In that time, I’ve covered topics from art to Ruby on Rails to a series of eccentric projects. And you all have responded, writting 286 comments for an average 1.45 comments per entry. My posts have been picked up by BoingBoing, 43 Folders, and many others.

Anyway, I’ve got lots of exciting stuff in the works including a series on the basics of microcontroller architecture and assembler programming, a few ideas for phsycial/ubiquitous computing projects, and a few other non-tech projects starting up as well.

So stay tuned and keep those comments coming…

Tagged: idfdz, meta, thrid, anniversary

Today marks the one year anniversary of Largehearted Goat?, my comprehensive study of Largehearted Boy‘s obsession with John Darnielle and The Mountain Goats.

I originally announced Lagrehearted Goat last October, and, in the course of the year since data collection began, The Boy wrote 362 ‘Shorties’ posts, 52 (or a little more than 14 percent) of which mentioned The Mountain Goats. The longest period during the year without a Goat post lasted 26 days, starting on June 6 and ending July 16.

As could probably be expected, the Goat posts tended to come in clumps (around relevant Mountain Goats news, mostly), the two most intense of which included runs of four consecutive days (from May 11 to May 14 as part of an incredibly Goat-ish week that included six Goat posts over a span of nine days and then again just recently from September 17 to September 20).

Overall, the rate of Goat posts has remained relatively constant (at about one a week), which was a surprise to me. The project began soon after the release of a Mountain Goats’ record and I expected activity to drop off precipitously after The Boy’s excitement around that event died down, but, though it flagged slightly from its initial intensity, his Goat-ing frequency has remained high.

Continued research is necessary to determine if the Goat-ing rate will eventually drop off with lack of band activity or if it will stay solid in the coming between-album year. Check back next September 29th for the second annual report.

And feel free to browse the data yourself: Largehearted Goat?

Tagged: largehearted boy, mountain goats, darnielle, largehearted goat, idfdz, anniversary

Since then, said brain seems intent on summarizing certain technical thoughts in haiku form. So, since I’ve got ’em, I decided to start posting ’em to my tumblog. And I was proud enough of one that I thought it was worth reproducing here. It’s called Haiku0002:

All the names of things
melt away like late spring snow.
Tagging will save us.

In re: Everything Is Miscellaneous by David Weinberger, Clay Shirky on “Making Digital Durable” at the Long Now

For more, you can follow along.

Tagged: haiku, weinberger, shirky, tagging, folksonomy

I’ve been busy with life and work and blah, blah, blah. . .No excuses: I’ll be back with more regular posts any day now — including some exciting announcements resulting from this last month’s hermit-like activities, I hope, not that I’m over-confident in a way that could jinx things or anything, *cough* *cough*.

Anyway and in the meantime, I’ve been doing a bit of micro blogging (or ‘tumblelogging’, as the kids like to say) here: IDFDZ (tiny) on Tumblr.com. Hopefully that will tide you over.

One example of this trend that I’ve never understood was a post I wrote last November called Superman Jesus. The post contained a simple expression of my surprise at the heavy religious imagery in the trailer for the upcoming Brian Singer-directed Superman movie. A tsunami of comments ensued, ranging from corrections of factual mistakes in the post itself to a debate about the arkana of the original movies and comics to this incredible interpretative insight from an honest-to-god rabbi:

It’s pretty obvious that Superman is a Jesus figure. His kryptonian name is Kal-el, which in Hebrew means “voice of God”. His father’s name is Jor-el, which in Hebrew means “fear/awe of God”.

Thus, we have the classic Christian paradigm of the supposed Wrathful God of the “Old” Testament sending the human-word to earth, with, of course,
powers and abilities far beyond those of mortal men.

This comment, in addition to being brilliant, was posted just last week, a full eight months after the original post.

And, if that doesn’t top it, the post, along with Rabbi Shevack’s great comment, was quoted in an MSNBC article about the Christian imagery in the film, published on Tuesday. I probably wouldn’t even have found out about the article if it wasn’t for Mikey’s post yesterday on Let’s Get Famous, the Urban Honking blog that tracks the influence of us UrHo-ers on the larger world.

I’ve never been one to bash the so-called ‘mainstream media’ as such, but seeing their reporting from the point of view of a source certainly makes it tempting. They quoted my blog without talking to me. They generalized Rabbi Shevack’s comment so as to avoid attributing or verifying it. The whole story was reported second, third, and fourth hand through web searches and hearsay.

Tagged: msnbc, superman, singer, movie, blog, post, idfdz

Even though, I’ve never been the most regular of bloggers, to my credit, there were some actual reasons that this gap went on as long as it did. And, hence, I have some things to talk about now that I’m back. First of all my band, At Dusk finished a new record called You Can Know Danger and I totally rebuilt our website to match the aesthetic of the new record. Look for a series of posts on the strategy I took (“How To Make Your Band Website with Web 2.0”) to come soon. Plus we just got back from our first tour in support of the new record which encompassed nine shows in ten days in California. Keep an eye on the At Dusk Flickr Group for pictures from that.

Also on the music website front, before leaving for tour I totally rebuilt the PDX Pop Now! site in Rails. The new site’s really exciting. It’s got a super-minimal content management system that lets all of our board members add and edit content. This means that as things go forward, I’ll have more time to develop new features that we’ve wanted for a long time like actual RSS feeds and maybe even forums, since I won’t be the only one editing the live site. Also, we’re now taking requests for who you’d like to see play the festival. Unlike in the past where we made Portlanders jump through complicated and often malfunctioning hoops before being allowed to put in their two cents about who they wanted to see play, this year we’re keeping things super simple. As many people as want to can just show up, tell us what band they’d like to see, and bam it gets added to our running list. Totally easy. You can do it as many times as you want. We’re going to let the computer do all the work this time to figure out what’s actually going on. Plus, we’ve got an XSPF-based player through which you can listen to all of the bands that submitted their music for consideration for the compilation. I didn’t realize it until I had it completely built, but it is probably the biggest online collection of Portland music that’s ever been assembled. If you want to know what Portland sounds like, there’s really no better place to start.

All of this combined with my actual paying programming jobs added up to no time for blogging. In the next couple of weeks, I’m going to try to more than make up for it. I’ve got long posts planned, instructive series, short blurbs on artists, lots of stuff. So, thanks for hanging around through the lull. It’ll turn out to have been worth it. I promise.

Tagged: blog, lull, tour, pdxpop, at, dusk, music

Ideas for dozens: A techie geekfest by former WW intern Greg Borenstein. From Jan. 24: “I honestly can’t remember the last time I listened to commercial radio…. So, what’s left? More and more, what’s left is: mp3 blogs. Just individuals out there talking about music, bravely posting songs they like despite the potentially quite serious legal consequences of the musicians’ and labels’ ungratefulness.”

Its from my post about Hype Machine.

As you can see above, if you’ve got a keen eye, the photos for the article where taken at Less Distracted, the office/wharehouse space I share with the Urban Honking guys. A photo of LD also accompanied the Oregonian article on Ultimate Blogger making it the second most famous place I’ve worked recently.

Anyway, congrats Mike, Steve, and Jona! Now, all you’ve got left is the Tribune and the Mercury and you’ll have run the table! How ’bout it?

Tagged: urban honking, blog, press, willamette week, portland, oregon, less distracted, ultimate blogger

The second of these got solved when I happened across a great tutorial on making three column layouts in CSS. It’s the first CSS walkthrough I’ve done that left me with both some working markup to copy and a greater understanding of how this crazy stuff actually works — exactly what I want from a learning experince. MT on the other hand turned out to be an even worse muddle than I’d feared. I really have to edit 8 different templates if I want to change one link in my sidebar (and through a web form no less)? Maybe I’m missing an easier way to do this, but as it is the process was pretty miserable, not to mention highly maintenance unfriendly.

On the upside, while mucking around in the guts of the site’s backend, I found a bunch of interesting comments I hadn’t noticed on their way in (if anyone out there knows how to set it so that I get email notifications on the occasion of new comments without having to subject them to approval, I’d really like to hear about it). One thrilling comment for me to see was from Doug Kaye, founder of the great tech podcast network, IT Conversations. Doug commented on my entry about Hyperlinks for iTunes. Unsurprisingly, he’s way out ahead of these issues — IT Conversations already puts URLs for each of their shows in the Comments field of the ID3 tags. So, at least for their shows, someone could totally come along and build the iTunes plugin I was imagining in that entry.

Another fascinating comment that I’d missed came from Cobalt whose collage The Next Katrina I used in my entry on Flickr’s Interestingness feature. Apparently Cobalt’s had 10 of her photos featured in Flickr’s Interesting pool, which is impressive. Another picture of hers which landed in that pool caused some controversy:

Imagine my surprise again, when it [the photo I linked just above, not the one from my original post — ed.] was REMOVED from flickr temporarily, and replaced with another image from a widely-seen photo of the WTC Towers being hit by a plane. This was directly on 9/11/2005. I titled mine “Memorial to 9-11 and Katrina” and outlined my thoughts on that sad anniversary. This situation lead to a critical overhaul of “Interestingness” on flickr.com, which had been brewing for a while. I also documented the removal of my image and the replacement image and questioned “Why?”

Stewart Butterfield (CEO of flickr) came to post in my comments on this documentation and then reported back that my images had now been restored to public view. They had been removed from public view by anonymous members who marked them “may offend”. Little did they know that their temporary sabotage did the most possible to insure my “fame” and following within flickr.

The Flickr Central debate that surrounded this episode is still some pretty interesting reading for anyone curious about the way a big and active community like Flickr polices itself on the fly in public. You can see from the comments on Cobalt’s screen capture where she documented the removal that this scuffle over the “may offend” flag and Interestingness is part of a long running debate on the site about censorship and political expression.

Anyway, let me know what you think of the new design (and, especially if you come across any little bits that seem like I may have missed them in the transition — like the search results page, goodness gacious, will someone tell me how to style the search results page?!?). And keep those comments coming! They’re the best part.

Tagged: Moveable Type, blog, redesign, css, Joshuaink, flickr, Doug Kaye, ITConversations, Interestingness, templates

I think this is pretty different from the expectations in many blogging communities that exist primarily (or at least initially) online. These communities tend to form around discussions of sets of ideas or obsessions: commonly techie or political ideas, but there’s plenty of groups around music (the thriving mp3 blog ecology of which Hype Machine offers a taste, for example), art (Drawn! and Art Dorks are popular), and local culture (PORT is a great Portland example).

Now, while I don’t think that my blog is especially technical — and it’s definitely not about “computer programming” — I do use it to participate in a community of ideas rather than to provide an illusion of proximity for far away friends. I can definitely imagine that, if you are not part of the “idea community” to which my blog aspires to contribute, the things I talk about here would seem technical or impersonal. I’m also not especially interested in changing my blog, in making it more personal. It’s exactly this feeling of participation that I enjoy about blogging.

But I think I’ve got a solution for my alienated-feeling friends. If you’re wondering what I’m up to and are particularly craving a “cheese sandwich”-style blog post from me, all you’ve got to do is send me an email (greg@mfdz.com works) with the date and the phrase “What Kind of Day It Has Been” as the subject line, and I’ll send you your own personal post all about what I did and ate that day (I can’t promise I won’t edit out bad things about you or people you know, but that kind of cryptic tongue holding is exactly what makes personal blogs tantalizing to read). Plus, if you know where the phrase comes from you get extra points. Complain no more!

Technorati Tags: blog, cheese sandwich, strategy, email, personal