Month: December 2007
December 31, 2007
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Move Complete
It looks like everything is moving smoothly post migration to Typepad. DNS propagation took longer than I expected but my goals was to have everything in place for the end of the year and it looks like that is the case.
I’m sure I’ll be fiddling more with the look of the site and with tweaking the content, but I’m pretty happy with the results even as they are now.
Let me know if anything looks funny or is broken from your end!
December 30, 2007
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Thought
I am propagating.
December 26, 2007
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A Young Person’s Guide To Punk Rock — The Buzzcocks
For me the most brilliant punk was also some of the most brilliant pop music. The Buzzcocks had a damn fine sense of what made a song great…
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Back To TypePad!
I took a few hours this morning to move all the posts I did on the WordPress version of my blog over the last six months to this TypePad version of the blog.
I’m pretty happy with the move (back) to Typepad and I’m looking forward to playing with the site again (something I couldn’t do with WordPress because it really needs to you to understand basic coding to get things looking the way you want).
Next step is to update DNS to point here to make it all official.
December 20, 2007
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Back To TypePad?
I’m thinking about it. I like my WordPress blog well enough but it’s probably more horsepower than I need. 2008 will be (once again) a year where I focus on simplifying and going with what I care about rather than what I “ought to do”.
December 17, 2007
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Thought
Listening to The Editors makes me wonder what would have happened to Joy Division if Ian Curtis hadn’t committed suicide.
December 7, 2007
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Thought
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Thought
Something for the Zune Fanboy out there: http://tinyurl.com/yttxpy
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Thought
Just had coffee with Paul Chato of The Frantics (with the bow tie in this version of “Boot to the Head”): http://tinyurl.com/ywgh48
December 6, 2007
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Thought
Google spreads some sweet chart love on the world: http://tinyurl.com/2nukzo
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Thought
Interestingly, I’m getting more Spock requests these days. Looks like it might have some traction.
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Thought
I saw Moe Berg from TPOH on the street outside Tucows the other day and – despite the song – he’s still not an adult now.
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Thought
Yay! Facebook sends the body of messages instead of just sending links to the messages. http://tinyurl.com/2g9yst
December 3, 2007
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Thought
Snow day
December 2, 2007
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Thought
Who are your heroes?
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A Young Person’s Guide To Punk Rock — Siouxsie & The Banshees
Not all punks were guys. Siouxsie Sioux was part of the Bromley Contingent along with Sid Vicious and Billy Idol and started a band called Siouxsie and The Banshees very early on. At the start I think the band was more a concept — a desire to be in a band rather than a band in fact.
But after a while they got the hang of it and became on of the few bands to move out of the early punk days and have successful careers as “punk” became “new wave”.
Hong Kong Garden was always my favourite from the early stuff:
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Dear Podcasters — I’m Not Listening
I have a very long commute to Tucows every weekday. I generally spend two and a half to three hours in the car each day. Crazy, I know. But my family loves our little village (as do I) and the commute is just a fact of life.
Rather than resign myself to losing 10 to 15 hours every week to mindless FM radio, I decided I’d use the time a little more constructively. For the first year and a half of commuting I listened pretty much exclusively to podcasts in the car. This was great. I listened to Across The Sound, For Immediate Release, Daily Searchcast, Six Pixels of Separation, Marketing Martini and several podcasts each from CBC, New York Times, and Slate. I highly recommend all of them.
But after a while I realized the the signal to noise ratio on podcasts was leaving me frustrated. To much “welcome from…” and “here’s how you can subscribe…” and “to recap last week…”, and “here’s what I’m doing/did/won’t do…”. It was information for sure, but not information that was useful or enriching — and that was kind of the whole point.
I also found that most podcasts suffer from diminishing returns. Once I’m inside the head of a podcaster and understand their world-view I get less and less from each new podcast. But finding new podcasts is a daunting task that can’t be done in the car, so I kept listening to the same podcasts despite the decline in useful insights per hour in the car.
Then a few months ago I basically flipped a switch and decided my commute would be filled with audiobooks and it has been a wonderful, revelatory experience. I’m now consuming one or two books a week. I’m tackling business, science, modern fiction, and classics.
Essentially audiobooks act are incredibly high signal-to-noise podcasts. Or maybe more accurately, books are like really poorly written and produced audiobooks.
So sorry podcasters, until you figure out how to compete with Harper Lee, Walter Isaacson, Cormac McCarthy, Haruki Murakami, Bill Bryson, Nassim Nicholas Taleb, and Chip & Dan Heath I don’t think I’ll be listening anymore.
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Thought
Can I still call myself a blogger if I don’t in fact blog much anymore?