Blog
The Drupal Dojo
By the end of next week, I'll probably be either a Drupal ninja or I'll be fired. So what am I going to do this week? I'm going to be downloading lots of screencasts from the Drupal Dojo site. They've got plenty of stuff to get you thinking about the ninja-like moves you could do in Drupal too.
What Happened To The Daily Update?
Some might be wondering such a thing. Well, it depends on what you're really asking.
A couple weeks ago I dropped the "Daily Update 3/21/2007:" from the post title. I realized that was not really helping Search Engine Optimization at all. Plus, well, it doesn't look cool. Plus, trying to make it include a "da" wasn't working well either.
Most of you may not have noticed that the posts were also posted at 8am Eastern every weekday morning. I also realized that it's a bit suspect and decided to let the posts flow a bit more freely. So now there's no real schedule, but just good content.
Am I going to keep posting daily? Hopefully, yes. I'm thinking that I just took the last couple days off after my birthday. We'll see if that happens, but that's my aim.
A Milestone
Guess what? Starting today, I can rent a car!
Oh wait...
Here's a great Birthday greeting for me from my sister. It was so cool, I just had to share it with everyone!
Point and Click With Your Eye
I recently ran across this article on a Search Engine Optimization site. Many may not know that SEO/SEM peoples are also interested in interface design for the best and easiest way to reach their customers. Bill Slawski of SEO By The Sea found some interesting research papers from Stanford about a point and click interface - except without a mouse. I haven't read through them entirely yet, but somehow the computer senses which part of the screen you're intently staring at and if you hang on it for long enough, your eye will "click" it. It's mostly for people with disabilities at this stage and it might not be too easy to figure out, but it may become the "wave of the future", as some say.
Music Industry To Kill Online Radio
You'd think that one of these times the RIAA would make a smart move. Well, I guess the only word in their vocabulary is "money". One of these years, they will figure out that just means, "losing money".
The Copyright Royalty Board recently released its updated rates for Internet radio stations. Five or six years ago, the board finally required online stations to pay royalties and it killed most of the small radio operations on the Internet. It was the case that many did not make enough money to pay the eight cents per song played to the right persons. It's just insane, too, that the real over-the-air and satellite stations are not required to pay these fees. Thank the Lord for that, because RadioU can still be on the air despite a much higher Internet streaming cost.
However, even the biggest names in online broadcasting are crying foul because the rates are going up drastically. Many, including the Music Genome Project's Pandora, are saying they will have to go out of business. No online radio will be left unless its sponsored by companies that can bleed cash. If you run the numbers, stations will be required to pay thousands or millions more per year. But there's even something more at stake.
As the folks at This Week in Media were saying, the RIAA has almost run out of town all the ways to get free promotion of their music. If online radio does not exist, there's only boring over-the-air radio that is free for listeners. How am I supposed to listen to music that I like? Where am I to find new music? The guys on TWiM were saying that they don't buy any new music because they don't hear any new stuff. I'd love to bring the music of inReview.net to the Internet in the form of podcasts or something, but with all the fees, it's never going to happen.
What can you do? Write your state representatives, the Copyright Royalty Board, and at least sign this online petition.
The Academy Awards of DVD
The guys over at The Digital Bits have been covering the wide world of DVD for a whole decade now. I've always enjoyed that they find out the advance word on DVDs. Plus, their in-depth reviews tell me all that I want to know - if the video and audio quality is good and how many special features are on the disc.
This week they announced their yearly awards for the DVD format, The Bitsys. This year, of course, they also branch out to HD-DVD and Blu-Ray related awards. It looks like there's great stuff here: I want to see the beautiful new copy of Seven Samurai from Criterion. Bill Hunt has talked up the extended cut of Kingdom of Heaven a lot too - apparently it's a well-made movie that suffered from excessive cutting for theaters. Of course, they rightfully moan about George Lucas and Star Wars as well. Plus, for the kid at heart in you, there's even an award category for "Best DVD - Retro Saturday Morning". I mean, who doesn't want The Animaniacs on DVD?
Apple TV and Hacking
So, apparently the Apple TV should be coming out any moment now. However, some of the other portions of the info at AppleInsider were more interesting to me. Here's the juicy bits:
As AppleInsider exclusively reported back in January, Apple TV will drawn its graphics capabilities from NVIDIA's G72M graphics chipset with 64MB DDR2 video memory -- essentially the firm's GeForce Go 7400 chip.
At the heart of Apple TV device is a 1.0GHz Pentium M-based Intel chip with 2MB of L2 cache (code-named "Crofton"), which will be under-clocked to run on a 350MHz bus. The device will also pack 256MB of non-upgradable 400MHz DDR2 main system memory, a 40GB 2.5-inch PATA hard disk drive, and a 802.11n capable wireless card.
Let me tell you. There definitely will be a whole underground movement of geeky hackers doing amazing stuff with this box. There will definitely be a couple distributions of Linux for the machine. Hopefully they'll even get a version of MythTV running on the box if it has enough power. With that underclocked processor, there'll definitely be whole cooling systems the size of the machine itself to make it into something nice and snappy. Who knows? Maybe someone will even find ways to install Mac OS X and make it the even cheaper Mac Mini.
Internet Marketers and Getting Married
Marketers are odd people. Internet Marketers - doubly so. Sure, their jobs are getting their client's sites to the top of the search engines, but they also know how to use the web for fun (or personal gain - or both). And, of course, they're not your normal blue-collar workers; they're out-of-the-box, mind-blowingly smart people.
In the last couple years, one thing they've used the media for is to make engagement proposals. The owner of Search Engine Roundtable, Barry Schwartz, even made mainstream news headlines by working with Ask.com to propose to his girlfriend.
But only this year was Barry one-upped by another member of the search industry. Apparently Rand Fishkin of SEOmoz (which has a great site and Internet marketing blog, btw) had been secretly planning to propose to his girlfriend during the Super Bowl. It didn't work out because even the local the Super Bowl ads are sold out far in advance, but about a month ago he did the next best thing. Rand ran a spot during his girlfriend's favorite show, Veronica Mars. She agreed and they are to be married, but that's probably the most public thing I've ever seen anyone do for a marriage proposal.
OpenID Working
For those who wanted to use OpenID to authenticate themselves on my site, it should now work. There were some problems reported with logging in because my PHP was not compiled with the GMP library. You should and are encouraged to start using OpenID in many places, if possible.
New Life in the Heart of Minneapolis
About five years ago, I was walking around on the streets of Chicago Ave. and Lake St. in Minneapolis and we were talking about Christ and praying with people in the neighborhood. There were many homeless and very poor people walking around and it was a tough neighborhood. We told people that we wanted to make the neighborhood better by leading them to Christ. I remember one man saying, "If you want to help out this neighborhood, buy that building."
The building he was referring to was the Sears, Roebuck and Company Mail-Order Warehouse and Retail Store in the middle of South Minneapolis. According to the Wikipedia article on the site, it was built in 1927 and is the second-largest building in the state to the Mall of America. It's a huge, old stone building that was closed by Sears in 1994 and has a 211-foot tower that climbs above the surrounding area.
I was told that the neighborhood was getting a bit better but I hadn't been down there since then. A couple years ago I started hearing about a large redevelopment project on the property. I heard they were putting in some fancy condos and was worried that they'd drive all the people out of the neighborhood and just bring in lots of richer people. Thankfully, that did not happen.
Today I went into the building for the first time to get my state ID card renewed. I found that past the beautiful entryway and down in the basement was the nicest DMV office I've ever seen. It wasn't busy, looked great, and had fancy computer systems that called my number when they were ready to help me. 
(She said there was a glare on my glasses for the ID photo, and she asked if I'd take my glasses off. I bet I'm making a funny face just because I didn't have my glasses on.) Of course, I decided to stick around and find a bit more about the building.
Of course, the condos were there. I didn't see them, but The Chicago had a big presence in the signage and I've seen plenty of ads over the last couple years. I think a condo on the 10th floor of that tower would be so cool to have, overlooking all of Minneapolis. Of course, they are expensive, new property though. There's a lot of rentable office space there too, with a large Allina Health office on the main floor. I just realized that there's also a large section that is apartments for rent, many of which to people of moderate incomes
The biggest community benefit, though, is the Midtown Global Market on the south half of the first floor. It reminds me a lot of the State Fair because it's a large smorgasboard of items in a crowded marketplace. There was clothing, jewelry, art and collectibles, plus plenty of foods from all over the world. The many cultures that live in the neighborhood were all there to hang out with friends and enjoy life together. It's great that there's a year-round place just to congregate in public. Next time I'll have to remember not to each lunch before I go too!
Hats off to the city for doing a good job at bringing life into the neighborhood. It was really needed, and it seems like it helped out a bunch. Find out more information about the building and the Midtown area at the Midtown Exchange News site.