WTF EX

I did a similar thing over on Twitter a couple weeks ago, and I think I only got one response .

I know there are people out there that are reading this, and a few of you have already commented on a few blog posts. Just out of curiosity, though, who are you? How’d you get here?

No, seriously. I really want to know. If you’re reading this, consider yourself obligated to comment and tell me! Even if you think I know who you are and know that you’re reading, respond anyway. It’ll feed my internet popularity ego.

Which really isn’t something I need, but whatever .

So for the last many years, I occasionally receive spam specifically geared towards a car enthusiast. Nothing strange here, but keep reading.

Let it be known that my dad owned a Corvette for a while, and thought he was the super-awesome car guy. He got rid of it a few years ago, mostly because he didn’t really have a whole lot of time to actually enjoy it besides pumping money into it to keep it clean and shiny.

I’ve told him time and time again that it’s not OK to use my e-mail address to sign up for extra entries on sweepstakes, mailing lists for coupons at the local car supply stores, etc. I understand that he really wants to win those things, but it’s not NOT a big deal ‘cuz pressing “DELETE” on the keyboard wears a little thin after a while (spam filters are only so good, blah blah blah). It’s certainly slowed down lately, but I occasionally get one that reminds me that he’s still doing this stuff.

Today I received an offer for a complimentary car inspection from a dealership down the street from him in Richmond, Virginia (note that I live in New Jersey). This clearly says to me that he’s still using my e-mail address to sign up for things.

What does this mean? What does it say? He’s the type of person who types full URLs into the search bar, and also didn’t understand why it wasn’t OK for me to “just put in a little higher bid” on one of his eBay auctions to force the other guy to bid more. It’s not like he’s a bad guy, or anything (though he would be extremely defensive if I called him on it, again). So what is it? Are we just so in tune with the internet and its associated culture that we don’t even know how to explain these concepts and best-practices? Are they that foreign to people? Or are some people just inherently inconsiderate, regardless of the context?

This has nothing to do with Spore. Sorry.

One of the funnest (see what I did there? It’s topical!) things that Meri and I do after AWA is create some kind of “mix-tape” (well, an MP3 playlist that may or may not be burned to CD for my line-in-less car audio system) of our favorite songs-from-AMVs over the last year.

I’m not going to lie and say I don’t just grab a song or two from friends when they’re the ones that have done the videos (Hell, half the time they’ve sent me the song long ago, anyway). This isn’t going to be any kind of general defense or offense one way or the other on file sharing, though.

However, at the same time, I’m not going to not try and legally pick up some music every so often. I think it’s pretty important. It makes me feel warm and fuzzy on the inside. I guess it’s as much for me as it is for the artists. Regardless, my point is that the Amazon MP3 service is awesome and you should use it. Right now. Here are the couple songs I grabbed last night:

Asobi Seksu – “Walk On The Moon” (from Koop’s/Jay’s video “Twilight“) – 99 cents
DJ Spoke – “Watch Them Fall Down” (from Xavier’s/Nostromo’s video “Auriga“) – 88 cents

What was really interesting to me was that the first place I looked was still the iTunes Store. For whatever reason, that’s still where I go first. However, I absolutely will not purchase any music from there, these days, unless it’s iTunes Plus (DRM-free and higher bitrate… I think it’s 192 kbps AAC, as opposed to the standard 128 kbps AAC). The compression is better and more efficient with the AAC, so if I can get that version DRM-free, it still makes sense to me to get that above the MP3.

Sounds like the new Android phones are going to have the Amazon service built-in. Oooooh… it’s on, now.

What about you guys? Best source for music? Preferred format? I know you’ve got some thoughts, Mr. Campbell .

I suppose this is something I could get answers to if I felt like looking at and analyzing some server logs, but comments are much more interesting.

For this blog (as well as vgconvos, and perhaps any other blogs you read)… are you directly visiting the website, or are you reading it in some type of RSS reader (be it Google Reader, an e-mail client, or something else)? Why? Does it affect whether or not you’ll come leave a comment on a blog?

So I was down at Anime Weekend Atlanta (or just “AWA”) this past weekend doing all sorts of wonderfully nerdy things with a whole bunch of seemingly-equally-nerdy people. Saturday afternoon I happened upon a couple DBZ cosplayers, and felt obligated to take a few photos. Here’s the first one I snagged (off the ol’ iPhone):

After I took a couple pictures, I started up a little conversation with them, and found out there was going to be a larger gathering of DBZ cosplayers at 12:30 pm. Awesome! Not only people of my own kind, but multiple super-nerdy people of my own kind! Once we got a little dialogue going, I figured it was as good a time as any to mention the website. I asked if it was OK to put the image up on my site, and then if they had ever checked out the DBZ podcast that we do.

Yajirobe (the one on the far left) stared at me blankly for about four/five seconds, and then replied, “What’s a podcast…?”

As the guys over at GeekNights have said time and time again, it’s all well and good that we are trying to get other podcast listeners to check out our own shows, but what we really need is for more people in general to listen to podcasts in general… not specifically our own shows. If they don’t even know what the word means, how on Earth are we to expect them to listen to our piddly shows?

What came next was the real killer. After briefly explaining that we do this cool show every week talking about what’s going on with news, in-depth topics about the series, etc., the same guy blankly stared at me again for a couple seconds and replied, “Well, I’m not that big a fan…”

I did everything I could to hold myself back from saying, “BUT YOU’RE $%#@ING COSPLAYING GOD-DAMNED YAJIROBE~!!!!1″

Learning a little bit more about how WordPress actually works and farting around with some themes. The blog may continue to look completely different every single time you come (unless you’re getting it through something like Google Reader), so please excuse my breaking the code every so often.

If you’ve subscribed to the feed for the podcast, you may have noticed something other than the first podcast episode appearing in the feed. Do you have any recommendations on how I may be able to link to an audio file within a regular blog post (such as in the “Top 10 Pokemon” post) without it actually showing up as an “episode” in the podcast feed? Any types of special “exclude” linkings?

The web of today is so different than how I first got into it… it still remains so exciting to me, but it’s just as frustrating in a whole bunch of different ways!

(or lack there-of)

That’s right, I’m doing a third podcast (#1: Daizenshuu EX, #2: vgconvos.com, #3 this one). As you’ll hear on the show, this is going to be about whatever I want it to be about, whenever I want to do it, and whoever I want to do it with. I have a bunch of random topics flying around in my head that I would absolutely love to talk out with friends, and this gives me an excuse to get them over here for said topical discussions.

For this first episode, I decided that Jeff (a familiar voice to those who follow anything else I do) would be a great guy to have on. We talked about how we manage to accomplish all these various things in life… things like going to work, paying bills, going out for a walk, and all those extra nerdy things in between.

I don’t really have a whole Hell of a lot to say about it. If you’re here reading this (and listening to the episode), there’s a good chance you already know who I am and have at least a quasi-stalker-ish interest in following the things I do. If you don’t already know me…? Well, I don’t know what to tell you. I’m the most bad-ass person on the planet, and you’ll be a fan immediately. I think.

 Episode 001: Time and Project Management [62:37m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download