Blast from the past, courtesy of Dave K.

Dave sent me some video of the “Social Distortion incident” at the Odd Rock Cafe, which might have happened in 1988, but I’m not entirely sure I have the year right…

In the photo, from left to right is me, Scott Schoenbeck, Rob, J.J.(?) Bill Couture, and Brad Stezala. Rob and Bill are doing some sort of funky hand-jive thing that in the video looks like they are describing an automobile accident.

I came up with this crazy idea, and since I didn’t think it was something I could pull off, I enlisted Drew to do all the hard work. The result is such: 12 Days of Podcasting. Enjoy…

So I’m in the office in the early morning, which happens to be in the basement, and Lucy the Cat is getting all buggy. I soon realize why when I hear noise in the ceiling. Crap. A mouse. This happened once before… Damn mice…

Sure, you would think with two cats in our house the mouse problem would be nonexistent, but you would be wrong. I put Lucy on top of the large metal cabinet where we last saw a mouse, and we wait. Finally! A small face appears in the crack between the ceiling and wall, right where the window is. (I’ve long ago caulked the window shut due to August flooding…) Lucy the cat and the mouse are now face to face, maybe 6 inches apart and… nothing. Lucy sort of stares at it, and it runs away. Thanks, Cat!

Later Tinkerbell (Cat Number 2) is trying to get behind the clothes dryer because she hears something. Now I thinking it’s more than one mouse, since, you know, we’re on the other side of the basement. I jump on the dryer and look and see something which appears mouse-like scurry away.

Mouse 2, Cats nil.

One more time down to the basement at night, and I see a tail right behind the door. A bushy tail… Too small for a cat’s tail. Well, it was no mouse, it was a baby squirrel. Well, my size 12 boots made short work if it! I’m kidding, you don’t kick (or stomp) baby squirrels. The little thing was no threat. It was lost and confused. I slowly put a bucket over it until I could get it out. Lucy came down and I showed her the baby squirrel and she was curious, but that’s about it.

I got some heavy gloves and a big glass jar and put Simon (yes, I named him Simon) inside. I showed the girls, and the cats, before I took it outside. I thought we should give Simon some nuts, but it was ultimately decided against, so there were no nuts for Simon.

I took Simon the Baby Squirrel out to the park behind our house and after I forced him to get out of the jar (I don’t think he wanted to) he scurried up a tree. Goodbye Simon!

Oh, Emma informed me it was a flying squirrel, and she should know since she did a report for school on squirrels.

Squirrels in the house is not uncommon I guess, though I’d keep them out of your bed. Supposedly flying squirrels were often pets. Of course I also discovered that one of it’s principal enemies is the cat. Flying Squirrel Central has more, and if you are looking for a great webmail application I highly recommend SquirrelMail

Don’t you hate being in the middle? I mean, I ask you this assuming you are one of those people in the middle somewhere. All you experts and know-nothings can stop reading right now…

What is “The Curse of the Middle” you ask? It’s simply being in a position of being good and/or knowledgable at something, maybe better than a lot of people, but just not an expert. Mark at BrainWagon hit on this recently in a podcast when he said “People who don’t draw think that I draw reasonable well, people who actually are artists think that I draw terribly.” Bam! That nails it.

I sometimes feel I’m doomed to the middle. To always be a middler. Stuck. Never to go up (please?) or down (hopefully!) It’s like that episode of Seinfeld title "The Opposite" where Jerry is “even Steven” and things just always work out, no big wins, no big losses.

So on to my area of expertise… I don’t know if I have one. If I do, I can’t quite see it. I mean, I dabble in a lot of different technologies, Linux, Mac OS X, Perl, HTML, syndication, MySQL, automation, and on and on but I just don’t consider myself an expert on any of them. Why is that!? It is just me? I mean, other people think I’m an expert on things, of course this is just due to them not knowing as much as I do about a subject. How can I be an expert when there are people who know 10 times more than I do, and are 10 times better than I am, and are looked up to as experts?

The last time this subject came up in a career-type question it was sort of explained that I was someone who was not an expert in any one thing, but had very broad experience in many different things… Is that it? Am I ok with that? Should I even care about this “expert” thing?

It’s all so very confusing…

I used to work at a place where I was convinced if anyone else figured out that Google existed I’d lose all value. I suppose back then my expertise was in finding answers no one else could.

Does it all have to do with the pool you swim in? Is it all relative? I mean, at home I am the “computer expert” but if I go to a LUG meeting that might not be the case. That’s the geo-angle, but expand that to the internet, what does it take to be an expert at something on the big old internet? (I don’t even want to think about it!)

What makes an expert anyway? I know this guy who is often amazed at some of the things I come up with. To him I guess I’m an expert. He tells me I should write a book, and I pass it off. Of course we’ve learned that you can make more money selling the book than writing the book, but which one will make you an expert? An expert at what? The subject of the book, or the subject of selling books?

Anyway, I thought about it a bit more and told him “I am writing a book, it’s just on the internet!”

(New chapters daily!)

Let’s mix it up a little… Perl, Python, HTML-Template… Atom, RSS… Words, Photos, Links, and Objects of Desire…

Say what?

Say Planet Planet!

Or say Planet RasterWeb!

There are billions and billions of planets out there, well, ok dozens maybe. (Heck, there’s even a WordPress Planet.) the one that was the tipping point for me was Planet Burningbird, which is explained in It’s the Oddest Thing.

After seeing Planet Burningbird, I said “Heck, let’s do it!”

The Planet website has no real documentation and very little explaining things. (True geek software, eh?) I downloaded whatever version I could from whatever link I found, and took a look. Python. I mean, I completely gave up on Python earlier this year, but, well, OK. We’ll give it a try…

Now, on Mac OS X I did have a hiccup or two. Searching…. Ok, this post about Mac OS X fixed things. After that it was on to templating. Ah! HTML-Template, but done in Python. (Gosh, where have we heard about HTML-Template before?)

So templating was fairly simple, since I knew the tags. What’s next? Feeds! Yes, we need some feeds… I grabbed my own feed from this site, as well as my feeds from del.icio.us and Flickr and… Is that it? Hmmm, I need more feeds. Luckily I had been experimenting with a Perl module named WWW::Amazon::Wishlist to create an RSS feed of my Amazon Wish List. Of course some of the stuff on my wish list was from the year 2000, so I had to update it. (Honestly I don’t expect anyone to ever actually buy me a gift, but you know, if you want to, the option is there… hint, hint. Aw, who am I kidding? I can barely get feedback on the stuff I do here…)

So where was I?

Ah yes, Feed the Planet, yes… Oh, PubSub! I got two feeds there! One for sites that link to RasterWeb! and one for sites that “mention” RasterWeb!. You’d think if they mention it, they’d link to it, but they seem to have different results. So in theory now, if you link to this site, you should show up on the planet. (This might go sour in the future, we’ll see…)

Is there more? Sure! Though Planet doesn’t seem to handle enclosures in any way, we also have RasterWeb! Audio, which is one of those “podcasting” things we started back in August before podcasting even had a name…

Ok, so that’s the lowdown on the planet. It’s seems to have been released under the same license as Python, and a quick check with the Open-Source Initiative’s Licenses says it’s open-source. (I think.)

Any problems? Well, it doesn’t quite validate. I mean, all the feeds I have control over seem to validate fine, but the Planet page itself doesn’t, partly due to the foreign content from the PubSub feed, and maybe because of Planet doing something silly as well.

So that’s my combination of Perl, Python, HTML-Template, Atom, RSS, del.icio.us, Flickr, PubSub, and other things I won’t mention again. Enjoy!

I know, you punks online all day with your blogs and chat rooms and www’s think the iPod is all the cat’s pajamas and the bee’s knees, right? Well, it ain’t…

See, yesterday I was talking with a Youth, my nephew in this case, who is somewhere between the age of 0 and 18 years old, and he did not know what the iPod is. This is a kid who has been using a PS2 and Gameboy for like 1/2 his life, and uses computers, and rocks out to music, and he said he wanted an MP3 player for Xmas.

So I sez, “Ah, you want an iPod, eh?” and he’s all puzzled, trying to figure out what I’m taking about. So I ramble on for 5 minutes about usability, and bring up the Rio, the iRiver players, and other such stuff, and he’s not quite there. I tell him that in the “ease of use” and “user experience” categories, the iPod appears to be the clear winner. Sure, I even mention that if you do want features like voice recording, and FM radio, the iPod don’t do it without add ons while some of the other players do.

I tell him that he can put his home directory on it and carry it everywhere, a safe backup right? (His mom thinks I’m nuts, but I point out that a kid has important files too!) I said you could get a crappy player that’s a pain in the “ease of use” and “user experience” categories for around $100, or for around $250 you could get one that holds 10 to 20 times more stuff, and is a portable Firewire hard drive, and was the clear winner in the “ease of use” and “user experience” categories.

The verdict is out. Expect an updated on December 26th.

In Paging Jennifer Beals Mr. Gruber says that an iPod without a display is just silly. (I’m paraphrasing here…) What he doesn’t know is the new iPod will be using a display that utilizies Spin technology.

That’s right, the new iPod will display information by being rapidly spun in the air by the earbud wires. I know it sounds ridiculous, because it is. Wait. that’s just the leaked story, the real story is that it will project the display onto a flat surface just like that atomic projection clock at your Mom’s house, where you can lie in bed at stare at the time slowly changing while being displayed on the ceiling. Wait. that’s just the leaked story, the real story is that there will not be a Firewire port, USB 1 or 2 port, or even some special new dock. The new iPod actually comes tuned to your brainwave patterns and will be controlled (only by the owner) using thoughts and brainwaves. It will respond to your mood, and what you are thinking. (”Hmmm, I’d like to listen to The Clash” or “That Dawn and Drew Show is funny!”) The fact that it can only be controlled by the owner’s brain will also lower the risk of theft. Oh, also, it won’t actually have a hard drive or flash memory, it will just use the audio stored inside of your brain, talk about DRM‘d music!

Now folks, I must have made hundreds… ok, dozens… well, at least a few posts on Apple’s iPod audio player, and even though I do not own one (yet) don’t you think I’m probably right this time?

[Editor’s Note: If your browser does not support SVG images, you should be seeing PNG images instead, which will not look as good as the SVG versions. If you don’t see any images, let me know what browser, version, etc. you are using. It seems some of the popular browsers out there don’t “do the right thing” hmph!]

[Editor’s Note Part 2: Seems that RSS 2.0 can’t handle the <object> tag properly? At least that’s what the validator tells me. The Atom feed seems ok though…]

I’ve been working on some simple graphing utilities in Perl to create SVG graphs… Here’s a few samples…

Our cost for phone service seems to have gone down.

Local utilities continue to rise. Ugh…

We’re spending less on food, well, most of the time. ;)

I like the fact that these are very simple, showing just the trend and not going into details like month, amount, etc. In fact, to create one of these just takes the following:

perl ggraph2.pl "Phone" "44 54 50 53 44 41 43 53 42 42 44" >phone.svg

Run the script passing in the name you want on it, and a string of numbers space separated, and output it to a file. It’s still a bit fragile, and only does some basic normalizing, so wacky things will break it, but it’s a start. Like all other quick little hacks, in the hands of the guy who wrote it, it “gets the job done” while users would break it in less than 10 minutes and start yelling.

I really like SVG. It reminds me of the old days of plotting out graphics on the Apple ][+ and that’s a good thing! It’s another one of those “edge technologies” I keep hoping will finally catch on big one of these years…

I needed a Jabber (oops, I mean XMPP) client for Mac OS 9. What? Mac OS 9? What am I doing, some crazy time-travel experiment?

No, I stopped working on my time-travel experiments in the year 3042, but anyway… I didn’t have to look far. I just looked back to August 2000 when I last mentioned Jabbernaut.

Sure Jabbernaut is no longer being developed, but lucky for us it’s open-source, so it’s still available. Oh, lucky for us it’s hosted at SourceForge, so we can actually download it. (Though I’m sure I have a backup on CD… In a box… Somewhere…) And most importantly, we are lucky that the Jabber protocols have not been changed for silly reasons over the years. Open-source, open-protocols, they’re good things… Do you think a 4 year old version of AIM, Yahoo! Messenger, or MSN Messenger would still work today? (It might, I don’t know for sure, this isn’t one of those rhetorical questions, I honestly don’t know!)

If I haven’t mentioned it recently, I’m a big fan of Jabber (I mean XMPP!) It’s another one of those “edge technologies” that I keep wishing and waiting for to just take off. Next year will be the year it does. I’m sure of it. (Right Apple?)

There have been no photos posted recently. This is due to the death of our digital camera. Countertop. Children. Floor. You can put the pieces together…

So we never quite got around to replacing it, I mean, isn’t the cost of technology supposed to go down? It never seems to, you just get more for the same price. A good Mac will always cost around $2000. Six years ago that got you a 233 mhz PowerMac G3 with 64 MB of RAM, and today you still pay $2000 but now you get a Dual 1.8 ghz PowerMac G5 with 256 MB of RAM. Six years from now you’ll get a 20 ghz PowerMac G8 with 2 terabytes of RAM, and you’ll pay about $2000… (Ok, the numbers might be off, but you get the idea…)

Anyway, I was secretly hoping the upcoming holiday season would help out with this problem, when a friend of mine gave me an old Olympus camera to use. I mean, how often does someone give you a $1000+ camera? Well, when it’s 6 years old! ;) (I should add a sidenote that this friend is the same one that I got my old Wallstreet PowerBook from, and it too was state-of-the-art in 1998. Thanks Friend!)

I’m not complaining, I’m quite thankful actually! It uses SmartMedia cards (of which I have about 5 or 6 now, some from the old Olympus, some from the Rio 500.) It’s a huge camera! It’s not gonna fit in your pocket unless you are a kangaroo. No matter, I can again take pictures! Of course with the 8 MB card it seems to hold only 4 images in “Super High Quality” mode. I’m hoping it can use the 64 mb card I have…

The test images seemed a little soft… Hey, just think of the Dischord inspired photos I can take now - Flickr here I come!

We got new phones for the house last year, since we started using caller id, and I picked up a dual-handset (two phones, one home base, one recharging station) from Uniden fairly cheap. One still works, but a few months back we noticed that one of the phones seemed to not be transmitting sound when you talked, so people would call, we could hear them, and the could not hear us, they’d get frustrated and hang up. (It was actually sort of amusing… “Hello? Hello? Ok, I’m hanging up now!”)

I eventually opened up the broken one and found the microphone had come loose, and since it did not seem like a fun soldering job, it was time for new phones. (I don’t want to knock Uniden, as the phones did take a good deal of abuse in the form of falling, dropping, etc. and our old Uniden phone is like 10 years old and it still works ok.)

Nonetheless, I had heard good things about Panasonic phones, and picked up the aptly named Panasonic KX-TG2344B. Again a dual-handset model, but this time, it’s got neat features like intercom between the handsets and the base station, speakerphone, (easy to use) phonebook, and I’m sure other stuff…

Let’s hope these last a while…

Kids use the internets, that’s no secret, but how do you keep them from “harmful matter” out there? I’m not worried about web sites, but I’d like to eventually let the kids use those email addresses they’ve had for years. Do I need to create a whitelist, so that any friend of theirs has to be pre-approved by me before they can receive mail from them? that seems like a good idea, any problems with that? Spoofing? Spammers? Hmmm…

I’ve also thought about IM. I rarely get anything nasty or SPIM-like, and I figured setting up Jabber accounts would be the safest bet. Of course that really only sets them up to IM with me, which is fine for now. I’m sure at some point some of their friends will want them to come to the dark side (AIM, or worse MSN Messenger! I gotta draw the line somewhere!)

Anyway, I’m going to look into ways of protecting the kids without installing goofy “nanny” software, or having to put proxies in place. Good luck to me!

I’ve been busy lately, real busy… But I thought I should at least take a few minutes to list off some of the stuff I’ve been listening to…

• Daily Source Code [RSS] - Come on, it’s Adam Curry, ’nuff said right?
• Evil Genius Chronicles [RSS] - Been listening to Dave since we started this stuff and he, Adam and I all had our own versions of ‘iPodder’ clients… Dave’s an interesting fellow, and always has something interesting to say.
• The Dawn and Drew Show [RSS] - Yes, I’m probably to blame for getting Drew started on the podcasting thing. What can I say, I so proud… (!?!?)
• Reel Reviews [RSS] - Brilliant! Film reviews that hit the target, dead on… I’m surprised there isn’t a link to Amazon to buy the DVD’s, seems like a perfect match.
• The Rock and Roll Geek Show [RSS] - I can’t say I love all the stuff Mr. Butler plays, but I’ve enjoyed the shows, and it’s pretty darn easy to skip the songs you don’t like (try that with radio!) Again, I’m surprised there isn’t an Amazon affiliate thing going on to sell CD’s.
• Coverville [RSS] - I’ve figured out the secret of Coverville, and it’s simple. It’s things that are familiar, but newly discovered all at once. Songs you probably know, done by artists you might now, but it’s all mixed up… or something like that. again, simple to skip the songs you don’t like, kicks the butt of radio.
• Treo Podcast [RSS] - How can you not like a podcast where the host says “This is a special podcast, if by "special" you mean "drunk."”? Entertaining indeed!
• Brainwagon Radio [RSS] - I really like the geeky topics of the show. Mark always seems to have some new gadget or experiment to talk about.

Wow, the list is a lot longer than last time we looked at my playlist. This isn’t even it, I just wanted to highlight a few… We still got Trade Secrets, all the stuff at IT Conversations, Eric Rice, Esc From the World!, Jimmy Jett… and the list goes on and on…

A while back Drew and I were discussing the fact that neither of us have really heard Lazer 103 since August… Hmmm, about the time podcasting started to take off… And what’s happening in Denver? Denver radio stations launch battle to win back listeners… Wake up RadioLand! It’s a Brave New World…

I donated blood today, which is something I’d really like to do more often, but it’d hard to find the time in the 50+ hour work week to do so… Well, it’s the Holiday Season, so this is my donation to a worthy cause I guess.

Here’s my vitals for today:

• Blood Pressure: 118/78
• Temperature: 98.4
• Pulse: 78

If you want to do something nice this year, go donate some blood.

You must read The Blue Packet. Ok you don’t have to read it, I’ve pulled out the one nugget in the whole thing I found most amusing/relevant/true:

Some Linux guy in either Engineering or IT sets up a server that generates perfect blue packets with 3 lines of Perl code, but nobody notices him.

Ok, there is one more bit at the end…

The Linux guy eventually leaves the company to start his own Internet venture and ends up buying Google five years later.

(Still waiting for the second part…)