Recently, I set up a blog at the main URL for geoF:stop media, LLC. I don’t allow comments there. Why?

1. 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.
2. 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].
3. 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:

1. 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.
2. 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.
3. 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.

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.]

In a larger entry about information, Rands writes:

Those frustrated with Twitter are frustrated because they have a belief that a story needs a beginning, middle, and end. And that it should have all of those parts before it’s presented to them. What the hell am I supposed to learn from a tweet? The point of Twitter isn’t knowledge or understanding, it’s merely connective information tissue. It’s small bits of information carefully selected by those you’ve chosen to follow and its value isn’t in what they send, it’s how it fits into the story in your head. There are great stories to be found on Twitter, but you have to do the work.

I tell a narrative with my tweets—the narrative of my life, mainly. I announced my probable bi-polar II diagnosis on Twitter long before I posted it here. [And before I got some great feedback from friends who wanted to tell me that I'm not alone. That made it worth it.] My friends have an idea what’s going on in my life, because I share a goodly chunk of it on Twitter. Jonathan figured out that I had an obsession to eating sushi last week. My tweeps know I’m sick today. [Oddly enough, I didn't tweet where I went in to work for a couple of hours because I felt I had to do it. It was the right idea, but I'm paying for it now in feeling puny. I'll live.]

I’ve often said that I don’t know why someone who didn’t know me would read my Twitter. I’m largely the same way with Twitter—I care about the people that I follow, for the most part. I know about my friend Justin’s music school debt, how it creates angst for him and has him in a job he hates because it pays him well enough to get out of that debt. I know that some friends saw a lot of snow today, and some saw none. [And folks know that I saw very little at my house but a lot out by where Stephen and Misty live.]

Now, few of these little blips of information make a whole lot of sense if you don’t have some sense of the larger picture, which is why I write here. Why I share my life online, I’m never 100% sure, but the fact of the matter is that I do it. Part of me thinks that it’s self-expression. Part of me thinks that it’s narcissism. But I find value in it, which is why I’ve done it for almost a decade [!]. But these moments make more sense in the context of friendship, which is why I enjoy it when I go visit Rick and Jessica and don’t have to fill in gaps about what’s been going on with me since they last saw me, or how I’m excited when Mike Terry or Josh Stockment come to visit and roll on up to Nashville ['cause that's how we do], or when we meet Hubbs in Nashville.

Fundamentally, I find that Twitter is a channel of that narrative, a way of taking your friend’s temperature. What has their eye? [when it comes to links]. What has their ear? [when it comes to music.] What has their ire up? Are they at GEOFCON TWO? Are they happy about something? Have they been in a car wreck? [Happened to two different friends this week. Found out via Twitter both times.] I care about Twitter because I care about people, both those I’ve met and those I’d like to meet.

Valentines and Desserts

Friday, February 5, 7:30 PM, North Hills Church, 11319 Highway 231/431 North, Meridianville
Friday, February 12, 7:30 PM, First Presbyterian Church, 307 Gates Ave., Huntsville

Erin Colwitz, conductor
Stacy Owens, assistant conductor
Sharon Keffer, accompanist

Join the Huntsville Master Chorale and a few special soloists for an evening of unique music about the joy – and sometimes not-so-joyous – pangs of love. Enjoy the music of the Victoria and Palestrina, celebrating religious love; a choral song cycle by modern composer, Karl Korte; and old standards like Gentle Annie, Aura Lee and Paddlin’ Maddlin’ Home.

We hope you’ll join us for this varied evening of musical Valentines and Desserts.

C’mon … you get to see me in a tuxedo! Isn’t that worth coming out?

Dead Oceans 2008/2009 Sampler

Another free one.

Neumann KM140’s~>Aerco Pre~>Sony PCM-M1

**recorded FOB/DFC
**recorded by MKHstudios
**this show took place in between a ferry landing and a set of train tracks of which both were active. a few times through this recording you can hear a low ohm rumble of the ferry. we were also treated to a frieght train that passed within 40 yards of the stage during Airline to Heaven.

2006-07-12: Alderney Landing, Dartmouth, NS, Canada (disc 1) and 2006-07-12: Alderney Landing, Dartmouth, NS, Canada (disc 2).

There’s a fundamental disconnect, I’m afraid, in Twitter’s two user models. Twitter, no matter what you’re pushing out on it, can be used in two ways: narrowcast or broadcast. You’re either considering yourself to be a broadcaster of information, or you’re a narrowcaster and trying to hit just a few people. I think the main different would be whether your account is public or private, but it’s also in use.

I’m a narrowcasting person—sure, I “broadcast” information, but I usually try to keep specific folks in mind when I tweet. Most of the time, but not all, I ask, “Is this something I would phone a friend about?” The rare “broadcasting” I do is stuff like today, when I’m posting weather updates. Otherwise, my random ramblings of under 140 characters tend to be things that I’d tell my friends.

This is, of course, not the only way to use Twitter. Everyone has these conversations, at some level; but you can truly broadcast as things get aggregated. If a bunch of people tweet about an event—be it an Apple product launch, a weather/natural disaster, or the stock market—it shows up in tools that glean the chaff from Twitter.

We’re seeing the same thing that we saw with blogging—you were either doing it for personal or promotional reasons. To be honest, we’re all on some portion of that spectrum. But where I think feelings get hurt and people get riled up is when people who were sociable and narrowcast go to the broadcast end of the spectrum.

An example: my good friend Mark Traphagen. Mark’s a marketer. He went from the narrowcast model—sending things that he’d call his friends on the telephone about—to far more down the broadcast end of the spectrum. I think a lot of people are turned off by that; me, I quietly unfollowed Mark and then explained it when he emailed me about it. From reading between the tweets, I see that it’s a kerfuffle again today with a bunch of my RMFO friends, many of whom have said, of late, that Twitter has replaced the forum as their primary “hang” place.

And see, that’s the disconnect: we all tell our friends about things, like “Hey, the weather is bad in your area,” or “Yo, traffic is blocked on your drive home.” But when you’ve got this friend who’s calling you all the time to tell you about things that you’re not interested in, eventually, you stop answering the phone every time they call, right? On Twitter, you just stop following them. Sure, some people are going to take offense at that—after all, the following thing is public, and there’s tools like Twitual to show you who is and isn’t following you—and that’s understandable. There’s also different toolsets for reading Twitter, including some with grouping features that let you filter incoming stuff.

The point is this: everyone’s use case is different. I add and remove feeds all the time for my own needs, and the only difference is that I don’t make that list public, whereas Twitter does make that public. Twitter does that, I think, to push people to be more social/narrowcasted with their service. A lot of my friends—and me!—use it this way. But it’s so arrogant to tell Mark, “You’re doing it wrong!”

Again, to quote Rands, you choose who you follow. That’s it. Twitter is totally an opt-in system. If you feel spammed, stop.

[And this is where I again wonder why anyone reads what I tweet if they don't know me. Because, well, I vent and it's craaaaazy.]

NHL 09 is missing a crucial mode in Be a Pro: the ability to go to the Coach’s office and say, “Hey, coach, I’m a right-handed left wing on a team where the best right wings are mediocre at best. Sure, I won the Hart Trophy last year and have won the Maurice Richard Trophy four years straight, but … shouldn’t you have me at RW and Dany Heatley on the LW? Really?”

Also, I would like to declare where I played in juniors or college, because I’d like to be the third Charger in the fictional NHL.

So I’ve been thinking lately about openness. I am, fundamentally, an open person. As such, my decision six months ago to lock down my Twitter account was a very hard one. I reversed it today. Why? Simple: I am an open person. You ask me a question, and you’re going to get an answer. Whether you like it or not really isn’t my concern. I talk about my faults, probably not often enough. I understand and respect the reasons for privacy, but at my core, I would rather be transparent than not. As such, I have a tendency to say some surprising and shocking things—partially because I don’t have much of a filter, and partially because would rather just speak my mind and be judged for that rather than hiding things.

So I’m sitting here in my terribly messy house, waiting for guys to bring in my furniture. In fact, they just called—they’re 15 minutes out. Is my house a wreck? Yes, it is, but I’m working on it. My house is a metaphor for my life, I think—too much junk, too much stuff of little value being held onto, entropic, chaotic and full of music and computers. It’s just who I am, for better or for worse. There is some of that that I’d like to change—de-junk the house, learn to let things go more, etc.—and I think that I can change that if I put forth the effort. But I really don’t want to change the fact that I’m a fundamentally open person.

As such, you can read my Twitter account if you wish. Warning: it can be scary inside my head.

We’ve all heard of DEFCON, right? The DEFense readiness CONdition rating system? If not, go check that link. I’ll wait.

Now, DEFCON goes from 5 [copacetic] to 1 [thermonuclear war]. Sometime recently on Twitter, maybe the last few weeks, I jokingly started referring to the GEOFCON system to gauge my mood/relative irritation at [colleagues|subordinates|support organizations|customers|NASA]. GEOFCON 5 is a normal, happy, easy-going time. Most of you would look at GEOFCON 5 and hate it, but I like the frenetic pace of what we do, and most of the time, I handle it.

But sometimes … well, sometimes, people start fucking up, and I get mad.

I have only been to GEOFCON 1 twice. The first time was in October. The second time was today. I’m really glad that it happened at the end of the day, because I didn’t get an opportunity to find out who’d screwed up. I … didn’t need the confrontation, because I was out of control.

Right now, I’m about a GEOFCON 3. I’m agitated. I’m gonna sleep like crap tonight. But hey … we have hockey on Friday night, and this means I’ll probably have some especially fine commentary for our referees.

So Facebook’s Notes function acts a lot like a blog, but … I have one of those. I got “tagged” [literally] in one of those viral Facebook things, but since it’s the lovely Dr. Perry, whom I’ve known for almost half my life, I’ll respond…

I. Once you have been tagged, you are supposed to write a note with 16 random facts about yourself.
II. At the end of the note, tag 16 people
III. If I tagged you, it’s because I want to know more about you.

Ain’t taggin’ no one but Jeff, because well, Jeff Holland sucks for making me do this.

1. I shoot a Canon DSLR, but I have a Nikon Coolpix S210 for my point-and-shoot … on purpose.
2. Despite the fact that I wore a lot of flannel shirts in the 1990s, I didn’t own a Nirvana record until the current decade.
3. Contrary to how I was raised, my vote for Obama was not my first for a Democrat. That one went to Don Siegelman, and boy do I ever regret it. [Correlation != causation.]
4. I had never met anyone in Caedmon’s Call [after a show, or otherwise] before becoming a member of the [caedmonscall.net] Staff. I don’t think anyone in the band actually realizes this fact.
5. I purposefully chose not to date in my two years at MSMS because, “I’d never find my wife there. We’re gonna go to separate schools, and what’s the point in that?” Somewhere, Rick and Jessica are laughing.
6. I love that my dad’s middle name is his mother’s maiden name, and any girl I date ends up getting judged, rightly or wrongly, by what effect her last name would have on the middle name of our theoretical first-born. [This random note intended to prove to my mother that I do, in fact, want to get married and have kids, and think about it.]
7. I own a classic acoustic guitar, a 1960s Gibson Dove, but do not actually play the guitar. Andrew Osenga played it on the first of his Letters to the Editor EPs, which you can still download for free, and it resides at his house to this day.
8. I swore that I would go by my middle name, Franklin [probably shortening it to Frank], when we moved to the South. I forgot about it until Mom asked me about two weeks before we moved, and I decided I’d stick with my weird shortening of Geoffrey.
9. I had never seen a live-action hockey game until I first came to Huntsville. I have seen many, many, many since then.
10. I had a 34 on my ACT, a 1510 on my SAT, was a National Merit Finalist, and finished college with a sub-3.0 GPA, lower than my brother’s collegiate scores. I am living proof that a high IQ doesn’t mean you’re gonna kick ass in college. My GPA is decremented for a variety of reasons: MSMS burning me out on school, my untreated depression, all the time I spent screwing around with Student Government instead of school, and … well, being a lazy student.
11. My boss asked me how much money it would take to buy me out of the last year of my degree program, as he needed me full-time at the time. I considered his offer but knew it would affect our ABET accreditation.
12. I used to be afraid to fly, and am still afraid of falling from heights. I used to freak out when our family would drive over bridges, especially the Brent Spence Bridge. [What can I say? I was a weird kid.]
13. Two of my best friends pretty well thought they’d never like me after the first time they met me. That’s because our first meeting was right before the second Lord of the Rings movie came out, and my friends decided to prepare for it by watching the extended version of the first one. How would you torture me, y’all? Strap me to a chair and make me watch a three-hour movie and do nothing else. I’m such a spastic, continuous partial attention person that I just can’t do it. [The last movie I saw in the theater was The Incredibles, and only because Mark wanted to go see it.]
14. If I’d been born three hours earlier, I would’ve graduated with the aforementioned Dr. Perry. I was born at 0300 on 1 Oct 1978, and Ohio’s cutoff to start school was 30 Sep.
15. I once had a friend tell me, “If something ever happened to my husband, I would want to get remarried to you.” This revelation became even weirder when she got divorced.
16. My pinkies are crooked, which is a family trait. My left one is straighter because I’ve broken it seven times. Okay, broke it once, playing soccer, and I keep re-breaking the same spot because the break is at the end of the penultimate bone.

Any other questions?

Now if you’ll excuse me, I’ll go back to working on my Antero Nittymaki and Mathieu Biron voodoo dolls …

Again, not available on DIME, but I’ll reseed if requested.

Mic: Sony ECM MS907 (120-degree setting)
Mic config: handheld, chest level
Location: FOB DFC, 3 concrete platform levels down inside the first semicircle walkway above the pit.
Source: Sony MZ-R37 MD Recorder
Lineage: source > Total Recorder (16-bit, 44.1khz) > TLH FLAC16 (Level 6)

Edits to track 16 and fade-ins/outs done with Goldwave.

Recorded by: litmus

Transferred and mastered by litmus
www.bigmicroscope.com

A ‘From Where I Stand’ Release: FWIS-014

2007-08-24: Greek Theater, Berkeley, CA, USA

When we played Colorado College to start our season, Scott Owens, CC’s radio voice and a former member of the Michigan State organization, called our coach, Danton Cole, to talk about the Alabama-Huntsville team. Cole is an MSU alum, and so the conversation was free and easy.

And then Owens asked about recruiting. And then … then I got to remixing.

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That was a fun ninety minutes last night … and now I have to mix it down to 30 and 60-second loops before tonight’s game.

I just had one of those wacky ideas that might not be too wacky to work, so … why not post it on the Internet?

Everyone talks about the stock market, but no one talks about the credit market—at least until now. Why? The bond market is difficult to understand, because you’re lending money for a return on the investment, and sometimes you borrow money to lend it. It’s counter-intuitive in how the pricing works, etc. It’s wacky.

Anyhow, every economist worth their salt argues that what worries everyone is the credit market; the stock market just goes where it goes. [To wit: the credit market has been seizing up for weeks, while the stock market has only just now started to really, really tank.] So if fixing the stock market takes fixing the credit market, let’s really fix the credit market—not by an infusion of taxpayer cash, but true capital.

Where do we get that capital? 401ks. Everyone is aflutter over how 401ks are evaporating in value, which … well, yes, that’s what paper wealth does, people. It fluctuates until you liquidate your assets, unless you’re the cautious sort that only buys blue-chip, dividend-paying stocks. Otherwise, it is a big gambling market—that your investment allows capitalization of the company you’re buying stock in, which allows them to make more money. Until they’re paying you a dividend for the shares you own, you’re simply betting that, down the line, someone will value your investment more than you did when you bought it. This is the Greater Fool Theory, and at the end of the day, someone loses. [As long as it's not you, though, who cares?]

Anyhow, folks are worried about losing money hand over fist—again, paper wealth. So, let’s one-time, for 90 days, let everyone liquidate their assets, tax-free—ONLY if they buy certificates of deposit, T-bills, etc. You can only avoid the income/capital gains taxes if you capitalize the market or the government. Period. This floods the credit market with capital while letting the stock market tank. What happens then? The Warren Buffets of the world, the guys who buy for value and hold for a long time, they’ll go buy now-undervalued stocks. Flush with capital, banks will have money to lend companies—and with companies’ stock values in the crapper, that’s where they’ll get their capital, because selling their own shares of stock just won’t be all that appealing.

This fails all sorts of tests that I have for providing simple solutions to complex problems, and it might well be something I regret posting in the morning, but right now … seems like a half-assed good idea to me.