Towse: views from the hill

December 6, 2006

Moved to beta Blogger

Filed under: SJTblog — Tags: — Towse @ 8:00 pm

Moved to beta Blogger last night after setting up a trial account and making sure the FTP to my Web site worked. It did.

Then I had to wait until I got another “how’d you like to move to beta Blogger” note. Eric Case, in that video linked to in a prior post, explained that Blogger was offering the switchover to just a percentage of classic Blogger users at a time soze not to overwhelm the systems. Each time I logged on, it was a tossup whether I’d get the offer or not. Once I decided to move over, it took something like three or four log-ons before I got the offer again.

I moved yesterday after much shall-I shan’t-I because Blogger was overwhelmed and my posts they would not post. (Oh, my. That dreaded tick-round-and-round-and-round at 0% completion.) We are told upfront that once you transition, you can’t go back.

Another Yo! Blogger folk! You know that blog you maintain that’s supposed to give heads-up about troubles with Blogger and posting issues and downtime and all? You really should use it.

In amongst the cautionary “make sure that your FTP will work if you don’t host with Blogspot before you make the transition” messages, Blogger forgot to mention that Blog This! doesn’t work with the beta system and they’ve been “working on it” since September. Excuse me? How hard can this be? Until they get it fixed I’m back to the old save-a-link-write-a-post method.

Turns out the post to Blogger from Picasa won’t work either. They’re working on it.

More whines to follow, I’m sure. I’m an old-fashioned girl and change is so difficult, isn’t it?

Update: whine: I added a “label” when I was writing this post. Nothing showed on the post except the label, the title, and the whodunnit information. I re-edited and took the label off. Nothing showed for the post except the title and the whodunnit information. I went in again and took out some code I’d had in my classic Blogger that related to “fullpost” and voila!

You know? I’m a teeny bit more geared to all this stuff than someone who hasn’t been playing with code since the 70s and it took me a bit to figure out the problem. How is all this affecting Aunt Eunice?

Update 2: Eric’s right. They’ve got rid of that annoying 0%. Unfortunately, contrary to promise, they can still have the annoying round-and-round-and-we’re-working-on-it-round.

December 5, 2006

Eric Case on beta Blogger

Filed under: Uncategorized — Towse @ 11:43 pm

Jay Dedman and Ryanne Hodson, known collectively as RyanIsHungry have a video interview with Eric Case, discussing beta Blogger.

Vienna Teng

Filed under: Uncategorized — Towse @ 10:09 pm

I was checking to see if Vienna Teng was going to be back in town for the holidays. A brief profile of her in the Examiner this morning made me think of it.

VT comes from that fair ville to the south of here where the younger, younger guys grew up. She graduated from the HS a couple few years ahead of the older younger guy, graduated from Stanford with a computer science degree, worked for Cisco and worked on her music while she was at Cisco, quit Cisco for her music, now lives here in the city, when she’s not elsewhere for her music.

The younger younger guy has been a fan of hers for a long time and gave me one of her CDs years back and said, listen to this, mom …

The Examiner, POS that it can be archive-wise since the ownership change, of course doesn’t have a link to the article in this morning’s paper for me to send on to the younger younger guy.

Home for the holidays, VT will be playing at the Independent, Dec 22-23. $20/. We went to her show at the Independent last December, on the eve of his nibs’ bday. The date’s a bit later, but … maybe this year too.

If you don’t know Vienna Teng and the music she makes, click some of the music clips she has up at myspace.com.

Gee those CDs would make excellent holiday presents, wouldn’t they?

Searching Google with her Vienna Teng moniker and the one she was born with, I found this click to the Houston Chronicle for the article that was in today’s Examiner. Funny thing, that.

Listen to music while you prepare for your day …

Filed under: Uncategorized — Towse @ 2:07 am

What everyone needs: Bath Tissue Holder with Dock for Apple iPod™.

Includes two mid-range speakers, two high-range speakers, volume, power on/off. W00t!

Do your friends have this?!??!

I think not!

Be the envy of all the crowd!

December 4, 2006

Mashups

Filed under: Uncategorized — Towse @ 8:44 pm

Some discussion in comments re mashups and me being amazed that a Sony sort I’d met had just heard about mashups a day or two before. She had a seventeen-year-old kid for pete’s sake! Then turns out our Paula didn’t know mashups. A couple teenagers she asked didn’t know mashups.

Is it this city I live in? It’s not like I’m into the clubbing scene with its DJs and mashups nor do I hang out at avant garde theaters or art galleries. Mashups are just part of the scene and have been for years now.

Oh, forgot to come back, sorry. I asked two 13 year olds. They’d never heard of it. My daughter said it sounded like a gang bang, while her friend thought it had something to do with drugs. There ya go!

Wow. No kidding.

Mashups are the raging copyright infringement issue hereabouts. Music mashup creators take two or more pieces of music and mix and mash ‘em together to create something entirely distinct. Some are pretty clever, others are lame. Other mashup creators have moved into video mashups, expropriating images and clips. Recontextualizing, they call it.

e.g. music mashups:

Check this one out: A mashup with Jay Z, Beyonce and Britney. Yow! Yikes!

People Like Us’ Swinglargo

DJ John‘s Chariots of Fire vs Kalifornia vs Music vs It’s My Life

e.g. video mashups:

Faithless Hexstatic Mashup

Added: The Passion of Benny Hill (linker thingie lifted from Sour Grapes)

Fun stuff. Very annoying to some of the folks whose music/video/pictures are used. But I think being “very annoying” is part and parcel of the reason mashups exist.

The Bargain Barn, a cheap wine/liquor/stuff chain, has some marked down mashup Christmas CDs with old time favorites like Sinatra and Como paired with rappers and such like — for sale for 99 cents.

And, in honor of the season, a mashup which some people think is genius, but which I think is not hardly as good as they think it is: Santa Benz. Would I buy an album for this song? No.

Added #2: Over dinner at Perbacco his nibs pointed out to me (yes, we do discuss blog posts over dinner … how weird is that?) that mashups aren’t just music and video. There are a gazillion Google Maps mashups including mashups with Craigslist and Google Maps — HousingMaps f’rex — and mashups with Google maps and Yahoo Traffic like this. Interested? Check out Alan Taylor’s Mashup Resources.

December 3, 2006

[LOWPAY MKT] Dragons, Knights, and Angels Magazine

Filed under: Uncategorized — Towse @ 10:55 pm

Dragons, Knights, and Angels: the magazine of Christian fantasy and science fiction

submission guidelines

In 1999, Rebecca Shelley founded the Dragons, Knights, & Angels (DKA) magazine on the idea that the power of God is the greatest magic of all, and that idea remains at the core of our mission. We are not at all interested in stories that preach, tear down, or indict. Rather, we look for stories and poems that build up the reader and give them opportunity to be better for having read them.

Stories and poems submitted to DKA for publication will be examined first on their merit as works of sci-fi / fantasy / poetry. Works submitted to DKA will also be examined as to how well they entertain, uplift, and enlighten.

DKA is open to edgy stories that explore the fullness of life. However, sexual content, profanity, and other elements that would be considered offensive to the general Christian community must be handled with great care and be essential to the story. Profanity can almost always be omitted, suggested, or implied. Sexual content can almost always be removed or referred to, rather than explicitly stated.

Needs: Fiction and poetry
Prefers <5K wds but will consider works up to 7K wds.

PAYS: $10 for short stories (<1500 wds)
$ 5 for flash fiction (<1500 wds)
$ 5 for poetry

by check or PayPal

Pays on acceptance for one time electronic rights. (… as well as archival rights). No simultaneous submissions.

[hattip to Rebecca Luella Miller]

The Cape Henry, out for a spin

Filed under: Uncategorized — Towse @ 10:38 pm

 

Permanently stationed in San Francisco, the Cape Henry is part of the Ready Reserve Force. Mostly she just hangs around south of here, ready to do what ever needs to be done, should she be asked. Every once in a while, she goes out for a spin, just to make sure all her gears are oiled. Posted by Picasa

[LOWPAY MKT] PseudoPod (Horror)

Filed under: Uncategorized — Towse @ 3:56 am

podcast market

PseudoPod submission guidelines

Pseudopod is always looking for quality fiction to feed our listeners. If you’re a writer with a horror short story that you’d like to hear narrated by one of our talented performers, we’d like to see it. Probably.

What We Want

Pseudopod is a genre ‘zine. We’re looking for horror. We apply a fairly broad definition to “horror,” running the spectrum from supernatural horror (Dracula) to realistic horror (Cujo). We’re not going to try to pin down the genre’s boundaries and hack away at it until there’s nothing left. (We’ll leave that sort of hacking for your stories.) What matters is that the stories should be dark and they should be entertaining.

PAYS: $20 for short fiction and $10 for flash fiction.

Google Answers

Filed under: Uncategorized — Towse @ 3:47 am

I heard last week that Google Answers is history.

It is.

Luckily Google will be keeping the archives online.

What did them in? Competition. Yahoo! Answers in particular.

Yahoo! harnessed what Google always had, an army of folks willing to answer questions for free. Google charged for their answers. Yahoo doesn’t.

Is the quality of answers better? Do you get what you pay for? I don’t know.

I am glad, however, that Google Answers is leaving their archive online. I tap into it when I need to.

[PAY MKT] Escape Pod (SFF)

Filed under: Uncategorized — Towse @ 3:41 am

podcast market

Escape Pod submission guidelines

Escape Pod is always looking for quality fiction to feed our listeners. If you’re a writer with a speculative short story that you’d like to hear narrated by one of our very nearly talented performers, we’d like to see it. Probably.

What We Want

EP is a genre ‘zine. We’re looking for science fiction and fantasy. Please don’t send us anything that doesn’t fit those descriptions. And by the way, we mean SF/F on a level that matters to the plot. Your story about a little boy receiving a balloon before his heart transplant may be touching literature, but it probably isn’t something we’re interested in, even if you edit it so that the balloon’s an alien and the heart came from Satan.

PAYS: $100 for short fiction $20 for flash fiction

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