Alt + Ctrl + X I just finished Lirael: Daughter of the Clayr by Garth Nix and wanted to repost my review here:
I have 2 issues with these books. Part of my problem with these books is that both Mogget and the Disreputable Dog are basically deus ex machina. God like characters that explain nothing, know everything and fix all problems and because of that all agency is taken away from the main characters. YA books should be about giving agency to teens and Garth Nix just refuses to do that.
Thomas Friedman is a really cheesy speaker. I have not read the world is flat and I thought every one had good things to say but if it’s this cheese and built around these fake dates then I don’t want to read it.
There are a lot of ways to measure how involved you are in the youtube community. I think most go by subscribers or videos posted. But you could post awesome videos all day and never really be involved with the community. I think one of the best ways to see how involved you are is by how many videos you have seen.
This is a quick informal survey I did (spreadsheet embedded below) of youtube accounts of different levels of prominence. I find smpfilms a little hard to believe but I’m not sure what advantage they would gain from spoofing that number. On the other hand I totally believe What the Buck (along with his personal account peron75) has seen 50,000 videos. I’m also impress with the number of videos BarackObamadotcom has seen. I imagine that that number is across a lot of staff members though.
Mia Rose and a lot of other sponsored channels have very few videos viewed. Almost always in the low hundreds.
I have to say I wasn’t wild about the end of Dr Horrible. I didn’t dislike it. I just didn’t like it as much as the first too parts. I think the songs were a little weaker which did not do a good job of highlighting the change to a sadder tone. I’m still buying the DVD though so I can’t wait for that to come out.
Thanks to Joel and every one at Fog Creek for an awesome open house. It’s clear why they are so well respected as each member of Fog Creek was extremely friendly, Joel in particular. Definitely the best hosted meetup I’ve been to in a long time.
I’ve needed a better backup solution for a while and after looking arouns Mozy seemed like the easiest. $5 a month is nothing when you spend all day every day on your computer.
The weird thing seems to be how it handles it’s backups. You can’t delete anything it backs up. I rearranged some of my MP3 files and now Mozy has two copies because it keeps the files structure. At first glance this is horrible. If I rearranged all my MP3s my Mozy backup would be a mess and if my harddrive died it would be pailful to download all the files twice. I wish I could delete files on Mozy.
Mozy’s solution to this seems to be that if you delete or move a file on your computer it keeps a backup… but only for 30 days. Wait… what? They are saying that if I reorganize my MP3s they will delete the old MP3s in 30 days leaving me with just my new file struncture. Great!
But what happens if I delete a file and not notiec it right away? I have a lot of files I want to back up and there is always the chance something could happen to a file without me knowing. Well it seems that if I don’t notice a file is gone in 30 days then Mozy deletes it from my backup. What kind of backup service is this? How about some persistance of data!
I get that it’s a hard problem. If you let people delete stuff from thier backup then you end up needing a backup for your backup when you accidently delete stuff from it. Mozy probably wanted to avoid this and so stoped letting people delete stuff from thier backup. This presented the problem of reorganizing files. The file has moved and it’s backup a new version what should they do with the old version? They decided that could just phase it out in 30 days.
This just seems like a horrible idea. As soon as you delete a file the counter has started and you better notice it’s gone in the 720 hours the file will stick around or it’s gone forever. I want my files to stay on Mozy as ong as I pay for it. I want to manage my own backup and delete duplicates myself. I’m fine if it’s hard to delete with multiple varifications, just make it happen. Other wise the whol idea of a backup doesn’t seem to really hold true.
If you ever liked Degrassi you have to start watching The Secret Life of the American Teenager. It might even be better the early Degrassi The Next generation. Only one episode is out and there is plenty of way for the show to mess up but is seems pretty solid so far.
So I got in to The WB site’s beta and thought I would just give a quick review. Hulu has set the bar pretty high and no one should be surprised that The WB does not measure up. The site is really dark and the design is a little wonky. The shows’ flash player has a clunky MAC want to be interface and the video is really small.
But even with all of those problems they should have a chance as long as they put tons of video up. And I mean full seasons. Currently they just have a few random episodes of a few WB shows. I hope that’s a result of it being a beta as with out entire seasons I can’t imagine going back.
The do plan on adding some web only shows. I’m a sucker for good web content and so I do look forward to seeing how well they are made.
Over all disappointing and I doubt most will be fixed. But with enough content they should draw plenty of traffic. I know Keri really wants to watch Everwood.
If you need a video, a 2:47 minute video, to show people how to register then it is TOO HARD to create and account (video below).
When I heard the new weezer song I didn’t really like it but I thought I might come around. The more I hear it though the more I hate it. Like really hate it. The album is out now and you can preview the songs on amazon. This really has to be not only the worst weezer album but just a horrible attempt at making music. I have some affection for the Green album and Maladroit and some songs on Make Believe are guilty pleasure worthy but this album is just painful to hear and I refuse to own it.
On the first of 2007 John and Hank Green decided to stop talking to each other via text and alternate days creating Youtube videos instead. A Year and almost 300 videos later a community of 30,000 people formed around their discussion of Harry Potter, Awesome, Nerdfighters (a pro-nerd moniker), and WorldSuck.
Their experiment ended at the end of 2007 but as they wrapped up the idea of sharing a channel and posting a video on alternate days was about to get a refresh. The Five Awesome Girls channel started just before the Green brothers were done. The brain child of Kristina Horner, of The Parselmouths, along with Lauren Fairweather, of The Moaning Myrtles, Five Awesome Girls brings together five girls who each were apart of the community that John and Hank Green built.
Quickly a format was established. The five girls each picked a day of the week to post a video. They didn’t all know each other in real life and so the used the videos as a way to learn about each other. Each video addressed the other girls to directly to ask questions and give challenges. Other habits also came in to the format like says why the day was awesome.
Hardly a month later Five Awesome Girls was such a complete success that other channels popped up fast and furious with the same format. a Five Awesome Guy’s channel popped up in late January and not a week went by in February where a similar channel had also appeared. Everyone was Awesome: Girls, Guys, Gays, Kiwis, Teens, People, and on and on. All with a clear legacy back to what the Green brother’s started and the Five Awesome Girls formalized.
This internet meme has been successful for a number of reasons and I think it’s here to stay and will not wither away. A group channel has several advantages over individual channels.
Multiple members makes it possible to put out more content at a higher level of quality. It also make more avenues of finding subscribers through the members individual channels. More people also makes it more interactive for the people making the videos. And their interactions also makes it easier for the audience to follow along.
You know you’ve hit it big when you have a lot of haters. Just this week the Five Awesome girls’ account was hacked and their videos deleted. YouTube has just restored their account today, four days later. I think this format has a lot more success in the future.
approx # of videos in ( )
January 01, 2007 - vlog brothers (299) - 27,658 Subscribers
December 31, 2007 - Five Awesome Girls (110) - 9,762
January 26, 2008 - five awesome guys (90) - 16,060 Subscribers
February 03, 2008 - 5 awesome gays (64) - 4,853 Subscribers
February 09, 2008 - Five Awesome Kiwis (74) - 1,236 Subscribers
February 14, 2008 - five awsome teens (45) - 71 Subscribers
February 15, 2008 - 5 Awesome People (81) - 51 Subscribers
February 16, 2008 - voltron team (87) - 59 Subscribers
February 18, 2008 - 5AwesomeRvBers (71) - 85 Subscribers
February 21, 2008 - Five Awesome Limeys (17) - 225 Subscribers
February 25, 2008 - five younger girls (60) - 494 Subscribers
February 27, 2008 - five awesome goats (20) - 1,188 Subscribers
April 02, 2008 - 5 Awesome Midwesterners (37) - 159 Subscribers
April 14, 2008 - amazing vlog show (33) - 41 Subscribers
April 14, 2008 - five awesome clones (26) - 169 Subscribers
May 09, 2008 - five awesome Js (16) - 65 Subscribers
I’ve been waiting for Little Brother to come out since Cory podcasted it last year. It has been a long wait but definitely worth it.
One thing I hope comes out of this book is that people push Cory to write more near future fiction. He really shines at that. Down and Out was far future, Some One Comes to Town was present day / magical realism. All were good but his near future story always rock the hardest.
Anda’s game was the first to catch me but Little Brother really sends it home. Cory knows the bleeding edge of technology so well that it’s effortless for his to jump four to eight years ahead. The changes to the world in Little Brother are extremely small and if anything extremely likely.
If anything this book was too short. The second half had several instances where it seemed like things were going to take a unique twist only to to take another twist. I would have liked more time to explore each scenario Marcus almost gets stuck in. I think it might have fit better in to two or three books. Neil also makes some good criticisms you might want to check out.
I think few things live up to a whole year of anticipation but Little Brother definitely did. It’s a super fun book (a boy book no less) and I can’t imagine any teen who likes computers not liking this book.
Un-kindness to developers: Internet Explorer 7 script debugger stops IE7 from doing anything. IE completely freezes.
After using FireFox 2 all day today I’m 100% sold on FireFox 3. I can’t live with out it. This 400mb giant needs to die and the trim and fit FireFox 3 needs to get out of beta asap.
Juno was pretty much everything I hoped it would be. Amazing. Some people companied that the dialog was too sharp and quick witted but that’s a style I will not get tired of for a long time.