Elvis Costello, "Accidents Will Happen"

OCTOBER 18, 2012: THIS POST INITIALLY CONSISTED OF A LINK TO A YOUTUBE VIDEO. UPON LOGGING IN TO THIS LONG-NEGLECTED BLOG TODAY, I RECEIVED A NOTIFICATION THAT THIS POST WAS THE SUBJECT OF A DMCA COMPLAINT. THE HECK WITH IT; I JUST DELETED THE POST CONTENT. IF YOU'VE READ MY MORE RECENT BLOG POSTS, YOU REALIZE THAT I'VE HAD ENOUGH PROBLEMS WITH YOUTUBE ALREADY.

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Not the last mrontemp post, but you may want to check out the Empoprises FriendFeed and Twitter accounts

On Tuesday, March 10 at 1:00 pm, I shared a post in this mrontemp blog entitled Of spans and series, or why I haven't written in mrontemp that much.

On Saturday, March 14 at 11:25 pm, I shared a post in my Empoprise-BI blog entitled Empoprise-BI temporarily focuses on self-referentialism. Toward the end of the post, I wrote:

...a lot of it boils down to the fact that my primary interface with the online world is under the "Ontario Emperor" name.

Well, until Saturday afternoon. I made one of those snap decisions and decided to change the precedence of the two personas, and formally make Empoprises (and thus John Bredehoft) my primary persona.

I'm not quite sure what this means yet. It probably means that some of the stuff that "Ontario Emperor" would do will now be done by Empoprises. It could mean a sharp decrease in "Ontario Emperor" activity. And it may also mean that I will spend less time looking at things like technology (unless there is a business focus), politics, and religion.

I've already done some shifting, moving many of my Google Reader subscriptions to my Empoprises Google Reader account, making "John Bredehoft" an administrator on the FriendFeed lastfmfeeds room, and making some other changes that will become more apparent in the coming days.

In essence, while I suspect that things will still pop up here and in my related "Ontario Emperor" properties from time to time, my interests have focused elsewhere.

If you want to follow what I'm doing, check out http://friendfeed.com/empoprises and http://twitter.com/empoprises.

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Of spans and series, or why I haven't written in mrontemp that much

It is now March 10, 2009, and this is only the seventh post that I've written at mrontemp this month.

Compare this with January 2009, during which I wrote 59 posts in this blog, or almost two posts per day.

Or how about January 2008, when I wrote 202 posts?

One could reach the conclusion that I've quit writing in the long form and have instead reverted to just shooting the breeze on FriendFeed.

But actually, that's only part of the equation. I've been blogging up a storm - just not here.

I've talked about my Empoprises project before on this blog. For those who aren't aware, I author a series of four blogs under the "Empoprises" banner. Unlike the "all-encompassing" blog mrontemp, the Empoprises blogs are each devoted to a specific topic.

Far from restricting me creatively, the existence of four separate blogs has actually given me more freedom.

For example, I will often make a game of taking the same event and spanning it across as many Empoprises blogs as possible. Take my weekend visit to the Wal Mart in Chino, California - a business in the Inland Empire that sells music. Yeah, I milked that one.

But I'm having just as much fun writing various series of posts in the blogs. My longest-running series, Empoprise-NTN High Noon, takes a look at various restaurants and bars that offer NTN Buzztime trivia. And I'm getting close to wrapping up a series entitled When Madonna Was Hot. And I just wrapped up A Piece of the P.I.E. (Professionals of the Inland Empire).

But sometimes, rather than planning a series, I just fall into one. For example, on Monday I wrote a post entitled Payola, pay per post, or the 1984 commercial? An inconsistency of moral outrage re product placement business practices. Today, I followed it up with Or perhaps I am outrageous - an opposing view on disclosure and pay per post. Although this doesn't have a cutesy title, I hope to pursue the topic in the future.

If I hold up.

You see, I've been able to keep these blogs running by writing scheduled posts at odd hours (for example, unless I change the schedule, I've already written a Thursday post for Empoprise-BI, "Words aren't only cool, they make you money"). But time is finite, as Steven Hodson noted in a post entitled "Think long and hard before starting that second or third blog." An excerpt:

The problem is that time and energy are never kind to us – especially if our work on our main blog is our primary concern. This isn’t an uncommon occurrence as the web is littered with blogs that have been long forgotten for one reason or another. We only have so much time and/or energy and no matter our first rush of getting that new blog up and running at some point we run out of steam.

So perhaps this may falter along the way, and Empoprises may give me nightmares in the future. But at the moment I'm having fun.

P.S. Steven Hodson wrote his cautionary post on March 2. I've wanted to write a formal response to it, but it's taken me eight days to do it. Although this post is a non-scheduled post, one problem with writing scheduled posts is that they often aren't all that timely. But what does that matter to me? I am not trendy.

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Pandora on the outs in copyright deal #DYSP

From Silicon Alley Insider:

The federal Copyright Royalty Board (CRB), which sets royalty rates for recording artists and labels, and the National Association of Broadcasters have resolved a dispute that threatened to shutter thousands of Internet radio stations as well as Web music sites....

The CRB did not reach a deal with the Digital Media Association (DiMA), which represents Pandora, RealNetworks (RNWK) and MTV. Those negotiations failed to resolve before [the February 17] deadline.

We'll see if we have a bunch of Pandora alerts again.

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Mongoloid, the Portgrass Oregano version

Several years ago I threw away all of my cassette tapes.

That's probably a good thing, because I not only threw away a vast music collection (including the first tape I ever purchased, John Lennon's Walls and Bridges), but also several tapes that I made during my years at Reed College, either on my own or with various college roommates.

For some unknown reason, my mind flashed upon one song from one of those tapes a few minutes ago. It was made with a roommate who shall remain nameless, primarily because he now has a PhD and is presumably pictured as a pillar of the scientific community. We borrowed some musical instruments from a third college roommate and slapped a few songs together. My favorite was our musical arrangement of "Kill Bond Now!" I also hold a warm spot for our Tri-Met (at the time, a bus system in Portland) version of "A Day in the Life" - my roommate contributed the line "He didn't notice that the fare had changed."

Ironically, I was reading Barry Miles' book on Paul McCartney a few minutes ago when a song from that cassette flashed through my mind - not our Beatles parody, but our Devo parody. If I remember correctly, I was the one who came up with the new lyrics for "Mongoloid." Two things require explanation:

• "Theaters Three" was the name of another cassette that I had assembled, on my own. Years upon years later, after I got tired of my BBS handle of Wasp the Houseboy, I adopted Theo Tres Thr3 as a pseudonym, then eventually junked that and became Ontario Emperor.


• Ironically, that cassette name was unrelated to The Theatrical Event, which happened to be the name of a textbook that the third college roommate was using. He ended up majoring in theater, but he had the good taste not to be performing as I sang the words below.

So, without further ado...

Mongoloid, he was a mongoloid
And he looked just like me
He had no hair, and his head was air
He played for Theaters Three

And he...walked on water
And he...drank a lot of beer
And he...read "The Theatrical Event"
And he...he wasn't queer

Mongoloid, he was a mongoloid...

Hey, it was college. And at least my youthful banterings didn't get posted in News of the World.

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An update on the now FOUR-blog Empoprises blog empire

Perhaps some of the readers of this blog may know about my side project, Empoprises. In essence, while this blog, mrontemp, is "all-encompassing," the Empoprises blogs are much more vertically-oriented, and only deal with one topic per blog.

In fact, the first two "Empoprises" blogs that I started are VERY vertically-oriented:

• Empoprise-IE, started in May 2008, is devoted to the Inland Empire of California.


• Empoprise-NTN, also started in May 2008, is devoted to the NTN Buzztime trivia game that you find in various bars and restaurants.

Now those two blogs are clearly of limited interest; for example, a French person would have no interest in either of these two blogs, since France is clearly outside of the Inland Empire, and NTN Buzztime has no sites in France.

But then I began thinking about my own personal interests, and began to branch out a bit.

The third Empoprises blog that I started was Empoprise-MU, devoted to music. That blog had a soft introduction on August 6, 2008, and started posting real music stories the next day. Those who have read mrontemp know that I've posted a lot of music items on this blog - over 400, as a matter of fact - so I figured that I've have something to say about music. Plus, if I may say so myself, as the founder of the lastfmfeeds room on FriendFeed (currently with 108 members viewing 50 "recently played tracks" feeds), I've certainly demonstrated my interest in the topic.

But if I've posted over 400 music items in mrontemp, it should also be noted that I've posted over 1200 business items on this blog. And as I found myself writing more and more about subjects such as what Apple should and should not disclose about Steve Jobs' health (sample post here), I began thinking that it was the appropriate time to add a business blog to the Empoprises empire. Again, this blog had a soft launch on Thursday, January 29, with real posts beginning on Friday, January 30.

So, what happens to mrontemp if I start putting all the business and music stuff elsewhere? I can only share my thoughts as of today, and you need to bear in mind that they could very well change tomorrow. (If you had asked me last April whether I would ever start a business or music blog, the answer would have been an emphatic "no.") So, here's my thinking:

• There will still be business and music posts in mrontemp, as well as some Inland Empire and NTN Buzztime posts also. Obviously there won't be as many, but they'll be there, though the ones that end up here will probably be more personal, such as the wrap-up of the story about my Oracle OpenWorld Unconference presentation.


• Incidentally, it's very possible that the Empoprise-BI blog may be my main posting ground for Oracle OpenWorld 2009, assuming that I actually go to Oracle OpenWorld 2009. Over the years I've shifted my Oracle OpenWorld posts from blog to blog - for example, my first Oracle OpenWorld posts were in an old blog called the Ontario Technoblog.


• Which brings me to my next point - if you were to ask me today whether I'll be starting an Empoprises technology blog, my answer would be an emphatic "no." Frankly, there are a ton of tech blogs out there and, other than user experiences, my best contributions to technological blogging are on the business end of things.


• Let's talk monetization. As you can see, all of the Empoprises blogs contain ads, while the mrontemp blog does not. Presently I plan to keep it that way, since an "all-encompassing" blog doesn't really lend itself to targeted ads. Incidentally, that's also why I haven't started an Empoprises religion blog, despite my clear interest in the topic. At present I feel a little funny making money off of God. Not that I quibble with religious bloggers who do carry advertisements, and it's possible that I may change my mind someday, but not now. (And in case you're wondering, yes I used to have a religion blog also.)


• So will mrontemp (and, for that matter, the "Ontario Emperor" name) become a mere personal blog/face to the world, with Empoprises becoming less personal? Yes and no. Frankly, I have more fun when I write Empoprises posts from a personal perspective. For better or worse, the Empoprises blogs will focus on my thoughts about business, music, and the like.

Well, that's about it for this point except for the RSS subscription links. Here are the feeds for the four (at present) Empoprises blogs:

http://feedproxy.google.com/Empoprise-bi (Empoprise-BI, business)

http://feedproxy.google.com/Empoprise-ie (Empoprise-IE, Inland Empire)

http://feedproxy.google.com/Empoprise-mu (Empoprise-MU, music)

http://feedproxy.google.com/Empoprise-ntn (Empoprise-NTN, NTN Buzztime)

I look forward to your subscriptions, your visits, and your comments.

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We're not doing this because we're greedy (the Chicago Bears on leadership)

Even if I weren't trying to become a U.S. Senator from Illinois in 2009 - a goal which has become immeasurably harder to achieve - I would have been attracted to a story shared by Steven Perez Monday - namely, an item from chicagobears.com entitled Bears shuffled to lopsided victory in Super Bowl XX.

You see, the title of the item reminded me of this:



And who was the first of the stellar rappers who soloed in this video? The late Walter Payton.

Which got me wondering about something that I may have once known, but have since forgotten - who were the leaders on that Super Bowl-winning Chicago Bears team?

My memory is still alive enough to realize that Refrigerator Perry was probably not the leader of the Bears, but it got me wondering whether DA Bear was the MVP who led off the video, the quarterback Jim McMahon, the coach who didn't appear in the video, or someone else.

The chicagobears.com article calls out the defensive leaders - Mike Singletary and Dan Hampton - but does not try to characterize the offensive or overall leadership of the team.

Another article positions Ditka in the leadership position:

There was something in the air in Platteville, WI, in August 1985. Throngs of new tourists suddenly showing up to watch the team practice....Mike Ditka set the tone, as he told the team that this was their year. "Put a chip on your shoulder, and don't let anyone knock it off until we win the super bowl!", became the team's rallying cry.

But there is another candidate whose name is bandied about:

The NFC Championship game featured some high drama of its own in the final seconds. Down 17-0, Los Angeles was desperately trying to put points on the board. As QB Dieter Brock dropped back to pass, he was sacked by Richard Dent, and fumbled the ball. Just as Wilbur Marshall picked up the ball and ran in for a touchdown, it started to snow. Many surmised it was George Halas giving his mark of approval on the team.

And perhaps that's the secret. Perhaps it wasn't Ditka (or Halas) imposing their vision upon the crowd, but the group of people deciding to achieve a common purpose together. In fact, the video itself, with its variety of "stars," musicians, and people dancing in the back, attests to this team togetherness.

Almost:

In the next 3 games, the Bears were clearly on a roll. They beat up on Detroit, Dallas, and Atlanta by a combined score of 104-3. The pinnacle was a 44-0 defeat of the Cowboys in Dallas, their worst loss at home ever. These 3 losses set up disappointment at Miami on December 2nd. The Dolphins defeated the Bears 38-24, and ensured they would remain the only unbeaten team in the modern era.

Ironically, Bears players gathered the following day to record the "Super Bowl Shuffle" video and single. Some players were invited, but refused to participate.

The article doesn't say why some people refused to participate - perhaps they felt this was inappropriate after a loss - but those non-participants are now the ones who weren't in the video. And, for what it's worth, the Bears performed well after the video was shot:

After the Miami loss, the team did turn it back around, with 3 wins over Indianapolis, the New York Jets and Detroit, to finish the regular season. The playoffs were upon the Bears, and they controlled their destiny with home field advantage throughout the post season.

Incidentally, if you want to practice your wicked rapping skills, the rhymes can be found here. Here are Payton's lines, as recorded at lyricsmode:

Well they call me Sweetness
And I like to dance
Runnin the ball
Is like makin romance
We had the goal
Since training camp
To give Chicago
A Superbowl champ
We're not doing this
Because we're greedy
The Bears are doin it
To feed the needy
We didn't come here
To look for trouble
We just come here
To do the Superbowl Shuffle

P.S. Back in October 2008, I Stumbled Upon a Chicago Tribune article that documented William "Refrigerator" Perry's fight with Guillain-Barré syndrome. A January 25, 2009 Washington Times article offered no update on his condition. Both articles quote him as saying, "I'm doing fine." Hope so.

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Outline skating, cheek by jowl in a riot (lost in translation)

I'm trying to follow the results of the ladies' events in the European Figure Skating championships in Helsinki, but some of the first reports that I saw were in Finnish. I can't read Finnish text, but I can read Finnish numbers.

Taitoluistelun EM-kilpailut, naiset, tilanne lyhytohjelman jälkeen:

1) Laura Lepistö Suomi 56,62
2) Susanna Pöykiö Suomi 56,06
3) Carolina Kostner Italia 51,36
4) Jenna McCorkell Britannia 50,00
5) Katarina Gerboldt Venäjä 48,62
6) Ivana Reitmayerova Slovakia 48,00
7) Kiira Korpi Suomi 47,60
8) Irina Movtshan Ukraina 46,48
9) Tugba Karademir Turkki 46,26
10) Nella Simaova Tshekki 45,24

Since Laura Lepistö is my second favorite Finnish figure skater (you don't know my favorite Finnish figure skater), I'm naturally pleased with the results.

And I was even more pleased when I found an English language account of the short program.

Until I actually read it.

Once you start looking at the account, it's obvious that the account was actually written in another language, then translated to English via automatic translation software. It's pretty obvious that no human reviewed the translation, especially after seeing phrases like this:

HELSINKI, Finland: Laura Lepisto and Susanna Poykio of Finland gave the hometown fans a 1-2 finish Friday in the pointed program, in which case Carolina Kostner indispensably to make a good use of to bring over a third straight denominate at the European outline skating championships....

Later Friday, Russia'session Jana Khokhlova and Sergei Novitski possibility of good to gain over their earliest inscription in ice-cream dandle....

Kostner was heavily favored to make it three European titles in a riot, something that hasn'cheek by jowl been granted since France'session Surya Bonaly won five upright from 1991-95....

Poykio's literary work was a scrap of redemption. Runner-up at the 2005 Europeans, the 26-year-old didn'familiarily on a level contribute the Finnish lot ultimate year. But she looked relaxed and cocksure, and is 4 minutes from some other European medal.

And yes, we laugh at things like this, but it does point out a serious flaw in my eventual plan for world domination (which will occur after I secure the vacant U.S. Senate seat from Illinois). I am reputed to be able to speak English, and I have some very small ability to read Spanish and German, but there are (give or take) 6,912 living languages in the world today. And, as the example above proves, we aren't even able to master a greatly reduced subset of these languages, such as the 34 languages supported by Google Translate.

The ideal solution in the past (and present) has been for everyone to adopt a common, universal language when communicating with people from other parts of the world. As Omniglot notes, previous and current candidates for a universal (or semi-universal) language have included Greek, Latin, French, English, and Chinese. And the Omniglot article didn't even mention everyone's favorite universal language. But even this language has its drawbacks:

Desperanto
(with apologies to The Eagles)

Esperanto, why don't you come to your senses,
Your simplified tenses aren't enough anyhow,
Oh you're a hard one, but I know that you've got your reasons,
The cases that were pleasin' you, accuse you now

Don't you call the queen reg^ino boy, she'll king you if she's able
You know what kind of queen wants a name that ends in -o
Now it seems to me extreme things have been set out in that table,
You should corral your silly schemes, you know

Esperanto, oh, you ain't gettin' no younger,
You age and you hunger, and you're all but unknown,
And English, oh English, well that's just some people talkin'
Your prison is walking through this world all alone

Don't your circumflex now circumscribe
The speed we type and the speed we write,
It's hard to circumcise it either way,
And you're writin' X or H or gripes,
Ain't it ASCII you were plannin' for, I say?

Esperanto, why don't you come to your senses,
Stop manning those fences- open the gate
You may be failing, but there's ways to rearrange you
You'd better let somebody change you,
Let somebody change you
You'd better let somebody change you,
Before it's too late...

Taquito to the person who wrote that song parody.

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Rick Warren's prayer - Why should the Muslims have all the good phrases?

Decades and decades ago, Larry Norman released a song "Why Should the Devil Have All the Good Music?" that basically said that yes, Christian music can have loud guitars and stuff. And while there are some pockets of objection, most Christians have agreed that the existence of an amplified musical instrument does not necessarily mean that a Christian is prohibited from using said instrument.

Earlier today Rick Warren spoke a prayer at the inauguration of President Barack Obama. Perpetua of Carthage linked to a YouTube video of the prayer.



While there are some who objected to the presence of anyone praying to God at a state event, and while there are probably some who don't really want to hear the Lord's Prayer, there was another thing that Rick Warren said that angered some.

The Scripture tells us, "Hear, O Israel: the LORD is our God; the LORD is one." And you are the compassionate and merciful one....

Yes, Rick Warren used the "c" and "m" words. John at True Discernment points out the significance of the words:

“The compassionate, the merciful” is, of course, a reference to the invocation at the beginning of every chapter of the Qur’an except one: Bismillah al-Rahman al-Rahim, “In the name of Allah, the compassionate, the merciful.”

Making sure everyone feels included — terrific. But the prayer indicates yet again that there is little general awareness of the reasons why the term “Judeo-Christian-Islamic values” is a misnomer.

John's point, which I believe is valid, is that the Muslim god is in no way to be equated with the Christian God.

And yes, I believe that Warren probably included the words "compassionate" and "merciful" to make the words sound inclusive.

But, in the old Lutheran phrase, "what does this mean?"

Personally, I have no problem using the words "compassionate" and "merciful" in prayers to my God, the Christian God. Just because someone came along a few hundred years later and applied them to his god doesn't mean that I have to quit using them. Or that I have to take verses such as this out of my Bible for fear that Christians may be offended by them:

Exodus 33:19 (New International Version) And the LORD said, "I will cause all my goodness to pass in front of you, and I will proclaim my name, the LORD, in your presence. I will have mercy on whom I will have mercy, and I will have compassion on whom I will have compassion.

Psalm 51:1 (New International Version) Have mercy on me, O God, according to your unfailing love; according to your great compassion blot out my transgressions.

James 5:11 (New International Version) As you know, we consider blessed those who have persevered. You have heard of Job's perseverance and have seen what the Lord finally brought about. The Lord is full of compassion and mercy.

Next thing you know, people are going to complain if Rick Warren uses the term "Christian." "Ah, an obvious attempt to incorporate the philosophy of Mary Baker Eddy," they will proclaim.

Of course, we need to ask the question - where is Rick Warren going? Over the past century, there have been several Christian pastors - Billy Graham and Jerry Falwell come to mind - who have tried to maneuver themselves into the role of "America's pastor." Rick Warren is apparently following in their footsteps. One can ask whether Warren, or Falwell, or Graham, or whoever is doing this to promote the kingdom of God, or to promote the kingdom of America, or perhaps both. I can't read Warren's heart, so I guess we'll have to see.

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25 things (it's a beautiful day in the neighborhood)

To keep things succinct, let's just say that the first 14 items in this post came from three previous posts. But now that FriendFeed has upped the ante and people are posting 25 things about themselves, it looks like the 14 items that I had previously posted were insufficient. So I've taken those 14 items and added 11 more. This allows me to compete with the other 25 things crowd, such as the Bohemian Sparkly Penguin, alphaxion, pea, Helen Sventitsky, and probably everybody else on FriendFeed. Yes, I'm getting to this late. No, I'm not trendy.

Incidentally, I have made minor edits to the original fourteen points (wow, sounds Wilsonian), including combining items 2 and 6 from the first post. And to get the links that I originally embedded in the first 14 items, you have to go back to the original posts; I was too lazy to reproduce them here.

1. About twenty years before I became "Ontario Emperor," I was hobnobbing with Presidents. Sort of. I didn't tell the whole story when I referenced this back in 2006, so I'll tell it now. During the 1977 Virginia governor's race, the Republican candidate got some heavy hitters at one of his campaign rallies. Not only did he get Bob Dole, U.S. Senator and former Vice Presidential candidate, but he also got former President Gerald Ford. I got a chance to shake Ford's hand that day (left hand, if I remember correctly). Hey, how many Presidents have YOU met?


2. I was probably using the Internet before Al Gore was. As I've mentioned in a couple of MySpace posts, I had access to Usenet while at Reed College. Reed was one of the pioneers on the Usenet network (scroll down to the summer 1980 map in this article), and Professor Richard Crandall included Pascal and UNIX use in his labs for freshman Physics. I didn't really do a lot of physics work on that DEC PDP-11/70, but I acquired some experience that has stood me in good stead to the present day. And it's been more useful to me than Professor Nicholas Wheeler's lectures on the 17th dimension. While on Usenet, one of my favorite Usenet groups was alt.non.sequitur. A sample post is here (my contribution is at the bottom of the post; true to alt.non.sequitur, it is not a sign). I eventually left Usenet after an unfortunate pizza delivery accident, and have never returned. Paddy O'Furniture is probably sad about my departure.


3. Let's continue with an explanation of the "audio artist" phrase that I've thrown around here and there. When I started as "Ontario Emperor," I used the name to post various synthetica songs on the web - originally MIDI songs generated on the Mac, then mp3 songs generated on the Mac (and released on CDs via the old mp3.com), then MIDI songs generated in Windows after I moved away from the Macintosh platform. Since mp3.com changed formats in December 2003, the only mp3 of mine that remains online is the song "Non Sequitur 15," available here. This song holds the dubious distinction of being the only Ontario Emperor song that is not an instrumental. MIDIs, by the way, can be found here, although since MIDI is (like HTML) dependent upon the presenting device, the MIDIs that were composed on the Macintosh don't sound that good on Windows. (Frankly, the MIDIs composed on Windows may not sound that good on Windows, but that's another matter entirely.)


4. As my old biography indicates, I have been published in the dinosaur traditional media. This occurred when I wrote something or another to Inland Valley Daily Bulletin columnist David Allen, who proceeded to publish it in his September 13, 1998 column. I'm vague about what was published because I have since forgotten what wise words I provided, the article is no longer available online, and I haven't taken the time to go to the library and look it up in the archives. I'm sure it was fascinating, however.


5. Ditto with my call to Poorman's "Anti-Radio" show that was referenced in my old biography; can't remember what I said. Jim "Poorman" Trenton originally came to fame by writing "poorman" restaurant reviews. He eventually became a deejay at KROQ, most famous for his participation in the "Loveline" program. He parted with KROQ, not on friendly terms, and has drifted from radio station to radio station since. In 1999 he was championing the idea of a radio show for unsigned bands; the only song that I remember from that show was the classic "I Gotta Poo." He's still around somewhere on local radio or TV, but I'm not sure where.


6. You may know that mrontemp is not my original blog, and that I've created a number of other blogs since October 2003, most notably the Ontario Empoblog. But did you know that I was a contributor to a blog that was reading through the New Testament? The blog was called Word Search, and although the blog itself no longer survives, the posts are still available as part of A Human Bean's blog. Although the identities of the individual post writers are no longer preserved (we'd rotate amongst ourselves), I found a post that was obviously written by me (it links to a bad joke in one of my old blogs).


7. I am an actor who regularly appears on stage, performing for thousands. It's true. There is a southern California performing arts organization called Children's Theatre Experience, and after my daughter had performed in several shows with the Claremont group, she let me know that they needed adult men for their production of "Fiddler on the Roof." Apparently a lot of kids approached their fathers, because several of us formally joined the cast at that point. In addition to appearing in "Fiddler on the Roof," I have also appeared in "Big River", "The Music Man", "Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat", and other productions. Our performances are at the Bridges Auditorium in Claremont, California, which does hold well over 2,000 people and has played host to a number of more prominent people than myself.


8. I have found that once I am at an area, I am just very very happy to stay there and not move at all. I moved into my current home in 1997 and have no desire to leave, but if I do, and I end up in Olten, Switzerland, I'll probably never want to leave there until I have to move and end up in Barrow, Alaska, and I'll never want to leave - I'll just buy bright lights in the winter.


9. We didn't get our Christmas tree up until mid-December, and wouldn't have done it except for my daughter who just started dragging it out.


10. Some of you may already know that my employer is selling my division to another company. The potential sale was announced in October, but hasn't happened yet.


11. I did not attend my usual church right before Christmas. It was still a Lutheran Church Missouri Synod church, but it was a different congregation, a different pastor, and a different type of sermon. I missed my regular pastor, who always makes a great point of having us look at the Bible reading during the sermon itself. This pastor showed a video, and while Charlie Brown is meaningful, it wasn't the same.


12. Despite my pseudonym, I have not been to Canada in a few years. Previously I would make fairly frequent business trips to Canada - mostly to Ottawa, but I have also been to Toronto, Montreal, and Orillia. Having not been there in a while, Tim Horton's actually sounds like an exotic place. You may laugh now.


13. My home computer disk was over 90% full, but we've worked on reducing it.


14. I've mentioned that I didn't avail myself of the chance to see Depeche Mode (and OMD) at the Rose Bowl, but I also missed a chance to see Jonathan Richman, even though I could have seen him for free by taking a thirty-second walk. This is again a Reed College story, but it's outside of the classroom or the lab. Every year Reed closes its spring semester with a Renaissance Fayre which has hardly anything to do with the Renaissance, but it does emphasize the "Fayre" part. One year Jonathan Richman was scheduled to play at the event. This was years after his ground-breaking work, and occurred at about the time he was singing about being a little airplane, but it was certainly a show worth seeing. Unfortunately, there was a Ferris wheel at this Ren Fayre, and after going around the wheel one time...the operator decided to send us around a second time. After that experience I wasn't up to doing anything, so I missed my chance to see Richman.


15. So how did I get to Reed College? In first class! For some unfathomable reason, when I flew out to Reed College for a campus visit, they flew me out first class. The plane was pretty much a local, because after Minneapolis it stopped in three different cities in Montana (this was the only time I ever visited Bozeman, whose airport is even smaller than the 1980s-era Ontario, California airport).


16. While that was my most interesting westbound trip, my most interesting eastbound trip was made by train in May of 1980. I left Portland and took the train to Chicago, where I visited my childhood home during a brief layover (I would not return to my boyhood home until the summer of 2008), then took the train from Chicago back to my home, arriving on Saturday. The next day Mt. St. Helens blew up.


17. I previously mentioned my early involvement in UNIX, but I was a little confused about who did what in the UNIX arena. I was first exposed to the operating system before the AT&T breakup, so the phrase "UNIX is a trademark of Bell Laboratories" was embedded in my brain. However, the ramifications of this didn't penetrate said brain. A few years later, I was at some trade show looking at some UNIX material, and an AT&T salesman walked up. In his salesman-y way, he said something like "I'm from the company that brought you UNIX." A little confused on the concept, and thinking of the PDP-11/70 hardware, I replied, "DEC?"


18. I mentioned this in a comment to a Queen of Spain blog post, but if I say it again here I'll be one step closer to my 25 items total. My cluelessness about things goes way back. In elementary school, we were given an assignment to interview someone. I (and another girl in my class) hit upon the idea of interviewing President Richard Nixon, who lived a few miles away from us at the time in a white house in the city. I think we seriously believed that the President would sit down and talk to us, but all we got is an official letter of regret from the White House.


19. My greatest regret in life is that I didn't go to the Depeche Mode/OMD concert at the Rose Bowl (the "101" concert).


20. I was an active BBS'er in the early 1990s, visiting several Inland Empire blogs such as Deep Thought in Mt. Baldy (the first BBS I ever joined) and the Grotto in Rancho Cucamonga. I've lost touch with Starfish who ran the Grotto, but her daughter is now a webmaster for the union in which her stepfather (Bloose) works. See these posts from 2007 and 2008 for related information.


21. I have attended United Methodist and Lutheran churches during my adult life, but for a couple of years in college I attended a Pentecostal church known as World Outreach and/or Gospel Outreach. The senior pastoral family, Scott & Ellie Snedeker, had their roots in the Lighthouse Ranch, and have apparently since left Portland and gone to Eureka. The most famous member of the church was former Guatemalan President Efrain Rios Montt, who was either a hero or villain depending upon how you looked at him.


22. I'm running out of ideas, so I'll close with my attendance at games from the four major American sports. Unless there's a Cubs game in my early childhood that I don't remember, the first major league baseball game that I attended was a Washington Senators game. Frank Howard didn't get a hit.


23. Not too long after that, I attended a Baltimore Bullets game in Cold Feet House.


24. It took me a while to make it to a National Hockey League game. In fact, I didn't go to one until 2004, and that was primarily because we were hosting a Finnish exchange student who really liked hockey. The L.A. Kings lost the game.


25. Which brings me to the NFL. I have never seen a National League Football game live. Of course, I have two excuses: (1) when I was growing up, Redskins games were always sellouts, and (2) the closest NFL team to me is the San Diego Chargers.

Well, there's 25 items (unless I counted wrong). I just hope that nobody comes up with a 50 items meme.

P.S. I'd tell you the story behind the title, but that story really doesn't have to do with me.

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Enjoyed the semi-silence?

Late Wednesday night, after a post and a stumble), I decided to take a 36-hour vow of semi-silence, which would end Friday at noon when my weekly "Empoprise-NTN High Noon" appeared. (In truth, it only lasted 33 hours; see below.) No posts, stumbles, tweets, shares, or scrobbles that would show up on my ontarioemperor or empoprises FriendFeed pages. However, I was going to make two important exceptions.

• I reserved the right to continue to converse about the Eddie Murphy song "My God is Color Blind." And I certainly did.


• I reserved the right to use FriendFeed's "like" facility. If you want to see all 13,000+ items that I've liked, check my "Likes" page.

But those were the only two exceptions. For example, while I'd like stuff, I wouldn't comment on it.

In essence, I'd be listening to the Murphy song (since I wouldn't be scrobbling), I'd be listening to what other people say (and liking it, literally), and (with the exceptions above) I wouldn't be creating any online output.

What I envisioned would happen was that

• I'd learn a lot of stuff from what I was reading.


• Anyone visiting my FriendFeed page would be treated to the amazing wonder that is the song from Eddie Murphy's first serious music album, since those were/would be the last things that I posted to FriendFeed.


• I would be missed terribly, and Steve Jobs would even issue a press release, asking, "Hey, where did Ontario Emperor go?"

OK, I didn't really envision the third thing would happen, but I didn't realize that I'd have so much trouble with the second. I figured that, since anything that I entered since Wednesday night would have to do with Eddie Murphy's song, the Murphy material would always be at the top of my feed. I even planned it so that if (as) I wrote additional Murphy material, I'd also bump up the older stuff I wrote.

But I forgot that other people can like and comment on my stuff.

Specifically, on Wednesday afternoon I shared something via Google Reader on how Facebook shut down Burger King's Facebook promotion. If you didn't hear about it, Burger King designed an app that would reward you if you de-friended people on Facebook. As part of its operations, the app would notify the de-friended people, thus helping to propagate the app. Facebook didn't like that, but a few of my FriendFeed readers "liked" it in FriendFeed. And people commented, also:

you had me at "blows a whopper" - Lindsey in Love

that's what she said - RAPatton

So a sublime moment was ruined. I mean, here's the young Eddie Murphy, vaulted to higher levels of success than I will ever achieve, taking the opportunity to express himself in a new way, and taking the opportunity to offer some serious thoughts on racism. But before you can hear Murphy's soft, pleading voice, you have Lindsey laughing at the phrase "blows a whopper." Oh well, 99% of the people who have heard the song think that the Whopper is better than Murphy's voice, so I really can't complain.

And the liking continued, when Seltoon liked my share of a Ray Parker Jr. vs. Nine Inch Nails mashup. Well, it got bumped to the top, and you can't change that.

Meanwhile, I was liking stuff. Here's just a few of the things that I liked, even though I didn't comment upon them.

• Leo Laporte's bad, bad page


• Jeff Quinton's tweet about "Luke Steelerstahl"


• Richard Walker's share of a South Carolina move to outlaw profanity


• RAPatton's share of "Star Wars Retold by Someone Who Hasn't Seen It" (classic!)


• Another RAPatton share (follow him!) about Depeche Mode's "Sounds of the Universe"

And, needless to say, there were many more.

And for once, I didn't blog about them, or add commentary to them. I just liked them.

In fact, because of that there are certain FriendFeed entries that I just plain passed up because they DEMANDED comment:

• “would you support a single unified world government? Under any circumstances?”


• Does Obama's Presidency End Racism in the U.S?


• Steve Jobs a 'national treasure'

Oh well, now that the experiment is obviously over (if you're reading this post, the experiment is by definition completed), I can follow up now. But I have to tell you - it was almost literally painful to stop myself from commenting on things. If FriendFeed were to remove the comment facility, I'd definitely miss it. Or I'd blog more, just to get my comments in.

But back to the experiment. As I was finishing up lunch on Thursday afternoon, things got really interesting.

You'll recall that Wednesday was the day that Steve Jobs announced his leave of absence; I ended up blogging about it. So Wednesday was a pretty busy news day, especially since I was following stories about layoffs (and other things) at Google, Motorola, and Oracle. I knew that Jobs wasn't going to take another leave of absence on Thursday...but then as I was finishing lunch, a plane crashed in the Hudson River.

And I had taken my vow of semi-silence.

But this was probably a good thing, since everyone and their grandmother were opining about the Hudson plane crash. The world had no pressing need to hear what I thought about it. Although maybe now that my vow of semi-silence is done, I might say a couple of things.

But then things fell apart on Friday morning. I had literally listened to Eddie Murphy all day on Thursday, and by Friday even I was tired of it. Then I began to wonder - is ComaR's "Mr. Jones in a Forest" downloadable? It turns out that it was, so I downloaded it and played it - then realized that the last.fm software was on and had scrobbled it, which sent it to the lastfmfeeds room in FriendFeed. So much for the 36 hour semi-silence.

But back to this "the world had no pressing need to hear what I thought" thingie that I cited earlier. As I've previously noted, I primarily blog for myself. (No, I know of no demographic segment that wants to see THREE posts about Eddie Murphy's "My God is Color Blind.") So, if I blog for myself, then are there times that I shouldn't blog...again for myself?

Something to mull over.

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Perhaps there IS a wrong way to use Twitter

Before beginning this tale, I guess I should note something. Perhaps (perhaps?) it sounds egotistical, but it's worth mentioning.

When I write in one of my blogs, or on one of my Twitter accounts, or in one of my FriendFeed accounts, or on one of your blogs, or whatever, I am effectively contributing to a canvas of communications. When I contribute to this canvas, my ultimate goal is not to please you, or to please Matthew and Sarah Gray, but to please myself.

Bear this in mind as I describe what I wrote yesterday, and remember: it was Saturday night. I guess that makes it alright.

So anyways, late Saturday night I was suddently inspired to tweet the following:

is it a warzone

At about the same time, Twitter user and Arizona Cardinals fan @clintus was in the midst of issuing his own series of tweets, read as follows:

Beer pong has ended. The girls are attempting to dance to the radio.

I replied:

@Clintus is it a freakshow

Before I continue, I have to acknowledge that some of you know where this is going. However, I have to note that 24 hours previous, if I had seen either of those tweets, or even both of them, I would be scratching my head.

If you're scratching your head, read on to find out that Twitter user @bluestbutterfly was online also. And she had found something - luckily:

Glad I have not lost my library card. I have a habit of doing that. Librarians get mad at the littlest fine or lost card-not kidding.

I sympathized with her:

@bluestbutterfly is it a terrordome

Then I said:

is it a radio

Appropriate time to take a break from Twitter, yes? I thought so.

lesson. if you are tweeting a predefined series that partially depends upon semirandom input, don't do it late sat night.

You see, there was a method to my madness. FriendFeed user WorldofHiglet either knew what I was about, or was attempting to humor a madman.

...but that is part of the fun

So inspired, I eventually continued:

is it a firewall

But Twitter user @tagstrance was stirring, and tweeted the following:

Swen Weber - Smith And Wesson (Original Mix)

So I replied:

@tagstrance is it a deathtoll

I mean, you'd ask that too, wouldn't you?

At about the same time, Twitter user @doctorlinguist was encountering a nasty technical problem:

VMware has just made a big mess out of my Windows 98 image. great.

Again, I sympathized:

@doctorlinguist is it an atombomb

Pretty quickly (for it was getting late) I followed up with this:

is it a tombstone

So, eight tweets, all beginning with "is it a." The middle two tweets in the first half were replies, and the middle two tweets in the second half were replies.

Why?

You see, earlier that evening I found a CD that others could not find for me, even though it was on my Christmas list. At the time that I bought the CD ("Dystopia" by Midnight Juggernauts), I had already heard seven of the songs on the CD:

Ending of an Era 4:50 9
Dystopia 2:54 6
Into the Galaxy 4:53 5
Shadows 4:13 2
Road To Recovery 6:19 1
Tombstone 3:58 1
Worlds Converged 2:02 1

I had only heard "Tombstone" once before buying and listening to the entire CD, and I actually added it to my last.fm "Loved" tracks, but obviously once is not enough:

got to track 10, "tombstone." haven't heard this before, i don't think. like it!

(Incidentally, note that a slightly different placement of the last comma and last period would result in an entirely different meaning to the sentence above. I should communicate more clearly.)

The lyrics are somewhat simpler than some of the other lyrics on the CD. In fact, the lyrics consist of only eight lines.

Now do you get it? I guess you missed my final tweet of the evening:

the previous 8 tweets were brought to you by "tombstone" by midnight juggernauts. yes, i like the song.

Wesley Willis I ain't.

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Gerald Casale on the Kent State shootings

Well, THAT was an interesting evening.

After several people (including myself) posted 1980s era pictures of ourselves, I began posting links to a number of 80's era videos.

And the conversation flowed around my sharing of a video of the Clash's performance of "Straight to Hell" at the US Festival.

First, I was talking about the performance of "Straight to Hell" that I really wanted to see:

Good performance, but the one I *really* want to see is their performance from Saturday Night Live. They owned Studio 8H that night.

Incidentally, that was the same night that Eddie Murphy, in character as Raheem Abdul Mohammed, referred to the mustached Ron Howard as "Opie Cunningham."

Then Larry Kless contributed his memories of the Clash:

Thanks for sharing this. I was lucky enough to see them live in Kent, Ohio at the student center when they were on their Combat Rock Tour. I remember wearing army fatigues head to toe, army boots and painted my face army fatigues too. They made the 80's bearable!

I replied:

Larry, I never saw the Clash live, but I did see Devo around 1981-1982.

Larry certainly had a contribution to make at that point:

Thats cool Ontario, I didn't see Devo but they got their start at Kent State in Ohio where I went years later. That must have been a fun show.

Yes, Devo definitely got their start at Kent State University, and what Gerald Casale and Bob Lewis saw there helps to explain the rest of Devo's career.

Yes, Bob Lewis was definitely there:

Lewis played basketball briefly for Bobby Knight at Cuyahoga Falls High School, was a National Merit Scholar at Kent State University, and the first student at the university to earn a degree in anthropology, graduating shortly after the Kent State shootings on May 4, 1970.

But Lewis no longer speaks for Devo any more, and now lives in Independence, Missouri, home to Dave Winer's hero Twitterin' Harry Truman.

Gerald Casale, of course, has no reluctance in speaking, and has spoken about his experiences in Kent State. In 2008, Alan Canfora interviewed Casale. This is (part of) what he (Casale) said:

By 1970 there seemed to be evidence to suggest that about 1200 students belonged to and/or participated in various anti-war groups on campus. That would still account for less than 10% of registered students at Kent State at that time. SDS, of which I was a member, was certainly the most threatening of those groups by virtue of their somewhat militant, politically and socially astute, articulated attacks on the hypocrisy of our federal, state and local government in a supposed free, democratic society. Their ideological, Gestalt type analysis went way beyond passively opposing the Vietnam War. To us, that war was just a symptom of the corrosive power of the military-industrial complex married with corporate capitalism. The co-option of true freedom and the dissolution of local community power were points of serious contention. In light of present day culture all we can say is "I hate to say I told you so"....

There is an indescribable lifelong bond between so many of us who survived that day. Imagine being 18 or 19 years old at noon on a sunny day in May attending a student rally against President Nixon's unlawful expansion of the Vietnam War into Cambodia after being subjected to Martial Law type, Banana Republic tactics by local police and deputies in town on the weekend before. You're standing on a grassy hill known as The Commons on campus with many of your friends listening to various activist luminaries ranting against our tone deaf leaders. Suddenly you are surrounded by National Guard troops who have been hiding in non-classroom buildings on campus as well as many more who pour onto campus in military jeeps. They announce your assembly is unlawful and thereafter start shooting tear gas at you when you defy their order to leave your own campus....

Like some Civil War parody, the first row of soldiers kneel and the second row stand. To the side a commander yells something and drops his arm. They all shoot!

As I ran from them I wheeled around in the direction of hideous, mass screaming to see Allison Krause laying on the ground, a huge pool of blood spreading out around her, coagulating in the bright heat of the sun. My mind snaps. The guns are LOADED WITH LIVE AMMUNITION!...

We were marched off campus single file after what seemed like hours. No campus buses were operating so I walked home 3 miles crying and taking back streets to avoid the locals, many of whom were out for blood having heard false radio reports that students had shot at guardsmen.

Casale then said:

People thought that what I did and said with my band, Devo, was just a silly prank. True we employed humor and irony to get our message out. But, unfortunately, Devolution is real.

More here.

P.S. Although audiography got Mothersbaugh and Casale mixed up, it's interesting to know that Devo covered the Crosby, Stills, Nash, & Young song "Ohio." You can hear it here on last.fm.

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To everything (turn, turn, turn) there are two seasons (turn, turn, turn)

Ecclesiastes 1:9 (New International Version)

9 What has been will be again,
what has been done will be done again;
there is nothing new under the sun.

When someone has been blogging since October 2003, there is obviously a potential to perform a personal type of data mining - going back into old posts, revisiting topics that were of great interest to me a couple of years ago, and the like.

This is something that I've thought about doing for some time, and in fact it's probably something that I should make a New Year's resolution about. However, if I make a New Year's resolution to leap into the archives during 2009, that will probably ensure that I won't do it, since New Year's resolutions are meant to be broken.

But I guess I'm already doing it, after a fashion. It took a Jake Kuramoto post to bring this fact home to me.

If you don't know who Jake Kuramoto is, he is an Oracle employee and the chief blogger for the Oracle AppsLab, a group within Oracle that conceives and implements various endeavors to benefit Oracle and the Oracle community.

For example, in the course of writing his year end post about the AppsLab blog, Jake touched upon one of the AppsLab's successes:

Mix left the nest.

We spent much of the first part of 2008 building new features for Mix with the help of ENTP.

No, Jake is not referring to a Myers-Briggs thingie. In this context, ENTP is actually a consultancy based in Portland, Oregon. But let's get back to what the AppsLab and ENTP did:

Marketing saw potential in Mix and made it a centerpiece of their OpenWorld 2008 efforts, including the highly popular Suggest a Session campaign.

Mix has since graduated out of the ‘Lab and into the capable hands of Marketing. This is perfect for everyone involved. One of our original goals as a lab was to keep the innovation flowing, both in and out of the team. So, when Mix was ready for primetime, it naturally went to an organization that could support its user base appropriately.

Now while I happen to be an Mix member (would that make me a Mixer?), and while I've written about Mix in the past (for example, see my post Debra Lilley gets a lift from the Oracle Mix community), that isn't why Jake mentioned me in his year-end post. This is what he said:

The 8 things meme circled the ‘tubes all year.

The controversial round of blog tagging I lobbed into the Oracle blogosphere back in January just resurfaced again, like a bad penny. Initially, I planned to track its progress, but after the blowback, I figured it was best to let sleeping dogs lie. Still, the experiment worked as planned, exposing several parts of the blogsphere, and forcing the Ontario Emperor to divulge 14 things about himself.

For those who are counting, Jake got fourteen by adding the six things I just posted with the eight things I wrote at the beginning of the year. In summary, the fourteen items are:

1. I shook Gerald Ford's hand in 1977.


2. Via Reed College's participation in Usenet, I am an Internet pioneer.


3. I used to post mp3 files.


4. David Allen of the Inland Valley Daily Bulletin referred to me in a 1998 column.


5. I called Jim "Poorman" Trenton's "anti-radio" show at about the same time.


6. Via Reed College's...hey, wait, this is the same as item 2. Oops.


7. I contributed to the "Word Search" Bible study blog (R.I.P.).


8. I have acted in several stage productions.


9. I like to live wherever I am.


10. Our Christmas tree went up late in 2008.


11. My division is being sold...sometime.


12. I attended a different church on December 21, 2008.


13. I haven't been to Canada in a while.


14. My disk is full.

Well, since I really only posted thirteen things about myself (since two of the original eight items were pretty much the same thing), I guess I'd better come up with one other random item.

Here's a good one - I've mentioned that I didn't avail myself of the chance to see Depeche Mode (and OMD) at the Rose Bowl, but I also missed a chance to see Jonathan Richman, even though I could have seen him for free by taking a thirty-second walk. This is again a Reed College story, but it's outside of the classroom or the lab. Every year Reed closes its spring semester with a Renaissance Fayre which has hardly anything to do with the Renaissance, but it does emphasize the "Fayre" part. One year Jonathan Richman was scheduled to play at the event. This was years after his ground-breaking work, and occurred at about the time he was singing about being a little airplane, but it was certainly a show worth seeing. Unfortunately, there was a Ferris wheel at this Ren Fayre, and after going around the wheel one time...the operator decided to send us around a second time. After that experience I wasn't up to doing anything, so I missed my chance to see Richman.

But, by the way, I already wrote about Reed's Renaissance Fayre in response to a Pownce item.

The Pownce item was written by Jake Kuramoto.

Yeah, this is one of those subtle connections between things.

P.S. for people checking out my post title. The verse cited by the Byrds, and Pete Seeger, is actually found in Ecclesiastes 3. But if you're allowed to use Wikipedia, you already know that.

P.P.S. For those who say that my two meme posts were written in one season, not two...you're right. But they were two SEPARATE winters, weren't they?

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What I DIDN'T get this Christmas

Once one reaches a certain age, one doesn't necessarily want the latest gizmo for Christmas. I can honestly tell you that the first item on my Christmas list this year was socks. Thankfully, I got them, and I also got some other very nice things that weren't even on my Christmas list.

But I can truly give thanks for the fact that there were several things that I DIDN'T get this Christmas. Now perhaps a few of you would actually like some of these items...but I wouldn't.

• A singing telegram from Andrew Fletcher, performing an acoustic version of "Pleasure Little Treasure" (even just acoustically, this is IMHO the worst song the Depeche Mode has ever recorded)


• Some "Number 2.0" from twins Matthew and Sarah (perhaps their parents would like it, but not me)


• A white Christmas (yes, I was born in Chicago, but that was a long time ago - having lived in southern California for over a quarter century, snow is pretty much foreign to me)


• A front-row seat at a taping of "Oprah" (the prospect of being surrounded by the You-Go-Girl nation puts fear in my heart)


• A one-on-one counseling session with Donald Trump (if he were so successful, why the hair?)


• A day with Woz (I like Woz and find him inspirational, but I fear that I probably couldn't understand half of what he talked about - and anyway, it's my wife who is the former teacher)

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FriendFeed - Gateway to the Geeks! (an explanation of my previous posts)

Perhaps I should explain the recent series of posts in the mrontemp blog.

It all started last night, when I ended up watching an old Human League video for the song "Circus of Death." After writing a post in Empoprise-MU, I kept on reading and discovered that the Human League, Heaven 17, and ABC recently banded together for a British tour. This got me thinking about Sheffield - and, being an ignorant American, made me realize that I didn't have the slightest idea where Sheffield actually is.

Because FriendFeed is wonderfully geo-aware, I figured that once I determined the location of Sheffield, I could post an item in FriendFeed with the link to the appropriate Google Map, and the map itself would auto-magically appear in FriendFeed.

Well, I entered the item in FriendFeed - but no map auto-magically appeared.

And I ended up puzzling people with my one word FriendFeed post "Sheffield."

I can honestly say that is one of the most bizarre links I have ever seen posted to FF. Ontario Emperor never fails to deliver. - Andy C

---

forgot i had clicked this, cleaning up my tabs is a map of sheffield .. how the heck did that get there, i asked, and remembered wendy whatshername, and closed it ... - Gregory Lent

But the key phrase that appeared in the conversation was shared by Mathew Butler:

Gateway to the Peaks!

Well, that sent me on another FriendFeed rampage - check the map and the picture and the video.

Plus there was my next one-word post with link, Wednesday. This one might require some explanation for some of my readers:

Sheffield Wednesday football emerged from 'The Wednesday Cricket Club' based in Sheffield who used to play on Wednesdays, as this was the day when the steel-workers in the team got a half-day and used it to play sports on.

It was decided that a football team was needed to keep up the physical fitness of players during the winter months, when cricket wasn't played. So Sheffield Wednesday was formed on Wednesday 4th September 1867, keeping the theme of Wednesday nights in their name.

Anyway, I personally resolved to work the phrase "Gateway to the Peaks!" into something or another.

But, as you can see from my previous posts, I kinda sorta goofed it up...

P.S. It was purely unintentional that this whole series of blog posts and FriendFeed shares began with the Human League song "Circus of Death" and ended up with a blog post about near-death at a circus. But, as Elvis Costello once said, accidents will happen.

P.P.S. No, this doesn't mean that I'm about to launch into ANOTHER series of posts based on THAT song...

P.P.P.S. Then again....

The whole series: sneaks | beaks | teaks | reeks | freaks | geeks

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A night of communism, atheism, and free love

After I read a Steven Hodson Inquisitr post on the first dot.com domains, I was moved to assemble information on my initial experiences on Usenet.

This got me into a Reed College reminiscing mood, so I ended up editing Richard Crandall's Wikipedia page to document his musical accomplishments.

I then ended up checking out the economics faculty.

It could have been worse. I could have tried to research that whole subway construction thingie. (That's my contribution to Reed lore. And you thought I just sat in the computer room and read Paddy O'Furniture jokes.)

P.S. For an explanation of the title of this post, read this John Sheehy article. An excerpt:

Given the labeling of [Reed] [C]ollege as a haven for “communism, atheism, free love” by hostile Portlanders, [the board of trustees] had their work cut out for them.

Reed was not the only liberal arts college branded with this or similar derogatory slurs after the Red Scare that followed World War I. However, it appears to be the only institution to which the brand stuck for the next century.

Be sure to go to page 8 to straighten out the differences between William T. Foster and William Z. Foster, and between Simeon Reed and John Reed. And this quote from Ruth Wetterborg Sandvik:

And then free love. I always enjoyed saying, "I didn't get any."

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Twitterville, revisited

Here's part of what I wrote a few hours ago regarding Shel Israel's planned book Twitterville:

He notes that "this book needs to get out fast," but can he get it out fast enough? One disadvantage of the book form is that it takes a long time to write and produce an entire book, while Julia Roy can knock off a Tweet Week in a day or less. We'll see what happens.

I then added this postscript:

(And no, Loren Feldman, I don't have ordering information for the book.)

Feldman himself has weighed in; here's part of what he said:

We need to give good advice to others if we are to grow as an industry. We need people who truly understand [social media] to explain it to others if we are to grow. I’m not saying it’s me, not at all. I just want someone who’s not a complete idiot to write about Social Media.

Oh, and there's a video too.



Incidentally, Feldman also addressed the timing issue, in a response to Sean Percival:

Me and you should just write it over a weekend and release as an Ebook.

However, Feldman isn't gunning for Israel 24/7. Feldman's post on Chinese Democracy is completely unrelated to Israel's post on Chinese censorship.

By the way, Penguin's Portfolio imprint has published other techie business books:

Purple Cow by Seth Godin (more than a full year on the Business Week bestseller list)

The Smartest Guys in the Room by Bethany McLean and Peter Elkind (source for the Academy Award-nominated documentary on Enron)

The Art of the Start by Guy Kawasaki

The Big Moo by the Group of 33, edited by Seth Godin

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Auto-play and web design - remind me to never...

...link to news video from KPSP ever again.

I did it in this post, and found out that the video auto-plays. Kind of irritating to be listening to DJ Shadow's "Midnight in a Perfect World" on last.fm, go to your blog (with the last few day's worth of posts) and then suddenly have a mashup of DJ Shadow with a commercial for office furniture or whatever.

Now I see why America Needs Fatima didn't embed the video.

Auto-play just is not friendly. As Gaurabh Mathure stated:

Not everyone likes to arrive at a page and be surprised by a video playing on screen... more importantly if the user has been surfing non-rich media content for a while he has also forgotten what the volume his notebook/pc speakers is. Sometimes when a video autoplays it causes the user to be startled as he might be in a cafe/library/office, and does not want to attract too much attention.

Therefore I think you should convince the client that it might not create the best user experience to have the video in autoplay mode.

And there are other offenders. G. Jason Head:

The first example that came to mind to me is ESPN.com. I visit the site daily as a user (i/e I leave my developer hat off when I get there). They have a video box on their main page that always starts automatically - and I absolutely hate it. Reasons being - I'm busy reading whats new on the front page and the video is always a distraction.

Will Evans:

90% of the time, I work, surf, write with my headphones on, with the music playing. Autoplay overides what I am listening to, usually at a volume much more than my music, and in somecases have literally cause pain in my ears - that is why I will never go to MySpace - ever.

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Time to chill - it's hover (I mean "over")

Followup.

OK, there's got to be a morning after, and this is it.

Worldwide reaction is pouring in regarding Obama's election (I just heard from someone in Europe), and, for what it's worth, the world is excited.

The people in Europe are excited.

Dear President Obama, Europe has high hopes for you. Almost certainly too high.

With the exception of a few of our east European brethren, we will be delighted to see the end of President George W. Bush and his 'my way or the highway' unilateral leadership style.

Your election has created enormous excitement in Europe and you can expect an immediate lift in America's international image, which will make it easier for us to give public support to your policies and to U.S. leadership in global security.

We look forward to a president who consults his allies -- and don't forget we are your most reliable democratic partners -- and who works with us, where possible through international institutions, to achieve our common goals.

The people in Kenya are excited.

Barack Obama's 87-year-old grandmother, Sarah Obama, and her family ran out of their house in the western Kenyan village of Nyang'oma-Kogelo and started dancing when they heard the news of his election as U.S. president.

(Aside: I didn't realize Obama's paternal grandmother's name was Sarah. Heh.)

The people in Obama, Japan are excited.

The sleepy Japanese fishing town of Obama went wild on Wednesday as locals gathered to celebrate namesake Barack Obama's victory in the U.S. presidential election.

More than a hundred residents gathered to watch the vote count on television in a public hall in the middle of the day, and chanted "Obama, Obama!" as the result was announced on a news programme.

Some were clad in hula costumes in honour of Obama's birthplace in Hawaii. Others showed up wearing "I love Obama" T-shirts.

The town has taken advantage of the name -- one of many named Obama, or "small beach" in Japanese -- to launch products from fish burgers and steamed cakes to chopsticks.

And I'm sure that the people in Los Angeles are excited.

No, not the one in South California. They got one in South Patagonia. Heh.



So let's all board our hovercraft and drift to the Land of Change...

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