House of Jorob

Forever Tweet

Old Tweets never die.

They just get archived.

And are now searchable.

Forever and ever.

Details are here. This is Twitter's take.

Over here is the official Google announcement.

Mad Avenue Blues: American Pie

I love a good parody.
Even one that's over nine minutes long.
There are 19 stanzas making up L McDuff's spoof-song, and every one's dead on.
Vocalist Kevin Osbourne's work is up to the task, he doesn't get in the way of the lyric.

McDuff says he wrote his lyrics and produced the vid in just one day.

Wow.

Released in early June, the tunes been viewed 121,000 times.(performed by vocalist Kevin Osbourne)

So bye, bye those big upfront buys.
Pitched my client who was pliant
But the pitch didn't fly.....

Word Clouds and the House

Been posting for a while now, and thought it'd be fun to play around a little with Wordle, the cloud generator.

The larger the font, the more frequent the word.

This is what House-of-Jorob looks like in a cloud:

I have no idea why Titanic is so big.

Or Rachel.

Looking at it, I think Wordle didn't hit the archives, just the last couple weeks worth of posts.

WTF. 

Looks nice, though.

It's easy to Wordle any page.

Just hit this link and enter a URL.

The Java application does the rest.

World Clock, Spiritual Awakening, and Where's the Joy?

This is the World Clock.

A neat idea.

On the surface.

But the damn thing is soooooooo subtley negative. Right there, under the coolness of it all.

Negative.

Which is really ironic.

Considering Peter Russell is a spiritual kind of guy. And a bit of a pioneer. He's had a website going since 1996.

That's the stone age, as far as the Internet is concerned.

Back then, you coded by hand.

In Notepad.

And uploaded on a 56K modem on your house telephone line.

The hell with everyone else in the house wanting to use the phone at the time.

But to return to the point.....

I don't think the negativity is intentional.

But the choice of what's being tracked is what's doing it.

Births. Deaths. Population growth.

Deforestation.

Communicable/noncommunicable diseases.

Species Extinct.

Abortions.

Hot-button items, all of them.

Each stat is rising, of course, because the figures on the clock are approximations based on past stats and estimates, and then aggregated since the thing started counting, whenever that was.

And when you're done being impressed with the stats, the negativity kicks in.

The world sucks. People suck. We're killing ourselves.

<sigh>

Where are the counters for:

• successful organ transplants
• dollars donated by individuals for disaster relief
• babies and older children adopted
• spayed and neutered puppies and kittens
• teenagers getting their driver's licenses
• weddings
• barrels of single-malt whiskey
• pounds of aluminum, glass, and paper recycled

I mean, if you're going to seek spiritual enlightenment--using these clocks--why not leave a little joy around for others to find?

Wizards in Winter Light Show

This is Carson Williams's 2004 light show.

The original. 

Visitors to the neighborhood heard the sound track by tuning their car radios to the FM channel he was broadcasting his music over--he posted a sign out front with the frequency.

The tune is Wizards in Winter.

The holiday house display spawned a whole bunch of imitators, and got glommed by a beer company.

Williams has gone on to bigger things--read about them here.

Wizards in Winter belongs to the Trans-Siberian Orchestra.

Who might actually have a new album out before too long.

<sigh>.

Perfectionists.

What can you do?

The Great Firewall of China

I wish I could claim credit for that phrase.
But I can't.
"The Great Firewall of China" is a phrase coined to disparage the Chinese government's Golden Shield project.
Golden Shield is China's $800 million dollar Internet lockdown; probably the most sophisticated Internet filtering system of its kind.
Two or three sides are fighting over Internet regulation here in the United States, but in China, the battle is already lost.
(Type Falun Gong into a web browser in a Chinese Internet cafe and watch how fast the police show up after the sirens go off.)
Companies like Cisco happily sold all kinds of filtering gear to the Chinese--what, you thought they manufactured all this stuff themselves?
Hardly.
I'm all for making a buck--God knows, I need them, so I understand the rationale behind the sales.
And Cisco's shareholders would have crucified their board if they didn't make the deal.

Dollar bills don't have a conscience.

But I do.

Which might surprise some people.

Bill Xia heads up a company called Dynamic Internet Technology. He launched it six years ago, and its purpose was to assault the Great Firewall.

Bill brings uncensored Internet to Chinese end users--the citizens. About a million of them make use of his company's software, designed to get around the Great Firewall.

I'm sure any journalist reading this will want to take advantage of the toolkit before they go overseas.

Go right here to get it: The Global Internet Freedom Consortium. There's a zip file that's got 5 tools for busting through the Firewall, right in the middle of the page.