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Verbal Assault (Affected Me!)

Verbal Assault - Trial The year was 1988. I heard Verbal Assault’s album Trial, and I fell in love.

I spent the entire summer enjoying that album. And then fall, and winter, and the next year.

Verbal Assault also came to Milwaukee, and played at the Odd Rock Cafe to a small crowd. A very small crowd. I think it was a Saturday afternoon… the weekend Summerfest opened. It was great seeing them, but the live experience doesn’t have an affect on me the same way Trial does… even today.

For years I didn’t hear Trial… I had it on vinyl and it wasn’t available on CD, and my respect for artists prevented me from trying to find some illegal download of it. For years I checked verbalassault.com hoping to see Trial get released in some digital form, but it never happened. Finally, I gave up, and digitized my old worn out copy of 12″ musical magic. Hisses, pops, and cracks galore…

And it’s amazing. The sound quality is not great… I’ve got a worn-out needle on an old turntable with my battered vinyl. It’s also the greatest thing I’ve ever heard.

Maybe it transports me to an idealized time in my life: young and mostly care-free, but I tend to not buy into that salad days bullshit and in thinking about it, it’s the powerful words and music that still affect me.

Listening to it more than 20 years later, I start to wonder if it’s had a major effect on my life, or if it’s some strange coincidence that I find so much of it relevant to whom I’ve become.

So many of their songs have to do with persevering, and not giving up, and continuing when the odds are against you. Never stop. In all my years, I’ve always found it hard to quit things I believe in. It’s a rare thing for me to do. I don’t like to admit defeat. There’s plenty of things I probably should have quit over the years, but didn’t for one reason or another. I find a way to rationalize things. (I guess It’s a good thing I tend to do creative things, and not self-destructive things.)

So right now, I’m listening to Trial by Verbal Assault. And when I’m done with that I’ll probably listen to it again. That may continue for a while.

Here’s what someone else has to say about Trial.

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Trial

Trial

Inspiration can come from the past. Something that inspired you more than 20 years ago can return to inspire you all over again. Music + Words. Those two things combined can be the most powerful thing in your life. And I’m thankful for that.

See Also Verbal Assault (Affected Me!)

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BarCampMadison: Building Strong Communities for Hacker/Maker Spaces

Here’s a video from BarCampMadison, which took place August 28, 2010 in Madison, Wisconsin. The session was titled “Building Strong Communities for Hacker/Maker Spaces” and was presented by Bob Waldron.

Just a note on this video, the production is a bit poor, but I felt it was still worth sharing. I set up the camera, hit record, and ran in and out between sessions. I did the best I could to clean up the audio, but didn’t really edit the image quality at all.

This video is also available at blip.tv and Archive.org and is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution License.

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The End of Vox

R.I.P. Vox 2006-2010

Vox is closing on September 30, 2010 (via closing.vox.com, great subdomain, btw!)

Vox launched in October, 2006 and is closing down less than 4 years later. Plenty of people have been blogging for 5 years or more, so really, 4 years is not a long time. There’s some information on moving your Vox blog to Posterous or WordPress.com. (I’d pick WordPress.com, they have a longer track record and I see them lasting longer than Posterous, and they also provide a path to export from WordPress.com to eventually host your own WordPress install. Truth be told though, Posterous is becoming a bit of a powerhouse, so who knows…)

This highlights something I’ve been an advocate of for quite a while, owning your content online, and owning your identity online.

By “owning” I’m referring more to owning the place where your content lives. There are prolific producers on the web nowadays who put everything into other people’s baskets. They post on Twitter, FaceBook, Flickr, Blogger, Posterous, and all sorts of other sites… none owned by them. If you started a blog in 2006 on Vox and it grew to something huge, you’d now be in the boat with all the other Vox users looking for a new home.

Moving from one domain to another and maintaining your momentum, making sure people know you’ve moved, and are able to find you can be done, but it’s best done if you have control over the old domain, or at least if you can control the old posts, perhaps pointing people to the new home. When services shut down this may not be possible. I’m not sure yet how Vox will handle this…

I wish all the Vox users good luck in their search for a new home… don’t forget that your own blog on your own domain is always an option.

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WordPress Plugin Rundown

Adam Chernow has a blog on his own site, but tends to use Tumblr more… He also asked me what plugins I use.

chernowachernowa @raster WP is what I have my blog on right now… http://www.chernow.org/blog. What plugins are you running to do everything? →

So I thought I’d give the rundown of the current plugins I’m using. Many of these were added fairly recently. As a bit of history, I started this blog in 1997, first using UserLand Frontier as the publishing tool, and later using a Perl-based system I developed, until about 2005 when I moved to WordPress. I used my own custom theme since then and just within the past few months got around to fixing a few issues that prevented a few plugins from working properly.

So… here’s the list:

  • Akismet – stops comment spam. (From the fine folks at WordPress.)
  • Clean Archives Reloaded – used on the Archives page – it works. Not much more to say.
  • Comments with OpenID – it seems to work. Is there a better one? I don’t know…
  • Configure SMTP – my mail goes through an SMTP server.
  • Foursquare – provides a widget in the sidebar with my most recent check-ins.
  • Google XML Sitemaps – generates a sitemap.xml file used by Google to assist in indexing the site.
  • I Like This – provides a ‘Like’ button on each post. I didn’t want to outsource the ‘liking’ of posts to FaceBook, so I added my own thinking people who didn’t want to leave a comment might use it. (Almost no one uses it.)
  • Inline Tag Thing – I use this on occasion when I go through old posts adding tags. I hacked up my version a bit…
  • OpenID – supporting OpenID. (Thanks DiSo!)
  • Subscribe To Comments – pretty basic functionality that should be included with pretty much any blog nowadays. (Even though everyone says “email is dead.”)
  • WordPress.com Stats – added recently, just testing it out. I go on these kicks where I keep a close eye on stats, and then I completely ignore them for months at time.
  • WordPress Gravatars – adds Gravatar avatars to comments.
  • WP Simple AdSense Insertion – I’ve been experimenting with adding ads to old blog posts that get a lot of views. We’ll see how it goes.
  • WP Super Cache – great caching plugin to speed up page delivery. (I even donated some cash for this one!)
  • WPtouch iPhone Theme – provides a more mobile-friendly version of the site.
  • XRDS-Simple – I think the OpenID plugin required this to work properly…

I am by no means a WordPress expert (though I know a few!) and this is just the current snapshot of what plugins I’m using here. As I said, some have been added pretty recently, or I’m sort of “test driving” them for a while.

(I’d love a BarCamp session talking about WordPress, and it’s plugins, and overall best practices…)