msb-0071 Sucks to be me? Nah. Well, maybe a little.
I'm feeling in a classical mood today so you're going to be subjected to a heavy dose of it.
The usual five pieces of music but l-o-n-g-e-r.
I'm changing for format, the frequency and the duration of the show.
Sit back, have your breakfast, lunch, dinner or a late night snack (I have no idea when you're listening to this,) drink a glass of whatever's handy, OJ or brandy, and lets get on with the show.
Feedback come first so...
Carlo Magno is almost ready to get back on the road.
And what a road it is. Across the northern portion of the United States, raising money for MS.
Hope to see you for an interview before you get home.
----
I'm still enjoying blogging and reading/writing on other's people's blogs.
One Crazy Chick, aka Miss Chris, has been leaving some nice comments on my blog.
Yes mdmhvonpa, of the "White Lightning Axiom: Redux", I had indeed looked up Pennsyltucky.
Like I said, I loved the description I'd found about it.
Mullet wearing husbands of their own sisters leads to a family tree which does not fork.
You don't write like that is your problem.
MS yes, inbreeding, nope.
I got more feed back which is going to influence this show, or at least the production I apply to this show. (Isn't nice to be able to infuence people and make a difference? More and more of you are coming at this show the web and not using iTunes.)
----
I guess this next bit is "feed bag" instead of "feed back."
I went to the Chefs For MS (they are no longer on the links because this year's event is over.)
It was a great big event (definitely well attended,) on a great big ship (the "Cornucopia,") on a great big river (well two actually, the Hudson and the East rivers,) for a great big city (the 'Big Apple",) and the food was delicious.
The chefs had stations all around the perimeter of the boat, on two of the three levels) and people went all over the place gathering and grazing. (Which I must admit was a bit of a challenge of me as I only had one hand free while the other of course was being used for my cane.)
It was a beautiful night out and the air was crisp with the chill that announces fall.
As for the wine < sigh > I only had one glass of red. I didn't stray from the straight and narrow.
They had divvied up the dozen bottles and made up baskets with donatted items. I didn't bid on any of the items but MBPodcast.com was mentionned on a placard and I was able to place some cards and handouts on a table.
The cruise ended off with a passage in front of the Status of Liberty. It looks very inspirational when its all lit up.
Next year, I hope to attend again, but, failing that, MSBPodcast.com will definitely be a sponsor and donor.
But it was an evening of grazing on "Amuse Geules" rather than actually chowing down on something substantial.
For that I waited until Wednesday when "She Who Must Be Obeyed" proceeded to make me the most fan-ta-bulous lamb chops I had ever eaten.
They were perfect.
She made them with a rosemary and a touch of lime marinade and then broiled them until the meat was just past pink.
They were accompanied with broccoli cauliflower, carrots and delicious bread and washed down with a bottle of Boggle Merlot red wine.
Damn, I've got it good.
----
I bought a nice black T-Shirt from Brad Sucks.
He is somebody who's songs I really like, specially "Making me Nervous," and he's from Ottawa, a town that I called home for almost ten years. (Point your browsers at http://www.bradsucks.net and support him.)
I've been in touch "Ultravox" ( http://www.ultravox.org.uk/ ) I love Midge Ure's voice. They're still around and I'm trying to turn them onto the PMN (Podsafe Music Network.)
I still need for some you to drop me a line. I know you're out there. My download stats haven't cratered yet. In fact, I've picked a few people since I started posting on other people's blogs.
But I got some good feedback this week.
As a result, I'd going back to a weekly format.
It'll be hard for me because this show provides me with a means of expression and I really like that.
I'm hoping to take the time and make the effort to improve the production on this show.
I think I'm going to go to a radio school (http://www.radioconnection.com/) and check out what I can take.
I simply have to slow down and enunciate.
Getting a metronome with a blinking light to pace myself is one technique. Its also helping me with my breath control.
As my friend Eugene pointed out to me over a beer, (or three, :-) my show has almost no actual MS content.
I don't feature the latest and greatest from the labs or have interviews with great and learned doctors.
Well, I'm actually of two minds about giving you that kind of show.
Yes, I could record all kinds of stuff and track down various doctors and other kinds of health care providers.
But as someone from the care givers confab pointed out, they already know all about MS.
They don't want to hear about it any more.
They don't wan't to hear more suff which possibly scares them even more, depresses them even more or gives them news that might, and I say might, maybe, give them some hope ... in ten years.
And frankly that's not what I had in mind when I started doing this show.
I was bitching about how you never hear a peep in the media about what you can do for yourself today, and how you never see or hear about products you can use today.
Not some worst case scenario. (The aproach used by most fundraisers.)
Not at some nebulous point in the future. (The approach used by most researchers.)
But something that you can use right now to help you over life's little bumps right now.
And legally, I am severely ham-strung.
I am not a doctor (and I don't even want to play one on TV. :-)
I'm not a nurse.
I am not a therapist.
I am not a medical technician.
Face it, I'm not much of anything else that would be useful in any kind of emergency.
What I am though is an MSer.
I know what you're going through, and, at a meta level, I can make sense of it all. (With my looks, I 'd better be bright. Otherwise I'd have nothing going for me. :-)
I've figured how we can keep advertising out of out faces unless we need to see something at some point in time.
Then I can help the advertisers by cutting the cost of delivering their message down to a fraction of any other medium.
Now, just like a pusher, 'the first one's always free.' After that they gotta pay.
I'm going to be putting these shows up for anybody with anything related to MS. One show per ad and one ad per show.
That way we don't have to download them except when we need them. (Of course the show notes will become filled with references to these ads/shows and I'll be organizing them and reciting them at the end of the shows.)
Give me some feed back about that. How do you feel about advertising this way?
----
I'm still a bit pissed off at my mom for getting rid of all my old LPs. Some of that stuff was really choice. Really "get your ass out of that chair and shake your bootie" fine music.
But mom's birthday came up so I did the obligatory bunch of flowers type thing. (I live over a day's drive away, so don't give me crap about not being a good son and never visiting, okay?)
I had all kinds of music by Jimy Hendrix, Johnny Winter, early Alice Cooper, (though I still think "Flush The Fashion," which came out in 1980, was one of the most grossly under-rated and media ignored albums.)
Now I'm not blaming my mother for all of my losses since I was already married to my first wife and living my a bungalow with an attached granny flat on 40th avenue in Lachine, Quebec Canada, Canada by that time. (I hate the burbs, but its because I've done my time there.)
The entire granny-flat type extension was dedicated to my collection by then.
And I had an enormous stereo system to go along with it. A honkin' big Elextrovox Circa series. It could pump out 180 watts RMS per channel through two enormous wooofer cabinets and a pair of sattelite tweeters.
Man, I loved that thing.
When I played "Sky Pilot" by, uh, I'm having a senior moment here, (Eric Burdon & The Aminals maybe?) a Scotsman who lived across the backyard came to tell me he "liked the bagpipes, but could ye turn it down a wee bit."
And then I started making a list of all of the stuff I'd lost whenever I'd moved from place to place. Gawd... What a little tragedy.
Did you know that, in insurace terms, three moves equals a fire? Between one thing and another, breakage, outright losses, abandoning stuff before you leave, not bothering to unpack boxes when you finally get to your new house, you can lose everything you originally owned and get all new stuff in three moves.
I've lived a peripatetic lifestyle, must have moved from one end of the continent and back again at least twice, with stops along the way, and I must be a friggin' turtle because I still have alot of my stuff. But some of course was lost.
Still, I've managed to hang onto about 800+ CDs and 400+ albums.
And I've managed to hand onto a lot of my old books too. :-)
----
Having MS and having it take over my life sucks.
Sucks to be me? Nah. Well,maybe a little.
Right now Lee is in my office. She should know better but she's going away for the week-end and wants it tidy.
Damn. I've got Thomas Dolby's "She Blinded Me With Science" running as a background.
Specially the passage:
"I -I don't believe it!
There she goes again!
She's tidied up, and I can't find anything!
All my tubes and wires.
And careful notes.
And antiquated notions."
Like my notion that a man's office is sacrosanct.
Hey I've noticed that this show is less about "moi" and its becoming about the people I run into. This is "Grr-rr-eat!"
'Til next week then.
Tuesday, September 19, 2006
Friday, September 15, 2006
msb-0070 Wine whine.
msb-0070 Wine whine.
Feedback come first so...
I've actually got some.
First to the people who have spammed me about paedophiles on LibSyn.com.
Its not that I don't care. I do care.
But I rather have one source out there which can catch them all and round 'em all up for, uh, "re-reducation."
Unlike Bush's approach to "The War On Terror" which cause Al-Queda to metastasize out of Afghanistan, to Pakistan, to Malaysia, to Iraq, to Spain, to France, to England, and beyond.
He had a chance to let them fail all at once in Afghanistan [they were demanding food and it was falling on deaf ears,] and instead he attacked them and make martyrs out of ben Laden and the rest of them.
What an ignorant simp. A real semi-simian. His knowledge of how to handle international relations would fit on a 3x5 card and it would include exactly the wrong advice.
Oh happy me. Being somebody's tech-support. :-)
[climbs down from soabox]
I'm helping (well trying to help) some of you to get iTunes and to download the episodes.
No Michelle, you don't need an iPod.
Its so much easier to use RSS and downloading with iTunes, or another podcatcher, than trying to listen to these live.
Specially if you don't have a good broad band connection.
----
"Veni, vidi, vinci" blogs.
I'm finally getting into blogging and reading other people's blogs ... Social networking ... What a concept ...
I'm really getting into this; I started with reading Ms. Chris's site, and it has pointed me to other blogs by or about MSers.
One of these was from someone who goes by the handle mdmhvonpa.
He's from Pennsyltucky.
I love the definition I found in the Urban Dictionary: (http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Pennsyltucky)
"A state in which it is considered 'gauche' to marry outside your immediate family.
You are required to own at least two off-road vehicles and if you have a firm grasp of the English language you are considered a homosexual.
Non-whites are severely frowned upon as are people with their own identity, thoughts and more than three books in their home...unless those books include Jeff Foxworthy's "You might be a redneck if..." or "Guns and Ammo" or any book pertaining to incestuous relationship with your daughter.
This state is known for it's infamously archaic infrastructure, most notably it's highways and byways.
It's chief exports include 'Yeungleung' beer, coal and tarts with floppy breasts and flabby white legs who dance in G0-Go bars in NY and NJ and who compete visciously with the Russian and Brazilian girls for that 'almighty dollar'.
One final note on 'Pennsyltucky': it might be said that the mullet is alive and well in this godforsaken state.
'I went to Pennsyltucky this weekend to play a little golf and nearly got run off the road by some mullet wearing neanderthal and his sister/wife.' "
Now, you just know I'd going to do a show on Appalachian music soon.
If only I could find some effin' music and some jug band music, it would be perfect. Gotta seach the PMN with a fine tooth comb. (An appliance about as likely to be found in them there parts as a to-oo-oth brush.)
I've read every book he's got on his list of favorite books. (But I'm such a print-o-holic that I could say that about almost everybody.)
I've seen every movie on his list too. He's a media soul mate. :-)
----
I've also been communicating with a few other people.
This blogging is great.
Its all asynchronous so you have time to compose an intelligent reply instead of blathering piffle and waffle.
(Hmm ... Sounds like my show... Well it can be entertaining piffle and waffle. :-)
Drop me an email at charles at MSBPodcats.com and tell me where your blog is.
----
But today, in keeping with the theme of libations, its about whine, uh wine.
Wine came before beer by at least 2,500 years.
Beer didn't come into its own until the development of agriculture and the cultivation and processing of grains, about 6,000 years ago.
Wine may even have led to the development of agriculture!
Since fruits and berries were part of every diet since earlest hunter/gatherer stages of human development (not evolution but development :-), it stands to reason that it came first.
Heck, you don't even have to be human to enjoy a tipple.
I've heard of bears getting absolutely sloshed on berries at the absolute tail end of the growing season. (The thought of facing a bear with a hang-over is something I don't want to even contemplate. Though it would exlain why they run off if you make loud clanging noises at them. :-)
Wine is basically crushed grapes and its all white.
There are lots of varieties of grapes, lots of colors of grapes, but if they are peeled they all make white whine, uh, wine.
Wine becomes red when its combined with red grape peel and left to ferment.
A wine's color is called its robe. After several bottles you begin to disrobe.
All wines have a nose. Well, actually its your nose; and you shove it into the glass twice. Once when the wine has just been poured and once again when its been swirled around in your glass.
Then wines have a body. (Its usually hiding under its robe.)
Wines have a start, which you taste at the front of your mouth. It usually sounds like you're slurping your supper off the dining room table and you can't do it too loud 'cause is would upset the other people in the psych ward. And you definitely don't want to get the staff to notice you either. They've got hipodermics and wooden clubs and they know how to use them.
Wines have a palate, which you taste in the middle of your mouth. It usually sounds like you've just been told that you're eating rat's ass-hole but that's okay because it really spicy and really really hot.
Wines have a finish, which you taste at the back of your mouth. It usually sounds like you've managed to get rid of most of the rat and you're looking up at the ceiling, gargling to wash the taste uut of your mouth while trying to keep it shut, so the spiders you've just noticed crawling on the ceiling, don't fall in.
Then you've got the age old decision to make.
Do you spit, and risk hurting his feelings or do you swallow, and make a new friend for life.
Although there's no way to be genteel about spitting, if you've been swallowing the vinters' guff all evening, you may find yourself either sitting there slack-jawed and just letting it drool out, or laughing like an idiot and then it gushes out your nose.
Wine tasting is not for amateurs.
There's all kinds of tricks with the ripeness of the grapes.
Sauterne wine is made from grapes that have over ripened and have a much higher sugar content that the same grape when picked at its normal gathering ripeness. (I'm thinking of the bears again; drunk off their asses on what amounts to Sauterne. :-)
----
Oh Joy, Hosana du plus haut des cieux, Angels are weeping with joy. Halleluyah and hoo-fuckin'-ray!
I have managed to finally track down, find and buy a copy of "Eefin-Nanny Down Home" by Billy Hutch his harmonica and orchestra.
This is possibly the most influential album you've *never* heard. At its heart is the quintessential, definitive root sound underlying ALL of American music. Its reverberation can be felt even to this day.
I had a copy of this album, along with all kinds of gems of delta blues (Mississippi Fred Macdowell, Mississippi John Hurt, Robert Johnson,) early proto-punk music, (Albums like "Moonquake." Music from bands like "Rhinoceros," "Big Brother and the Holding Company," "Echo and the Bunnymen") and about a hundred more. All of it primo choice.
Unfortunately my mother not realizing their inestimable value to music history (or perhaps in an attempt to rid of her son of his obsession with music in all of its forms,) just threw them away when in one fell swoop.
Haaa! I was dumb struck and heart broken when I discovered. I came home from school one day and my crates were gone. Just ... gone.
I've never quite forgiven her for that shock. It was like Maxwell's demon had taken all the air from my bedroom and my lungs were sucking in sulphurous fumes instead.
< sigh >
To inject a little levity (instead of Rebif or Copaxone or whatever your poison might be,) I got in touch with Alex Whitmore and he got back to me PDQ (Pretty Damn Quick) giving me permission to play the following song.
----
Feedback come first so...
I've actually got some.
First to the people who have spammed me about paedophiles on LibSyn.com.
Its not that I don't care. I do care.
But I rather have one source out there which can catch them all and round 'em all up for, uh, "re-reducation."
Unlike Bush's approach to "The War On Terror" which cause Al-Queda to metastasize out of Afghanistan, to Pakistan, to Malaysia, to Iraq, to Spain, to France, to England, and beyond.
He had a chance to let them fail all at once in Afghanistan [they were demanding food and it was falling on deaf ears,] and instead he attacked them and make martyrs out of ben Laden and the rest of them.
What an ignorant simp. A real semi-simian. His knowledge of how to handle international relations would fit on a 3x5 card and it would include exactly the wrong advice.
Oh happy me. Being somebody's tech-support. :-)
[climbs down from soabox]
I'm helping (well trying to help) some of you to get iTunes and to download the episodes.
No Michelle, you don't need an iPod.
Its so much easier to use RSS and downloading with iTunes, or another podcatcher, than trying to listen to these live.
Specially if you don't have a good broad band connection.
----
"Veni, vidi, vinci" blogs.
I'm finally getting into blogging and reading other people's blogs ... Social networking ... What a concept ...
I'm really getting into this; I started with reading Ms. Chris's site, and it has pointed me to other blogs by or about MSers.
One of these was from someone who goes by the handle mdmhvonpa.
He's from Pennsyltucky.
I love the definition I found in the Urban Dictionary: (http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Pennsyltucky)
"A state in which it is considered 'gauche' to marry outside your immediate family.
You are required to own at least two off-road vehicles and if you have a firm grasp of the English language you are considered a homosexual.
Non-whites are severely frowned upon as are people with their own identity, thoughts and more than three books in their home...unless those books include Jeff Foxworthy's "You might be a redneck if..." or "Guns and Ammo" or any book pertaining to incestuous relationship with your daughter.
This state is known for it's infamously archaic infrastructure, most notably it's highways and byways.
It's chief exports include 'Yeungleung' beer, coal and tarts with floppy breasts and flabby white legs who dance in G0-Go bars in NY and NJ and who compete visciously with the Russian and Brazilian girls for that 'almighty dollar'.
One final note on 'Pennsyltucky': it might be said that the mullet is alive and well in this godforsaken state.
'I went to Pennsyltucky this weekend to play a little golf and nearly got run off the road by some mullet wearing neanderthal and his sister/wife.' "
Now, you just know I'd going to do a show on Appalachian music soon.
If only I could find some effin' music and some jug band music, it would be perfect. Gotta seach the PMN with a fine tooth comb. (An appliance about as likely to be found in them there parts as a to-oo-oth brush.)
I've read every book he's got on his list of favorite books. (But I'm such a print-o-holic that I could say that about almost everybody.)
I've seen every movie on his list too. He's a media soul mate. :-)
----
I've also been communicating with a few other people.
This blogging is great.
Its all asynchronous so you have time to compose an intelligent reply instead of blathering piffle and waffle.
(Hmm ... Sounds like my show... Well it can be entertaining piffle and waffle. :-)
Drop me an email at charles at MSBPodcats.com and tell me where your blog is.
----
But today, in keeping with the theme of libations, its about whine, uh wine.
Wine came before beer by at least 2,500 years.
Beer didn't come into its own until the development of agriculture and the cultivation and processing of grains, about 6,000 years ago.
Wine may even have led to the development of agriculture!
Since fruits and berries were part of every diet since earlest hunter/gatherer stages of human development (not evolution but development :-), it stands to reason that it came first.
Heck, you don't even have to be human to enjoy a tipple.
I've heard of bears getting absolutely sloshed on berries at the absolute tail end of the growing season. (The thought of facing a bear with a hang-over is something I don't want to even contemplate. Though it would exlain why they run off if you make loud clanging noises at them. :-)
Wine is basically crushed grapes and its all white.
There are lots of varieties of grapes, lots of colors of grapes, but if they are peeled they all make white whine, uh, wine.
Wine becomes red when its combined with red grape peel and left to ferment.
A wine's color is called its robe. After several bottles you begin to disrobe.
All wines have a nose. Well, actually its your nose; and you shove it into the glass twice. Once when the wine has just been poured and once again when its been swirled around in your glass.
Then wines have a body. (Its usually hiding under its robe.)
Wines have a start, which you taste at the front of your mouth. It usually sounds like you're slurping your supper off the dining room table and you can't do it too loud 'cause is would upset the other people in the psych ward. And you definitely don't want to get the staff to notice you either. They've got hipodermics and wooden clubs and they know how to use them.
Wines have a palate, which you taste in the middle of your mouth. It usually sounds like you've just been told that you're eating rat's ass-hole but that's okay because it really spicy and really really hot.
Wines have a finish, which you taste at the back of your mouth. It usually sounds like you've managed to get rid of most of the rat and you're looking up at the ceiling, gargling to wash the taste uut of your mouth while trying to keep it shut, so the spiders you've just noticed crawling on the ceiling, don't fall in.
Then you've got the age old decision to make.
Do you spit, and risk hurting his feelings or do you swallow, and make a new friend for life.
Although there's no way to be genteel about spitting, if you've been swallowing the vinters' guff all evening, you may find yourself either sitting there slack-jawed and just letting it drool out, or laughing like an idiot and then it gushes out your nose.
Wine tasting is not for amateurs.
There's all kinds of tricks with the ripeness of the grapes.
Sauterne wine is made from grapes that have over ripened and have a much higher sugar content that the same grape when picked at its normal gathering ripeness. (I'm thinking of the bears again; drunk off their asses on what amounts to Sauterne. :-)
----
Oh Joy, Hosana du plus haut des cieux, Angels are weeping with joy. Halleluyah and hoo-fuckin'-ray!
I have managed to finally track down, find and buy a copy of "Eefin-Nanny Down Home" by Billy Hutch his harmonica and orchestra.
This is possibly the most influential album you've *never* heard. At its heart is the quintessential, definitive root sound underlying ALL of American music. Its reverberation can be felt even to this day.
I had a copy of this album, along with all kinds of gems of delta blues (Mississippi Fred Macdowell, Mississippi John Hurt, Robert Johnson,) early proto-punk music, (Albums like "Moonquake." Music from bands like "Rhinoceros," "Big Brother and the Holding Company," "Echo and the Bunnymen") and about a hundred more. All of it primo choice.
Unfortunately my mother not realizing their inestimable value to music history (or perhaps in an attempt to rid of her son of his obsession with music in all of its forms,) just threw them away when in one fell swoop.
Haaa! I was dumb struck and heart broken when I discovered. I came home from school one day and my crates were gone. Just ... gone.
I've never quite forgiven her for that shock. It was like Maxwell's demon had taken all the air from my bedroom and my lungs were sucking in sulphurous fumes instead.
< sigh >
To inject a little levity (instead of Rebif or Copaxone or whatever your poison might be,) I got in touch with Alex Whitmore and he got back to me PDQ (Pretty Damn Quick) giving me permission to play the following song.
----
Monday, September 11, 2006
msb-0069 Bier, bier, Ich liebe mein bier
msb-0069 Bier, bier, Ich liebe mein bier.
Feedback come first so...
My download stats are showing me a couple of things.
First is that I've got over 3,000 thousand downloads.
Not bad for a 'cast I'm only getting around to promoting.
I started this thing nine months ago.
I fumbled around trying to see what it could do and how it could do it.
Apart from the nacent business model, there has been the therapeutic, almost cathartic, effect of just not shuting up about having this disease and, keeping a stiff upper lip, soldiering bravely on.
(Screw that. There are some days I just want to hiss at the facing throng, like Marullus in Julius Caesar: You blocks. You stones. You worse than senseless things!)
Now I think I've found a stable enough format that would allow me to continue for an indefinite amount of time while giving advertisers the space and time they need.
They almost stay out of my content and I stay out of their ads.
That's the kind of sponsorship I can tolerate.
And if the advertising budget can be reduced by the cost of the old content delivery, from over four dollars a patient down to 5 cents a patient, maybe the cost of the treatments could go down too. (Who am I kidding? ... Never happen!)
Second is that more of you are coming at my show from the web than from iTunes and that that portion is growing slightly faster.
So be it.
So then, who the heck are you?
I thought my audience was going primarily composed of one segment of the iTunes+iPod listening public but I'm being sort of proved wrong; not that that's necessarily a bad thing.
The audience pool is much larger that I'd originally estimated ... maybe.
Over 60 million iPods have been sold.
I figured that half of those are "repeats', people who own more than one. Say 30 million of 'em.
I also calculated that with the reliability of Apple products, over half of the replacements are due to new styles or capacities and not due to devices crapping out. Say 15 million of 'em.
I also figured that half of the kids would buy the new ones and and give the older working ones for their 'rents to find. Say 7.5 million of 'em.
Statistically, if one person in twelve hundred, or 0.0833% of the population gets MS, (a figure I'm using that's given out by the National MS Society,) the odds were that 6,250 of you would have MS.
Given the multiplier effect that people with MS have care-takers and relatives, that might double the potential audience and make for a final audience of about 12,000.
But about half of you now aren't listening with an iPod or even downloading through iTunes; you're picking the shows up directly from the web.
So my assumptions were wrong, but in a good way. (We all know that when you assume anything, you make an ass out of u and me.)
So who the heck are you?
Drop me an email to charles at MSBPodcast.com and just tell me how you're picking up the show.
----
Like Simple Simon, I went to the fair, the church art fair.
I stumbled and shambled about, met people, handed out my card, ate the food, drank the seltzer (when I'm on, I eschew all forms of alcohol,) and checked out the art.
It was interesting; some of the pieces were choice; several of them were arrestingly beautiful; it was not at all run of the mill, (the black and gleaming chrome Harley Davidson with the saber toothed tiger skull headlight was definitly not what one expects to encounter in a church apse.)
A few of the pieces were quite interesting, as were a few of the people who were more decked out for Carnaval that for church.
Hats off for the pastor.
But the building was still a church and churches give me hives.
Like all churches built in that era (the thirties,) the building was ramshakle and remarkably unfriendly to people with disabilities.
There were a few people with canes. We confined ourselves after one trip through the art to scattering ourselves about the ample available seating, not confortable but ample.
The stairs between the nave above and the hall below were definitely not ADA.
Heck, with the pipes that passed for handrails, it wasn't even safe for healthy people.
Women in heels slowed to teetering precariously while we disabled were slowed to less than that.
----
I'm still reading the book "Who's in Control of your Multiple Sclerosis?" by the Codes.
Man there's a lot in there. (And he's got plans to podcast it too.)
----
I'm still communicating with One Crazy Chick.
The beauty of RSS is that you can set a podcatcher, such as iTunes, loose and it can download all day long or all night long and it can tell you what new episodes are ready for you to play when they're finally all caught.
You don't have to sit there and wait, which what you have to do if you don't have a rock steady reliable broadband connection.
Podcatchers are great at taking the need for synchrony out of communicating.
----
I posted a comment on a what turned out to be an almost brand new blog, "Hello life, now lets get cracking." (hatchedeggs.blogspot.com), by Justin Eggar, which seems to have been up and runnning since September 4th, 2006.
I discovered that yet another techy from North Carolina, has another relative (his aunt) with MS.
Like me he's into project management. Unlike me, he's much younger and less dissolusioned by the whole process.
Following links around I managed to discover that were both subscribed to "The Project Management Podcast". (iTMS podcasts http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=79900698 ) Kewl.
Project management is the art of both leading a parade with a baton, in front of a circus elephant, and following behind it with a shovel...
Actually, that's why you need proofs-of-concept trials, object and behavior models, prototypes, standards and checklists and, most importantly, PIRs (Post Implementation Reviews).
Its tough to convince upper management that, just like doctors and architects, we don't really know what we're doing when ever were confronted with something new.
Unlike doctors, who can always bury their mistakes and achitects who can sometimes advise their clients to plant vines, if you're doing software project management, you have to fight a short history of blood-minded denial.
Its not like trying out a new surgical procedure which will cure or kill (cemetaries are filled with those,) or erecting a building which will let gravity inform you of your success of failure by standing or falling down. (Many a cathedral did exactly that.)
Because software project aren't dealing with reality, we often get stupid and ignore the glaring errors and omissions in our projects by "shrinking the project box," and jettisoning everything that sticks out over the edge of "the project box".
That's why things don't ever seem to change. The interesting parts of the project, the parts that should have been worked on first, the APIs (Application Progam Interfaces) to the other things we will have to co-exist with, have all been jettisoned when the schedule got tight.
(Why is Microsoft once again stuck with yet another kludge to its file system instead of starting clean? Why else? Because instead of having an operating system capable of supporting several file systems, they think monolithically and that part of the OS keeps getting jettisoned.)
Project management, no matter how good it is, no matter how good the techniques and tools are, won't change a corporate culture which inevatibly leads to project stagnation.
Sorry to have gone off on a bit of a rant here but this is something I actually care deeply about.
----
I know I'm supposed to be loooking forward to Chefs for MS and all the wine I'd bought, but, lets face it, I'm staying sober that evening; walking the straight and narrow (always an iffy proposition with MS,) and putting my best foot forward. (An expression which never made much sense to me. I mean: "best foot." I only got two! And they don't exactly do what I want or go where I thought I was sending them all the time.)
In fact, I'm a beer lover.
I've had beers from every continent except Antartica, 'cause there's no brewries there, and from almost every country around the globe.
Some of which tasted bloody awful, like the beer from the Horse People in Outest Mongolia, who lived on horseback, ate horse flesh, wore horse hides, fashioned twine, or gutta percha from horse sinews and drank a weak, thin beer, who'se origins don't bear thinking about. (Apologies and thanks to Terry Pratchett, Rincewind the wizzard [that's what it said on his hat,] and the entire Disk World series. :-)
Some of which, like Belgian Abbey beer, tasted like the am-freakin'-brosia.
My favorite is Chimay. On those occasions when I can find it, I like to sit back with a liter of it and just savor it.
Beer has quite a history.
Its a legacy from the Sumerians.
About 6,000 years ago life was tough.
Specially if you're somebody's slave.
It could be that a piece of bread or grain became wet and a short time later, began to ferment; and a inebriating pulp resulted.
Nobody but a slave would ever have known that it was alcohol laden because nobody but a slave would be so hungry and so desperate not to throw it out but to actually eat it, mold and all.
Anybody else would have tossed it to the dogs.
This feat of ingesting a familiar substance, an improperly stored grain, it having strange side effects, getting whacked out and stoned, and surviving to tell the tale, was not to be repeated in recorded history until 1692 when the a couple of kids in Salem Mass. ate grain that was infected with ergot. (This halucinogen made for all the fun at the witch trials in that town. [Better living through chemistry. {At least when people were dropping acid in the sixties, they knew what to expect.})]
Luckily alcohol is a much more, uh, benign substance; and beer, while an acquired taste, is definitely an acquirable taste.
Like wine, which is the bi-product of rotten, moldy grapes, beer is the bi-product of rotten, moldy grains. (Actually, you can make an intoxicant from almost plant product. Not fungus and not flesh, but plant.)
But beer holds a special place near my heart (my stomach.)
Feedback come first so...
My download stats are showing me a couple of things.
First is that I've got over 3,000 thousand downloads.
Not bad for a 'cast I'm only getting around to promoting.
I started this thing nine months ago.
I fumbled around trying to see what it could do and how it could do it.
Apart from the nacent business model, there has been the therapeutic, almost cathartic, effect of just not shuting up about having this disease and, keeping a stiff upper lip, soldiering bravely on.
(Screw that. There are some days I just want to hiss at the facing throng, like Marullus in Julius Caesar: You blocks. You stones. You worse than senseless things!)
Now I think I've found a stable enough format that would allow me to continue for an indefinite amount of time while giving advertisers the space and time they need.
They almost stay out of my content and I stay out of their ads.
That's the kind of sponsorship I can tolerate.
And if the advertising budget can be reduced by the cost of the old content delivery, from over four dollars a patient down to 5 cents a patient, maybe the cost of the treatments could go down too. (Who am I kidding? ... Never happen!)
Second is that more of you are coming at my show from the web than from iTunes and that that portion is growing slightly faster.
So be it.
So then, who the heck are you?
I thought my audience was going primarily composed of one segment of the iTunes+iPod listening public but I'm being sort of proved wrong; not that that's necessarily a bad thing.
The audience pool is much larger that I'd originally estimated ... maybe.
Over 60 million iPods have been sold.
I figured that half of those are "repeats', people who own more than one. Say 30 million of 'em.
I also calculated that with the reliability of Apple products, over half of the replacements are due to new styles or capacities and not due to devices crapping out. Say 15 million of 'em.
I also figured that half of the kids would buy the new ones and and give the older working ones for their 'rents to find. Say 7.5 million of 'em.
Statistically, if one person in twelve hundred, or 0.0833% of the population gets MS, (a figure I'm using that's given out by the National MS Society,) the odds were that 6,250 of you would have MS.
Given the multiplier effect that people with MS have care-takers and relatives, that might double the potential audience and make for a final audience of about 12,000.
But about half of you now aren't listening with an iPod or even downloading through iTunes; you're picking the shows up directly from the web.
So my assumptions were wrong, but in a good way. (We all know that when you assume anything, you make an ass out of u and me.)
So who the heck are you?
Drop me an email to charles at MSBPodcast.com and just tell me how you're picking up the show.
----
Like Simple Simon, I went to the fair, the church art fair.
I stumbled and shambled about, met people, handed out my card, ate the food, drank the seltzer (when I'm on, I eschew all forms of alcohol,) and checked out the art.
It was interesting; some of the pieces were choice; several of them were arrestingly beautiful; it was not at all run of the mill, (the black and gleaming chrome Harley Davidson with the saber toothed tiger skull headlight was definitly not what one expects to encounter in a church apse.)
A few of the pieces were quite interesting, as were a few of the people who were more decked out for Carnaval that for church.
Hats off for the pastor.
But the building was still a church and churches give me hives.
Like all churches built in that era (the thirties,) the building was ramshakle and remarkably unfriendly to people with disabilities.
There were a few people with canes. We confined ourselves after one trip through the art to scattering ourselves about the ample available seating, not confortable but ample.
The stairs between the nave above and the hall below were definitely not ADA.
Heck, with the pipes that passed for handrails, it wasn't even safe for healthy people.
Women in heels slowed to teetering precariously while we disabled were slowed to less than that.
----
I'm still reading the book "Who's in Control of your Multiple Sclerosis?" by the Codes.
Man there's a lot in there. (And he's got plans to podcast it too.)
----
I'm still communicating with One Crazy Chick.
The beauty of RSS is that you can set a podcatcher, such as iTunes, loose and it can download all day long or all night long and it can tell you what new episodes are ready for you to play when they're finally all caught.
You don't have to sit there and wait, which what you have to do if you don't have a rock steady reliable broadband connection.
Podcatchers are great at taking the need for synchrony out of communicating.
----
I posted a comment on a what turned out to be an almost brand new blog, "Hello life, now lets get cracking." (hatchedeggs.blogspot.com), by Justin Eggar, which seems to have been up and runnning since September 4th, 2006.
I discovered that yet another techy from North Carolina, has another relative (his aunt) with MS.
Like me he's into project management. Unlike me, he's much younger and less dissolusioned by the whole process.
Following links around I managed to discover that were both subscribed to "The Project Management Podcast". (iTMS podcasts http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=79900698 ) Kewl.
Project management is the art of both leading a parade with a baton, in front of a circus elephant, and following behind it with a shovel...
Actually, that's why you need proofs-of-concept trials, object and behavior models, prototypes, standards and checklists and, most importantly, PIRs (Post Implementation Reviews).
Its tough to convince upper management that, just like doctors and architects, we don't really know what we're doing when ever were confronted with something new.
Unlike doctors, who can always bury their mistakes and achitects who can sometimes advise their clients to plant vines, if you're doing software project management, you have to fight a short history of blood-minded denial.
Its not like trying out a new surgical procedure which will cure or kill (cemetaries are filled with those,) or erecting a building which will let gravity inform you of your success of failure by standing or falling down. (Many a cathedral did exactly that.)
Because software project aren't dealing with reality, we often get stupid and ignore the glaring errors and omissions in our projects by "shrinking the project box," and jettisoning everything that sticks out over the edge of "the project box".
That's why things don't ever seem to change. The interesting parts of the project, the parts that should have been worked on first, the APIs (Application Progam Interfaces) to the other things we will have to co-exist with, have all been jettisoned when the schedule got tight.
(Why is Microsoft once again stuck with yet another kludge to its file system instead of starting clean? Why else? Because instead of having an operating system capable of supporting several file systems, they think monolithically and that part of the OS keeps getting jettisoned.)
Project management, no matter how good it is, no matter how good the techniques and tools are, won't change a corporate culture which inevatibly leads to project stagnation.
Sorry to have gone off on a bit of a rant here but this is something I actually care deeply about.
----
I know I'm supposed to be loooking forward to Chefs for MS and all the wine I'd bought, but, lets face it, I'm staying sober that evening; walking the straight and narrow (always an iffy proposition with MS,) and putting my best foot forward. (An expression which never made much sense to me. I mean: "best foot." I only got two! And they don't exactly do what I want or go where I thought I was sending them all the time.)
In fact, I'm a beer lover.
I've had beers from every continent except Antartica, 'cause there's no brewries there, and from almost every country around the globe.
Some of which tasted bloody awful, like the beer from the Horse People in Outest Mongolia, who lived on horseback, ate horse flesh, wore horse hides, fashioned twine, or gutta percha from horse sinews and drank a weak, thin beer, who'se origins don't bear thinking about. (Apologies and thanks to Terry Pratchett, Rincewind the wizzard [that's what it said on his hat,] and the entire Disk World series. :-)
Some of which, like Belgian Abbey beer, tasted like the am-freakin'-brosia.
My favorite is Chimay. On those occasions when I can find it, I like to sit back with a liter of it and just savor it.
Beer has quite a history.
Its a legacy from the Sumerians.
About 6,000 years ago life was tough.
Specially if you're somebody's slave.
It could be that a piece of bread or grain became wet and a short time later, began to ferment; and a inebriating pulp resulted.
Nobody but a slave would ever have known that it was alcohol laden because nobody but a slave would be so hungry and so desperate not to throw it out but to actually eat it, mold and all.
Anybody else would have tossed it to the dogs.
This feat of ingesting a familiar substance, an improperly stored grain, it having strange side effects, getting whacked out and stoned, and surviving to tell the tale, was not to be repeated in recorded history until 1692 when the a couple of kids in Salem Mass. ate grain that was infected with ergot. (This halucinogen made for all the fun at the witch trials in that town. [Better living through chemistry. {At least when people were dropping acid in the sixties, they knew what to expect.})]
Luckily alcohol is a much more, uh, benign substance; and beer, while an acquired taste, is definitely an acquirable taste.
Like wine, which is the bi-product of rotten, moldy grapes, beer is the bi-product of rotten, moldy grains. (Actually, you can make an intoxicant from almost plant product. Not fungus and not flesh, but plant.)
But beer holds a special place near my heart (my stomach.)
Saturday, September 09, 2006
msb-0068 Memes, Words, Phrases and Sentences
msb-0068 Memes, Words, Phrases and Sentences
Feedback comes first so...
Carlo Magno has been in touch. He's scheduled to get back on the road at the end of this month. Lets hope everything goes according to plans. I'm hoping to get my banner on his three wheeler, Blue.
I'm still looking forward to Chefs For MS. I'm printing up about a hundred handouts and business cards as I write this. (Its fun being a techy with lots of hardware. :-)
I'm still in touch with one CrazyChick on her blog.
She'd written something about a colleague who perished on 9/11/01 and I was quite moved by it. I don't know which I liked better, the piece on the blog or the fact that it was written so well and so lovingly
----
As I mentionned in msb-0067, the last episode, I went to the MS function and found out what promise stem cells hold for you (I think I'm a little too advanced to qualify at this stage of the research. I'm also too chicken. They have to make swiss cheese of your hip-bone to extract enough marrow. Youch! :-)
The treatment seems to be geared at completely obliterating the disease by completely obliterating the immune system, (that what the chemo therapy does,) and then replacing it, either with screened portions of your own system saved before the chemo, which gets around all kinds of immune system rejection problems, or with using an uncompromised immune system as a transplant source, which brings those immuno-rejection problems back into focus.
I'll stick to my cane and keep on with Rebif. (Though I'm still up with for testing an oral or inhalable form of treatment instead of injectables.)
I gotta ask, why are so many of you downloading, or at least catching the episodes, off of the web?
You're proving that a plan never survives contact with reality.
There are more of you who aren't subscribing via RSS. You seem to be going to the MSBPodcast.com site instead of through iTunes.
I hope that you are able to get the chapter headings and the links to the bands' websites which I have just discovered how to do in GarageBand for the iPod and iTunes. (Thanks to Screen Casts Online.)
----
So what is a meme?
Richard Dawkins in The Selfish Gene (ISBN: 0-19-286092-5) defined it as "a unit of cultural transmission, or a unit of imitation." That means that a meme is some form of non verbal idea or other copy-writable object. (Not patentable but copy-writable.)
What is a word?
We'll ignore the computer science definition of a number of bits in a regularlized chunk of data, and stick to the human definition of a unit of language that native speakers can identify; "words are the blocks from which sentences are made."
What is a phrase?
We'll ignore the musical definition of a repeated pattern of notes and stick to the human definition of an expression consisting of one or more words forming a grammatical constituent of a sentence. However, phrases tend to be our verbal equivalent of memes. Thus we tend to 'grok' memes or complete phrases.
What is a sentence?
We'll ignore the legal definition of a period of incarceration or other restrictions on a person, and stick to the human definition of an expression consisting of a string of words satisfying the grammatical rules of a language.
Given that there are hundreds, nay thousands of languages, with special sentence structures SOV, SVO and other rules to express memes, we're obviously going too far.
So lets go back to the definition of phrase, and skip back before we have to apply a grammar.
Human beings tend to think of things in memes and express those memes in phrases.
Objectively, in the computer science sense of the word, objects are insufficient. To properly express things we have to construct memes and express these memes in phases.
----
Now lets take on a definition of a language.
Its got an alphabet of some form, a vocubulary, a grammar and a grammar.
Lets take a very simple alphabet, 0&1 which lets us express things as binary streams, or ACTG which lets us express things as quaternary. (ACTG sound familiar. It should you're composed almost entirely of and by it. All of life is defined by sequences of ACTG.)
Want to step up? Lets take Do Re Mi Fa So La Ti. (I don't need to restate Do which is just a point on the octave helix.)
Lets take a more complex alphabet, say Roman, (its easier for me to type :-) which lets us express things in a host of languages.
We're expressing ourselves, our memes, in the English language.
This implies certain word selection, certain word order and places some other restrictions on the form of what we can express but not on the memes we can express.
Feedback comes first so...
Carlo Magno has been in touch. He's scheduled to get back on the road at the end of this month. Lets hope everything goes according to plans. I'm hoping to get my banner on his three wheeler, Blue.
I'm still looking forward to Chefs For MS. I'm printing up about a hundred handouts and business cards as I write this. (Its fun being a techy with lots of hardware. :-)
I'm still in touch with one CrazyChick on her blog.
She'd written something about a colleague who perished on 9/11/01 and I was quite moved by it. I don't know which I liked better, the piece on the blog or the fact that it was written so well and so lovingly
----
As I mentionned in msb-0067, the last episode, I went to the MS function and found out what promise stem cells hold for you (I think I'm a little too advanced to qualify at this stage of the research. I'm also too chicken. They have to make swiss cheese of your hip-bone to extract enough marrow. Youch! :-)
The treatment seems to be geared at completely obliterating the disease by completely obliterating the immune system, (that what the chemo therapy does,) and then replacing it, either with screened portions of your own system saved before the chemo, which gets around all kinds of immune system rejection problems, or with using an uncompromised immune system as a transplant source, which brings those immuno-rejection problems back into focus.
I'll stick to my cane and keep on with Rebif. (Though I'm still up with for testing an oral or inhalable form of treatment instead of injectables.)
I gotta ask, why are so many of you downloading, or at least catching the episodes, off of the web?
You're proving that a plan never survives contact with reality.
There are more of you who aren't subscribing via RSS. You seem to be going to the MSBPodcast.com site instead of through iTunes.
I hope that you are able to get the chapter headings and the links to the bands' websites which I have just discovered how to do in GarageBand for the iPod and iTunes. (Thanks to Screen Casts Online.)
----
So what is a meme?
Richard Dawkins in The Selfish Gene (ISBN: 0-19-286092-5) defined it as "a unit of cultural transmission, or a unit of imitation." That means that a meme is some form of non verbal idea or other copy-writable object. (Not patentable but copy-writable.)
What is a word?
We'll ignore the computer science definition of a number of bits in a regularlized chunk of data, and stick to the human definition of a unit of language that native speakers can identify; "words are the blocks from which sentences are made."
What is a phrase?
We'll ignore the musical definition of a repeated pattern of notes and stick to the human definition of an expression consisting of one or more words forming a grammatical constituent of a sentence. However, phrases tend to be our verbal equivalent of memes. Thus we tend to 'grok' memes or complete phrases.
What is a sentence?
We'll ignore the legal definition of a period of incarceration or other restrictions on a person, and stick to the human definition of an expression consisting of a string of words satisfying the grammatical rules of a language.
Given that there are hundreds, nay thousands of languages, with special sentence structures SOV, SVO and other rules to express memes, we're obviously going too far.
So lets go back to the definition of phrase, and skip back before we have to apply a grammar.
Human beings tend to think of things in memes and express those memes in phrases.
Objectively, in the computer science sense of the word, objects are insufficient. To properly express things we have to construct memes and express these memes in phases.
----
Now lets take on a definition of a language.
Its got an alphabet of some form, a vocubulary, a grammar and a grammar.
Lets take a very simple alphabet, 0&1 which lets us express things as binary streams, or ACTG which lets us express things as quaternary. (ACTG sound familiar. It should you're composed almost entirely of and by it. All of life is defined by sequences of ACTG.)
Want to step up? Lets take Do Re Mi Fa So La Ti. (I don't need to restate Do which is just a point on the octave helix.)
Lets take a more complex alphabet, say Roman, (its easier for me to type :-) which lets us express things in a host of languages.
We're expressing ourselves, our memes, in the English language.
This implies certain word selection, certain word order and places some other restrictions on the form of what we can express but not on the memes we can express.
- I love alphabets.
- I love words.
- I love phrases.
- I love sentences.
- I love grammar.
- I love syntax.
- I love language.
Tuesday, September 05, 2006
msb-0067 "He not busy being born is busy dying"
msb-0067 "He not busy being born is busy dying"
Bob Dylan wrote some words that kind of got into my mind.
I was only twelve but they have stuck with me all these years.
If my mother had her 'drudders, she'd 'drudder I wouldn't have MS.
Actually, I'm pretty sure she'd 'drudder a lot of things but ... shit happened.
Shit like:
Life is made up of the shit that we get smeared with.
Sometime we can just wash it off and sometimes we friggin' drown in it.
----
Feedback before I go any further:
There are no more videos until I can check out some more things about permissions, feedback to artists and the like.
I'm sending messages to Adam Curry about Democracy. It seems like the PMN (Podsafe Music Network) would benefit from and could be an asset for the guys at Participatory Culture.
For all the useful info on ScreenCastOnline, I'm giving a BIG SHOUT OUT to Don McAllister and ScreenCastsOnline [ http://screencastsonline.com/sco/ ].
Hello Miss Chris. Hope you're hangin' in there.
Hello Carlo Magno. Stay healthy and get back on the road according to your schedule. I don't know how it will be to travel with Jerry Caldwell aka Binky, the World Famous Clown. I hope he is a real good friend. Traveling on the road is sometimes a lonely trek, but sometimes you want it to be.
I'm still looking forward to going to Chefs For MS.
----
I'm finally reading doctor Code's book "Who's in Control of your Multiple Sclerosis?"
(ISBN: 0-9737918-0-2) and I must say its already teaching me things and confirming some things I'd sort of figured out for myself.
This book is thin, 223 pages, but dense.
Yesterday, Lee brought home "Twelve Sharp", the latest Stephany Plum novel by Janet Evanovich (ISBN: 0-312-34948-3) and I read it in a single sitting.
Its partly Evanovich's fault. She's an engaging writer and Stephany Plum is a great character.
But I was able to read the 310 pages of the novel at my own pace rather than the creep I am having to read the good doctor's book at.
Its got so much information in it and I'm constantly looking things up on the web because there are resources out there I never knew existed or hadn't appreciated properly.
I can tell you that this book is a lot better than repeatedly wasting time watching Dr. Phil waiting for information on MS.
I like the fact that he places importance on social relationships in recovering your sense of self-esteem and affirming your self-worth.
Which I must confess I didn't, until I thought about it and realized that this entire podcasting venture is a great way for me to build a social network and to communicate with you.
I am defining my life in this podcast and its keeping me going.
I just wish more of you sent me an email or Odeo'd me or took my survey or got onto my Frapper map. Find it all at MSBPodcast.com
He's confirmed some things that Lee, my wife, had thought about Omega-3 oils.
----
Speaking of Lee, now I'm on a cod liver oil regimen, enforced by "she who must be obeyed"
I'm a very happy, very well fed, very married man and my wife is a diva, nay, a godess in the kitchen.
I not only know which side my bead is buttered on, but also how its made and by who. Its great.
We stay away from all kinds of processed crap. It might cost a bit more but our health is worth it.
----
Actually, its something that doesn't really make sense, does it?
I have to pay more to have them just leave our food alone, than if I let them have their way and then they, the agri-businesses,
Something is very wrong here.
----
Why does milk, which is fine for lactose tolerant kids, less so for adults because they no longer need it, [why does milk] cost more than an equivalent volume of cola?
Why are we willing to pay a buck for 12" of water when its free from the tap?
Why are we willing to eat crap when we could be eating stuff that tastes better and isn 't at the center of debates on obesity, diabetes and other diseases that affect our digestive tract from one end to another, from the teeth to the ass-hole.
Basically, we're eating ourselves into an early grave and making ourselves ill doing it.
I know, lets find out what the agri-business parents are feeding their kids and buy that.
I sure as shit doubt its the crap they make and sell.
----
There are no more videos until I can check out some more things about permissions, feedback to artists and the like.
For all the useful info on ScreenCastOnline, I'm giving a big SHOUT out to Don McAllister and ScreenCastsOnline [ http://screencastsonline.com/sco/ ].
----
P.S. I know what day it is.
Its the fifth anniversary of 9/11... I was a personal witness to that little bit of Arab street theatre.
But I don't wanna to celebrate it and I definitely don't want Bush wrapping himself in our tragedy.
He's in New York City, tying up traffic, and he's not welcome.
I was attending an MS function and he managed to screw us all over from one end of Manhattan to midtown.
After an excellent presentation on using stem cells by a Canadian doctor, something else Bush doesn't believe in, like global warming or pollution, Dr Herbert's presentation was cut short because the traffic was being brought to a standstill by all of Bush's security.
Let him stay away, go and read something about sex with a goat to a bunch of Texan kiddie gardners, rather than trying to screw the rest of us, and shut his lying cake hole.
It ain't working Bush. Nobody buys it anymore.
I suspect that your family's political heritage is going to be that they will be exempt from any elected office for at least the next century. Until the globe cools down again.
It'd be easier to take if he was being genuinely hipocritical but I suspect that he's just flummoxed by our refusal to fall for his inconsistency and his outright lies.
Bob Dylan wrote some words that kind of got into my mind.
I was only twelve but they have stuck with me all these years.
If my mother had her 'drudders, she'd 'drudder I wouldn't have MS.
Actually, I'm pretty sure she'd 'drudder a lot of things but ... shit happened.
Shit like:
- her bout of pleuresy
- the Great Depression of the thirties,
- the second world war,
- the Korean war,
- Cyprus, where Canadians wore UN blue targets, uh, hemets,
- my first "unofficial" MS episode in the early sixties,
- my first "official" MS episode in the late seventies,
- my second MS episode in the mid nineties,
- her own small strokes, which have left her in a home with short term memory impaired,
- the attack, in 2001, on the World Trade Center, which could have killed me and still ruined my life for about a year,
- and the attack on Israel, though the Lebanese would say that they were attacked instead.
Life is made up of the shit that we get smeared with.
Sometime we can just wash it off and sometimes we friggin' drown in it.
----
Feedback before I go any further:
There are no more videos until I can check out some more things about permissions, feedback to artists and the like.
I'm sending messages to Adam Curry about Democracy. It seems like the PMN (Podsafe Music Network) would benefit from and could be an asset for the guys at Participatory Culture.
For all the useful info on ScreenCastOnline, I'm giving a BIG SHOUT OUT to Don McAllister and ScreenCastsOnline [ http://screencastsonline.com/sco/ ].
Hello Miss Chris. Hope you're hangin' in there.
Hello Carlo Magno. Stay healthy and get back on the road according to your schedule. I don't know how it will be to travel with Jerry Caldwell aka Binky, the World Famous Clown. I hope he is a real good friend. Traveling on the road is sometimes a lonely trek, but sometimes you want it to be.
I'm still looking forward to going to Chefs For MS.
----
I'm finally reading doctor Code's book "Who's in Control of your Multiple Sclerosis?"
(ISBN: 0-9737918-0-2) and I must say its already teaching me things and confirming some things I'd sort of figured out for myself.
This book is thin, 223 pages, but dense.
Yesterday, Lee brought home "Twelve Sharp", the latest Stephany Plum novel by Janet Evanovich (ISBN: 0-312-34948-3) and I read it in a single sitting.
Its partly Evanovich's fault. She's an engaging writer and Stephany Plum is a great character.
But I was able to read the 310 pages of the novel at my own pace rather than the creep I am having to read the good doctor's book at.
Its got so much information in it and I'm constantly looking things up on the web because there are resources out there I never knew existed or hadn't appreciated properly.
I can tell you that this book is a lot better than repeatedly wasting time watching Dr. Phil waiting for information on MS.
I like the fact that he places importance on social relationships in recovering your sense of self-esteem and affirming your self-worth.
Which I must confess I didn't, until I thought about it and realized that this entire podcasting venture is a great way for me to build a social network and to communicate with you.
I am defining my life in this podcast and its keeping me going.
I just wish more of you sent me an email or Odeo'd me or took my survey or got onto my Frapper map. Find it all at MSBPodcast.com
He's confirmed some things that Lee, my wife, had thought about Omega-3 oils.
----
Speaking of Lee, now I'm on a cod liver oil regimen, enforced by "she who must be obeyed"
I'm a very happy, very well fed, very married man and my wife is a diva, nay, a godess in the kitchen.
I not only know which side my bead is buttered on, but also how its made and by who. Its great.
We stay away from all kinds of processed crap. It might cost a bit more but our health is worth it.
----
Actually, its something that doesn't really make sense, does it?
I have to pay more to have them just leave our food alone, than if I let them have their way and then they, the agri-businesses,
- truck it to a factory,
- mush it all down,
- do all kinds of expensive processes
- with all kinds of expensive processors,
- some of which involve treating it with stuff we are now going to sue them for,
- like trans-fats and
- hydrogenated oils and
- high-fructose corn syrup, and then
- box it all up and
- truck it back to some store with all the ambiance of a food morgue,
Something is very wrong here.
----
Why does milk, which is fine for lactose tolerant kids, less so for adults because they no longer need it, [why does milk] cost more than an equivalent volume of cola?
Why are we willing to pay a buck for 12" of water when its free from the tap?
Why are we willing to eat crap when we could be eating stuff that tastes better and isn 't at the center of debates on obesity, diabetes and other diseases that affect our digestive tract from one end to another, from the teeth to the ass-hole.
Basically, we're eating ourselves into an early grave and making ourselves ill doing it.
I know, lets find out what the agri-business parents are feeding their kids and buy that.
I sure as shit doubt its the crap they make and sell.
----
There are no more videos until I can check out some more things about permissions, feedback to artists and the like.
For all the useful info on ScreenCastOnline, I'm giving a big SHOUT out to Don McAllister and ScreenCastsOnline [ http://screencastsonline.com/sco/ ].
----
P.S. I know what day it is.
Its the fifth anniversary of 9/11... I was a personal witness to that little bit of Arab street theatre.
But I don't wanna to celebrate it and I definitely don't want Bush wrapping himself in our tragedy.
He's in New York City, tying up traffic, and he's not welcome.
I was attending an MS function and he managed to screw us all over from one end of Manhattan to midtown.
After an excellent presentation on using stem cells by a Canadian doctor, something else Bush doesn't believe in, like global warming or pollution, Dr Herbert's presentation was cut short because the traffic was being brought to a standstill by all of Bush's security.
Let him stay away, go and read something about sex with a goat to a bunch of Texan kiddie gardners, rather than trying to screw the rest of us, and shut his lying cake hole.
It ain't working Bush. Nobody buys it anymore.
I suspect that your family's political heritage is going to be that they will be exempt from any elected office for at least the next century. Until the globe cools down again.
It'd be easier to take if he was being genuinely hipocritical but I suspect that he's just flummoxed by our refusal to fall for his inconsistency and his outright lies.
Tuesday, August 29, 2006
msb-0066 66? What happened to 59 throught 65?
msb-0066 66? What happened to 59 throught 65?
Feedback goes first so ...
you're probably asking what is happening to the numbering.
I'm skipping the episode numbering for the videos on my podcast.
Every piece of video that I'm putting out right now is on an episode of its own.
It is not meant for me to contribute anything to it or take from it.
This also gets me around some copyright issue.
Also, if you liked them, good; but they're over.
I'm getting everything from democracy (if they didn't get whatever appropriate clearances or permissions, its their problems, I'm just a wire.)
Apart from wrappering them in a different file named for my podcasts' sequencing. I did not alter them in any way.
I do hope you enjoyed them and are supporting the artists by buying their music.
It would help if you thought of them as place markers for ads. (On the internet, you can have a hundred such place markers and still have plenty of time for the 'cast.)
Every ad on this podcast will be on its own and can be downloaded on its own, without any other competing ad, and without having to compete for time, or your atttention span, with the 'cast content.
I should/could/would might/maybe/perhaps remind you of an ad, (admittedly for some money, after all I have to eat and pay for the cost of this podcast.) and point you to it on the site but it should not interfere with my content in any real way.
In the same way, you should be able to download an ad, found through my podcasts or through a search engine, without any interference from my content, like time limitations or conflicting/competing messages.
Actually, podcasting takes serial time right out of the equation.
You are in complete control.
The shows, be they text only, audio or video files, are downloaded to your player (PC, Mac, iPod, whatever,) when you go looking for them.
You read, listen to or watch them when you want.
And they persist.
I may refer back and tell you about something but you can look through the old episodes, or reload an episode of an ad, and get the information that way.
I see my role as an aggregator for all kinds of things related to MS (unlike a corporate ad which doesn't mention any competion or unrelated goods or services.)
And unlike mass media which has some justification for never covering MS related material as being for too small a market. (Face it. Being 0.0833% of the population means that they'd rather sell air time to people with more money to, uh, spend reaching a bigger slice of the audience pie.)
I also see my role as laying the foundation for this site and bringing you entertainment. (And you can guide me there if you want. What kind of music do you like; what makes your ears happy?)
----
Actually, its a new advertising model that I'm pushing.
The separation of the ads from the content can be accomplished with podcasting.
It used to be seperated back when sponsorship really meant something.
It also used to be seperated in Europe where ads were run in a block in between programs.
Then you didn't have to put up with incongruities like a detergent ad running on a show about how phoshates were killing our rivers and steams. (I'm sure the advertisers were not too thrilled about that. [But not as thrilled as I was to get them to stop putting stuff into the water that was killing them. {Remember the time the Manongahelah river caught fire? (Not all businesses, governments or religious groups are run by geniuses and not all ideas they have are bright ones.)}])
Once again I'm beholding to someone else, the genius at Acura, who set up a podcast for their car, which you can download when you're ready to look for it.
The interuption of ads come from somebody, usually the show host, telling you to go look at it.
----
Except that I'm tying you, the consumer, to a response to an ad on my site/podcast so that I would get the advertising revenue for it, for as long as the ad was on my site to be downloaded.
If the ad is not viewed the good or service is not necessary.
End of story for you and minimal cost for the advertiser. Nor do I expect exclusivity. But they're not broadcast advertising now and they're not likely to suddenly get the urge to throw away the customers money on an broadcast media ad.
They would pay a small one time set up fee and a promotion charge, (if you don't know the ad is here, its not likely to get downloaded is it,) and pay per download.
No downloads, no other costs. Simple, clean and cheap.
If the ad is viewed and you found out about the good or service listening to this podast, then this podcast should get the financial support of the advertiser.
----
That's the plan anyway.
Adverising on demand instead of constant interuption of content by advertising and the corrolory interuption of the advertising by the content.
I would only mention that we have these ads for your perusal, along with weblinks, at the end of the 'cast along with the show credits.
The rest of the 'cast would be me (shut up already,) and my tunes.
Sound good? Good...
Now, you get to listen to me and my revolution.
----
Feedback goes first so ...
you're probably asking what is happening to the numbering.
I'm skipping the episode numbering for the videos on my podcast.
Every piece of video that I'm putting out right now is on an episode of its own.
It is not meant for me to contribute anything to it or take from it.
This also gets me around some copyright issue.
Also, if you liked them, good; but they're over.
I'm getting everything from democracy (if they didn't get whatever appropriate clearances or permissions, its their problems, I'm just a wire.)
Apart from wrappering them in a different file named for my podcasts' sequencing. I did not alter them in any way.
I do hope you enjoyed them and are supporting the artists by buying their music.
It would help if you thought of them as place markers for ads. (On the internet, you can have a hundred such place markers and still have plenty of time for the 'cast.)
Every ad on this podcast will be on its own and can be downloaded on its own, without any other competing ad, and without having to compete for time, or your atttention span, with the 'cast content.
I should/could/would might/maybe/perhaps remind you of an ad, (admittedly for some money, after all I have to eat and pay for the cost of this podcast.) and point you to it on the site but it should not interfere with my content in any real way.
In the same way, you should be able to download an ad, found through my podcasts or through a search engine, without any interference from my content, like time limitations or conflicting/competing messages.
Actually, podcasting takes serial time right out of the equation.
You are in complete control.
The shows, be they text only, audio or video files, are downloaded to your player (PC, Mac, iPod, whatever,) when you go looking for them.
You read, listen to or watch them when you want.
And they persist.
I may refer back and tell you about something but you can look through the old episodes, or reload an episode of an ad, and get the information that way.
I see my role as an aggregator for all kinds of things related to MS (unlike a corporate ad which doesn't mention any competion or unrelated goods or services.)
And unlike mass media which has some justification for never covering MS related material as being for too small a market. (Face it. Being 0.0833% of the population means that they'd rather sell air time to people with more money to, uh, spend reaching a bigger slice of the audience pie.)
I also see my role as laying the foundation for this site and bringing you entertainment. (And you can guide me there if you want. What kind of music do you like; what makes your ears happy?)
----
Actually, its a new advertising model that I'm pushing.
The separation of the ads from the content can be accomplished with podcasting.
It used to be seperated back when sponsorship really meant something.
It also used to be seperated in Europe where ads were run in a block in between programs.
Then you didn't have to put up with incongruities like a detergent ad running on a show about how phoshates were killing our rivers and steams. (I'm sure the advertisers were not too thrilled about that. [But not as thrilled as I was to get them to stop putting stuff into the water that was killing them. {Remember the time the Manongahelah river caught fire? (Not all businesses, governments or religious groups are run by geniuses and not all ideas they have are bright ones.)}])
Once again I'm beholding to someone else, the genius at Acura, who set up a podcast for their car, which you can download when you're ready to look for it.
The interuption of ads come from somebody, usually the show host, telling you to go look at it.
----
Except that I'm tying you, the consumer, to a response to an ad on my site/podcast so that I would get the advertising revenue for it, for as long as the ad was on my site to be downloaded.
If the ad is not viewed the good or service is not necessary.
End of story for you and minimal cost for the advertiser. Nor do I expect exclusivity. But they're not broadcast advertising now and they're not likely to suddenly get the urge to throw away the customers money on an broadcast media ad.
They would pay a small one time set up fee and a promotion charge, (if you don't know the ad is here, its not likely to get downloaded is it,) and pay per download.
No downloads, no other costs. Simple, clean and cheap.
If the ad is viewed and you found out about the good or service listening to this podast, then this podcast should get the financial support of the advertiser.
----
That's the plan anyway.
Adverising on demand instead of constant interuption of content by advertising and the corrolory interuption of the advertising by the content.
I would only mention that we have these ads for your perusal, along with weblinks, at the end of the 'cast along with the show credits.
The rest of the 'cast would be me (shut up already,) and my tunes.
Sound good? Good...
Now, you get to listen to me and my revolution.
----
Monday, August 28, 2006
msb-0058 I feel super today. Go figure?
msb-0058 I feel super today. Go figure?
I have no idea what bug got up my ass last episode, but it was bad.
The music was a reflection of that of course.
It wasn't bad as far as music goes but I was barely in any mood to enjoy it.
There's not much feedback.
You folks are not heeding my whining, uh, wheedling, uh, begging, uh, pleading, uh, requests to get in touch.
Remember, you can email me, voice mail me, subscribe with iTunes, and leave me messages on an episode you liked (or didn't like,) all on the page at MSBPodcast.com
----
I'm going to a church group's art exhibition. I've even taken an ad for MSBPodcast.com in the program.
Bet you never thought of me as a patron, eh?
I would surprise you with the arts I've supported over the years: photography, Japanese print making, guitar, sculpture, architecture (I've had the chance to mess with house designs before the buildings' were even framed. That's great fun. And if you get to it early enough, you can really mess with a contractor's head.)
I'm still going to Chefs or MS.
The booze was ordered, delivered and divied up into decorative baskets, ready to be given away (I'll try not to sob too loudly as the bottles get wrenched from my grasp.)
----
One Crazy Chick is still blogging away, writing interesting things that I suggest you go and read.
----
I'm a little pissed-off at Tod and Kim Maffin for the state of the Canadian based "Multiple Sclerosis Podcast," which seems to have lapsed into limbo for over a month now.
C'mon, give us some news. I can put shows twice a week and video, you should be able to give us some word. It's not just about the MS. We care about how Kim's doing.
I'm still waiting for Lee to get through the good goctor's book so I can at last read it.
----
Speaking of books, I've finished with the book by Pema Chödrön. She is a fascinating writer. But I'm thinking that she is blessed with insights into the human condition that are way, way beyond what I can muster.
I'm just an ol' classical/rocker dude with a brain, that's had time to figure some things out.
MS gives you plenty of time when you have to occupy your mind with something, anything ... and playing hockey or even billiards is right out just at that moment.
Well it certainly gave me pause. Lets hope it never happens to you.
The links are all in the show notes (and this time I'm making it easier than ever for you web downloaders. I've noticed that a fair percentage of you come to the show from web browsers (though this could/should work on anything that's actually connected to the web.)
----
Today I have just got back from the dentist for my quarterly exam and teeth cleaning. Luckily, I don't have anything wrong with them. Luck has nothing much to do with it really.
Brushing everyday does. I'm not obsessive about my teeth but I do take care of them.
I had lousy teeth while I has growing up and through my teens and twenties. Soft enamel, mostly because Montréal mayors are congenital idiots who are against fluoridation.
Fuck Gordon Sinclair, his comparing fluoridation to pouring rat poison in the water and his communist plot theory.
He's dead, Communism's dead in North America, and my teeth are much better since I moved away from a city where right-wings bigots ruled. I'd like to kick him in the crotch until he had a new set of tonsils for the years of agony my teeth caused me.
I had the disposition of a sour ol' rat, or Gordon Sinclair, until I hit Ottawa. Chronic pain does that to you.
Luckily, I found a dentist's dentist when I got to Otawa and my disposition improved in direct proportion to my dentition. By the end of it, I'd fall asleep in the chair. I've found another one since, on Wall street. He costs the earth but he's worth every dime of it. I fall asleep in his chair too.
Some MSers have the same kind of chronic pain because their incoming sensory nerves have been affected.
Those people are constantly afflicted with strange symptoms, phantom pain and those effects are the primary reason MS sems so mysterious. What, uh, hurts, is not what should hurt.
I've been blessed, if such a phrase can apply when discussing my MS, with all of my sclera affecting only my effector or volitional nerves.
While walking is now a big time waster, at least it doesn't hurt; well not me anyway. If you're waiting for me to get somewhere, its a big pain in the ass.
----
Super Creep by Steve Doctor reminds me of a SlyRob animated video that's buried somewhere on my iPod; SuperThruster I seem to remember it was called.
Maybe I can get clearance from them and play it for you. But don't hold your breath. I've been turned down plenty of times, by plenty of people.
"Oh we don't own the rights to that anymore. Its the record company's now."
And the record companies want money. Now I could even pay ASCAP/BMI, and pay the recording company, (just because you've paid ASCAP/BMI doesn't mean you in the clear with the RIAA, you also have to pay the record company,) and get caught in the reporting trap.
Kee-rist! The record contacts might be merely complicated but the reproduction contracts and labyrinthine. Since podcasts are stored until played (and even after) they're considered reproductions of the original.
And notice the artist has been entirely forgotten at this point. There are plenty of ways for an artist to get totally screwed when the original performance is captured, at their expense of curse, and the captured performance is copied onto new media, like going from record to cassette, to CD, to DVD.
When you die, or when you just get weak and end up in an old artists' home, your recordings get sold to a bunch of dentists in Oakland or Omaha or somewhere; and you end up listening to your young self on some late night movie commercial; while you're laying there on the couch, up all night, worrying about how you're going to pay for hemmorhoid cream (and we all know who gave you the flaming hemmorhoids don't we?)
No ... I'm not bitter.
I'm fuckin pissed off is what I am.
Still, its just sour grapes, since I can't play anymore.
But I can podcast.
I have no idea what bug got up my ass last episode, but it was bad.
The music was a reflection of that of course.
It wasn't bad as far as music goes but I was barely in any mood to enjoy it.
There's not much feedback.
You folks are not heeding my whining, uh, wheedling, uh, begging, uh, pleading, uh, requests to get in touch.
Remember, you can email me, voice mail me, subscribe with iTunes, and leave me messages on an episode you liked (or didn't like,) all on the page at MSBPodcast.com
----
I'm going to a church group's art exhibition. I've even taken an ad for MSBPodcast.com in the program.
Bet you never thought of me as a patron, eh?
I would surprise you with the arts I've supported over the years: photography, Japanese print making, guitar, sculpture, architecture (I've had the chance to mess with house designs before the buildings' were even framed. That's great fun. And if you get to it early enough, you can really mess with a contractor's head.)
I'm still going to Chefs or MS.
The booze was ordered, delivered and divied up into decorative baskets, ready to be given away (I'll try not to sob too loudly as the bottles get wrenched from my grasp.)
----
One Crazy Chick is still blogging away, writing interesting things that I suggest you go and read.
----
I'm a little pissed-off at Tod and Kim Maffin for the state of the Canadian based "Multiple Sclerosis Podcast," which seems to have lapsed into limbo for over a month now.
C'mon, give us some news. I can put shows twice a week and video, you should be able to give us some word. It's not just about the MS. We care about how Kim's doing.
I'm still waiting for Lee to get through the good goctor's book so I can at last read it.
----
Speaking of books, I've finished with the book by Pema Chödrön. She is a fascinating writer. But I'm thinking that she is blessed with insights into the human condition that are way, way beyond what I can muster.
I'm just an ol' classical/rocker dude with a brain, that's had time to figure some things out.
MS gives you plenty of time when you have to occupy your mind with something, anything ... and playing hockey or even billiards is right out just at that moment.
Well it certainly gave me pause. Lets hope it never happens to you.
The links are all in the show notes (and this time I'm making it easier than ever for you web downloaders. I've noticed that a fair percentage of you come to the show from web browsers (though this could/should work on anything that's actually connected to the web.)
----
Today I have just got back from the dentist for my quarterly exam and teeth cleaning. Luckily, I don't have anything wrong with them. Luck has nothing much to do with it really.
Brushing everyday does. I'm not obsessive about my teeth but I do take care of them.
I had lousy teeth while I has growing up and through my teens and twenties. Soft enamel, mostly because Montréal mayors are congenital idiots who are against fluoridation.
Fuck Gordon Sinclair, his comparing fluoridation to pouring rat poison in the water and his communist plot theory.
He's dead, Communism's dead in North America, and my teeth are much better since I moved away from a city where right-wings bigots ruled. I'd like to kick him in the crotch until he had a new set of tonsils for the years of agony my teeth caused me.
I had the disposition of a sour ol' rat, or Gordon Sinclair, until I hit Ottawa. Chronic pain does that to you.
Luckily, I found a dentist's dentist when I got to Otawa and my disposition improved in direct proportion to my dentition. By the end of it, I'd fall asleep in the chair. I've found another one since, on Wall street. He costs the earth but he's worth every dime of it. I fall asleep in his chair too.
Some MSers have the same kind of chronic pain because their incoming sensory nerves have been affected.
Those people are constantly afflicted with strange symptoms, phantom pain and those effects are the primary reason MS sems so mysterious. What, uh, hurts, is not what should hurt.
I've been blessed, if such a phrase can apply when discussing my MS, with all of my sclera affecting only my effector or volitional nerves.
While walking is now a big time waster, at least it doesn't hurt; well not me anyway. If you're waiting for me to get somewhere, its a big pain in the ass.
----
Super Creep by Steve Doctor reminds me of a SlyRob animated video that's buried somewhere on my iPod; SuperThruster I seem to remember it was called.
Maybe I can get clearance from them and play it for you. But don't hold your breath. I've been turned down plenty of times, by plenty of people.
"Oh we don't own the rights to that anymore. Its the record company's now."
And the record companies want money. Now I could even pay ASCAP/BMI, and pay the recording company, (just because you've paid ASCAP/BMI doesn't mean you in the clear with the RIAA, you also have to pay the record company,) and get caught in the reporting trap.
Kee-rist! The record contacts might be merely complicated but the reproduction contracts and labyrinthine. Since podcasts are stored until played (and even after) they're considered reproductions of the original.
And notice the artist has been entirely forgotten at this point. There are plenty of ways for an artist to get totally screwed when the original performance is captured, at their expense of curse, and the captured performance is copied onto new media, like going from record to cassette, to CD, to DVD.
When you die, or when you just get weak and end up in an old artists' home, your recordings get sold to a bunch of dentists in Oakland or Omaha or somewhere; and you end up listening to your young self on some late night movie commercial; while you're laying there on the couch, up all night, worrying about how you're going to pay for hemmorhoid cream (and we all know who gave you the flaming hemmorhoids don't we?)
No ... I'm not bitter.
I'm fuckin pissed off is what I am.
Still, its just sour grapes, since I can't play anymore.
But I can podcast.
Tuesday, August 22, 2006
msb-0057 I'm rightously angry an' I don't know why.
msb-0057 I'm rightously angry an' I don't know why.
there's no feed back this episode because I'm to stinkin' angry.
I've got a hard rock, metal edge to me.
If I had any damn balls I'd play "Iron Man" by Black Sabath or "Frankenstein" by Edgar Winters.
Don't worry RIAA and ASCAP/BMI, you're not coming after me yet ... you cock-biters.
I'm pissed off at the world today.
I feel abused, bemused, disused, fused, misused, rused, underused and generally fucked over; like the whole planet is lining up to piss down my throat.
I feel like kickin' butt and takin' down names. And wouldn't you know it, my penmanship stinks and my printer's fresh outta ink.
The songs on the podcast are all about machines and they're all fuckin' rock. Ya hear! Rock.
I'm out here trying to play nicey-nicey, trying not rile too many feathers and try to sweet talk advertisers into this fly-by-wire internet concept but I'm getting fed up with being nice.
No I'm not going to explain or otherwise go into the psychotropic or mood altering effects of MS (and there must be some explaining to do because most of us MSers have an unnatural cheerfulness about this disease despite everything we experience and learn about it.)
----
Yeah!
I know I'm the wrong man in the right place at the right time, trying to do the right job.
But nobody else see this idea, this meme, this presentation of a new reality yet.
Except for Acura, Adam Curry, EarthLink, GoDaddy, Kiptronics, LibSyn, LimeLight Networks, Podshow, and a handfull of others.
Unfortunately, that handful are not making products for MSers.
Oh no-o!
Those airheads are happy passing the cost of the advertising and shipping onto us.
'Cause you know who gets it in the shorts, doan'tcha?
We're just the sickies who pay for it all.
We must be sick, in the head, 'cause we're paying for it all.
Today I'm going to rock out because I just fuckin' feel like it.
----
I hadn't checked my Frapper Map in donkey's years.
When I did I found a few more people including somebody from Wellington NZ.
Kewl. That's what I call international distribution.
Feel free to add yourselves on it. The link's on the MSBPodcast,com page.
If your PC's got a microphone, drop me a voice mail with Odeo. The link's on the MSBPodcast,com page.
Feel free to take the little survey. The link's on the MSBPodcast,com page.
Feel free to drop me a email at charles at MSBPodcast.com. The link's on the MSBPodcast,com page.
Feel free to keep on downloading the episodes, or maybe subscribing on iTunes. The link's on the MSBPodcast,com page.
Feel free to tell a fellow MSer about the site, about the podcasts.
----
I've figured something from watching my stats very closely, almost in-real time, as people were picking up the show.
A great many of you are picking up with iTunes (the recommended way as far as I'm concerned,) but you've got it set to pickup the latest episode and not set to pickup all new episodes.
Now a few of you have the video, (specially msb-0053 HealthClubCommercial, eh?), but not the audio.
Oops, I see a lot of web download of the health club ad.
Fuck the FCC, eh?
You're catching the babe with ass-cheeks so firm she can crack nuts with 'em. Right on!
Sex still sells even when we're as likely to get a babe like that as we are to run a mile in the blazing sun.
Now that explains some of the characteristics of the stats and I'll have to remind you to check the episode list and pick up on things you might have missed.
Go and push the damn (GET) button, won't 'cha?
there's no feed back this episode because I'm to stinkin' angry.
I've got a hard rock, metal edge to me.
If I had any damn balls I'd play "Iron Man" by Black Sabath or "Frankenstein" by Edgar Winters.
Don't worry RIAA and ASCAP/BMI, you're not coming after me yet ... you cock-biters.
I'm pissed off at the world today.
I feel abused, bemused, disused, fused, misused, rused, underused and generally fucked over; like the whole planet is lining up to piss down my throat.
I feel like kickin' butt and takin' down names. And wouldn't you know it, my penmanship stinks and my printer's fresh outta ink.
The songs on the podcast are all about machines and they're all fuckin' rock. Ya hear! Rock.
I'm out here trying to play nicey-nicey, trying not rile too many feathers and try to sweet talk advertisers into this fly-by-wire internet concept but I'm getting fed up with being nice.
No I'm not going to explain or otherwise go into the psychotropic or mood altering effects of MS (and there must be some explaining to do because most of us MSers have an unnatural cheerfulness about this disease despite everything we experience and learn about it.)
----
Yeah!
I know I'm the wrong man in the right place at the right time, trying to do the right job.
But nobody else see this idea, this meme, this presentation of a new reality yet.
Except for Acura, Adam Curry, EarthLink, GoDaddy, Kiptronics, LibSyn, LimeLight Networks, Podshow, and a handfull of others.
Unfortunately, that handful are not making products for MSers.
Oh no-o!
Those airheads are happy passing the cost of the advertising and shipping onto us.
'Cause you know who gets it in the shorts, doan'tcha?
We're just the sickies who pay for it all.
We must be sick, in the head, 'cause we're paying for it all.
Today I'm going to rock out because I just fuckin' feel like it.
----
I hadn't checked my Frapper Map in donkey's years.
When I did I found a few more people including somebody from Wellington NZ.
Kewl. That's what I call international distribution.
Feel free to add yourselves on it. The link's on the MSBPodcast,com page.
If your PC's got a microphone, drop me a voice mail with Odeo. The link's on the MSBPodcast,com page.
Feel free to take the little survey. The link's on the MSBPodcast,com page.
Feel free to drop me a email at charles at MSBPodcast.com. The link's on the MSBPodcast,com page.
Feel free to keep on downloading the episodes, or maybe subscribing on iTunes. The link's on the MSBPodcast,com page.
Feel free to tell a fellow MSer about the site, about the podcasts.
----
I've figured something from watching my stats very closely, almost in-real time, as people were picking up the show.
A great many of you are picking up with iTunes (the recommended way as far as I'm concerned,) but you've got it set to pickup the latest episode and not set to pickup all new episodes.
Now a few of you have the video, (specially msb-0053 HealthClubCommercial, eh?), but not the audio.
Oops, I see a lot of web download of the health club ad.
Fuck the FCC, eh?
You're catching the babe with ass-cheeks so firm she can crack nuts with 'em. Right on!
Sex still sells even when we're as likely to get a babe like that as we are to run a mile in the blazing sun.
Now that explains some of the characteristics of the stats and I'll have to remind you to check the episode list and pick up on things you might have missed.
Go and push the damn (GET) button, won't 'cha?
Friday, August 18, 2006
msb-0052 Ch-ch-ch-ch-changes. (Turn and face the strain)
msb-0052 Ch-ch-ch-ch-changes. (Turn and face the strain)
apologies to David Bowie. :-)
There's not much feedback as I write this episode. (Talk about time shifting, I haven't even uploaded the episode for last thursday, which is still tomorrow for me.)
----
My wife Lee and I are officially registered for the Chefs for MS event.
The wine has been ordered. And the "bon vivant" won't be having any.
I'm putting my best foot forward which means I have to try and keep my speech clear.
Like a lot of MSers out there, I slur my words at the best of times.
----
I haven't heard a peep from Carlo Magno. Its been almost a month. I do hope he's alright. I know he'd been ill with intestinal bleeding.
I've been communicating with One Crazy Chick on my blog and will keep any eye open and ear cocked for any for any news.
I've also heard something yesterday on Channel 11 news, Tuesday August 22, 2006 as I update this, on using some chemotherapy drug: Cytoxan.
I will definitely ask Dr. Herbert about it but I'd have to be pretty sure about it because I really don't like the thought of having to wipe out my immune system, which the chemo would do, in order to rebuild it.
Like how long would I have to be without one because I'm not interested in having to live being scared of anything and everything.
----
"Where's msb-0049 and msb-0050?" I hear you ask. (Okay. So I don't. Its a couple of days off anyway.)
You may have noticed that the numbering on this blog is getting more and more skewed.
I am releasing some video only episodes as trial baloons.
Potential advertisers can see that they can reach an audience of MSers (that's you gentle people) for a very low cost when compared to the usual approach of using the mail.
Never mind what it would cost for them to use TV ads.
That's just plain lunacy.
Also, from the stats again, you have decided to download msb-0050 but not as many of you downloaded msb-0049.
Like what's up with that? Boss Fearss was actually funny.
----
MS changes lives, but its not alone on having that kind of impact.
MS usually hits people who have made some decisions in their lives and have chosen some direction to their lives.
MS just blindsides 'em with a pipe smash to the spine.
In that respect its a car wreck; its like a side swipe.
What you knew and trusted; yourself if nothing else, just isn't there anymore.
But MS is a disease and like all diseases, its completely fair (in a statistical sense.)
----
MS is utterly without prejudice.
Male or female, of almost any age (within certain limits for discovery,) black, white, red, yellow, its utterly without significance.
MS doesn't care about you beyond a hunger for myelin, and your spinal chord is on the menu.
MS is utterly without pity. It can't be appealed to, bargained with or pleaded to.
Most of the problems I have seen or heard, or heard of, are related to people's inability to accept that utter randomness.
Its a bitch to realize that you don't matter worth a damn in the larger scheme of things.
There isn't even anyone to crook a finger at.
Its not like Osama blaming non-muslims for his troubles tinkling or whatever's got his knickers in a twist.
MS happpens utterly without any respect to nationality, religious affiliation, social standing, occupation, sexual orientation or any other category you care to use to divide the chosen from the damned.
Nothing like a little enforced humility.
----
My life has changed several times.
Twice my life almost ended. (I was one of the first chidren in Québec to receive penecilin. I was sooo sick. I'm actually older than the spread of antibiotics outside of testing by the military. The second time was a car crash I walked away from that could have left me a smeary statistic skewered on a median.)
Twice my life got interrupted by MS. (Both times I have managed to recover, the first time almost completely and the second time, to a good extent.)
Once it got interupted by a terrorist act. (Osama bin Laden is equivalent in intent to every two-bit, tin-cup fascist dictator that's ever existed, except he doesn't even have any territory. On that basis, he doesn't even rate as much respect as a school yard bully. All he can do is wreck other people's things.)
Each time I had to pick myself up out of whatever bed I was in and just get on with the fact that life had changed.
I didn't want it to but what I wanted wasn't a consideration.
----
MS doesn't mean anything.
Its utterly impersonal.
But it is vincible.
It can and will be defeated, conquered, brought to reins.
No...
How about a metaphor that works.
It can be cured.
MS requires that we get to know it and get to know ourselves well enough to understand the mechanisms that cascade into an exacerbation.
----
I loathe people that accept "Its a mystery." as an answer for anything.
"Its a mystery" only because they're too lazy, cheap or intellectually crippled to look for a mechanism.
And those people need to change.
apologies to David Bowie. :-)
There's not much feedback as I write this episode. (Talk about time shifting, I haven't even uploaded the episode for last thursday, which is still tomorrow for me.)
----
My wife Lee and I are officially registered for the Chefs for MS event.
The wine has been ordered.
I'm putting my best foot forward which means I have to try and keep my speech clear.
Like a lot of MSers out there, I slur my words at the best of times.
----
I haven't heard a peep from Carlo Magno. Its been almost a month. I do hope he's alright. I know he'd been ill with intestinal bleeding.
I've been communicating with One Crazy Chick on my blog and will keep any eye open and ear cocked for any for any news.
I've also heard something yesterday on Channel 11 news, Tuesday August 22, 2006 as I update this, on using some chemotherapy drug: Cytoxan.
I will definitely ask Dr. Herbert about it but I'd have to be pretty sure about it because I really don't like the thought of having to wipe out my immune system, which the chemo would do, in order to rebuild it.
Like how long would I have to be without one because I'm not interested in having to live being scared of anything and everything.
----
"Where's msb-0049 and msb-0050?" I hear you ask. (Okay. So I don't. Its a couple of days off anyway.)
You may have noticed that the numbering on this blog is getting more and more skewed.
I am releasing some video only episodes as trial baloons.
Potential advertisers can see that they can reach an audience of MSers (that's you gentle people) for a very low cost when compared to the usual approach of using the mail.
Never mind what it would cost for them to use TV ads.
That's just plain lunacy.
Also, from the stats again, you have decided to download msb-0050 but not as many of you downloaded msb-0049.
Like what's up with that? Boss Fearss was actually funny.
----
MS changes lives, but its not alone on having that kind of impact.
MS usually hits people who have made some decisions in their lives and have chosen some direction to their lives.
MS just blindsides 'em with a pipe smash to the spine.
In that respect its a car wreck; its like a side swipe.
What you knew and trusted; yourself if nothing else, just isn't there anymore.
But MS is a disease and like all diseases, its completely fair (in a statistical sense.)
----
MS is utterly without prejudice.
Male or female, of almost any age (within certain limits for discovery,) black, white, red, yellow, its utterly without significance.
MS doesn't care about you beyond a hunger for myelin, and your spinal chord is on the menu.
MS is utterly without pity. It can't be appealed to, bargained with or pleaded to.
Most of the problems I have seen or heard, or heard of, are related to people's inability to accept that utter randomness.
Its a bitch to realize that you don't matter worth a damn in the larger scheme of things.
There isn't even anyone to crook a finger at.
Its not like Osama blaming non-muslims for his troubles tinkling or whatever's got his knickers in a twist.
MS happpens utterly without any respect to nationality, religious affiliation, social standing, occupation, sexual orientation or any other category you care to use to divide the chosen from the damned.
Nothing like a little enforced humility.
----
My life has changed several times.
Twice my life almost ended. (I was one of the first chidren in Québec to receive penecilin. I was sooo sick. I'm actually older than the spread of antibiotics outside of testing by the military. The second time was a car crash I walked away from that could have left me a smeary statistic skewered on a median.)
Twice my life got interrupted by MS. (Both times I have managed to recover, the first time almost completely and the second time, to a good extent.)
Once it got interupted by a terrorist act. (Osama bin Laden is equivalent in intent to every two-bit, tin-cup fascist dictator that's ever existed, except he doesn't even have any territory. On that basis, he doesn't even rate as much respect as a school yard bully. All he can do is wreck other people's things.)
Each time I had to pick myself up out of whatever bed I was in and just get on with the fact that life had changed.
I didn't want it to but what I wanted wasn't a consideration.
----
MS doesn't mean anything.
Its utterly impersonal.
But it is vincible.
It can and will be defeated, conquered, brought to reins.
No...
How about a metaphor that works.
It can be cured.
MS requires that we get to know it and get to know ourselves well enough to understand the mechanisms that cascade into an exacerbation.
----
I loathe people that accept "Its a mystery." as an answer for anything.
"Its a mystery" only because they're too lazy, cheap or intellectually crippled to look for a mechanism.
And those people need to change.
Wednesday, August 16, 2006
msb-0051 Oops, I Missed the Half a Century Show.
msb-0051 Oops, I Missed the Half a Century Show.
I've decided to celebrate the fiftieth show, albeit a show late, with a bunch of podcasting anthems.
Enjoy.
Send me some feedback: charles at MSBPodcast.com
----
To my audience ...
My stats are driving me nuts.
What happened?
Did a whole bunch of you come back from vacation and waited 'till now to pick up the old shows?
My stats for those shows are looking better now. Weird.
----
And to any potential advertisers ...
How did you like the videos?
And it would only cost $0.05 per view, instead of the current cost structure, such as pharmacos' marketing approach of $4,50+|- per person to mail it.
And they're left to hope it doesn't end up, unplayed, in the bottom of a drawer somewhere.
I don't own a VCR so that pointed up that there was nowhere else that you material could go, except maybe the trash.
This nickel per view is usually in addition to other media, like ads in the MS publications.
The internet is wonderful if you already know where you're going, that's what's behind the success of Google.
----
Here's an idea...
Lets try a grass roots movement to increase the audience.
If you like the show, you can spread the word, tell others you meet at some MS event.
If you'd like some cards email me: charles at MSBPodcast.com.
I'll be doing my bit too.
I'm going to an event sponsored by Teva Neurosciences on Sundau, September 10th, 2006 at the W Hotel in New York.
Its featuring:
All of your feedback has been very positive and encouraging.
Well ... all but one, from somebody who accused me of technophilia (and somebody tell me how the hell did she get to even hear my show anyway?)
She reminded me of the woman who wrote to me (with pen and paper, an envelope and a stamp, no less,) back when I was producing the newsletter for the Ottawa chapter in 1985 or '86, whining about my saying we all needed to use computers to overcome our respective handicaps. (Man I feel old.)
Now, once again, I seem to be on the bleeding edge of technology.
I've decided to celebrate the fiftieth show, albeit a show late, with a bunch of podcasting anthems.
Enjoy.
Send me some feedback: charles at MSBPodcast.com
----
To my audience ...
My stats are driving me nuts.
What happened?
Did a whole bunch of you come back from vacation and waited 'till now to pick up the old shows?
My stats for those shows are looking better now. Weird.
----
And to any potential advertisers ...
How did you like the videos?
- Such Great Great Heights, by The Postal Service by/for SubPop records
- Berlex Trial Balloon (by invitation only!)
- Boss Fear
- Slip Of The Tongue
And it would only cost $0.05 per view, instead of the current cost structure, such as pharmacos' marketing approach of $4,50+|- per person to mail it.
And they're left to hope it doesn't end up, unplayed, in the bottom of a drawer somewhere.
I don't own a VCR so that pointed up that there was nowhere else that you material could go, except maybe the trash.
This nickel per view is usually in addition to other media, like ads in the MS publications.
The internet is wonderful if you already know where you're going, that's what's behind the success of Google.
----
Here's an idea...
Lets try a grass roots movement to increase the audience.
If you like the show, you can spread the word, tell others you meet at some MS event.
If you'd like some cards email me: charles at MSBPodcast.com.
I'll be doing my bit too.
I'm going to an event sponsored by Teva Neurosciences on Sundau, September 10th, 2006 at the W Hotel in New York.
Its featuring:
- Dr. Joseph Herbert of the MS Comprehensive Center,
- Dr. Harold Atkins of the Otawa Hospital (where I was first officially diagnosed) and
- Ann Oswald, an MS Advocate at the Teva Booth.
All of your feedback has been very positive and encouraging.
Well ... all but one, from somebody who accused me of technophilia (and somebody tell me how the hell did she get to even hear my show anyway?)
She reminded me of the woman who wrote to me (with pen and paper, an envelope and a stamp, no less,) back when I was producing the newsletter for the Ottawa chapter in 1985 or '86, whining about my saying we all needed to use computers to overcome our respective handicaps. (Man I feel old.)
Now, once again, I seem to be on the bleeding edge of technology.
Thursday, August 10, 2006
msb-0048 Together
msb-0048 Together
Feedback come first so...
I'm still not able to give any feedback on Dr. Code's book because Lee, my wife, has seized it from me and is reading it.
But from the comments she insists on making to me, it appears to be full of sound nutritional advice, like stuff on omega-3 oils and something I'd never heard of emu oil.
More on this when either I can get Lee to give a synopsis, wish me luck, or I can give it myself.
In the mean time, I've been reading "No Time to Loose" by Pema Chödrön.
Even if you're not into eastern mysticism or comparative religion or much of anything else dealing with Buddhism, you have to admire the phrases she quotes: "For those ailing in the world, until their every sickness has been healed, may I myself become for them the doctor, nurse, the medicine itself."
----
msb-0047 Oh Wow! indeed.
I got feedback almost immediately from Miss Chriss.
"I'm so psyched up you are getting the word out about MS with your podcast.
So often it feels like we are forgotten because we aren't the 'disease du jour'.
Keep it up!"
I don't know what to say. (But you know I'm bound to try. :-)
If I'm getting the word out, its because people other than MSers like podsafe music too.
(The words of an old Monty Python skit rise unbidden to my brain: "I like a nice tune. You're forced to!")
But my primary focus is about weaving us MSers together.
Its about making a web of us so that we can be strong together, rather being left by the side of the road, one at a time, like debris or detritus.
300,000 or more of us is too large a number for anyone to glibly ignore; a politician or a company or an HMO or anybody who makes money off of us. (And make no mistake, people are making money off of us.)
Its nice that non-MSers can see us as people too but, at the risk of sounding callous, that's not what I'm trying to accomplish here.
I want to get the word out to us, the MSers, first.
Our drugs, our products, our services, our needs, our wants. Together we can rise out of our couches, wheelchairs and beds.
I've had it with denial.
I've had it with being ignored.
MSCPodcast.com is a way for us to get a voice coming out of 300,000 throats.
Where even a whisper can make for a mighty roar.
----
My stats are driving me nuts.
They just aren't consistent.
Either I'm rolling through the entire population of MSers (I should have such luck, for the most part they haven't heard of me,) or some of you are making download decision based on some criterion that is just baffling me.
Congrats. I'm now about to lose any remaining hair atop my dome from all the head scratching.
Stuff I though was going to do well doesn't. (And sometimes the stats sucked like a two horsepower shop-vac wiping up a basement after a flash flood.)
Stuff I wasn't so sure about had great stats.
Ya gotta drop me an email telling me how you decide what you're going to get: charles @ MSBPodcast.com
----
I've been reading a couple of books on propaganda techniques.
They aren't very readable and while I will have the links in the shownotes, I really don't recommend them. Well, not "per se" but it does make for interesting reading.
Don't be like that.
I read a lot.
What else do I have to do with my copious spare time?
I don't like commercial TV.
I hate how the content has become so chopped up by and secondary to the ads.
I like the way they used to do it on many European channels. Like the Zweites Deutsches Fernsehen ("Second German Television").
They ran their advertisments in a block at the end of a program and they were all good. They had to be...
I like PBS but they currently on their twice yearly "Begging Hiatus".
I loathe the rapidly shrinking pool that commercial Radio has become, as the ClearChanneling consolidation has happened over the past decade, as the talent has been evaporated, distilled away.
I just don't listen ot it.
Its been months since I tuned the receiver to anything but the frequency my iTrip uses.
Its all become a become a wasteland of stupendous soporificity.
----
Anyways. One of the book I've been reading is by Erward L. Bernays (I bet you though I was going to say Marshall McLuhan, a fellow Canadian of note.)
Keep in mind that the book was written after the first world war but before the rise of the Nazis. Goebels had still to come to prominence.
I was reading it to see exactly how the phenomenon of mass media manipulation was structured; before it rose into an art form. (And with Leni Riefenstall, it was an artform.)
Its amazing to reflect that none of these techniques existed before the turn of the 20th century. In fact, none of the techniques existed formally a scant seventy years ago.
----
Look again.
This medium, podcasting, is less than two years old.
Oh there were expirements and trial balloons leading up to this but podasting itself is less than two years old.
The tools are evolving as I write this.
Likewise, the techniques are evolving as I write this.
We are making up the rules as we go.
But, by writing them down and adding to the store of knowledge, we are standing on the shoulders of giants.
As Miranda said to Prospero: "O brave new world,
That has such people in't!"
Feedback come first so...
I'm still not able to give any feedback on Dr. Code's book because Lee, my wife, has seized it from me and is reading it.
But from the comments she insists on making to me, it appears to be full of sound nutritional advice, like stuff on omega-3 oils and something I'd never heard of emu oil.
More on this when either I can get Lee to give a synopsis, wish me luck, or I can give it myself.
In the mean time, I've been reading "No Time to Loose" by Pema Chödrön.
Even if you're not into eastern mysticism or comparative religion or much of anything else dealing with Buddhism, you have to admire the phrases she quotes: "For those ailing in the world, until their every sickness has been healed, may I myself become for them the doctor, nurse, the medicine itself."
----
msb-0047 Oh Wow! indeed.
I got feedback almost immediately from Miss Chriss.
"I'm so psyched up you are getting the word out about MS with your podcast.
So often it feels like we are forgotten because we aren't the 'disease du jour'.
Keep it up!"
I don't know what to say. (But you know I'm bound to try. :-)
If I'm getting the word out, its because people other than MSers like podsafe music too.
(The words of an old Monty Python skit rise unbidden to my brain: "I like a nice tune. You're forced to!")
But my primary focus is about weaving us MSers together.
Its about making a web of us so that we can be strong together, rather being left by the side of the road, one at a time, like debris or detritus.
300,000 or more of us is too large a number for anyone to glibly ignore; a politician or a company or an HMO or anybody who makes money off of us. (And make no mistake, people are making money off of us.)
Its nice that non-MSers can see us as people too but, at the risk of sounding callous, that's not what I'm trying to accomplish here.
I want to get the word out to us, the MSers, first.
Our drugs, our products, our services, our needs, our wants. Together we can rise out of our couches, wheelchairs and beds.
I've had it with denial.
I've had it with being ignored.
MSCPodcast.com is a way for us to get a voice coming out of 300,000 throats.
Where even a whisper can make for a mighty roar.
----
My stats are driving me nuts.
They just aren't consistent.
Either I'm rolling through the entire population of MSers (I should have such luck, for the most part they haven't heard of me,) or some of you are making download decision based on some criterion that is just baffling me.
Congrats. I'm now about to lose any remaining hair atop my dome from all the head scratching.
Stuff I though was going to do well doesn't. (And sometimes the stats sucked like a two horsepower shop-vac wiping up a basement after a flash flood.)
Stuff I wasn't so sure about had great stats.
Ya gotta drop me an email telling me how you decide what you're going to get: charles @ MSBPodcast.com
----
I've been reading a couple of books on propaganda techniques.
They aren't very readable and while I will have the links in the shownotes, I really don't recommend them. Well, not "per se" but it does make for interesting reading.
Don't be like that.
I read a lot.
What else do I have to do with my copious spare time?
I don't like commercial TV.
I hate how the content has become so chopped up by and secondary to the ads.
I like the way they used to do it on many European channels. Like the Zweites Deutsches Fernsehen ("Second German Television").
They ran their advertisments in a block at the end of a program and they were all good. They had to be...
I like PBS but they currently on their twice yearly "Begging Hiatus".
I loathe the rapidly shrinking pool that commercial Radio has become, as the ClearChanneling consolidation has happened over the past decade, as the talent has been evaporated, distilled away.
I just don't listen ot it.
Its been months since I tuned the receiver to anything but the frequency my iTrip uses.
Its all become a become a wasteland of stupendous soporificity.
----
Anyways. One of the book I've been reading is by Erward L. Bernays (I bet you though I was going to say Marshall McLuhan, a fellow Canadian of note.)
Keep in mind that the book was written after the first world war but before the rise of the Nazis. Goebels had still to come to prominence.
I was reading it to see exactly how the phenomenon of mass media manipulation was structured; before it rose into an art form. (And with Leni Riefenstall, it was an artform.)
Its amazing to reflect that none of these techniques existed before the turn of the 20th century. In fact, none of the techniques existed formally a scant seventy years ago.
----
Look again.
This medium, podcasting, is less than two years old.
Oh there were expirements and trial balloons leading up to this but podasting itself is less than two years old.
The tools are evolving as I write this.
Likewise, the techniques are evolving as I write this.
We are making up the rules as we go.
But, by writing them down and adding to the store of knowledge, we are standing on the shoulders of giants.
As Miranda said to Prospero: "O brave new world,
That has such people in't!"
Tuesday, August 08, 2006
msb-0047 Oh Wow!
msb-0047 Oh Wow!
Feed back come first so ...
I got some from a Dr. Code. He's got a book on something I believe in, nutrition and MS.
This is some of the content of his email:
Hi Charles,
I am impressed that you are raising the awareness of Multiple Sclerosis in a new and unique way. Thank you for doing so.
My father was diagnosed with MS 10 years ago, and was forced to leave medical practice.
Since then he has regained his health though nutritional methods, and has written a book called "Who's In Control of Your MS?", ISBN: 0-9737918-0-2
(http://shop.drbillcode.com/index.php?main_page=product_info&products_id=1).
----
More feedback:
Advertising people don't understand podcasting and RSS yet.
I can distribute any kind of content: PDF (Portable Document Format) files, audio and video.
One objection I heard from someone that manufactures a complicated powered wheel chair is that they don't want to use podcasting because their advertising is basically visual and needs to be to show off the features of their wheel chairs and that my podcast is audio.
I produce an audio podcast because its cheap, easy and fast.
Also, this way I can do it in my office regardless of how dimly lit it is (or not, depending on whether I close the drapes, or not.)
Also that means I can wear whatever I feel like and be my usual schlubby unkempt self.
On the internet, no one can tell you're a dawg.
But video places certain demands on production values (and expenses,) that I don't feel are necessary or germaine to building up a community of MSers.
But that doesn't mean I can't 'cast quality video (to a pod or to a PC.) (Actually I was stunned at the tools available to let me do it.)
Which sort of explains msb-0045 Video Podcasting and msb-0046 XXXXX Trial Balloon.
I can take video content and put it out there.
msb-0045 was a video podcast of something put together by or for "SubPop" for "The Postal Service" promoting the song "Such Great Heights." They are a great band and deserve all the success they get.
msb-0046 was a video podcast lifted from a promotional video, sent to me for around four bucks in mail each, that could have gone out for about USD$50.00 per thousand or a nickel (USD$0.05) each.
That's five cents versus four bucks. 1/80 the cost.
The stuff looks great and I have the appropriate software to run conversions across almost any format the companies care to supply to the .M4V format which, while not native to the iPod, plays well in iTunes or on an iPod, as well as any web based player.
However the current approach that XXXX used with regards to text should be tightened and the colors should trend more towards using primary colors.
It didn't look that hot on the DVD either.
I don't feel that bad for them.
Its all stuff that can be redone in post-production from the original footage.
Apart from the one download that some got, its available by direct contact to potential advertisers.
However. because it is an advert, or a five minute snippet of one, unpaid for and, as my wife rightly pointed out, until and unless we get a contract authorizing us to play it, could be considered copyright violation, its not for general consumption. (And I can play anything as long as I don't 'cast it.)
Sorry, but there will forever be a hole in the episode numbering.
(Mostly because its on the server wating for potential advertisers to get their own "private screening" and see what this mother can do what you take the training wheels off.)
----
Some other feedback was somewhat less positive:
Okay, you're right. You're absolutely right. I appologize.
But you really put it rather harshly. (You know who you are.)
Lets start at the beginning.
Let me introduce myself.
My name is Charles-A. Rovira and I have MS. (Just listen to me. I have no breath control and very little voice control left. Do I sound normal to you?)
I have had MS since I was sixteen when, in 1969, MS took all the neat handwriting technique the nuns had taught me, under pain of eternal damnation, and threw it into a cocked hat.
Still I managed to recover enough of my coordination to become a guitarist, and a damn good one if I say so myself.
But being a musician and eating regular don't exactly go together. Besides I accomplished what I'd set out to do, I got respect, and the rest was impositions, all guys telling me about "getting that sound".
I went into computers in Montreal, back when there were only mainframe and mini computers. Micros were in their infancy. This was in 1976.
I was fine until 1985 when I had a bad attack that put me into the Ottawa General hospital, for five weeks. That's when I was officially diagnosed with MS.
I used the time in Neuro-ICU to think about objects and object-oriented programming. Its easy when you don't have any distractions, like a body, or an appetite, or much of anything else.
I recovered, I wrote for a bunch of magazines that don't exist anymore and was making a nice life for myself when MS came a knocking again; with a vengence.
I spent one miserable month in 1997 trying to get my ass out of a Brooklyn bed and discovered that, this time, I was left having to use a cane to get around.
Like the last time, the previous attack, I thought about objects and data relationships.
Rather than sitting on my duff, feeling sorry for myself, I went to school and finally got a degree, in business.
----
I discovered digital audio recording, RSS and Podcasting about 9 months ago.
Now I'm trying to make a go of MSBPodcast.com because I see the possibilities that its extremely focused 'casting capabilities have for giving news and tunes to an extremely small percentage of the population.
MSers make up 0.0833% or 1 in 1,200 of the population.
No advertising firm in the world will touch that.
But the internet can weave every one of those twelve hunded into over 300,000 people.
That's a lot of people.
I am trying to bring these people, us MSers, together with music, podsafe music.
What I hope is that I can bring quality to audio and video while creating a channel for information that we need.
This podcast is what I have planned to do it with and through.
And that's who I am, dearie.
Those are my bona fides.
Any more questions?
----
More feedback:
I recently got in touch with Pat Metheny or at least with the webmeiser who's taking care of his website (I'll put it in the show notes.)
He may be providing some tunes to the Podsafe Music Network, the PMN.
You might be hearing some jazz on this show real soon now.
----
Even more feedback:
Things are moving along for ChefsForMS. Twelve bottles of wines have been selected and they'll be going into some "gift baskets" four at a time. It should be a fun evening. Dry for me but fun regardless.
Feed back come first so ...
I got some from a Dr. Code. He's got a book on something I believe in, nutrition and MS.
This is some of the content of his email:
Hi Charles,
I am impressed that you are raising the awareness of Multiple Sclerosis in a new and unique way. Thank you for doing so.
My father was diagnosed with MS 10 years ago, and was forced to leave medical practice.
Since then he has regained his health though nutritional methods, and has written a book called "Who's In Control of Your MS?", ISBN: 0-9737918-0-2
(http://shop.drbillcode.com/index.php?main_page=product_info&products_id=1).
----
More feedback:
Advertising people don't understand podcasting and RSS yet.
I can distribute any kind of content: PDF (Portable Document Format) files, audio and video.
One objection I heard from someone that manufactures a complicated powered wheel chair is that they don't want to use podcasting because their advertising is basically visual and needs to be to show off the features of their wheel chairs and that my podcast is audio.
I produce an audio podcast because its cheap, easy and fast.
Also, this way I can do it in my office regardless of how dimly lit it is (or not, depending on whether I close the drapes, or not.)
Also that means I can wear whatever I feel like and be my usual schlubby unkempt self.
On the internet, no one can tell you're a dawg.
But video places certain demands on production values (and expenses,) that I don't feel are necessary or germaine to building up a community of MSers.
But that doesn't mean I can't 'cast quality video (to a pod or to a PC.) (Actually I was stunned at the tools available to let me do it.)
Which sort of explains msb-0045 Video Podcasting and msb-0046 XXXXX Trial Balloon.
I can take video content and put it out there.
msb-0045 was a video podcast of something put together by or for "SubPop" for "The Postal Service" promoting the song "Such Great Heights." They are a great band and deserve all the success they get.
msb-0046 was a video podcast lifted from a promotional video, sent to me for around four bucks in mail each, that could have gone out for about USD$50.00 per thousand or a nickel (USD$0.05) each.
That's five cents versus four bucks. 1/80 the cost.
The stuff looks great and I have the appropriate software to run conversions across almost any format the companies care to supply to the .M4V format which, while not native to the iPod, plays well in iTunes or on an iPod, as well as any web based player.
However the current approach that XXXX used with regards to text should be tightened and the colors should trend more towards using primary colors.
It didn't look that hot on the DVD either.
I don't feel that bad for them.
Its all stuff that can be redone in post-production from the original footage.
Apart from the one download that some got, its available by direct contact to potential advertisers.
However. because it is an advert, or a five minute snippet of one, unpaid for and, as my wife rightly pointed out, until and unless we get a contract authorizing us to play it, could be considered copyright violation, its not for general consumption. (And I can play anything as long as I don't 'cast it.)
Sorry, but there will forever be a hole in the episode numbering.
(Mostly because its on the server wating for potential advertisers to get their own "private screening" and see what this mother can do what you take the training wheels off.)
----
Some other feedback was somewhat less positive:
Okay, you're right. You're absolutely right. I appologize.
But you really put it rather harshly. (You know who you are.)
Lets start at the beginning.
Let me introduce myself.
My name is Charles-A. Rovira and I have MS. (Just listen to me. I have no breath control and very little voice control left. Do I sound normal to you?)
I have had MS since I was sixteen when, in 1969, MS took all the neat handwriting technique the nuns had taught me, under pain of eternal damnation, and threw it into a cocked hat.
Still I managed to recover enough of my coordination to become a guitarist, and a damn good one if I say so myself.
But being a musician and eating regular don't exactly go together. Besides I accomplished what I'd set out to do, I got respect, and the rest was impositions, all guys telling me about "getting that sound".
I went into computers in Montreal, back when there were only mainframe and mini computers. Micros were in their infancy. This was in 1976.
I was fine until 1985 when I had a bad attack that put me into the Ottawa General hospital, for five weeks. That's when I was officially diagnosed with MS.
I used the time in Neuro-ICU to think about objects and object-oriented programming. Its easy when you don't have any distractions, like a body, or an appetite, or much of anything else.
I recovered, I wrote for a bunch of magazines that don't exist anymore and was making a nice life for myself when MS came a knocking again; with a vengence.
I spent one miserable month in 1997 trying to get my ass out of a Brooklyn bed and discovered that, this time, I was left having to use a cane to get around.
Like the last time, the previous attack, I thought about objects and data relationships.
Rather than sitting on my duff, feeling sorry for myself, I went to school and finally got a degree, in business.
----
I discovered digital audio recording, RSS and Podcasting about 9 months ago.
Now I'm trying to make a go of MSBPodcast.com because I see the possibilities that its extremely focused 'casting capabilities have for giving news and tunes to an extremely small percentage of the population.
MSers make up 0.0833% or 1 in 1,200 of the population.
No advertising firm in the world will touch that.
But the internet can weave every one of those twelve hunded into over 300,000 people.
That's a lot of people.
I am trying to bring these people, us MSers, together with music, podsafe music.
What I hope is that I can bring quality to audio and video while creating a channel for information that we need.
This podcast is what I have planned to do it with and through.
And that's who I am, dearie.
Those are my bona fides.
Any more questions?
----
More feedback:
I recently got in touch with Pat Metheny or at least with the webmeiser who's taking care of his website (I'll put it in the show notes.)
He may be providing some tunes to the Podsafe Music Network, the PMN.
You might be hearing some jazz on this show real soon now.
----
Even more feedback:
Things are moving along for ChefsForMS. Twelve bottles of wines have been selected and they'll be going into some "gift baskets" four at a time. It should be a fun evening. Dry for me but fun regardless.
Sunday, August 06, 2006
msb-0044 Marilyn Monroe and "moi" (Believe it or not!)
msb-0044 Marilyn Monroe and "moi" (Believe it or not!)
Got Ya!
The closest I ever got to Ms. Monroe was when my father dragged me to the opening of a shopping mall in Ville LaSalle. Yes! Ms. Monroe was opening a shopping mall.
I remember thinking "What's all the fuss about?"
I was a very young boy at the time and wasn't into girls and all that messy biology stuff.
I wasn't drooling and making sidelong glances...
But all the older people were. (I'd call them adults but I suspect that that would be stretching your credulity. They were acting like gawking vessels of hormones. Jeez. You think you know your ol' man and he drags you to this.)
----
Hey, she'd be eighty-one years old this year.
She was born on June 1, 1926.
Its now August 2006. Do the math.
She'd be old enough to be my mother.
Now all these years later, it was back in 1961 or so, I am still thinking "What's all the fuss about?"
The mystique, of course, is that she was one of JFK's squeezes.
She was married, briefly, to Jimmy Dougherty, Joe DiMaggio and Arthur Miller.
Of the three, the only one I wonder about is Jimmy Dougherty.
But she left us some great pictures (which are scrolling past every few seconds if you've downloaded this podcast with iTunes) and some good movies.
Unfortunately, we don't get to see them except on occasionally on PBS and on the "Late, late show"on some oldies movie stations because the movie industry doesn't have much use for "dated content."
But at least you can make movies about anything.
----
Television has no use for anything that would upset anybody, specially the sponsors.
The less I say about that the better.
Its a hippocritical pipe pumping vapid and vacuous sewage into a wasteland.
Radio's was never much better.
That's why George Carlyn's "Seven Words You Can't Say On the media: Shit, Piss, Fuck, Cunt, Cocksucker, Motherfucker and Tits, even required a Supreme Court Decision. Supreme Court case of FCC v. Pacifica Foundation. (Hey. Its in the Supreme Courts' records. All seven words.)
Unlike Lenny Bruce, the little putz who kept using yiddish euphemisms, he actually managed to get the words out and into the court record.
----
But radio is a slightly different medium. It leaves much to the imagination.
You can be middle-aged, fat, balding, have body odor, bad feet and atrophied limbs, but if you sound good and have the right delivery, which means you can read faster than you can talk, you can be a golden boy on radio.
Look at Howard Stern. Nah, I'd rather not.
Or check out the Ouch! podcast from the BBC. Now there's a bunch of people who have their bona fides.
Of course, you still have the restriction on those seven words.
Ohh! What power, what Ju Ju there must be in the utterance of any of those seven words.
----
Podcasting is not subject to the FCCs vaguaries (both in form and in application.)
Its not a broadcast. Its by subscription or clearly by request.
But that doesn't mean it not subject to common decency (and the even rarer ... common sense.)
Gratuitous profanity is senseless and I say fuck it.
Got Ya!
The closest I ever got to Ms. Monroe was when my father dragged me to the opening of a shopping mall in Ville LaSalle. Yes! Ms. Monroe was opening a shopping mall.
I remember thinking "What's all the fuss about?"
I was a very young boy at the time and wasn't into girls and all that messy biology stuff.
I wasn't drooling and making sidelong glances...
But all the older people were. (I'd call them adults but I suspect that that would be stretching your credulity. They were acting like gawking vessels of hormones. Jeez. You think you know your ol' man and he drags you to this.)
----
Hey, she'd be eighty-one years old this year.
She was born on June 1, 1926.
Its now August 2006. Do the math.
She'd be old enough to be my mother.
Now all these years later, it was back in 1961 or so, I am still thinking "What's all the fuss about?"
The mystique, of course, is that she was one of JFK's squeezes.
She was married, briefly, to Jimmy Dougherty, Joe DiMaggio and Arthur Miller.
Of the three, the only one I wonder about is Jimmy Dougherty.
But she left us some great pictures (which are scrolling past every few seconds if you've downloaded this podcast with iTunes) and some good movies.
Unfortunately, we don't get to see them except on occasionally on PBS and on the "Late, late show"on some oldies movie stations because the movie industry doesn't have much use for "dated content."
But at least you can make movies about anything.
----
Television has no use for anything that would upset anybody, specially the sponsors.
The less I say about that the better.
Its a hippocritical pipe pumping vapid and vacuous sewage into a wasteland.
Radio's was never much better.
That's why George Carlyn's "Seven Words You Can't Say On the media: Shit, Piss, Fuck, Cunt, Cocksucker, Motherfucker and Tits, even required a Supreme Court Decision. Supreme Court case of FCC v. Pacifica Foundation. (Hey. Its in the Supreme Courts' records. All seven words.)
Unlike Lenny Bruce, the little putz who kept using yiddish euphemisms, he actually managed to get the words out and into the court record.
----
But radio is a slightly different medium. It leaves much to the imagination.
You can be middle-aged, fat, balding, have body odor, bad feet and atrophied limbs, but if you sound good and have the right delivery, which means you can read faster than you can talk, you can be a golden boy on radio.
Look at Howard Stern. Nah, I'd rather not.
Or check out the Ouch! podcast from the BBC. Now there's a bunch of people who have their bona fides.
Of course, you still have the restriction on those seven words.
Ohh! What power, what Ju Ju there must be in the utterance of any of those seven words.
----
Podcasting is not subject to the FCCs vaguaries (both in form and in application.)
Its not a broadcast. Its by subscription or clearly by request.
But that doesn't mean it not subject to common decency (and the even rarer ... common sense.)
Gratuitous profanity is senseless and I say fuck it.
Thursday, August 03, 2006
msb-0043 Was it good for you too?
msb-0043 Was it good for you too?
Feedback come first so ...
How did you like a shorter daily podcast? Its a bit more demanding in research but its a lot easier on my speech (and on your ears, I guess.)
Email me at charles at MSBPodcast.com.
Or record a voice email at www.MSBPodcats.com.
----
From the download stats, it wasn't so good.
Maybe you like the old format better; only twice a week.
Then again, maybe you're taking summer vacation.
I can't know unless you tell me. charles at MSCPodcast.com
Basically I've only had half the downloads that I usually do.
Its hard to make anything of that except that, since I didn't do anything else (except play some cool bands like CSS,) from my usual episodes.
----
One Crazy Chick got in touch with me after I mentionned going to Tai Chi on Friday (msb-0041 Broken).
Here is my reply:
"I love Tai Chi. I have derived a lot of benefit from it. I always feel energized and relaxed at the same time after the sessions.
While I would recommend it to anyone, I would check with a physiotherapist first to see if it might be contra-indicated for any reason.
Since you're into karate, you might find the pace quite slow. Its all about grace and flow. (Though some of the routines will leave you hurting, but it a good way. :-)
----
You may have noticed a return of Johnny Velcro's "Pod Pyrates" intro. He's allowing me to use it again.
(I love asking for permission. It lets me bounce emails around and catch up on how people are doing.)
He's been taking his kids everywhere while he and his wife have been house hunting. He's still looking though so its been a frustrating exercise.
----
I've just finished watching Bill Moyers speaking with Pema Chödrön.
Pema Chödrön is, to quote Mr. Moyers' pages on the PBS web site: (http://www.pbs.org/moyers/portraits_chodron.html, [it's all in the show notes folks, all in the show notes,]) "an American Buddhist nun and author whose teachings and writings on meditation have helped make Buddhism accessible to a broad Western audience."
I was stunned by this woman. By her own admission she no longer ventures forth from the monastary in Cape Breton, Nova Scotia.
Her health may be failing but I was the presence of a wellspring of sanity and of calm springing forth from this woman.
I was also stunned by her attitude toward deity, any deity.
She has written many books, the latest being No Time to Lose: A Timely Guide to the Way of the Bodhisattva (Hardcover) ISBN: 1590301358.
Go to Amazon and buy this book. I have just ordered my copy on another tab in my browser.
We have chosen radically different paths to get to the same place. I admire her path as much as she would admire mine.
I have found a place and a time for deity and for myself and I let deity be in deity's place and time and deity can let me be in my place and time.
(Who would have ever thought of Max Planck as a theosopher. Sub-Planck space-time is made up of units shorter than 1.61624 × 10-35 meter and spans of time shorter than 5.39121 × 10-44 second.)
----
I am still waiting to hear if Carlo Magno will be resuming the trek from Seattle to New York.
----
ChefsForMS is still looming large ahead of me.
Eight bottles of good wine and my lips won't touch a drop of their content.
And since I won't be at home relaxing, but I'll be working instead, promoting the podcast, I'll have to be on my best behavior that whole evening.
----
----
Feedback come first so ...
How did you like a shorter daily podcast? Its a bit more demanding in research but its a lot easier on my speech (and on your ears, I guess.)
Email me at charles at MSBPodcast.com.
Or record a voice email at www.MSBPodcats.com.
----
From the download stats, it wasn't so good.
Maybe you like the old format better; only twice a week.
Then again, maybe you're taking summer vacation.
I can't know unless you tell me. charles at MSCPodcast.com
Basically I've only had half the downloads that I usually do.
Its hard to make anything of that except that, since I didn't do anything else (except play some cool bands like CSS,) from my usual episodes.
----
One Crazy Chick got in touch with me after I mentionned going to Tai Chi on Friday (msb-0041 Broken).
Here is my reply:
"I love Tai Chi. I have derived a lot of benefit from it. I always feel energized and relaxed at the same time after the sessions.
While I would recommend it to anyone, I would check with a physiotherapist first to see if it might be contra-indicated for any reason.
Since you're into karate, you might find the pace quite slow. Its all about grace and flow. (Though some of the routines will leave you hurting, but it a good way. :-)
----
You may have noticed a return of Johnny Velcro's "Pod Pyrates" intro. He's allowing me to use it again.
(I love asking for permission. It lets me bounce emails around and catch up on how people are doing.)
He's been taking his kids everywhere while he and his wife have been house hunting. He's still looking though so its been a frustrating exercise.
----
I've just finished watching Bill Moyers speaking with Pema Chödrön.
Pema Chödrön is, to quote Mr. Moyers' pages on the PBS web site: (http://www.pbs.org/moyers/portraits_chodron.html, [it's all in the show notes folks, all in the show notes,]) "an American Buddhist nun and author whose teachings and writings on meditation have helped make Buddhism accessible to a broad Western audience."
I was stunned by this woman. By her own admission she no longer ventures forth from the monastary in Cape Breton, Nova Scotia.
Her health may be failing but I was the presence of a wellspring of sanity and of calm springing forth from this woman.
I was also stunned by her attitude toward deity, any deity.
She has written many books, the latest being No Time to Lose: A Timely Guide to the Way of the Bodhisattva (Hardcover) ISBN: 1590301358.
Go to Amazon and buy this book. I have just ordered my copy on another tab in my browser.
We have chosen radically different paths to get to the same place. I admire her path as much as she would admire mine.
I have found a place and a time for deity and for myself and I let deity be in deity's place and time and deity can let me be in my place and time.
(Who would have ever thought of Max Planck as a theosopher. Sub-Planck space-time is made up of units shorter than 1.61624 × 10-35 meter and spans of time shorter than 5.39121 × 10-44 second.)
----
I am still waiting to hear if Carlo Magno will be resuming the trek from Seattle to New York.
----
ChefsForMS is still looming large ahead of me.
Eight bottles of good wine and my lips won't touch a drop of their content.
And since I won't be at home relaxing, but I'll be working instead, promoting the podcast, I'll have to be on my best behavior that whole evening.
----
----
msb-0042 Broken.
msb-0042 Broken.
The heat has broken ... sort of/
Its only, only, eighty five here in Noo Joysey.
So all the songs are all about broken things.
Instead of getting up to record temperature, like in the triple digits, its only getting to eighty five. It still stinks.
----
Yesterday, something came across my 'junk' email inbox folder that caught my eye as I was deleting the usual messages with misspelt subject lines and the other dross that is immediately recognizable as Spam. (Hint to the clients of the loathesome spammers: 'Guess where your shit ends up, unread. I don't care how little it costs, you're still getting ripped off. Fuckin' fools...)
It was about Pat Buchanan's book: "State Of Emergency."
He is so wrong about why civilizations decline that its actually funny, funny, funny.
He thinks, if his xenophobic ranting can be called thought, that immigration will cause the decline and fall of "Imperium Americana" and that the 'States will decline because "we're letting in all these foreigners."
What kind of person call himself Pat? Am I supposed to think of a kindly, wise old man patting a puppy? He's more likely to yell al it until it either piddles on the carpet or jumps up and goes for his jugular. (Go doggie!)
Civilizations have all declined mostly because of changes to the environment in which they arose in the first place.
Changes to the water table have been behind the fall of civilizations from Angkor Wat, the empty palaces of ancient India, Kampucia the Middle East, places like Babylon, Ur, Sumer, the Hittites, the list goes on, to dozens of European Civilizations from Frisia to Gaul, to the dozens of empty cities in South, Central and even North America.
If you want a recent example, Nor'Leens is but a falling shadow of its former self. If it wasn't for the highway system it would be emptying down to sustainable level of population.
Basically the coastal wetlands had been starved for new soil by the very act of building the levees along the Mississippi, and them those levees failed.
Lets see him blame THAT on "them damn foreigners."
----
I'm still following Carlo Mano.
I'm still going to ChefsForMS.
I'm still promoting One Crazy Chick.
----
I'm still on about podcasting as the newest media because it IS.
Where else are you going to hear this next song?
----
Four broken records (sorry, bad pun) and they're "Not On The Radio."
That's it for me 'cause I got to get to work and then to Tai Chi.
Enjoy and have a good week-end.
The heat has broken ... sort of/
Its only, only, eighty five here in Noo Joysey.
So all the songs are all about broken things.
Instead of getting up to record temperature, like in the triple digits, its only getting to eighty five. It still stinks.
----
Yesterday, something came across my 'junk' email inbox folder that caught my eye as I was deleting the usual messages with misspelt subject lines and the other dross that is immediately recognizable as Spam. (Hint to the clients of the loathesome spammers: 'Guess where your shit ends up, unread. I don't care how little it costs, you're still getting ripped off. Fuckin' fools...)
It was about Pat Buchanan's book: "State Of Emergency."
He is so wrong about why civilizations decline that its actually funny, funny, funny.
He thinks, if his xenophobic ranting can be called thought, that immigration will cause the decline and fall of "Imperium Americana" and that the 'States will decline because "we're letting in all these foreigners."
What kind of person call himself Pat? Am I supposed to think of a kindly, wise old man patting a puppy? He's more likely to yell al it until it either piddles on the carpet or jumps up and goes for his jugular. (Go doggie!)
Civilizations have all declined mostly because of changes to the environment in which they arose in the first place.
Changes to the water table have been behind the fall of civilizations from Angkor Wat, the empty palaces of ancient India, Kampucia the Middle East, places like Babylon, Ur, Sumer, the Hittites, the list goes on, to dozens of European Civilizations from Frisia to Gaul, to the dozens of empty cities in South, Central and even North America.
If you want a recent example, Nor'Leens is but a falling shadow of its former self. If it wasn't for the highway system it would be emptying down to sustainable level of population.
Basically the coastal wetlands had been starved for new soil by the very act of building the levees along the Mississippi, and them those levees failed.
Lets see him blame THAT on "them damn foreigners."
----
I'm still following Carlo Mano.
I'm still going to ChefsForMS.
I'm still promoting One Crazy Chick.
----
I'm still on about podcasting as the newest media because it IS.
Where else are you going to hear this next song?
----
Four broken records (sorry, bad pun) and they're "Not On The Radio."
That's it for me 'cause I got to get to work and then to Tai Chi.
Enjoy and have a good week-end.
msb-0041 Sub Pop ... popped.
msb-0041 Sub Pop ... popped.
Man, its scorcher out there; another day of sitting by the noisy air conditioner, not venturing outside of my office.
Its still too friggin' HOT!
----
I'm featuring some more of the music I found at the SubPop site because some of it is really listenable and fits into my format.
Music with a certain "je ne sais quoi."
----
Feedback comes first so here goes ...
From you my audience, (and I know you're out there, the episodes ARE being downloaded,) there's bupkis. Nada. Zip. Nothing.
A great sucking silence cloying at my soul. (Not really, but I figure its more dramatic sounding.)
Actually, I'm running an little experiment with GaragaBand and putting stuff out there in 'm4a' format and I'd like to know if anyone out there WITHOUT AN IPOD can pick them up on their MP3 players and get the full benefit of the changing images and chapters, or not as the case may be.
Send me an email charles@MSBPodcast.com.
----
Mark Yashimoto Nemcoff, who hosts the Pacific Coast Hellway, said in an email that he might use some of the music that I find on his show.
He quoted from another letter/email from me on today's show, and he mentioned MSBPodcast. Anything that gets the word out there is good... Who hoo! :-)
Yes, Podshow was not mentioned in the WSJ article "Mogul of New Media," but since Podshow has some investors and an actual business model, I'm not so sure that that's a bad thing.
Its getting the world ready and stirring up interest, while keeping the good stuff for potential investors for later.
I suspect that Podshow won't get properly examined until"Shadow Falls" gets finished,
"Ancestor" gets made into a movie OUTSIDE of the traditional channels;
and that this indie production makes some money for
the PMN for producing it,
the PDN for carrying it out to the fifty plus million iPod carrying audience, and
for and its investors, that would be me and thee and anyone else who sticks his or her wallet out when the idea gets floated out there.
----
Likewise I'm trying to get in touch with the PodPyrate, Johnny Velcro.
He seems to have podfaded on hiatus for a while now now so I'm wondering ... could I use his intro again?
----
I'm scouring the 'Net for podsafe mp3s and record companies, including 'beck's, that might be enticed into putting some tunes on the PMN, so that I could play them on this 'cast and other people could play 'em on their 'casts.
The GarageBand website is calling to me again with their selection of tunes, like the Sirens calling to Odysseùs.
----
In the meantime, I've got some more tunes from SubPop to fling your way so lets get the obligatory permission out of the way:
----
Question.
Dear Sub Pop, I was wondering if we could play (insert Sub Pop band here) or any of the songs readily available from your site on one of our up coming podcasts?
Answer.
While we're unable to give you blanket permission to use any ole song you want from our catalog, you may incorporate any of the songs that are freely available as MP3s in the multimedia section of this website http://www.subpop.com/scripts/main/multimedia.php into your podcasts.
HOWEVER, we do reserve the right to change our mind about the availability of any song for any reason at any time.
----
They really should hook up with the PMN and be able to track all their music as it percolates through everybody's podcasts.
Man, its scorcher out there; another day of sitting by the noisy air conditioner, not venturing outside of my office.
Its still too friggin' HOT!
----
I'm featuring some more of the music I found at the SubPop site because some of it is really listenable and fits into my format.
Music with a certain "je ne sais quoi."
----
Feedback comes first so here goes ...
From you my audience, (and I know you're out there, the episodes ARE being downloaded,) there's bupkis. Nada. Zip. Nothing.
A great sucking silence cloying at my soul. (Not really, but I figure its more dramatic sounding.)
Actually, I'm running an little experiment with GaragaBand and putting stuff out there in 'm4a' format and I'd like to know if anyone out there WITHOUT AN IPOD can pick them up on their MP3 players and get the full benefit of the changing images and chapters, or not as the case may be.
Send me an email charles@MSBPodcast.com.
----
Mark Yashimoto Nemcoff, who hosts the Pacific Coast Hellway, said in an email that he might use some of the music that I find on his show.
He quoted from another letter/email from me on today's show, and he mentioned MSBPodcast. Anything that gets the word out there is good... Who hoo! :-)
Yes, Podshow was not mentioned in the WSJ article "Mogul of New Media," but since Podshow has some investors and an actual business model, I'm not so sure that that's a bad thing.
Its getting the world ready and stirring up interest, while keeping the good stuff for potential investors for later.
I suspect that Podshow won't get properly examined until"Shadow Falls" gets finished,
"Ancestor" gets made into a movie OUTSIDE of the traditional channels;
and that this indie production makes some money for
the PMN for producing it,
the PDN for carrying it out to the fifty plus million iPod carrying audience, and
for and its investors, that would be me and thee and anyone else who sticks his or her wallet out when the idea gets floated out there.
----
Likewise I'm trying to get in touch with the PodPyrate, Johnny Velcro.
He seems to have podfaded on hiatus for a while now now so I'm wondering ... could I use his intro again?
----
I'm scouring the 'Net for podsafe mp3s and record companies, including 'beck's, that might be enticed into putting some tunes on the PMN, so that I could play them on this 'cast and other people could play 'em on their 'casts.
The GarageBand website is calling to me again with their selection of tunes, like the Sirens calling to Odysseùs.
----
In the meantime, I've got some more tunes from SubPop to fling your way so lets get the obligatory permission out of the way:
----
Question.
Dear Sub Pop, I was wondering if we could play (insert Sub Pop band here) or any of the songs readily available from your site on one of our up coming podcasts?
Answer.
While we're unable to give you blanket permission to use any ole song you want from our catalog, you may incorporate any of the songs that are freely available as MP3s in the multimedia section of this website http://www.subpop.com/scripts/main/multimedia.php into your podcasts.
HOWEVER, we do reserve the right to change our mind about the availability of any song for any reason at any time.
----
They really should hook up with the PMN and be able to track all their music as it percolates through everybody's podcasts.
Tuesday, August 01, 2006
MSB-0040 Gawd its HOT!
MSB-0040 Gawd its HOT!
Feedback comes first, but its a two way street.
And I'm too pooped to give any back.
Its too friggin' HOT!
----
Right on Mark Yashimoto Nemcoff.
I am a disabled podcaster.
Like, who else has the time to devote to doing this shit right? Right?
But that's not the way to start an email which has nothing what-so-ever to do with, about, for or even against, disability.
Its a non-sequitur of the worst kind.
I am a disabled podcaster, but my podcasts aren't disabled.
And for doing such a great job on "Shadow Falls", [munk] and you get the first tune on my show, 'I am, Molly's theme.'
----
I'm not even going to try to get to work today.
I'll handle the conference call from home; within feet of my A.C. (The hallway betwen the office and the rest of the condo, like the bathroom, is a steamy hell, and so is the rest of the condo.)
I'd melt into an uncoordinated pile of spasms before I'd ever get to the corner to wait for a bus.
----
What?
You don't seriously expect me to drive a car in Manhattan, do you?
In Manhattan?
I'd spend my life in the car, driving in circles looking for parking and burning up the planet's fossil resources.
Not to mention then paying more to rent some "air rights," for my car, for a day, than my entire first apartment used to cost me for a month. And that included water, heat and electricity!
In New York all I get is the least open space posible under dirty concrete slab with some hot and cold unidentified running rodents (or, with apologies to Harry Harrison, was that really just a roach I saw, or was that merely the size of a small "Stainless Steel Rat"?)
----
"What about taking a cab, ya cheap bastard?"
Its easy to see you've never tried waiting for a cab in Jersey City, where I actually make my domicile.
"He'll be there in five minutes" gets real old when you've been waiting there for half an hour and have heard that repeated half a dozen times.
And, like the cabs are air conditionned?
I could get in, cane and all, but I'd have to be unstuck off the dark sun soaked vynil, like an egg fried in an old fashioned iron skillet, and poured out onto the pavement.
Screw that.
I'm just going to go and soak my weary butt in the tub or standing in the shower and cool off.
----
Have any of you gone and checked out a Crazy Chicks blog site? (The links are all in the show notes, folks; all in the show notes.)
I'm still waiting for Carlo Magno to get better, he's actually healing up right now, and to get going again. (I hope he's got enough brain to wait until its a bit cooler, Hell! A lot cooler.)
I'm still going to ChefsForMS. (And no, I don't get sea sick.) September 25th.
I know its not going to be the dreaded conference food meal of "chicken in ichor".
----
You're getting five short shows this week rather than the two longish ones.
We'll see how the stats react. You do know that you can download more than one episode, right?
And that you can set your RSS downloaders to getch all unseen/unheard episodes, right? Its a podcast. You can play it any ol' time.
Actually, I heard Adam Curry say something that really gives me pause. (My stats look like a saw with little predictibility from episode to epipsode.)
Adam said that he has seen his stats exhibit hat behavior and that the show notes were the culprit.
If they read like he had intetesting content, the show was downloaded.
If the website read like the show was going to be, uh, boring, people weren't downloading the episode. (Why waste the time on the wire if you aren't going to listen to it? Right?)
----
You know I used to wonder how I would fill the time but that has turned out not to be a problem. And I'm having so much fun.
(Now if only I could get my ass to a speech therapist and see if they can do something about my degenerating delivery.)
And an email would be very much appreciated charles@MSBPodcats.com
C'mon folks. Don't be shy. I don't names unless I have to. (Hey! Do want an Alias? Like an Otaku name?)
Feedback comes first, but its a two way street.
And I'm too pooped to give any back.
Its too friggin' HOT!
----
Right on Mark Yashimoto Nemcoff.
I am a disabled podcaster.
Like, who else has the time to devote to doing this shit right? Right?
But that's not the way to start an email which has nothing what-so-ever to do with, about, for or even against, disability.
Its a non-sequitur of the worst kind.
I am a disabled podcaster, but my podcasts aren't disabled.
And for doing such a great job on "Shadow Falls", [munk] and you get the first tune on my show, 'I am, Molly's theme.'
----
I'm not even going to try to get to work today.
I'll handle the conference call from home; within feet of my A.C. (The hallway betwen the office and the rest of the condo, like the bathroom, is a steamy hell, and so is the rest of the condo.)
I'd melt into an uncoordinated pile of spasms before I'd ever get to the corner to wait for a bus.
----
What?
You don't seriously expect me to drive a car in Manhattan, do you?
In Manhattan?
I'd spend my life in the car, driving in circles looking for parking and burning up the planet's fossil resources.
Not to mention then paying more to rent some "air rights," for my car, for a day, than my entire first apartment used to cost me for a month. And that included water, heat and electricity!
In New York all I get is the least open space posible under dirty concrete slab with some hot and cold unidentified running rodents (or, with apologies to Harry Harrison, was that really just a roach I saw, or was that merely the size of a small "Stainless Steel Rat"?)
----
"What about taking a cab, ya cheap bastard?"
Its easy to see you've never tried waiting for a cab in Jersey City, where I actually make my domicile.
"He'll be there in five minutes" gets real old when you've been waiting there for half an hour and have heard that repeated half a dozen times.
And, like the cabs are air conditionned?
I could get in, cane and all, but I'd have to be unstuck off the dark sun soaked vynil, like an egg fried in an old fashioned iron skillet, and poured out onto the pavement.
Screw that.
I'm just going to go and soak my weary butt in the tub or standing in the shower and cool off.
----
Have any of you gone and checked out a Crazy Chicks blog site? (The links are all in the show notes, folks; all in the show notes.)
I'm still waiting for Carlo Magno to get better, he's actually healing up right now, and to get going again. (I hope he's got enough brain to wait until its a bit cooler, Hell! A lot cooler.)
I'm still going to ChefsForMS. (And no, I don't get sea sick.) September 25th.
I know its not going to be the dreaded conference food meal of "chicken in ichor".
----
You're getting five short shows this week rather than the two longish ones.
We'll see how the stats react. You do know that you can download more than one episode, right?
And that you can set your RSS downloaders to getch all unseen/unheard episodes, right? Its a podcast. You can play it any ol' time.
Actually, I heard Adam Curry say something that really gives me pause. (My stats look like a saw with little predictibility from episode to epipsode.)
Adam said that he has seen his stats exhibit hat behavior and that the show notes were the culprit.
If they read like he had intetesting content, the show was downloaded.
If the website read like the show was going to be, uh, boring, people weren't downloading the episode. (Why waste the time on the wire if you aren't going to listen to it? Right?)
----
You know I used to wonder how I would fill the time but that has turned out not to be a problem. And I'm having so much fun.
(Now if only I could get my ass to a speech therapist and see if they can do something about my degenerating delivery.)
And an email would be very much appreciated charles@MSBPodcats.com
C'mon folks. Don't be shy. I don't names unless I have to. (Hey! Do want an Alias? Like an Otaku name?)
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