It’s apparently sightseeing in beautiful Hong Kong. It is supposed to be in Cleveland by the close of business tomorrow. I have my doubts.
I loved their debut LP and both of their EPs are interesting listening. This track is from their new EP (and I assume it’ll be on their soon-to-be-released LP). Hand claps are always fun, no?
Mute Math (sometimes typeset as MUTEMATH or MuteMath) is a Grammy Award nominated American rock band from New Orleans that formed in 2003. Their music consists of many elements such as alternative rock, new wave, electro rock, psychedelic rock, and post-rock with ambient vocals. The group consists of Paul Meany on Rhodes piano, bass, keytar, keyboards, samples, vocals, and more recently, guitar; Darren King on drums, samples, and programming; Greg Hill on guitars and vocals; and Roy Mitchell-Cárdenas on bass guitar, upright bass, and bass drum.
New favicon ...
I put together a new favicon this morning to complement my new hosting and new theme.
At 16x16 it looks like a random black & white pixel pattern. I’ve included the full-sized PNG below.
This is based on Anders de Flon’s 3x3 Typeface.
If you’re still seeing the old favicon, you’ll need to clear your favicon cache.
A good friend of mine loves Twitter. He uses Twitter to drive his status messages on other social networks (Facebook primarily). He promises me he’s got an upcoming blog post detailing his recommended method, so I won’t get into too much detail on it myself, but it basically involves using the Twitter application on Facebook to automatically change his Facebook status to match his Twitter status. I’ve lately started using ping.fm to do, essentially, the same thing. Either method is convenient and many people do it, but I see one small problem and one huge problem with this method.
First the small problem – grammar. From the ping.fm wiki:
Social networks that accept status update messages commonly prefix your messages with the username you have selected at the network. This is great and all, but some networks don’t do this and cause strange looking messages to be posted.
For example, say you post “is watching TV.” That message will end up on a network like Facebook as “USERNAME is watching TV.” But, if you also posted the same messages to a network like Blogger, or TypePad, the message would just show as posted: “is watching TV.” This can lead to confusion and chaos. Alternatively, the same websites that prefix the username will do so to micro-blog method messages and make it look all sorts of weird.
I’m still not convinced there is a good way to update your status in one place without running into these grammatical problems. I’ve tried playing around with Yahoo! Pipes without good results. Ping.fm’s approach might work (prefixing your status with “said: “), but I’m not completely sold yet.
The bigger problem I see is lack of engagement. It has been my experience that people that update their Facebook status via the Twitter application tend to be far less engaging on Facebook. Sometimes, days at a time go by between their visits to Facebook, resulting in these individuals joining a conversation long after everyone has moved on from the conversation. If I see a status message from my friend on Facebook, I can comment on his status on Facebook and expect a response eventually OR I can go to Twitter, respond to the same status message on Twitter and expect almost immediate engagement. Going to Twitter to respond works out fine for me, but he’s got plenty of friends on Facebook that see his status on Facebook only. These friends of his are hurt the most by missing out on the joys of an immediate and engaging back-and-forth.
Yes, I’m overstating things more than a little bit here, and to be fair, I have the same problem with Twitter. If you interact with me on Facebook, you can be almost 100% sure you’ll get a response from me in a reasonable amount of time. If you interact with me on Twitter, there’s a good chance I won’t see it until hours later.
So, my mission was to find a way to consolidate all of my social network updates into one place so that I’d never miss a comment or response, no matter what social network was pinging me for attention. Months ago, I read this article detailing a pretty nifty way to turn Twitter into a digital personal assistant (henceforth, and with apologies, referred to as your Twissistant). In a nutshell, the article suggests using a second Twitter account to monitor your social network presence. I liked the idea and started to try it out, but quickly saw a big problem with this process.
The email-to-RSS services available all generate publicly viewable RSS feeds. Also, using these services in this way requires you to change your registered email address on the networks you’d like to track to a throw away, unprotected email address. For most updates, this wouldn’t be a big deal. However, if someone were to manage to find your RSS feed, it wouldn’t take very much ingenuity for a mischief-minded person to hijack your accounts (hint: password resets are usually sent via email. some services even send you your current password in plain text in an email). I needed a way to get my notifications into Twitter without making them publicly accessible.
So I thought about it for a while and modified the method a bit. My first thought was to just use the RSS feeds Gmail creates for each of your labels. I figured I could label incoming notifications as “Social Networks” and then use Twitterfeed to send them as tweets. This didn’t work, however, since Gmail’s RSS feeds are only usable by clients that support authentication. I couldn’t find an RSS-to-Twitter service that supports authentication. I did find Twittermail while searching, though. So here are the steps I ended up taking to setup my Twissistant.
1 – Create your new Twissistant (complete with a cool name and nice avatar, if you care). Make your Twissistant follow your personal Twitter account. Then, log back in to your personal account and follow your Twissistant. Finally, log back in to your Twissistant account to set updates to be private. Remember, your Twissistant’s tweets are for your eyes only.
2 – Create an account at http://twittermail.com. You will receive a secret @twittermail.com email address. Anything sent to this email address will be sent to Ttwitter as a tweet. When signing up for this service, use your Twissistant’s Twitter username and password. Also, check the option to keep your updates private to prevent your updates from showing up in twittermail.com’s public feed.
3 – Create filters in Gmail to catch notifications from social networks, comments on blog posts, anything you’d like to track inside Twitter. Set the filter to automatically archive incoming notifications, mark them as read, and forward a copy to your new @twittermail.com email address. Be smart with your filters – you have full control over what will and won’t be forwarded to twittermail.com.
4 – Your Twissistant will sit there silently and privately, waiting for tweets from Twittermail. When you get a comment or a reply or a notification on one of the sites you’re tracking, you’ll see your Twissistant tweet that update to you in your Twitter stream. Since your Gmail, your Twitterfeed.com account, and your Twissistant Twitter account are all private accounts, your notifications will remain for your eyes only.
So now, while you’re browsing Twitter, using your favorite Twitter client, or checking incoming SMS messages from Twitter, you’ll see your Facebook notifications, blog comments, last.fm recommendations, email from your mom, package tracking messages from UPS, and whatever else you feel like tracking with your friendly Twissistant. Now you can keep up with all of your high volume social updates and notifications without clogging up your inbox AND you get the added bonus of making use of SMS and all the Twitter clients out there (both things you wouldn’t get from a Gmail-labels-alone solution).
One of my very earliest experiences as an Ubuntu user was an impromptu gathering of a handful of co-workers at my buddy’s place to install Ubuntu on various computing devices and eat pizza. If I remember correctly, we called it a GeekFest, but in hindsight, I realise that what he had was a Release Party. Ubuntu users all around the world gather at release parties marking each new release of the Ubuntu distribution. What follows below is a short photo-essay of sorts about Ubuntu Release Parties. The images are from Creative Commons licensed Flickr content; each is linked to the corresponding Flickr photo page. Inspiration credit goes to Boston.com’s Big Picture blog.
Twice a year, every six months, we gather in celebration of the continuing and growing success of the Ubuntu Linux distribution and the continually growing community that makes Ubuntu what it is. Many of us know each other very well. Some of us barely know each other; yet we enjoy each others company, we enjoy sharing each others knowledge and enthusiasm.
We gather in backyards.
We gather in restaurants
We gather in empty classrooms.
We gather pretty much anywhere we can find space to gather.
We bring installation discs.
…lots of installation discs.
We put those discs to good use, of course
Sometimes we’ll break things.
But that’s OK. We generally love helping each other fix things.
We also love cake.
and caffeine.
We’re willing to wait in line
for cake.
To the uninitiated, we may seem a little scary,
but we’re generally knowledgable, helpful and pleasant folks!
The next development cycle is already under way, which means we’re less than 6 months from the next round of release parties! The Januty release parties are still going strong as well. I’m headed to the Ohio LoCo release party just north of Columbus, OH. If you’re in the area, you should definitely stop by Panera Bread for good food and good times.
I’d love to shine a bit of a spotlight on the photographers behind these pictures, so if any of these belong to you and you haven’t heard from me yet, leave me an email or comment and let’s chat!
I’ve recently joined the ranks of tea aficionados and thought I’d share my experiences and resources with everyone. Tea is one of those things that you don’t realize you’ve been missing out on until you truly experience it. Growing up, I hated clam chowder. My father loved it and always had some of the Campbell’s canned variety in the pantry. Then I spent a summer in Boston and tasted real clam chowder for the first time in my life. It was an eye opening experience. I now enjoy clam chowder enough to even eat the canned-crap version.
I’ve had a similar experience with tea. I can’t say I hated tea, but I never realized that most bagged tea is crap-tea - made from low quality (sometimes leftover) tea leaves by machines. Inspired by discussion of good tea on an episode of Diggnation, I decided to purchase a proper infuser and some tea leaves to see what “real tea” tasted like. My verdict: if you have yet to taste good quality tea steeped at the proper temperature for the proper length of time, you are doing yourself a great disservice.
Here are some resources for those interested:
Tea
Hands down, the best place to buy good tea that I’ve found is Adagio Teas. They’ve got a great website with several dozens of varieties of tea for your brewing pleasure. Further, Adagio gives you the ability to create your own custom tea blends! Check out Patrick Thompson’s Battlestar Galactica Blend, for instance :). I ordered a few tea samplers (something like 25 different varieties of tea). Once I get a good taste of them all, I intend to create and post my own tea blends. Also on Adagio’s site, you’ll find some social features thrown in for good measure - wishlists, a friend list, even a TeaChat.
Follow @AdagioTeas on Twitter, they post codes to get 10% off an order pretty frequently.
Equipment
A good infuser is a must. I got mine pretty cheap in the tea aisle at the super market and it works well. For something more fun, check out the Shark Fin.
For most just starting out, an infuser is the only equipment necessary. If you decide to get more serious about the tea hobby, you’ll also need a good way to watch the temperature of your water. I haven’t actually tried this, but Kevin Rose, one of my tea inspirations, recommends this kettle with a built in thermometer. It’s definitely an investment, only for those very serious about their tea-craft. For now, I’m using a regular thermometer to estimate temperature. It’s definitely not the most accurate solution and I do intend to “upgrade” at some point down the road.
If you want a fancy mug with a built in infuser, check out the Adagio Teaware section, they’ve got some interesting stuff.
Blogs
Here are the tea blogs I’m subscribed to. I’m definitely interested in checking out some other tea blogs, so please, by all means, leave me links in the comments 
http://www.teamuse.com/
Multiple Infusions has a directory of tea blogs. There’s alot there and I’m slowly making my way through checking them out to see what’s worth following.
Other Stuff Worth Checking Out
@goodtea on Twitter and the corresponding Facebook group
Wikipedia pages are always interesting reading to familiarize yourself with a topic. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tea)
Proof: I grabbed my digital camera on the way out the door this morning. My intention was to take the camera to work to transfer a pic I had shot to my computer for use in a separate blog post I had written. I was in too much of a rush to do it at home (woke up late), so I decided to just do it at work. On my way out the door, I realized I had forgotten something else so i put the camera on the railing on my front porch, ran back upstairs, grabbed my stuff and headed back out. Of course, I hopped in my car, forgetting the camera sitting on the railing. I realized this about halfway through the workday when I finally had time to work on that blog post. I figured - oh well, it’s certainly gone by now. Good thing I didn’t have any terribly personal pictures on there. I get home from work and what do I see as I pull into the driveway but my camera, still there on the railing, unharmed and untouched :) In Germantown, Northwest Philadelphia, that camera was as good as gone no more than 10 minutes after I drove away. I live in a good neighborhood.
Chris Brogan has some words of wisdom concerning things that far too many people are doing wrong.
http://www.chrisbrogan.com/youre-doing-it-wrong/
Particularly agreeable:
You don’t allow blog comments.
You add people to LinkedIn that you don’t know very well. (I think this applies even more to Facebook)
You use partial RSS feeds.
You talk in LOLcat speak. (have you ever actually read a comment thread on ICHC? Inanity defined.)
Some on his list are a little silly
You aren’t using FriendFeed.
You are using FriendFeed.
Sooo…. I should have a FriendFeed account, but I shouldn’t use it? Or is FriendFeed just altogether wrong?
I’d like to add a few of my own:
You are an artist using Myspace as your primary (only!) homepage.
You are using Myspace.
You insist on using ‘www.’ before every domain name.
You ask a question on a message board, find a solution, publicly declare that you’ve found a solution, but don’t post the solution.
You’ve added 2 dozen applications to your Facebook profile, taking care to invite me to every one of those applications.
You top-post your replies.
You reply-all without reason. (anyone else ever notice Facebook doesn’t even give you the option to reply to the sender only?)
NO FACEBOOK! BAD!
Ultimately, of course, I agree with Chris Brogan’s sentiment that there really is no “doing it wrong” (who defines what’s right?) Still though, if everyone out there could at least stop doing one or two of these things, I’d be very appreciative, kthxbai!