The Jack of HeartsReviews of Geof’s New Music for 2010-03-14
- The acoustic Waterdeep show? At least four stars, and totally worth listening to. It's 44 tracks and epically long, but worth it.
-GFM #
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links for 2010-03-12
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Damn. So I guess this means that UNC = Zombies.
links for 2010-03-10
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Fuckin' A.
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"Question 5: How many FireWire devices can be connected at any one time?
"Answer: Fire Wire can work with up to 63 devices on a bus. The number of bus-powered devices you can connect depends on the amount of power available from the computer, and the amount of power required by each device." LIES! Daisy-chaining FireWire devices dies after four or so in my empirical tests.
On Comments, Links, and Raising the Bar of Discourse
Recently, I set up a blog at the main URL for geoF:stop media, LLC. I don’t allow comments there. Why?
- Comments have a very low threshold for barriers to entry into discourse. This encourages thoughtless replies. I wanted thoughtful replies to what I’m doing.
- I don’t have to handle comment spam. I mean, Akismet pretty well kills comment spam for me these days, but any time I spend fighting comment spam is time I’m not spending being creative [or, well, slacking off].
- Relating to #1, I think comments get a lot of me-too-itis, and for the most part, that’s not worth it to me.
Let’s take a case study here on GFMorris.com: my entry about my iPhone music disappearing and showing up as other. This was a temporary problem for me, but it continues to be a problem for other users. [Whether they're lusers or people jailbreaking their phones, I don't know.] But read the comments for the entry: no one is addressing my original post at this point. Google is bringing people to my blog, which is nice and all, but the content that people care about is from other people, not me.
Is that a problem? Well, I think that it is, in a way. While I do use Alex King’s Comment License plugin to say, “Hey, I own your comments, thanks,” I have some problems with that, in a way. I use the license to say, “You’re licensing your thoughts to me,” mainly so I can say in kind, “I can police the comments if I choose, fella.” I’m not really doing it to aggregate knowledge. This place is about me spewing out ideas, not so much what you have to say about it.
I want to go back to my first point, though. It’s not so much that I don’t want to own the discourse [which, again, I don't], but I want a higher level of discourse. What comes to mind is my post about the recording rig I’m using here in early 2010. The following thoughts come to mind:
- The initial comments I’m likely to get are “That’s cool” or “That sucks, go get better gear like X” comments. Neither of those are terribly productive.
- Future comments are likely to be irrelevant, because my rig is continually changing. That post would’ve looked different six months ago [mainly, I was too stupid to have battery boxes in the rig, plus I didn't have all the cabling I do now for soundboard patching]. I’ve learned. I will continue to learn, and I will make followups.
- I want to encourage discourse on what people do with their own rigs. I don’t want someone describing their budget rig in the comments on my blog—I want them writing their own posts. Is that too hard? With free blogging tools out there like WordPress.com, I don’t think that it’s too much to ask. Why do I want this? The comment box is awfully restrictive [as it has to be to avoid the comment spam problems---again, low thresholds and all that]. I want freedom of discourse.
That said, I’m going to leave the comments open on this post and see what I get. How very meta. 
links for 2010-03-09
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"Here's how I see it: If you really want to be a team front-office executive, you are better off spending your summer internship not fetching coffee for a team or leading stats-oriented Web site. Start your own and own the hell out of some segment of analysis. Post daily, post brilliantly, gently pass your stuff around to folks in media who would appreciate it. If it's good — and if you're not good, you might as well not even try — the teams will notice. There is no barrier (at least no publishing barrier) to becoming your own expert and putting your talent on display. THAT is the fast track."
Dan Shanoff is exactly right — publish or perish.
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Very tempted for this. Have to see if it's in the budget.
In Which I Share My Not-So-Inner Geek
Not-so-embarrassing admission: my computers are named after Space Shuttle Orbiters. Currently, I have Discovery [my 24" iMac], Atlantis [my Mac mini media server], and Endeavour [my Macbook]. [Ignore, for a moment, that I have other, non-working Macs in the house. Okay? Okay.]
Well, to the two desktops, I slave hard drives. And, well, I’m a bit of a geek, so …
Discovery has:
- HAL 9000, the internal drive for the iMac.
- Discovery II, the every-night-cloned-by-SuperDuper! backup drive that ensures I’ll keep running if HAL 9000 goes, well, insane. “Daisy, Daisy, give me your answer true …”
- TMA-1, which used to be my Time Machine drive until it became full and unwieldy. I recommend a TM drive be 2-2.5x of the base HDD, and I had only 1.5x with TMA-1. So she became the Moon, and now I have …
- TMA-2, TMA-1’s bigger cousin, a 1.5TB miniStack v3.
I also have a Drobo, which, if you’ve followed me on Twitter lately, has been giving me all sorts of hell. Something is amiss, and I’m sure that we’ll fix it. Anyhow, the drives used to be named lame names, until I came up with the following naming system:
- Io, for audio.
- Ganymede, for storage I let anyone use. [Well, not just anyone ... just the people I give a CrashPlan backup code to.]
- Europa, which doesn’t have any cool pun to it, but is used for storing my Aperture libraries.
It would be cool, you know, if that worked right now. But I’m not bitter.
What about Atlantis, you ask?
- Atlantis’s internal HDD is Plato.
- Atlantis’s backup HDD is Cave.
- Atlantis’s Drobo, which is working just fine right now, is “Drobo”. I should rename it Timaeus.
Endeavour gets backed up to an unnamed Time Machine. Lame, I know. I’m actually preparing to sell it to fund an iPad purchase, and also to prepare for the day when I can utilize corporate’s interest-free loan plan to buy a 27″ iMac, which will get the Endeavour name. I’m trying to keep myself to three main machines, because otherwise, this house would be full of computers and all my money would go to Cupertino.
[Shut up, all of you.]
links for 2010-03-08
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"I’ll go so far as to predict that by the time Monday April 5 rolls around, it’ll already be an established meme that non-iPad-optimized iPhone apps are to the iPad what Classic apps were to Mac OS X — something you’ll make do with 'for now' but can’t wait to abandon for the real thing."
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WIN WIN WIN WIN WIN as far as I'm concerned.
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There's nothing like posting on a three-year-old entry to make a friend laugh.
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"Finally, that one of the simplest of diseases managed to utterly confound us for so long, at the cost of millions of lives, even after we had stumbled across an unequivocal cure. It makes you wonder how many incurable ailments of the modern world – depression, autism, hypertension, obesity – will turn out to have equally simple solutions, once we are able to see them in the correct light. What will we be slapping our foreheads about sixty years from now, wondering how we missed something so obvious? "
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I now want to visit Mike and Kari.
links for 2010-03-07
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Need to contemplate how we can use this…
