25 Jun 2006
So, Working Stiff just keeps on plugging along. Greg Joyce's attempt to get his movie some visibility online is working.
10000 views of the trailer. That's a lot. You can make it 10001.
I'm interested in this for a few reasons:
- Greg's an awesome guy.
- Working Stiff is a funny movie (really! I have it on DVD and have even seen it in a theater. And I actually did some advertising for it .... which I'll link to someday).
- I'm utterly interested in the idea of turning conventional media on its head by leveraging the internet. Here's a movie that played a few times in the Boston area and I think once out in LA. It's a small, independent film with out a single name attached. It's not uber-trendy, nor shocking. It's a straight up romantic/workplace comedy. It's better than 90% of the Nora Ephron-esque tripe that gets released. But, it simply will never get seen via conventional means. But now, via the 'net, it's viewable online. You can subscribe and get chunks of it automatically downloaded to your computer or iPod to watch when you want. I have no idea how many people are actually viewing the movie via the Podcast, but anyone who's subscribed is getting a chance to see a movie they never would have otherwise. That's pretty cool.
23 Jun 2006
A belated "Happy Birthday" to Mindy for turning old.
A belated "thanks" to Liz for pointing out that I should get Nada Surf's "Let Go", which is very good.
A belated "my bad" to my comrades over at Dewey's House for not gracing them with my Red Sox thoughts recently. Sully's been picking up the slack and doing a stellar job.
A belated "sorry" to you for shirking my entertainment duties and allowing you to grow bored while I wrestled with things such as "work" and "sleep."
07 Jun 2006
When I was running the other day, I think I figured out one of those silly business ideas that people come up with and then other people go "that's a really dumb idea ... I bet people will pay for it."
With the prevelence of social networking websites on the web, particularly the big three of MySpace, Friendster, and Orkut (or maybe LinkedIn), it seems like people are always encouraging you to the join the one they're a member of. That usually means you start with like a Friendster account, get convinced to join Orkut (leaving your Friendster setup wilting ...), then you move to MySpace (and they both wilt). Then one day you remember your Friendster setup, and you go back in there to find now there's a bunch more people there.
Or at least I assume that's what people do. I don't have a MySpace account, but I do have an Orkut account (I don't think I've logged in for over a year) and a Friendster account (which I check maybe once a month). But, if you really cared about these networks and keeping your data up-to-date, wouldn't it be handy if you could update it in one place and have it magically update the rest?
That's my idea: to build MyFriendKut.com (I should probably removes some vowels to make it very Web 2.0). You'd setup your account on the site, and then give the logins to your social networking accounts (yeah, privacy issues, but whatever, it's all about convenience). The site would have a bunch of settings that are common to most of those sites. When you want to change something, you change it at the MyFriendKut.com site, and the site pushes it out. So then you keep all of your sites up to date through one interface, saving you time to stalk people on MySpace. Fun!
Better yet, maybe the site also throws up a tabbed interface or something that authenticates you to the social networking sites so that it's one-login-shopping. See! Amazing idea!
Now I just have to get motivated and build it. And probably check to see that no one has already built it. Then figure out how to make money off it. Sell out and become a millionaire. Just like the Underpants Gnomes.
05 Jun 2006
Thanks to a little tool called FlixQueue, I'm able to see at a glance that I've returned 195 movies to Netflix since I signed up.
The first movie I returned was Underworld, on January 19, 2004. Sure, not the most amazing movie to have at #1, but sometimes you need some cheesy action (2 and 3 were The 25th Hour and Rashomon, slightly more upscale). The last movie I returned was Hustle & Flow on May 31, 2006.
In between I've returned 193 other movies for my grand total of 195. Making the math easy, I started in January 2004 and last returned a movie in May 2006, which is 29 months. 195 movies over 29 months is about 6.7 movies per month. Not too bad -- I'm on the 3 out/$18 plan, which means I'm at about $2.70/movie. That's far less than I'd pay at Blockbuster (I think ... I haven't walked into a Blockbuster in over a year), so I think I'm getting my money's worth.
Over the weekend, since my DVRs are pretty much empty (nothing new on TV), I cleared out the three movies I had out (#196 = Bubble, 197 = The Devil's Backbone, 198 = All the Real Girls). If all goes well, I should be getting my next 2 or 3 movies on Tuesday. That means that rental #200 will either be Good Night, and Good Luck or Charlie and the Chocolate Factory.
This isn't really a milestone ... but it felt interesting to write about. Plus, given that I'll get through 200 movies in approximately 29 months, it means I'll get to the end of my Netflix Queue, assuming I don't add any more movies, sometime in 2008.
Maybe I should be more selective ...
02 Jun 2006
I work for a web hosting company, and we're currently monkeying around with an installer for WordPress. In testing it, I fully expected custom permalink rules to break--I'd heard rumblings from looking through our support queues that it might not work. Sure enough, custom permalink rewrite rules did not work.
WordPress 2.0 does some nifty stuff with rewrite rules. Rather than do what older versions did and generate a big .htaccess file with 50-odd lines, it instead generates a compact, sub-10 line .htaccess file. These rules basically let WordPress handle all of the rewrites internally. In many cases, this is a cool thing (it's what I use here on my blog). However, it's not universally compatible--a quick search on Google shows a bunch of people running into a problem with this new system.
I dug around for a bit, trying to find a solution for our customers. And I found one. In the wp-includes/classes.php file, there's a variable called use_verbose_rules. By default, it is set to false, which triggers WordPress to use the new, compact rules. Setting it to true causes WordPress to generate the old-style big .htaccess file. Sure enough, as these are pretty normal, generic rewrite rules, *everything* *just* *works*.
I'm sure I'm not the first person to stumble upon the solution, but since I didn't find it mentioned anywhere before, I thought I'd share it. Plus, my memory isn't what it used to be, so this'll be helpful in making sure I don't forget how to fix this, should the need arise again.
26 May 2006
My friend Greg Joyce made a movie a few years ago when we were working together. It's a little indie romantic comedy called Working Stiff.
It's quite funny.
However, being that Greg is neither a Hollywood bigwig, nor related to one, he busted his ass to get as many people to see it as he could. Local film festivals, showings at theaters in Belmont, Arlington, and Newton, and DVDs. The movie was well received and pretty much enjoyed by everyone, but still, if you didn't know someone, or stumble into the theater on one of the nights it was showing, you never got a chance to see it.
Now you have that chance.
Greg has just opened up Project: Working Stiff, his website/blog devoted to getting the word out .... and letting you watch the movie. The movie is going to be released in bite size chunks via an RSS feed--a video podcast, in other words. Even better, it's all nicely formatted for the iPod Video. You can also watch it right there on the web page. Brilliant. Flat out brilliant.
Go check it out. Check out the trailer. Go post comments on the blog. Mostly, just go check it out because the movie is worth seeing.
21 May 2006
Thanks to my friend Liz, who's made it a yearly ritual to get us tickets to the FNX Best Music Poll for my birthday, I got to head down to Lansdowne St. and listen to a bunch of bands I like.
We got there just in time to catch OK Go, a cool rocky/power pop band I've liked a lot. They've gotten a good bit of noteriety as of late from their video for "A Million Ways" which is clever and in the same vein as the Spike Jonze/Fatboy Slim videos. OK Go was one of the bands playing outdoors, so we watched from a little ways back, but the band sounded pretty great, playing a bunch of their bigger songs, including the criminally underrated "Do What You Want." They finished the set with a full on reproduction of the aforementioned "A Million Ways" video which sounds sort of stupid and pretentious ("oh, watch us imitate the video that made us moderately famous"), but came off as a bunch of guys enjoying doing goofy stuff.
Buffalo Tom and The Charlatans played the last two outdoors slots, and I didn't really pay attention to either. Buffalo Tom sounded pretty good from afar, but I've just never been that into them. The Charlatans sounded pretty good from afar, and I wanted to check them out, but by now, the sun had gone down and the wind had picked up and we decided to head into Avalon so as not to get screwed and miss out on the bands starting at 10.
We grabbed a table at Avalon, which gave us a good view of the stage and meant we could sort of avoid the mob on the floor and get in/out when we chose. I tend to not enjoy the back of a show (I'd rather be down in the middle losing my hearing), but it turned out to be a wise choice as Dear Leader came on and blew the fucking place away. Mostly it was because they came on and just balls out rocked, but it was also because they were mixed incredibly loud.
Dear Leader is one of my favorite bands, and I've written about them a good bit. This performance may have been the best I've ever seen. They were completely on their game, and when you're playing a shorter set in front of an audience who might not be there to see you, I think you tend to pick a setlist that lets you go all out. And that's what they did. Starting with my current fave song "Nightmare Alleys" they just blew through a bunch of insanely great songs, Aaron Perrino belting out each one in top form. They slowed it down for the sing along of "My Life as a Wrestler" and then finished up the set with their big hit "Raging Red" adeptly mixing in Snoop's "Gin and Juice" and completely winning over the crowd.
Nada Surf followed up right behind Dear Leader and were similarly fantastic. I've got two Nada Surf albums: the debut High/Low (which I own on cassette from college) and the most recent The Weight is a Gift. If Nada Surf sounds familiar, it's because they were the pseudo-Weezer band who had the hit "Popular" in about '96. Their recent stuff (that I've heard) sounds similar, but it's been modernized--they're more like what I think people thought Weezer would sound like today.
Anyway, they shocked the hell out of my by leading right off with "Popular" and completely rocking it out. Honestly, it didn't sound dated at all ... but that's probably because I haven't heard it in years. Nada Surf played a great set, complete with harmonies, a thoroughly entertaining drummer, and a bassist breaking and changing a string midsong. They played a couple of my favorites ("The Blankest Year" and "Concrete Bed") and obviously hit on what is their recent big hit, and one of the better songs of 2005, "Always Love." It was pretty fantastic to see the rest of the bands playing that night come down to the side of the stage and completely enamored with Nada Surf's performance.
That's when we left. There were a couple of bands left to go, but it was midnight, I was going to catch the T home, and it was a good place to cap it off. Leaving at this point also lead to my creation of the Theory of Parabolic Hotness, which I'll discuss in the near future.
17 May 2006
Like 1 week after iTunes eats my ratings, I take some poker winnings and go grab myself a 30GB video iPod.
It's nice.
The battery lasts much longer than my old iPod, which means I can get through an entire day at work on one charge, which is nice. Obviously, it plays video, which means I got to finally watch the Stephen Colbert/White House Correspondents Dinner speech from a couple of weeks back. And it's about half the size of my old iPod.
Now, I just need to figure out what I'm going to do with the old guy. I think I'm going to figure out some way to permanently wire it into my car. I've already got a car charger (not as easy to find, given that this is a 2G iPod with a straight-up FireWire connector), so I think I'll find some place, wire it in, and then use the inline remote to control it. Another project to add to the list.
Oh, and the sun is out. I'd forgotten what it looked like.
09 May 2006
Yesterday when I get to work, I flip on the iPod and I notice I've only got 3 playlists--my non-smart-playlists (i.e. the ones that don't do any auto-updating based on last date played or ratings). I make the stupid assumption that the sync just didn't work that morning, and go about my business.
When I get home, I notice that, hmm, those playlists are empty on my computer as well. Why are they empty?
BECAUSE MOTHERFUCKING ITUNES DECIDED ALL OF THE SONGS ON MY IPOD WERE RATED 1 STAR.
I'm not sure how that happens. Yes, my iPod is now about, 3 or 4 years old. And yes, it's gotten pretty flakey. It sometimes reboots randomly losing track of whatever I've played that day (annoying for me, since I use that to help keep the music on my iPod fresh). But why would everything be rated 1 star all of a sudden? Your guess is as good as mine. Sometimes the smart features of iTunes aren't so smart.
I poke around in my iTunes folder for the iTunes library XML file, and luckily, I find that it still has all of the ratings goodness in it. I back it up, empty out the iTunes itl file (the binary file for the library data), and then restart iTunes. Thankfully, now all of my songs have the proper rating, albeit with a loss of data for the past week. I then reconnect my iPod (which I'd previously set to sync manually), clear everything off it, and start resyncing from scratch.
That's where I'm at now. In this process, I've lost all of the podcasts I subscribe to, but that might be a blessing. I'll resubscribe to the stuff that I remember being most interesting, and won't be bogged down with crap.
And, after all this, I'll still probably be buying a video iPod in the next few weeks. But damn, I really do hate Apple today.
08 May 2006
Today is my 28th birthday. It's almost over.
I'm planning on getting myself a video iPod in a couple of weeks as a gift, but I was at Target today and they had an awesome DVD deal, so I pulled the trigger and got myself something.
It was like $23!! Less than my age!! So happy birthday to me.