WTF EX

I ask this question both of myself (to try and answer in an actual blog post… how fascinating!), and also of you all, dear readers. What does make a blog entry “good”…?

One thing to keep in mind is that I am not talking about a “blog” from a personal standpoint. This is work-work related (as opposed to hobby-work related), so the goals and methods will be slightly different. Are there any “professional” blogs that you follow? If so, what aspects really drag you in?

Here are a couple of my own thoughts:

Authoritative Tone
You know me well, by now — any writing that I do very purposefully takes on a tone of authority. If you simply act as if you know what you are talking about, it is all the more convincing! This is not something I am too concerned about, since the folks I will be calling on for articles have that authority… and I am the final word, anyway, so I get to copy-edit anything that needs it.

Be Personable
What makes a “professional” or “corporate” blog different from a standard press release is not just the tone, but the delivery. There needs to be a real voice. It can be a fine line walking between conversational and professional, but it can and should be done. Guest writers of relevant notoriety can be a huge help in lending a personable, yet authoritative, tone.

Outbound Links
Again, you know how I operate! If there is a source, it must be cited. Providing links to something other than your own website shows that you live in the real world and acknowledge that other people have ideas and opinions.

Make a Statement With the Post Title
It is a little basic, but it is true — grab the reader’s attention.

Know Your Goals
What do you want to actually accomplish with this blog? Do you want readers to comment? You need to ask them a question each time, then. Do you want to be picked up by news media? Be sure to mention your blog in conversations and other cross-promotions, have it readily accessible from your navigation… all the good ol’ regular stuff.

Maybe the best question to ask is: what makes a bad blog entry? What are some tell-tale signs that something is “off” and perhaps not credible, researched, authoritative, and even worth your time? Things like grammar and aesthetics (while important) are blatantly obvious, so we can skip past those!

Time for another crazy cat story.

So our little cat, Tara, has this fuzzy red/white ball toy that she loves. She likes to fling it around through the air and go chasing after it. She has even become slightly dog-like and will play fetch to some degree, depending on how lazy she is about bringing it all the way back to your feet.

There’s one big problem, though. When she picks this toy up in her mouth and wanders around, if there is no-one to take it from her, she will emit this incredible howl to get attention… while it’s still in her mouth. She’s a very vocal cat, anyway, so that’s not entirely surprising. It’s just a horrendous noise, is all, and one you can hear from anywhere else in the house.

(MP3 sample from latest vgconvos recording; bit.ly re-direction)

I mean, she’s super cute… but there’s a reason why we tend to hide the toy at night. Those 3 am howls don’t help the sleeping, much.

I was browsing through some YouTube comments again (I know, I know…), and noticed my video “Never Fall Apart” also uploaded on someone else’s account. I can’t really stop that, and don’t particularly care, either… but I was curious about the comments it might have, so I clicked through. For the most part, they’re the usual “I love it!” or “I can’t find this song on Limewire please send it to me for free because I’m an entitled little nitwit!“, but something stuck out to me even more than that:

It’s such a shame. I share no pleasure in detailing the news that vagettoEx is banned. I don’t exactly know who he is or why he’s banned from whatever he’s banned from, though. Just figured I’d pass along the word.

I just saw this report over on the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention website talking about the cancellation/removal of land-line phones in favor of cell-phone-only service. We are apparently at a point where one-in-five American homes have removed their plain ol’ telephone service in favor of exclusively using cell phones. The wife and I have been this way since 2004 when we moved into our first apartment, and continue to be this way in the new house. In addition to that, we also canceled our cable television service shortly before moving, and continue to operate with no traditional television service.

You know what? Things are just fine.

In terms of telephone service, it makes complete sense to abandon the land lines. While the quality of cell phone calls still leaves a lot to be desired, it suffices more than enough for my phone conversation purposes, which typically do not last longer than one minute unless I am calling my parents. If I am on the road or otherwise out and cannot be reached, my simply not answering the phone is exactly the same thing as someone calling me and not being home to pick up the phone. Combine that with text messages that completely replace voice mail in terms of disseminating tiny bits of information in quick, easily-digestible form… well, you’ve got a winner.

As for television, it is equally fine without it. We have enough things to keep us busy after the move that we have no time to just sit around and mindlessly watch television, anyway. Once things settle back down a little bit (which they are already beginning to do), we still have more than enough viewable-passive-media to keep us entertained until the ends of time without needing to obtain anything else. Throw video games into the mix, and I have a hard time understanding why I would ever actually need cable service on my television. In fact, the word “television” does not accurately describe that 50″ Kuro in my living room now, since everything from that to the “old TV” to the computer monitors are really nothing more than display surfaces of varying sizes and aged technology. Whether it’s a video game, a DVD, a Blu-ray, episodes downloaded online and burned to DVD+RW for viewing on the PS3 or 360… all of these display surfaces act in exactly the same way without needing to pay someone to be constantly broadcasting a live signal to them which I have no interest in tuning into, anyway.

I will admit there is a strange sort of “learning curve” to not being able to just sit down, hit a power button, and expect an in-progress video. Everything must be manually initiated. In the long run, I prefer this. Beyond the cost savings, I find that I gain precious minutes here and there that might otherwise be spent mindlessly flipping channels before realizing there is nothing to watch and starting up some other activity. Now-a-days, I just go right into whatever that “something else” would have been.

I’m constantly reminded of that Seinfeld episode where Kramer wants to cancel his mail. Can we do that, yet?

I am going to be doing a little presentation next week at a luncheon at an organization regarding children being online and social networking. The focus is keeping them “safe” in some sense, but it will be more along the lines of just being aware of what is out there, how to keep tabs on it, building the necessary vocabulary to understand it, etc.

I think the big thing I am going to harp on is just helping people understand why people join these sites and do the things they do. Once you understand the why, everything else falls into place. As far as I can tell from observation and my own personal experiences, the main reason is just selfish validation. What I mean by that is that people are using these sites basically for the purpose of having their own existence justified and validated by receiving positive feedback. Whether it’s Digg promoting things, Facebook with the “like” button and status update responses, Twitter and getting responses to tweets… everything is intended to be a virtual pat on the back to just prove that you exist.

While narcissism extends far into adulthood, there is no denying that it is far more prevalent among children (especially teenagers) and their rebellious age. It is always about finding your place, understanding where you fit into the world, blah blah blah.

What does everyone think about this? Would you describe it differently? What other reasons do people have for joining and participating in these social networking communities?

On March 20th, I received an e-mail from Meritline.com that the pair of digital audio cables I had ordered from them were on their way to me in the mail.

On March 23rd, I came home to see the standard orange/pink-ish slip the post office leaves when they have a package that will not fit in the mailbox that they attempted to deliver (but would not just leave on the porch for whatever reason). I could take this slip to the post office to pick up the package.

On March 27th, I placed an order on Amazon for a new microphone, XLR cable, and windscreen.

On March 28th, Amazon e-mailed me to tell me that the XLR cable and windscreen had been shipped (the microphone would come separately).

On March 30th, I finally had a chance to go down to the post office with my slip to pick up the package with my digital audio cables. I went there directly after work without first stopping off at home. I handed the slip to the nice lady behind the counter, she gave me a box, and I went back out to the car. As I walked to the car, I remembered that the slip had said “oversize envelope” as a description. I was holding a box. I opened the box to find the windscreen and XLR cable. I walked back into the post office and explained to the lady that I was pretty sure I had another package there waiting for me. It was impossible for the slip that I had just brought in (received on March 23rd) to be for an item that had not yet even been ordered at the time (March 27th). The now-sassy lady dismissed me away saying I would have another slip if I had another package, and she walked away without checking for me.

There was another slip in my mailbox upon returning home, this one (obviously) being for the XLR cable and windscreen, which I had just picked up.

I really hope when I go back to the post office that there is a different person working there. I suppose as long as I have a slip with my name and address, they will just give me whatever package matches that name and address.

But seriously. Logic, people. C’mon.

I very rarely use Facebook. As many problems as Twitter has with downtime and disappearing/reappearing tweets, I find the inconsistent wall listings, dates for posts, and blah blah blah over on Facebook all the more confusing and discouraging. This post is not to talk about the differences between the two services, though. I am ultimately going to compare and contrast where necessary, but probably not in the way you are thinking.

So Facebook recently went through another redesign. If you use the internet for more than checking your e-mail (which young people apparently do not use anymore), you are probably well aware of this. One of the biggest changes was the way in which the “Status Update” is structured and conveyed. Personal pages look much more like a Twitter stream than the previous status update structure did, but the biggest change may be in the verbiage. The standard Facebook status update always said something like this:

Michael LaBrie is writing a blog post right now.

With the change over to “What’s on your mind?”, someone familiar with the Facebook service and has that “(name) is…” wording so heavily ingrained in their muscle memory (if it doesn’t auto-populate the word “is” for you) would probably think something along the following:

So if I type in a random update the way I would type a tweet (say that five times fast), the result is as I would expect from using Twitter:

Here is where the disconnect comes in, though (completely ignoring all the people who manually type in “is” by themselves). I typically use the Facebook application on my iPhone to keep tabs on friends and their status updates rather than using the website. Until getting the very latest update to the application this morning, if you went to input a status update, the text input screen would still say “(name) is…”. Thankfully, here is what you will get now:

So what on Earth am I supposed to do…?! It does not seem like a huge problem, but for someone as grammatically-aware as I am, you can imagine the horrors I have unleashed upon myself when I compared a Facebook status update made on the web site directly (see above screens) versus one made from the iPhone application:

Ack! Apparently I is own a house!

The “problem” (if you want to call it that) is that Facebook has trained their users with a certain vocabulary. That standard verbiage is still entirely useful and seemingly encouraged, but they have opened-up that status update to “allow” any type of wording that a user desires. I can already see the confusion among friends and family with the way they have been typing their most recent status updates, and I can not even imagine how I would explain it to some of them.

The title should come as absolutely no surprise, but I’ve rofled enough to myself in the last couple of minutes that I figured I would share these with you. No, this is not a follow-up to my viewpoints on my own feedback/responses/criticism on YouTube, so don’t worry that I’m bombarding you with more of that nonsense.

YouTube has a post up on their own blog talking about devices and services that enable a consumer to view YouTube directly on their television. Makes sense, right? I mean, we know about Microsoft’s partnership with Netflix to get that service on the 360, and PS3 owners have no doubt seen the YouTube link right when they launch their browser. There are plenty of other set-top boxes and new televisions coming out with integrated services like these, as well. For those of us that live the modern, technology-based lifestyle, none of this requires any explanation.

Remember that the majority of the world doesn’t think the same way we do, though. Plenty of people are quick to point out that you can also hook up a computer to an HDTV, but most appear to be completely clueless. These two quotes stuck out to me (from what I could stand reading through):

great stuuf what is the channel number in the unite kingdom

… and…

what the number of the channel it’s gonna be on? will it work on cable

What I think this really proves is that general consumers still think of “TV” as meaning “a channel I flip to”. It’s easy for us to make fun of or at least chuckle at these types of responses, but for those of us trying to reach new audiences (ones that still don’t understand what it is we’re doing), seeing these types of comments is incredibly frustrating.

Despite it being entirely recorded, edited, mixed, and otherwise fully completed well ahead of schedule this weekend, Episode #0161 of the podcast for Daizenshuu EX is not online. Nor have I been able to help coordinate the forum transfer over to the new server. Nor have I been chilling in the IRC channel like I normally am.

Yesterday early afternoon I was unplugging my laptop’s power cord from the surge protector which the main rig is also plugged into. I accidentally flipped the switch on it, effectively cutting power to everything there. No biggie. Nothing that hasn’t happened before. Flipped the switch, and everything immediately came back on (monitor, computer, stereo, scanner, wireless headphones, etc.). I headed out into the dining room where I was working on hooking up the new HD digital camera to my laptop (sorry; that’s all work-work related, and not play-work related!) and installed a few things.

When I wandered back out to the main rig, it was sitting on this screen:

Very strange. I figured it perhaps just got itself hung up, and I would reboot and go into Safe Mode if I had to. Manually turned it off, let it sit for a minute, turned it back on… same thing. OK, now this is getting bad. I completely unplugged everything and let it sit for a long while, in the meantime consulting some friends online for opinions.

The opinions started pouring in that perhaps the power supply fried itself (or something along those lines). I found it very sad that such a simple little thing would cause such a drastic effect, but I suppose it’s not unheard of. This is also one of the aspects of computer hardware I know very little about; I can install a new optical drive or a hard drive or even a stick of RAM, but that’s about the extent of my internal-computer-knowledge.

(NOTE: Yes, everything whirled-up and sounded pretty normal when I rebooted it. The green lights on the front USB ports indicated they had power. The monitor definitely isn’t “frozen” with a burned-in screen, or anything, because I can cycle through inputs and it changes to show that it has no connected source.)

I ended up at Best Buy and picked up a 700 watt power supply, which was a contrast to the 1000 watt power supply inside my Dell XPS 710 (but all opinions seemed to be that 1000 watt was pretty ridiculous, especially considering I wasn’t exactly launching any spaceships with this computer). I had to spend some time at the in-laws’ after picking it up, but jumped right into potential repairs upon returning home. I eventually figured out that I needed to remove all three of my hard drives in order to get access to pulling out the pre-existing power supply, and it was around then that Jeff was able to run over and help me pull it apart.

Holy Hell.

Long story short, the power supply that came with it is a proprietary 1000 watt monster. I know very little about what I’m about to mention, but it had both a 24-pin and a 20-pin connector (yes, two of them) that went directly into the motherboard, which seemed very different from not only the new 700 watt power supply I picked up, but anything Jeff had seen before. As opposed to the new power supply, The Beast had all of its wires coming directly from one spot (which you unfortunately can’t see off-screen to the left in the above picture), all filtering and twisting and winding throughout the system. We eventually managed to feel them out and get every single last bit unplugged from devices, but now I’m pretty much left with a system that has no power supply.

This is all assuming the power supply was even in the issue in the first place, which I never really got full confirmation on (not that I’d ever be able to). I called Dell customer support out of morbid curiosity (warranty expired exactly a year ago), and after being potentially up-sold to “North American-based premium customer support”, I spoke with someone I could barely comprehend and ultimately had to say goodbye to without any real help.

So now I’m out in the cold all by myself. If it is indeed the power supply, Dell does not directly sell a replacement, so I’m potentially buying a new or refurbished one off of eBay ($50-150). If that’s not the problem… well… what is? And how do I even tell?

I’ve got a GeForce 9800 GT showing up this week, too… I was planning on finishing up Portal with it and running a bunch of other stuff all silky-smooth…

Didn’t sleep much last night due to my frustration. This is on top of a 360 whose graphics card fried itself alive (not covered by Microsoft’s extended warranty, though I’ve since paid the $100 to have it replaced), and a spontaneously-bricked PSP whose current status is theorized to be a fried motherboard (which cannot be brought back from the dead with a Pandora’s Battery, which I’ve already tried courtesy of Corey, and I will thus have to pay $100 to get it replaced or just buy a new one), and a Rock Band drum whose blue pad snapped a wire inside.

(To answer a couple quick questions, yes, if I get it back up and running or can hook up the SATA hard drive with Episode #0161 on it somewhere else, I’ll go ahead and post that show. If not right away, it will be retroactively posted in the future. Yes, I should be able to record another show on-schedule next week if we feel up to it… I can record on the laptop, and do all the mixing on the Shuttle which has all the project files and bumper music masters. Knock-on-wood, but here’s hoping that main C:/-drive isn’t farked… should be completely fine, though…)

I had originally typed this up on my iPhone and was planning on posting it via the WordPress application, but I ran into a little snag: the dreaded “invalid post id” error. Now I’m re-typing it on a standard ol’ computer while looking down at the draft on my phone to make sure it’s all written up verbatim. What a drag. Ah, well. It prompted me to upgrade the WordPress installation on this blog and get image insertions working again, so I suppose it was all in my best interest.

Anyway…

I have had this little issue for a while, but have not been able to solve it as-of-yet. When Apple decided to allow wireless downloads of podcasts to the iPhone from within the iTunes Store, I decided to try it out with Lo-Fidelity.

It worked perfectly fine, except that I am completely unable to locate it for deletion when the phone is connected to the computer and the iTunes application. It is not under “Music” and it is not under “Podcasts”. It simply does not exist, as far as I can tell. Except… ya’ know… it actually is there somewhere on the phone’s drive, since I can still tap and listen to it.

Thoughts? Similar experiences? Solutions? I haven’t tried downloading any more podcasts over WiFi for fear of not being able to delete them. I have to imagine this is some sort of strange, isolated case…