everywhere, especially on social networking sites. These, however, are tied to your e-mail address, and they automatically show up in weblog comments when you use that e-mail address (example).

It’s up to the weblog owner whether to install a Gravatar-enabler on his or her site before the icons show up (though I believe WordPress 2.5 comes with this functionality by default), and it’s up to the commenter to have an account with Gravatar in order for the right icon to appear. One neat thing is that you can have multiple addresses with separate avatars in your Gravatar profile. But on the flipside, you can be displaying Gravatars, and get a comment from someone who hasn’t set one up.

There are a couple of ways you can go. You can tell your weblog not to show any icon for someone without a Gravatar, and rearrange the layout accordingly. This is an elegant solution, with one major downfall: someone without a Gravatar will see the comments of people who do have one, and wonder how they got their picture to show up. That’s what happened to me for a long time.

Alternately, you can let people know how to get their picture to appear by using a default Gravatar when none exists (same example).

Space is limited, so I used the phrase “No Gravatar Yet”. I chose these words carefully because I wanted to explain why a boring gray box was appearing, and include a very searchable word for how to fix it. I fiddled with the font and the sizing for quite a while before I landed on something that worked at a small size:

So I’m officially giving it away for free. Copy, download and use at will, if you find it useful.

Aqua. Easily the best band to come out of Europe, in the '90s, named after a liquid.

2008-04-21T15:30:41Z

Aqua. Easily the best band to come out of Europe, in the ’90s, named after a liquid.

Folding Socks – Stop Being Broken

2008-04-21T13:19:12Z

Pretty excited about this new episode, if only because it’s the first one with my new theme music from Songs To Wear Pants To.

Xbox disappoints me, for once

2008-04-18T19:19:58Z

Usually, I am very impressed with the friendliness and usability of the Xbox division of Microsoft. Given the history of delighting me, I almost let this one slide:

Now, I’d be a total hypocrite if I said that everyone should know how to manage their feeds, since I just recently messed mine up. But the re-run feeds didn’t stop working, they started including more content than before (re-run and re-record were combined), so the worst-case scenario is that someone deletes a feed they don’t need anymore.

These people, on the other hand, need me to re-subscribe to their feed, because they know it won’t work in the future. It must be some terribly complicated change if they can’t simply redirect the old feed to the new one.

I mean, I can redirect feeds, and I have absolutely no budget to speak of. What is going on over there?

Web 2.0 explained in 3 seconds

2008-04-18T13:37:54Z

is the new

How to alienate your savvy customers

2008-04-17T20:00:00Z

LendingTree (I have used them in the past), sent me an e-mail about applying for a Home Equity Line of Credit which included this:

Let’s count the ways in which this is wrong:

Using more than one color to identify links
Showing me a Web address that doesn’t work
Telling me to click on a link instead of manually entering it into a Web browser. I haven’t spent the last ten years doing usability studies, but isn’t clicking on a link kind of the default behavior?
“Don’t cut and paste” — hard as I try, there is no way I can cut this link out of the e-mail you sent me
Forgetting the “J” in “Bryan J Busch”

Now that I think about it, I’m not sure I even understand the metaphor in the name “Lending Tree”. Is it a reference to “The Giving Tree” by Shel Silverstein?

Archives by date [5]

2008-04-17T16:50:41Z

I’ve been making some tweaks to re-run, primarily in the background. Hopefully all the feeds still work. If you read this site via a feed, and you don’t see this entry, there’s a problem.

Also, what do you think about the fact that re-run has no date-based archive? Here’s an example:

I don’t like cluttered interfaces (not that Alex’s web site is cluttered, per se, it was just a convenient example) and the way I figure it, if you’re looking for something in the past, you’re more likely to remember some searchable terms than you are which month and year it happened.

If you just want to idly flip through the history, I do have that “Older” link at the bottom of each page, so I think I’ve got all the angles covered. Thoughts?

Why the word "gist" was invented [1]

2008-04-14T13:16:01Z

It’s like they always say, “Please no close door look twmorrow working painters tank.”

Download Lastest Version

2008-04-13T20:22:09Z

Everybody makes mistakes. Some just get paid more than others.

Truman... where are you going?

2008-04-10T21:13:00Z

“The Truman Show” is one of those movies I can watch no matter what I’m doing when it comes on, and no matter how far into it the movie already is. You flip around the channels, and there it is, and I’m sucked in.

A little while ago when I realized that I probably like minimalist music, I bought the soundtrack and have been enjoying it daily.

There’s a great scene in the movie when Truman is (apparently) asleep, and the pianist is just sort of noodling to fill the space. People leave Truman on for comfort during the night, you know.

You know about “leitmotif“? For my purposes, it’s when each character gets his or her own theme, and it’s introduced into the soundtrack when the action focuses on that character. For example, here’s Princess Leia’s theme:

Over time, a character’s leitmotif may evolve, becoming dissonant, hopeful, morose, what-have-you. Or, let’s say you have two characters who are in love:

Over yet still more time, as the characters realize they can never be together (because one is a vampire and the other a vampire slayer), introducing this music will almost certainly make your audience cry. The music is the same, but the characters have evolved around it.

I was just thinking: in the context of The Truman Show, the composers had thirty years of music to write for a real human being. Imagine how many leitmotifs they must have developed.

Heck, the neighbor’s dog probably had his own.

How Long Until the Song is Played? [4]

2008-04-08T21:40:41Z

I utilize the heck out of the metadata produced and stored in iTunes. One of the prime factors in my Smart Playlists is “Play Count”: how many times a song has been played.

For example, if you’re looking at an entire album, and you see that a few songs have been played dozens of times, but more have been largely ignored, that can help you cull your library and either archive or delete some songs altogether.

But the Play Count doesn’t go up by one as soon as you hit the play button (unless you’re talking about a podcast, which have different rules applied to them). Likewise, you don’t have to listen to the entire song for the Play Count to get incremented. It happens somewhere in the middle.

I’ve been curious about this for a long time, mostly for selfish reasons. What with my brain configuration, I get bored with songs pretty quickly. If your song is Verse Chorus Verse Chorus Chorus Chorus, I’ve already tuned out by the end of the second Verse and generally skip to the next song. Unfortunately, the Play Count doesn’t increment when I Skip too quickly.

So I took a few minutes today and experimented. Incidentally, this was using iTunes 7.5.0.20.

Percentage of Song Until Play Count Increments
Song Length	Time before new Play Count	Percentage Listened
:31	:20	65%
:60	:50	83%
2:03	1:53	92%
3:00	2:50	94%

It’s a sliding scale. And it’s going in the wrong direction, in my opinion. By the time I’ve heard 65% of your average three minute song, I’ve heard enough. iTunes shouldn’t be waiting for me to hear 94% of it. I sure hope this gets reversed, or at least, configurable.

I am quite sure they will say so. [1]

2008-04-04T12:14:30Z

My life as a model [1]

2008-04-02T13:49:40Z

This is what I look like:

And this is what I look like when you remove the obvious blemishes, soften the skin, change the eye color… you know, your basic airbrushed model:

Looking like that in real life could be done, but it’d sure be expensive.

I just thought you might get a kick out of that.

Cameraphone Photos - Stop Being Broken

2008-03-22T21:08:14Z

See more at StopBeingBroken.com

SxSW KICK! 2008

2008-03-15T21:16:56Z