For the record, I was never a programmer.
via ColonelTribune
Tag Archives: geekery
Still the best thing I've ever done in any workplace ever. *
This has been a stressful week at work, due largely to a big online project I’m working on in conjunction with next week’s issue. Look for it on the site on Wednesday.
This package has a lot of video components to it, so I needed to grab a piece of code we used when I created the Indiana Jones vs. Megatron video over the summer. I ended up re-watching that clip, and decided to post the embedded version here. Enjoy.
Sometimes I think I have everyone fooled.
* Er, when I used to work on a crisis hotline that helped runaway kids get home to their parents? That was probably better in terms of making the world a better place. But this probably wins in the “Best Use of Video – Wanting Not To Laugh But Being Unable To Stop Yourself” category.
The other 10 percent of search?
Earlier this week, Google’s Marissa Mayer said that search was “90% solved.” Later in the week, she clarified that the remaining 10 percent was going to require 80% of the work.*
After sifting through the rubble of the Google vs. TribCo fight this week (that resulted in United stock tumbling from $12 to $3 in a scant fifteen minutes) it’s obvious that part of that 10% is going to be figuring out how to prevent problems like this from recurring.
In a perfect world, search engines and aggregators are amoral. They only re-broadcast the information that is out on the Web. If the information is tagged or dated incorrectly, the fault lies with the source, not the aggregator. But if the aggregator decides to make an assumption and modify the data, the fault indeed lies with the aggregator.
“Best practices” is one of those biz phrases that gets abused, but it’s not yet to the point where it’s useless. News sites ought to make sure they put a date on every story, and aggregators and bots ought to skip those stories that don’t. Agreed? I’m sure there’s an argument against this solution, but it’s not coming to me right now. Then again, I’ve had a couple glasses of wine so…
By the way, TribCo: You guys didn’t really “warn” Google to stop trolling your sites, did you? I can’t imagine that’s something The Colonel would countenance.
* If search is 90% solved then how come 80% of sites do such a lousy job with it?** Raise your hand if you ever spent 15 minutes searching a site for an article you knew was there only to go to Google, pound out a few keywords, and find the article within seconds? Yeah, me too.
** Yeah, I know what you’re thinking. Shut up.
Well-fed Animals
This Wired deconstruction of “What’s It All About” off of Girl Talk’s (nee Greg Gillis’s) Feed The Animals looks pretty and all, but I don’t find it as easy to follow as the Wikipedia entry on the same song.
Also, anyone notice how Yung Joc totally looks like Usher and Phil Collins seems to be looking disapprovingly in Faith No More’s direction?
Chicago New Media Summit stuck in an old way of thinking
I’ve been of two minds on this month’s Chicago New Media Summit.
Chicago could really use a place for all of its media folks – be they in content, editorial, marketing, sales or development – to come together and chat about the biz. Like most larger industry groups, we tend to congregate only with like-minded (or like-titled) people for cocktail hours or other networking events. Having everyone together in one place would be a boon, especially if there’s a way to learn from each other. The Chicago New Media Summit seems to want to lead the charge here.
But there are goals, and there is the execution of those goals. And on the latter point, CNMS leaves a lot to be desired. I realize this is the CNMS’s first year, but it seems like they’re missing some of the basics, even as they’re working to remedy their larger problems.
First – an error they realized early on – was the price. Originally $425 for a two-day summit, the CNMS quickly got re-priced to the much more reasonable $250.
Second was the plan for most of the registration spots to be “invite-only.” A cached registration page from its site shows that the original plan was for a 300-seat event.
“We are awarding some seats to the general public (60) and will have (10) scholarships. The remaining 230 seats will be invitation only to insure that the audience includes members from a large variety of industries and backgrounds represented by the Summit.”
On the first point, I don’t think even the full speaker list justified the original price, and clearly I wasn’t the only one who thought so. While there are some local luminaries involved, the omission of others is obvious. And honestly, a few of the planned speakers are people from whom the CNMS’s target audience have heard plenty from already. Finally, others on the bill have no place at a “new media” conference. I won’t name too many names here, but the email I got from them today touting “Matthew Lillard – Hollywood Celebrity” is a case in point, and if someone can tell me what a representative from the 2016 Olympic Committee can possibly teach a group of new media professionals about its industry, I will gladly pay the cost of your conference registration. (I know the 2016 group has co-opted more than a few local bloggers for its 2016 Channel, but that’s no reason or excuse.)
On the second point, it seems as if the “invite-only” plan has been abandoned, either out of necessity (not enough people were signing up/could be convinced to be “invited”) or due to some epiphany on the part of the organizers. Then again, who knows? A later version of the early registration page dropped the mention of the “invite-only” aspect, but there’s nothing on the CNMS blog that says why or whether it’s still in effect (the main page of the site doesn’t mention it at all either). Like most things with the CNMS, the true answers are shrouded in mystery, in a misguided attempt to manufacture buzz. In all fairness, a June launch event had good intentions of openness but as the Chicago Tech Report and the CNMS’s own blog points out, most people were in the dark at the time. (Note that the speaker list in the post I link to in that sentence is no longer current.)
I’m not sure how an event in its first year can justify so many invite-only spots or obscurantism, particularly since it goes against the very nature of the open Web. I’ve heard, anecdotally, that the people running the event have asked for the moon from its speakers, even those with a proven track record in new media (from permission to re-broadcast their speakers’ presentations as they see fit on down to asking them to have others provide testimonials that vouch for their bona fides, even after the CNMS invited them to speak in the first place). It’s as if they’ve assumed their event has a cachet that it doesn’t yet have.
Moreover, where’s the About Us page on the CNMS site or something similar that tells us more about who’s behind the CNMS? Why do I need to play boy detective by going to the CNMS Facebook page then seeking out the Facebook pages of the event’s officers and looking into their backgrounds to get a sense of the people running it? It should be front and center. Again: openness.
Finally, why – aside from the obvious convenience to those who are running the event – is Google Checkout the only obvious way one can pay for one’s registration for the event? I know we’re all supposed to be tech-friendly, but I deliberately chose not to store my credit card information with anyone online, particularly with Google, since the length and breadth of its data trail is long and vast. And since most of this data is used by Google to make money, I’m not interested in contributing to its bottom line at the expense of my privacy.
While Google Checkout is an attempt to safeguard its users from potentially suspicious sellers, I think the jury’s still out on whether Google can be trusted with its users’ financial data or not. While I don’t know how most of the CNMS audience feels about Google Checkout, most tech-friendly people are far more circumspect than the average person when it comes to sharing personal data. So I can’t imagine I’m the only person who has this feeling. This might be a minor point, but it’s another brick in the wall that the CNMS seems be building between itself and its potential audience.
All this having been said, I still plan on going to the networking/social event during the conference (even if it means paying the $20 door price instead of $10 in advance). As I said at the top, I support the idea of what they’re doing, even if I think the way they’re going about it is pretty misguided. Here’s hoping they spend that socializing time listening to their audience, rather than dictating to them.
Edited to add: Just found this post with a quote from CNMS organizer John Patterson.
“‘There will be movie stars,’ Chicago New Media Summit organizer John Patterson told me this afternoon.”
Sigh. Granted, their epiphany happened after this, but I’m starting to think Patterson doesn’t really know his market, much less his audience.
Update 9/9/08: And the hits just keep on coming. I just got an e-mail this morning announcing Chicago New Media Summit’s mission. It’s the same boilerplate on their main page (with the same “member’s” typo) and includes this gem:
Q: What might happen if we took CNMS08, poured it over a Tech Cocktail, added some MGFest, a twist of HDExpo, glammed it up with the Mid West Independent Film Festival, powered it by Microsoft and promoted it through the Chicago Tribune?
What if this was just the beginning of some new and powerful alliances?
What if you were part of it?
A:The Midwest just became little more SXSW
Sigh again. Aside from the typo that confuses the issue, I don’t think the CNMS benefits from the SXSW comparisons at this point.
Update 9/16/08: I attended the CNMS social event. More on that here.
My blog vs. IE (Or: How life is like a piece of code)
This weekend I was hanging out with some friends and they mentioned that they’d had some trouble viewing this blog in Internet Explorer. I checked, and sure enough, IE would only display the main page prior to the first use of the “jump” link I use (that link you see on the longer posts I write) and wasn’t displaying the right-hand links at all. So figuring that hack was causing the problem, I yanked the code. And sure enough, problem solved.
Having the job I do, I know that the fault lies more with IE’s developer-unfriendly, ass-backwards code, not the hack code that works on every other damn browser (incidentally, which one of you is using Camino?). But as I once pointed out to Time Out’s developers, you have to code for your users, not for yourself. And if IE is causing a problem on Time Out’s site, and 40 percent of our user base uses IE, we have to fix it. Since a whopping 64 percent of OMIC’s user base uses IE, I had no choice but to fix the problem especially since it was preventing people from reading my posts, which is pretty much the whole point of this blog.
There’s a lesson here: No matter how right you think you are, sometimes it’s better to stop beating your head against the wall and just try something else.
Had me a real good time
“Make sure you got it.”
These were the words spoken by Ian McLagan of The Faces, seconds after he was gracious enough to take a picture with a whiskey-soaked me.
But let me back up.
By Saturday night in Austin, I’d spent the better part of four days at SXSW working, in one form or another. After taking in a set from Justin Townes Earle, I headed to the Time Out showcase at Emo’s with The Donnas and X. As it would be ethically wrong for me to review a show my employer is sponsoring, I considered myself off the clock, and proceed to sip Maker’s throughout the night.
I drifted into a conversation with Matthew Albanese, who works on the Seaport Music Festival. He told me that he saw Ian McLagan of The Faces on his way in. I’d had just enough whiskey to make it my mission to meet Mr. McLagan.
Though I know what he looked like back in the day, I was a bit fuzzy on what McLagan looks like in 2008. One of my bosses corraled a Time Out New York marketing guy who had an iPhone. He ran a Google image search, and armed with a visual I proceeded to walk around Emo’s Main Room in search of my quarry.
About thirty seconds later, I think I’ve spotted him.
Aware of my previous mis-identification of Amy Winehouse, I get confirmation from a few of my co-workers before approaching him. Then this occurs:
Me: “Are you Ian?”
Him: “I am!”
Me: “Sir, thank you for everything you’ve done.”
Him: “Am I Sir Ian now? Was I there for the ceremony? Did I enjoy it?”
What more could you ask of a moment like this?
As we talk, I let him know I’ve from Chicago and he lets me know that he’ll be at Fitzgerald’s come August or September. And then I ask him for a picture.
Know this: ever since I started writing and reviewing people of some renown, I’ve made every effort to avoid any sort of star-fuckery. But faced with a man who has a direct line to rock’s booze-soaked heart, I couldn’t help myself.
As soon the flash snapped, McLagan said “Make sure you got it.”
Argue, if you like, the notion that nowadays McLagan is someone who doesn’t often get lauded by a fan, or asked for a picture. But even if that’s true – and I’m fairly certain it isn’t as I watched several people hail him throughout the evening – does it necessarily follow that he’d be concerned with me capturing the right photographic representation of that moment? No. He’s just being a decent bloke. And frankly, there aren’t enough guys like that in the biz.
So thanks, “Sir” Ian. Thanks for making me remember why I wanted to do all this in the first place. Not because I would get to meet and worship my idols, but because guys like you make me think it’s worth all the thinking and writing in the first place.
25 in 12: Superman/Batman: Supergirl
Hi, Chicagoist readers. You’ll find the main page of the blog here and more comics content here.
Well, it didn’t take me very long to start totally cheating within the bounds of this project.
At the beginning of the year when I decided to set a goal of reading 25 books over the next 12 months, I remember thinking “I’m probably going to end up including a graphic novel or two.” Not that graphic novels aren’t, or can’t, be literature. They are, and can. But making time for reading comics in any form isn’t a problem for me. It’s sitting down with a novel or non-fiction tome and carving out the time to finish it that presents a challenge. Still, I knew if I was going to hit this goal without cutting down on my other media consumption, a few comics would sneak in here. And as I’ve still been trying to slog through two books that I’m not at that wild about, this one certainly did.
Even worse, Supergirl doesn’t even qualify as a proper graphic novel. It’s merely a collection of the Superman/Batman team-up comics (numbered #8-13) – a novella one might say – which deal with the Supergirl’s re-appearance in the DC Universe.
(This is probably confusing for the non-comic-geeks among you but know this: every so often comic book characters – including and especially the most iconic of them from Superman to Spider-Man to Wonder Woman – have their backstories revised. It keeps the characters fresh, helps bring in new readers and also gives writers new stories to tell. It also brings out the nerd fury like little else in comics. In any case, this is story is a re-introduction of Supergirl into the DCU. If you want to know how it got this way, there’s always Wikipedia.)
Like any volume of Superman/Batman, even a story about Supergirl is always a story about Superman and Batman. And, by extension, a story of identity.
In this story, Kara Zor-El (Supergirl) is a teenager sent to planet Earth soon after her baby cousin Kal-El (Superman) is rocketed away from their dying home planet of Krypton. Her father intends for her to be Kal-El’s protector, but due to some interstellar traffic jam, she ends up arriving on Earth several years after he does. While Supergirl’s arrival feels like home to Superman, Batman is suspicious of her, and remains so throughout the story, never quite sure of who she is.
Wonder Woman harbors similar concerns, and she brings Kara to Paradise Island for training and observation, over the objections of Superman who finds himself in conflict with two of his closest friends, due to his certitude over who Kara is meant to be. But her training is interrupted by a visit from the malevolent Darkseid – ruler of the hell planet of Apokolips and generally bad dude – who brainwashes Kara into becoming his handmaiden, leading Batman, Superman and Wonder Woman to rescue her not once, but twice as Darkseid follows them back to Earth to make an attempt on Kara’s life.
If this volume of the Superman/Batman stories were a TV movie, it would be considered a backdoor pilot, as Supergirl was mainly a way to re-launch the character into her own title within the DCU. As such, there’s a feeling that all the “good stuff” about the Supergirl character was saved for later.
At times, it’s hard to tell if writer Jeph Loeb wants this new Supergirl to be a teenager just coming to terms with her adolescence or a fully-grown woman who realizes the person she was sent to protect is now protecting her. It leads to an odd juxtaposition of moments: Supergirl will be standing up to an accusatory Batman one moment – no mean feat – while in the next she’ll be gaily shopping for clothes, dressed in a baby-tee and low-rise jeans, the straps of her thong hiked up somewhere around her rib cage (granted, this book came out in 2004 but it just goes to show that boys on both sides of the inks and pencils have a hard time coming to terms with young women). But Loeb is smart enough to show us that when Supergirl is at her sharpest and best-defined is in moments of conflict whether with Batman, with an expert swordswoman on Paradise Island or even with Superman himself.
As I said, this is a Superman/Batman story. The through-line in these volumes is that each man finds a little of himself in the other, and vice versa. In this volume, Superman discovers that he shares Batman’s tendency to do “whatever is necessary.” Here, his desire to keep his family – Supergirl – safe, leads him to eventually bury, though not kill, Darkseid at the far end of the universe. It’s a frequent theme in comics: through adversity you find out who you really are. And family is at the core of who Superman is, whether on Krypton or in Kansas. At the end of Supergirl, Superman realizes that though Kara is Kryptonian and capable of super-heroism, it is up to her to discover her own place on Earth, as he did, away from the safe embrace of family.
I have to believe this has a resonance for other people the way it does for me: The moments in my life when I felt the most secure in my identity were the times immediately following periods of great conflict or insecurity.
In any case, the next time I sub a graphic novel in for a “real” book, I promise it’ll be something a little meatier. Like DC: The New Frontier.
The Chicago Tribune dips its toes further into the online video waters
A couple weeks ago, I noticed that the Chicago Tribune removed the navigation window that allowed direct access to its blogs from its front page. (Boo-hiss, incidentally.) In its place was an expanded video console that gave you access to more of its taped video packages, from site-specific packages to CLTV news reports.
So it shouldn’t have been a surprise when they launched an entire separate site devoted to video called ChicagoLive.com. I wrote a brief post about it for TOC, but it started squeezing my mindgrapes again today when the Trib posted a story about Mayor Daley’s response to his son’s investment in a company that had business with the city.
(That’s a whole separate post, so I’ll just say this, particularly to those Chicagoans who’ve found themselves calloused over by corruption as of late: if you’re giving Mayor Daley the benefit of the doubt, and believe he didn’t know his son was involved with Municipal Sewer Services, is that really a man you want running a world-class city?)
Here’s what’s great about the way this story is posted: I can get the 4 W’s from the story itself, and then see what happened at that news event via the video of the news conference, unedited and uninterrupted, complete with some guy shushing the chatterboxes in the background and Daley’s voice cracking when he speaks of how much he loves his son. It’s a complete picture.
Unfortunately, it’s the exact opposite of how the Trib normally handles video on its site.
More often than not, the Trib slaps video segments on its site that aren’t at all complimentary of the stories they’re paired with. In fact, they’re usually CLTV stories on those same topics. CLTV is fine on its own, but everyone knows that television news presents a shorter, capsulized version of a newspaper story. So instead of the video providing more of the story, it actually provides less.
And that brings me back around to ChicagoLive.com. The Trib is honest enough about the goals of the site. In a press release (posted in full at The Lost Remote), Allison Scholly of Tribune Interactive said:
“Chicagolive.com serves our customers by creating a unique and visually engaging environment for users to post or view videos and for advertisers to promote their messages.”
An excerpt from an internal memo posted by Chicagoist put a finer point on the matter of advertisers:
“Chicagolive.com will also serve our advertisers by offering a new avenue for them to reach the audience they are looking for. Online video is growing by leaps and bounds, and advertisers are looking for ways to take advantage of its interest to web users.”
As I alluded to on TOC‘s blog, ChicagoLive.com is “unique,” but for all the wrong reasons: it doesn’t have many of the social networking or community aspects people normally expect of sites that depend on user-submitted content, and it requires an approval process before videos will post.
The latter is perhaps to be expected: The Trib’s a huge entity, and an easy target for lawsuits. So it’s in its best interest not to post videos that would be controversial. The likelihood that someone will submit hard-hitting citizen journalism is certainly there, but it’s unlikely it’ll get past the Trib’s screeners since they’d be unlikely to post anything that would anger a potential source or their advertisers. But if they’re serious about it, they’ll need to find a way to come to terms with it. Still, I think the jury’s still out on the feasibility of crowdsourcing in journalism so perhaps it makes sense for the Trib to take tentative steps. (Then again, it’s been a year so perhaps a mistrial’s already been declared.)
That hesitancy is, I think, what is at the heart of the the Trib’s reluctance to embrace all of the Web 2.0 tech. In its past online offerings, the Trib has taken a wait-and-see approach. Tribune columnist Eric Zorn was an early adopter – early for the MSM anyway – of the power of blogs, but it was a while before the Tribune extended the privilege to anyone else. But with all its resources, the Trib is in a position to give people exactly what they’re looking for so it can compliment what it already offers, and provide that complete picture. The Daley story above is a great example of that.
Sooner or later, the Trib will get more comfortable providing this kind of instant access to news events, and will see the value in allowing people to create their own version of its site, whether through crafting user-specific front pages or offering more user-submitted content. They’ll do this if for no other reason than because advertisers follow users, and users follow content that gives them more information, not less, and information that gives them exactly what they’re looking for, and allows them to move it around as they please. Even if that information is as mindless as a bunch of kids from Park Ridge High School doing “The Safety Dance.”
And for anyone who’s reading this and thinking “Hey, why don’t you take all these high-minded musings and put ’em to work on TOC‘s site, smartass?” all I can say is: just wait.
Reflections on years of collecting pieces of plastic
I’m on vacation this week, and I fully expected it to lead to more blog posts here, but that hasn’t happened since I’ve been spending as much time as possible away from the computer so I’m not tempted to check and see how things are going at TOC in my absence. Instead, I’ve been knocking off some long-overdue projects around the house.
Today, for instance, I tackled a project that’s been hanging over my head for months: re-organizing my CDs. I’ve been dividing things into three piles: discs that I’ve loaded into iTunes and can be put into storage; discs that I don’t want in iTunes for space reasons, but still want easy access to; and the stuff I’m selling off. 
So for example: the double-disc version of The Very Best of Elvis Costello is in the first category, my copy of his Get Happy! album is in the second, and the single-disc version of Very Best that came out several years ago is in the sell pile. (I’m assuming Reckless still buys CDs. It’s been so long since I’ve sold CDs, Sean Fanning was still in high school.)
I’ve said before that it’s important to me to have a visual representation of this part of who I am in my home, and the piece I wrote a while back was pretty clear on how important it is to me that the records I share with others are reflective of my personal taste. Unfortunately, this plan means the discs on my shelves don’t necessarily reflect that. For example, I’d be mightily confused if I looked at someone’s collection of CDs and saw that the only Clash disc they have is Combat Rock, which is one of the lousiest “classic” albums you’ll ever encounter. I’d also wonder about the kind of person who only owns one James Brown album (James Brown’s Funky Christmas), but saw fit to purchase all three Sheryl Crow albums. Obviously, this means I can never have anyone over to the apartment.
Most of these CDs have been in boxes for the better part of a year and a half, and looking at them is like seeing old friends, particularly the numerous mix CDs my college friends I were trading for a year or so back in the early aughts. This probably explains why I’m having trouble parting with some discs, but does not explain why I am hanging onto that one Nikka Costa album, though I am sure it is the same reason why that Lisa Stansfield album isn’t going anywhere either. I am such a sucker for a pretty face and a little R&B street cred, no matter how long past its sell-by date it is.
There’s a lot of personal history here, like the time I went out and bought three (!!!) Don Henley solo albums because I was in a really big Eagles phase. I still remember my friend Rick asking “Why don’t you just buy more Eagles albums?” I didn’t have an answer for him then, and still don’t. I’ve also got mixes I made for when my friends and I drove to South Carolina for a friend’s wedding, for parties I threw, and to mark the holidays, among other occasions. 
And I still have the Ultradisc gold CD version of Queen’s A Night At The Opera (yes, you can tell the difference in sound quality) I bought in high school. It was $27. I was a huge fan, I did not have a girlfriend, and i had little else to do with the money I made at Bakers Square.
Speaking of, I was talking with a friend from high school this week about albums that are tough for me to listen to, even though they’re really great. I was listening to Art Brut’s first album and Tralala’s self-titled a lot when my ex- and I broke up in 2006, but I tend to avoid both of those now. Thanks to a breakup in college, I have a similar reaction when I hear No Doubt’s “Don’t Speak” or Sheryl Crow’s “My Favorite Mistake” though both of those songs are kind of crap, so no great loss there. But man I miss hearing Art Brut and Tralala, devoid of personal context. I carry those with me on my iPod, perhaps hoping that one day I will.
On the other hand, that really shitty Nina Gordon record 
went on the sell pile. You know how when you’re depressed, you start doing all kinds of things that are really bad for you? I can tell how unhappy I was in my life by the records I was buying. I had two rough patches in 2000 and in 1997, two years in which I purchased that Nina Gordon album and – I kid you not – the soundtrack to Ally McBeal, respectively. I enjoyed those records like someone who convinces themselves that they are in love with someone who treats them like shit. If you ever see me buy a Celine Dion record, please know that this is a silent cry for help.
Overall, the sell pile is pretty small. I know there are some people who wouldn’t understand why I don’t just burn everything onto an MP3, and toss the lot of it. But I don’t have a lot of pictures of the people I’m close to, or the important times we shared together.
But it’s pretty likely I remember what CD we were listening to at the time. And it’s nice to pull it out and look at it, now and again.
* Can someone explain to me why this album is still in print, but the version of the English Beat’s I Can’t Stop It** with “Tears of a Clown” on it, is not?
** My copy is safely ensconced in the storage pile, and loaded into iTunes.
