In an attempt to get some higher-bitrate rips of my Beatles catalog into iTunes, but fool the program into thinking that the files weren’t new, just updated versions of tracks already in its database, I managed to delete the 45MB file that contained all of my ratings and play count information. Well, not delete it– that would be recoverable. Rather, I managed to overwrite the file. I consider this the same thing as entering a fugue state and erasing all annotations from the margins of my books. Well, I would, if I wrote in my books, but it drives me batty to write in books even though I know it would be a good thing for me to do. Of all of the lame OCD traits to end up with, I get one that could one day significantly hinder my progress as a poet.

–David Ignatow

So much for blogging that much more with Performancing.  I haven’t opened this blog in days.  Hrm.

I took a couple other tips from Lifehacker about sorting e-mail and what not.

• Filter incoming messages by cc:– if it ain’t to me, I don’t need to know about it as urgently.
• Filter all listservs out.
• Filter out “public-face” e-mails.

I fucking hate being covered in poison ivy.  The calamine shit that I spread all over myself does not make for clean clothes.  I swear to God, you don’t realize how much your arms brush up against things until you cover them in orangy-pink goop.

Horrible news!  Where the hell am I going to eat lunch when I don’t know what I want to eat?  This is no fun.  No fun at all.

I fucking hate being sick.  I could not sleep last night.

Looks like my fishing trip is canceled.  Thompson has an out-of-town guest coming. 

Performancing is a super-awesome Firefox plugin.  So is Sage.  I am happier when I have great tools.  I’ve been reading Lifehacker and I want to be better about managing information, time, resources.  I have been feeling very weighed down recently, feeling like I am a victim of persistent partial attention.  I’ve found myself opening an application and then not knowing why I opened it when it’s finally opened.  This is happening a lot more.  Reading Tony Hoagland’s book yesterday was so nice because I think it was the first time in a while that I was able to concentrate on one thing, just one thing.

I’m hoping that using Performancing will help me to log some of those little thoughts a bit more effectively.  I sometimes think about blogging and fail to do so because I only want to get down one or two thoughts, and then I think that it’s not worth an entry. 

I think I may have just spent the last half hour with The First Wives Club playing in the background.  Christ.

Stupid firewall. All this time, I have been having trouble syncing the Windows Mobile machine to the home PC, and it turns out that Zone Alarm was blocking the home PC– it read the remote device just fine. Bah!

Reception to the announcement about the press has been awesome since I started sending stuff out about it a few days ago. That’s awesome… I hope people will jump on board.

Do you buy books online, use Google, or download to an iPod? Everything we do online will be hurt if Congress passes a radical law next week that gives giant corporations more control over what we do and see on the Internet.

Internet providers like AT&T are lobbying Congress hard to gut Network Neutrality–the Internet’s First Amendment and the key to Internet freedom. Net Neutrality prevents AT&T from choosing which websites open most easily for you based on which site pays AT&T more. BarnesandNoble.com doesn’t have to outbid Amazon for the right to work properly on your computer.

If Net Neutrality is gutted, many sites–including Google, eBay, and iTunes–must either pay protection money to companies like AT&T or risk having their websites process slowly. That why these high-tech pioneers, plus diverse groups ranging from MoveOn to Gun Owners of America, are opposing Congress’ effort to gut Internet freedom.

You can do your part today–can you sign this petition telling your member of Congress to preserve Internet freedom? Click here:

http://www.civic.moveon.org/save_the_internet?track_referer=706%7C3275014-izjCztyuRtikHVyY7hg0HA

I signed this petition, along with 250,000 others so far. This petiton will be delivered to Congress before the House of Representatives votes next week. When you sign, you’ll be kept informed of the next steps we can take to keep the heat on Congress.

Snopes.com, which monitors various causes that circulate on the Internet, explained:

Simply put, network neutrality means that no web site’s traffic has precedence over any other’s…Whether a user searches for recipes using Google, reads an article on snopes.com, or looks at a friend’s MySpace profile, all of that data is treated equally and delivered from the originating web site to the user’s web browser with the same priority. In recent months, however, some of the telephone and cable companies that control the telecommunications networks over which Internet data flows have floated the idea of creating the electronic equivalent of a paid carpool lane.

If companies like AT&T have their way, Web sites ranging from Google to eBay to iTunes either pay protection money to get into the “fast lane” or risk opening slowly on your computer. We can’t let the Internet–this incredible medium which has been such a revolutionary force for democratic participation, economic innovation, and free speech–become captive to large corporations.

Politicians don’t think we are paying attention to this issue. Together, we do care about preserving the free and open Internet.

Please sign this petition letting your member of Congress know you support preserving Internet freedom. Click here:

http://www.civic.moveon.org/save_the_internet?track_referer=706%7C3275014-izjCztyuRtikHVyY7hg0HA

Thanks.

I just downloaded Minefield, which I guess is the clever way of saying “Hey this is Firefox 3.0 but it doesn’t really work yet.” I’m not really having any problems thusfar, but is anyone else out there using it, and if so, are you having problems?

My only beef is that most extensions haven’t yet been updated. I can live with it. though.

I’ve complained before about Acrobat Reader. Man, do I hate that thing. So, when I saw PC World’s daily update today, I was a happy, happy dude.

I went ahead and did some tinkering and set up a second monitor, so it’s geekland for me.

My next geek project, and you will be handsomely compensated with lavish praise in this blog if you can help me in this endeavour: Figuring out how the php which allows the user to skin my site works. It’s there, and I have the skins folder ready to go, I just need to know how to point the user to the correct folder that contains the skin.

I would like to beat the staff at Walgreen’s to death. I waited for almost an hour for my prescription to be filled, and was assured several times that I was next, only I never seemed to be next. Finally, they figured out that they had filled it almost 30 minutes previous and no one noticed. During my one-hour wait, I heard them present many, many excuses to many, many customers, which individually sounded plausible, but which, in combination, sounded like a pack of big, fat lies. If you had a prescription filled, I’d look real hard at the pills to make sure you got the right meds. Otherwise, you may end up ingesting an anal suppository.

Ultimate Comics has opened a second store just in front of Eastgate on 15-501. It’s very nice. You should check it out. My visit on the way to the pharmacy today may be the last time I go into a comics shop and don’t spend any money. Ever.

I keep iTunes playing consistently on shuffle, with higher-rated songs played more often. At night, I do not stop the music, I just mute it.

The song “A Long December” by Counting Crows, which has a five-star rating, is the only song in my top 250 not played since November 2005, which means that it was never played through the entire month of December.

I love the ultra nerdy Sprint PPC-6700, but one thing that had pissed me off was that speed dial was not at all speedy– I had to open the phone app, choose menu, and then choose speed dial. And since that was like four clicks, it was just not working for me.

Well, I hit Google and found a dude who writes apps for Windows Mobile, and this hack just happened to let me assign speed dial to a button on the phone. I assigned it to the web browser button on the side, which I don’t really tend to use to fire up the browser, and now I have one-click access to speed dial. Sweet.

Hoo boy. Mike told me a while back about a program that would go through and grab album art images, and it was only like $9. This sounded really good. But with 21k mp3s, I thought that it would hog up all the processor, and figured I would need to make a project of it sometime.

Well, I was reading PC World tonight and stumbled across a Yahoo Widget called iTunes Companion that does the same thing, only it’s f-f-free. Ba-ding.

So far, I’m quite enamored of this little thang– I have it coming to the front of my screen each time the track changes, and I’m letting it hang out over the Trillian buddy list (when I finally wise up and go multiple-monitor, that’ll be one of those running-in-the-background things). It has volume control and play controls, so I got rid of FoxyTunes, which too often would hold up Mozilla while iTunes was busy doing something.

I’m a happy dude.

I also installed the Easy Button. For kicks.

The idea of communities keeps coming up in everything I do– trying to establish a more effectively community of colleagues among the teachers in the LEARN NC program, trying to establish communities of affinity across disparite groups of students to offer some virtual clubs (a longer-term idea for me… I haven’t really started rolling on that one), trying to strengthen the ties between the existing DSI community and students who are about to enter it, and operating i the community of writers with my MFA work.

One frustrating thing I run into is that I want everyone to communicate the way I do, which is, of course, ludicrous. Especially since I am not exactly the best communicator in the world. (I know this because if my wife wants to know what’s going on with me, she has to read it in my blog, and because I apparently imagine conversations with colleagues and then assume that they really happened.)

Still, I find myself wondering if there are some characteristics shared among online communicators and collaborators. I think a lot of people are online quite a bit now, for work or for play, and a lot of people have heavy online interaction but little online communication. That is, many of the online interactions I monitor are completely meaningless. And though that statement cannot help but be evaluative, it is not intended to judge the character of the subject matter. I don’t care one wit for anime, but I can see how meaningful discussion of anime could happen online– there’s loads of it. I mean to single out messages in which the author does not further the conversation, a personal agenda rich with meaning, or a relationship with one or more people– the author merely posts, adding nothing.

I’ve long bitched about the useless response to the message board post: one that cannot be meaningful to anyone but the author, doesn’t constructively offer information or offers information that ignores the topic at hand. An example of this is:

“Hey, I am going to the movies to see Final Destination 3 Friday at 5. Post here if you can come with me!”
“I can’t come. Have fun though.”

In the response, the author ignores the topic at hand, which isn’t that someone is going to the movies, but is a call to others to respond. Telling people you can’t come does nothing productive; in fact, it sends the subtle message that the original author is not worth seeing a movie with. Even a response like, “I can’t make it, but I have heard that Final Destination 3 rocks. I wish I could go see it with you” is more useful, because it offers some information that supports the original post’s intention. Similarly, “I will go with you but would love for you to reconsider your choice of movie” establishes sincere desire to spend time with the person, opening discussion for the relative merits of seeing a particular film. And a simple “You’re an asshole, stop posting on our boards” actually serves some purpose as well– revealing the respondent’s emotional connection to the original poster and/or agenda. (In some cases, these self-policing moves are necessary for a community to preserve itself. I would argue that they are an extreme measure and should not be used lightly, but my distaste for people who flame newbies is another topic.)

So here are my research questions, if you are a social scientist who is interested in conducting some experiments, or an amateur authority on people (Jennings):

• How, in a community of affinity, do you encourage all participants to communicate meaningfully in all circumstances?
• What are the pros and cons of managing interactions among participants to ensure a level of meaningful communication among all participants?
• Does the number of one-line posts in a particular forum or thread have any correllation to the number of meaningless posts in that forum or thread?
• Does the number of threads started in a given time period have any effect on the willingness of new participants to participate?
• At what threshold (percentage) of meaningless posts do new participants leave the forum?
• What are the greatest barriers to entry for new participants in a community of affinity?
• What factors most influence a new participant’s desire to join an existing community?

I don’t know if any of these questions are particularly useful. I would, however, love to hear your thoughts. Especially if you’re on the DSI boards; that’s where a lot of this thinking is directed at this moment.

I decided that if this new car of mine was going to advertise that it gets 30 miles to the gallon in city driving, why then, I was going to attempt to verify that fact. After my last fill-up, I reset that little mile counter– I recognize that this is a common practice for most of you, but I had never done it before. After 327 miles, the car needed 10.6 gallons of gasoline. I don’t know how the rest of you do math, but by my calculations, that’s 30.8 miles per gallon.

Well played, Honda Civic, well played.

1. Create your document in AppleWorks.
2. To save, select Save As from File menu. The Save As dialog box opens.
3. Open the Save As: pop-up menu for the file format:
4. Select RTF (Rich Text Format is the best format for cross-platform works).
   * If you select Text format, the text of the document, without its formatting will be saved.
5. Save the file with a name that ends in .rtf

I can blog by phone.

Here’s some stuff you’ll be certain to enjoy. First, a definition (apparently via Car Talk):

STUPIPHANY: The realization that you have been a complete idiot for way too long.

Then, a new extenstion for Firefox. Viamatic foXpose allows you to view all of the tabs you currently have open as little thumbnails, kind of like you can do with documents in Mac OSX. This is nice, seeing as how I sometimes have so many tabs open that I no longer know what is what.

In about ten minutes today at work, I set up a webcam. In fact, I think I spent more time noddling with settings and showing it to Ladybug, the Doctor, Corey, and Jess. But, it was fanastically easy, and it could lead to several innovations at the White House in the near future: a Kirk-cam and/or a Cave-cam. Of course, the Cave-cam would be really boring, but you could admire the mess.

This is my second foray into video in the past few days, with Skype releasing a beta of 2.0 that integrates video. John Pearson and I had the chance to video chat, which was ncie insofar as we could see each other, but a let-down, insofar as, to quote John, “we’re both ugly as sin.” Hell, if we were pretty, pretty girls, we could get $2.95 a minute for video chat.

Also, every time I post a blog entry from flickr, my line spacing is all out of whack. Does anyone know why adding a < div > tag into the body of an entry causes such fits for my stylesheet? Help wanted.