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Bluster == Journalism

Salon.com:

According to an Annenberg poll conducted this spring, about 40 percent of Americans consider Fox News talk show host Bill O’Reilly a “journalist” — while only 30 percent of the people surveyed said they considered famed Washington Post reporter Bob Woodward to be one. … Meanwhile, more than a quarter surveyed said that another champion of judicious reportage, radio talk show host Rush Limbaugh, was a journalist.

So when you see reports about the sinking credibility ratings of journalists, keep in mind who the “journalists” being rated really are.

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Heffalumps and Woozles

The hallucinogenic dream sequence from Winnie the Pooh and the Blustery Day has recently become one of Miles’ favorite bits. Amazing to see how the images and icons foremost in his mind become interleaved so fluidly with real life. Heard recently that children can’t distinguish between fantasy and reality until age seven. At two, it’s all one big plastic fantastic reality sandwich.

“Miles, what are you and Mommy going to do today?”

“Daddy, we’re going to go down in a gopher hole with Winnie the Pooh and some Heffalumps and Woozles and we’re going to take a train table and trains in there too and grandma will come with us down in the gopher hole and look for honey that’s what we’re going to do, Daddy.”

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Amplified Bicycle

Mallet On the second night of the recent Matthew Sperry Memorial Festival, cellist Theresa Wong played an amplified bicycle, in a performance that brought many in the house to tears. Wong, who studies performance at Mills College, had been playing the amplified bicycle prior to having known of Matthew or his death. I had been storing the bicycle from which Matthew was struck in our garage for quite some time.

After the performance, I offered Matthew’s bicycle to Theresa to use as her instrument; she accepted. I spent Saturday afternoon getting the wheels rolling again, chain disentangled, brake pads unstuck, and cleaning up the road grit. Rested my hands on the grips – the last things Matthew ever touched – and took the bike for a spin, meditating on his life. Sunday I delivered the bike to Theresa’s Oakland loft.

Theresa found the bike resonant, full of surprising sounds. After a few minutes of orientation, she improvised a piece for Matthew. A wild dove had been hanging out in the loft for a few days, and we imagined it to be Matthew’s visiting spirit.

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Colr Pickr

As KrazyDad, Jim Bumgardner produces dozens of web toys every year. His most recent is Colr Pickr — select a color value from a wheel and find Flickr images whose average value match the selected color.

To those that question the utility of this little application, let me point out that it is a toy — like all the stuff on my website. It’s purpose is simply to provide wonder and delight. Nothing more, nothing less. Isn’t that enough? — jbum

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Giant French Rocket Girl and Her Elephant of Royal Luxury

Royal27 Petit Nevermind Burning Man, the French know how to do performance spectacle x 10. From the Nantes festival, celebrating the works of Jules Verne:

“This Thursday, May 19, a rocket landed on the square of the Cathedral. It is a rocket controlled by a small giantess. Our sources of information indicate to us that it is probable that she will leave tomorrow morning… This Friday, the elephant of Royal of Luxury arrived on Saint-Pierre road and the small giantess left her rocket to join it and visit the downtown area.”

P.S. God bless Baby Elephant Walk.

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Solar-Powered Web Hosting

Back in 2003 I had this grand vision to offer solar-powered web hosting. That ended up not happening for a bunch of reasons, but great to see that the idea is taking off. Wired:

The panels are not only good for the environment, they’re also good for business. In addition to saving the companies thousands of dollars a month in electric bills, they’re drawing in customers from all over the world who want to host their websites in a green data center.

Of course, the problem a couple of years ago was that I was trying to think of ways to do it all myself. The answer now, clearly, would be to lease a server in a solar datacenter. But I’m not about to undertake another server move right now. Maybe in a few years…

Thanks Dylan.

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Skookum Tools: WordPress, VideoCue, Dashboard

As WordPress has evolved and grown itself a larger, more supportive community and a larger body of plugins, I’ve become increasingly enamored of it, using it for more side projects. I also love that my hosting customers can install a WordPress blog with literally three clicks from their cPanel interfaces. On Monday I hooked up with Matt Mullenweg (co-creator of WordPress) for lunch, who got me totally juiced up about the advanced capabilities of WP. The biggest thing that’s held me back from a full-scale migration from MovableType is the fact that WP still doesn’t have multi-blog capabilities built in from the ground-up. At the J-School I have about 300 users scattered across 20+ blogs, all with varying levels of permission. WP has nothing like this… or so I thought. Turns out there’s an alpha version of a multi-user WordPress out there. Apparently, WordPress-mu is pretty much production quality despite being listed as alpha. Need to check that out.

Mullenweg, FWIW, is one of the sweetest, most charming guys you could hope to meet. Was very interested to learn that c|net uses WP (with a simple caching plugin) for a huge number of public publishing projects. Last I heard was that c|net had basically invented the massive Vignette CMS. Very interesting to learn they’ve basically abandoned their own baby in favor of simple, lightweight, open source tools.

Yesterday hooked up with Simon Clarke of Vara Software — I know Simon from the Adamation days (can’t believe there’s still a web site there), where he and another engineer were responsible for personalStudio (BeOS video editing application, later released for Windows). Vara is doing some really cool stuff, and I’ve decided to stop using Channel Storm’s LiveChannel for J-School webcasting and switch to Vara’s WireCast. It’s that cool, and won’t result in any loss of functionality. Also got a personal demo of Vara’s VideoCue — teleprompter software that also takes camera input, lets you mix in images and titles, output to QuickTime, and optionally post results directly to a blog. Skookum stuff.

Just emerged from a couple of sessions on building Dashboard Widgets and am totally fired up. Just need to clear a few days (yeah, right) and go for it.

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Dolphins Found Using Tools

CNN: Some members of a group of Australian dolphins have been found to rip sea sponges from the ocean floor and use them to cover their snouts as they forage for food, apparently to protect themselves from stinging stonefish and other critters. And there’s evidence that the behavior is completely taught/learned, being passed from mother to daughter. This makes the behavior categorically different from instinctive forms of tool use among animals. Brilliant and wonderful. Go Dolphins!

Thanks Kabir.

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Orchesperry

Today marks the 2nd anniversary of Matthew‘s death, and the 2nd night of a four-day memorial concert series to benefit his family. Tonight went to see Orchesperry — a large ensemble of Bay Area musicians formed in his honor, in the spirit of a page his wife found in one of his notebooks outlining his dream of a well-contained ensemble that would defy expectations of what “energy music” or “free music” is or can be. “Loud passages should be the exception and not the rule.” I’m breathing. I’m floating. I’m smelling. I’m thinking:

I smell fresh paint.
I smell resin dust floating from a cello bow.
I smell fish on somebody’s breath.
Matthew, I smell your chicken soup.
I miss the way you played blocks of foam and garden tools
And anything you could find that made a sound.
The drummer is gently bowing a Bundt pan.
You would have loved that.
You signed your letters XXOO.
Tonight they played a piece with that title.
I watched your wife’s shoulders heaving with grief.
I felt you in the room, we all did.
Wish you were here. XOXO.

At one point, one of the musicians got up from her chair and started pedaling an amplified bicycle, a gush and whir of the chain in sprockets resonating through the frame, tweaking effects pedals, memorializing Matthew’s last ride, making incredible sounds. Later I approached the musician to tell her I still had Matthew’s partly wrecked bike in my garage. I told her I wanted her to have it, to make it her instrument. She agreed. Next week I’ll get the wheels spinning again, take it to her. A heavy but wonderful evening.