I’ve been revisiting the seminal Girl Talk album, “Feed the Animals” in preparation for the upcoming copyright discussion thats certainly to be had at BarCampMIlwaukee5. Gregg Gills’ album was heralded by some as one of the best albums of 2008.

It must be said, I really like this album.

It should be also said, I have no idea what the legal status of the music is anymore. I don’t care. The fact is, Feed the Animals is a great, immersive audio experience that gets me into a working mindset faster than most other music.
It’s not because the album is entirely derivative, playing over 300 samples in 53 minutes. The magic of “Feed the Animals” is that Girltalk threads together over 300 emotive states into a seamless floating experience. It never lingers on a hook to long, moving without stop into the next emotive state. You’re listening to a party on fast forward. Your brain can’t help but move along. And somehow, that tricks my brain into getting work done.

My belief is that when you publish your work, you’re releasing your work into the world to become bigger and greater. “Feed the Animals” does that. Good for it. I can’t help but feel like “Feed the Animals” is the ultimate truth twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools.

Is it legal? Who cares? Smarter people than I have a lot to say on the matter. What matters is that the music is good. THe rest of the conversation around it is just so much intellectual masturbation and gets in the way of an otherwise really good musical experience.

Life is to short to leave something as great as “Feed the Animals” stillborn. I’m grateful that Gills was able to take the music already all around us in the world and make something from it. This is what creation is all about. We take what we have, (in Gills case, the music that surrounds him) and we interpret it, improve on it, and then pass it on to the next generation; the work is forever changed through our experience and it is better for it.

Being overly concerned with the legality, artistic and moral ramifications of his work just get in the way of the humanity behind it.

I have made some horrible logos for BarCampMilwaukee over the years.

BarcampMilwaukee3 was a really great bad logo and should make you think about Mortal Kombat.

BarCampMilwaukee4's design had a Brent Favre feel to it.

And so I am most proud to reveal here to you, today; this is certainly not going to be the logo for BarCampMilwaukee5:

I wanted it to be almost one of those pictures you could rotate 180-degrees and have it still say the same thing. Like a word that is almost a palindrome.

Please come to BarCampMilwaukee5 anyway. Its on Oct. 2 and 3. Register. Do it.

Millenials! So short-sighted! So dramatic!

I try to remain hopeful, I really do, that the coming generations will have something special to offer our world. I think they will— but they’re going to have to pay some dues along the way. And dues are something, in my experience, the millenials don’t like to pay.

I’ll leave out the conversation about why I think that’s the case. Smarter people than I are on that, and can probably explain it in sociology of it more completely than I will ever understand. But if this woman is a hero to the millennials, then my faith that they will eventually come around is shaken.

Here's the short version of the story: A would-be broker is hired as personal assistant and is, after two years, sexually harassed by her boss, but instead of going to the authorities, she quits dramatically by emailing her resignation letter via key points delivered through a ‘clever’ series of photographs of white board messages.

Of course, I don’t believe it’s a real story. the site that hosts the photos' claim to fame is hoax. Whoever they are, they are not to be trusted as a resource. (And I mean hoax in the lame-internet sense of hoax, which in beter days might have been called “told fairly transparent lies to national media outlets.” )

But if it’s not real, why is my faith in the millennials shaken? Fictional or otherwise, this girl’s resignation is heralded as heroic by millennials and that's sad. What this girl, fictional or otherwise, is doing is not heroic. It’s stupid. And unnecessarily dramatic. And short-sighted. She’s throwing her future as "a broker" a way to gamble on a short-lived internet meme.

There are laws and policies designed to protect this girl. She has a right to seek justice within the system to make her point. The women who have endured this sort of thing in the past and will endure it again have made hard choices so that she has options withinthe system.

She could have done something that would have made the world better for everyone, not just her. But instead, she opted for vigilanteism. She takes the law into her own hands and instead of building a case for the dismissal of the offending supervisor in a documentable way that would have long term implications for the better of all of her fellow employees, she breaks information policy, network policy, and — judging from the pictures — dress code, for the sake of a short-term revenge payoff.

It’s foolish to take the easy way out and provide vigilante justice in a dramatic way. It cheapens all of us. I hope you really are going to be 'just fine,' internet meme girl. Somehow, I don't think there is much hope, but I will hold to providence that you will find your way.

Just pulled into Wales Community Park. I'd been circling around Wales looking for a forest or tree to crawl in, feeling kind of crummy and avoiding being mad at my client who had just called to tell me he was going to be a half-hour late.

There are a number of "old" subdivisions in wales. Nice big houses on big lots with old growth trees and that sort of thing. Nice houses tucked way back from the road behind a ridge of trees. Very nice.

Found a house for sale there: $425,000. I suspect I could negotiate down the $25,000. I wonder briefly where the other $400,000 will come from.

I look up and see the disk golfers-- fucking hippies-- following their frizbies around a largely un-treed savannah grassland. This isn't a park, its a wasteland.
Maybe one day it will be beautiful. Not today.

The downs I'm paying for the up I sustained last week-- and will sustain in the coming week of road travel-- are massive. And, what's frustrating about them is not that they're so painful or desperate. That the're just so goddamn apathetic. Big picture stuff wraps itself around my legs making me anxious, but little picture stuff-- the here and now-- is too easy to let go of. Too easy to not care about.

One step at a time. One more step forward. Towards the top of the mountain. Towards hope. And all that.

The clover at the park is deep green and pocked by the white flowwerheads, which bobble in the feeble breeze raking the Wales Community Park. This is not living. This is hiding. I close my laptop and head over to my client meeting. I will try very hard to be engaged and energetic with him. He will not be able to tell how morose I feel.

Tomorrow is another day.

Vessels of Change

Vessels of change
Vessels of change
Things that are normal
will soon seem quite strange.

Come this time tomorrow--
it’s hard to explain--
it will all seem quite different,
you now see what i’m saying.

This is a big one,
a heralded transition,
and those who have missed it
may have failed to listen
to the warnings that sung
from the tops of the trees,
from the depths of the ocean,
from the birds and the bees.

The storm’s come and gone,
and we’ve walked now around.
Walked somber and serious
till our purpose was found.

There will be again joy
and there will be again play.
It’s a shift in the times
and it begins here today.
This is the start
of a glorious rebirth.
A fresh coat of paint
for the children of Earth.

So pray for our people,
our lives and our times.
Pray for our memories,
our hearts and our minds.

And as the sun rises--
let the story be told--
the work’s made a difference;
our lead’s become gold.

May. 31, 2010 \ Photo attribution

Today's XKCD really hit me in a lot of ways. Not all of them good.

I clipped away the parts of the comic that set up the context because, frankly, those parts of the dialoge hide the mean-spiritedness that this comic is built on.
"You have no sense of perspective and are probably autistic."
Who says that kind of thing? Lots of people, I say. Who deserves to have that sort of thing said to them? Few, I says. Yes, obsession is a kind of indicator for a very specific autism-spectrum disorder, but making a throw away punchline out of a certain group of people who are suffering from a specific malady is just not nice. Replace "autistic" in that comic with any other group of people, and you'll see what I mean.

This sort of punchline is nothing more than the same kind of smarmy, self-congratulatory bullying that the so-called geeks, nerds and millennial hipsters who make up XKCD's core audience would claim to be above. The geeks must remain ever vigilant that they're not the next generation of high-school bullies. Making mean at the expense of another's passion is not our way. So stop it, already. There's enough of that bullshit on the Gawker network already.

I'm not saying its wrong to have a sense of humor about things. I'm really not. I diminish whole groups of people into easily categorized pigeonholes all the time. And it's not right. All I ask is that when you diminish a group of people's humanity with a broad stroke, be sure you're doing it deliberately.

I agree with many of the things listed in Consumerist article about things you should do before and after your laptop is stolen. But there are some suggestions that are not only dumb, but just plain foolish.

Everyone should have backups and serial numbers of their gadgets on file. They should, if possible, have original purchase receipts stashed away somewhere. I'll even give credence to the value of having a lo-jack type software product on your machine, in spite of my personal misgivings about them with regards to privacy.

But many of the Consumerist's suggestions for what to do after your laptop is stolen seem more about vigilantism than about getting your stuff back. That's kind of silly. You might have your priorities mixed up if you're willing to install theft reporting software on your laptop but don't carry renter's insurance.

It's not really the Consumerist's fault. News Media particularly likes to laud vigilantes as heroes. And, in a way, they're right. There is something heroic about the Joe Workaday guy who stands up to injustice and fights for what's right. But here's the thing: To paraphrase Zoe Washburne: A hero is someone who gets people killed.

Before you take a walk into the seedy pawn shop in your neighborhood all hell bent on getting your laptop back, ask yourself if your laptop is worth being killed over. When you see news stories of hipsters chasing down iPhone thieves via the GPS unit mounted on their fixies, remember that these people are putting themselves in a perilous confrontation with a person who, by definition, already has at least a marginally questionable moral compass. A person willing to steal from you might well be willing to shoot you when you call them on it.

When my Macintosh Powerbook 145b was stolen from my 48th Street home in 1998, I went down to the local pawn shop and asked about it. They sent someone from the back up to talk to me, and she, seeing my glare and the twitch in my face (and certainly sensing my angry vibe) showed me one or two laptops and then asked me to leave. *I am so glad I did.*

Is your iPhone worth depriving your mother of ever seeing you again? Is your laptop more important to you than seeing your children grow up?

I'm not saying that you should just lay back and let the criminals win, I'm saying that you need not get so caught up in your feelings of loss, injustice and victimization that you lose sight of the bigger picture. You're more important to the world than your gadgets. Never lose sight of that.

I like this comment on Read-Write-Web.

400 million people now use Facebook, and they don't all have CS Master's degrees from Stanford. But if you work in the IT/tech/Internet/online media industries, they do manage to pay your bills. They're the ones who open emails, click ads, make purchases, sign up for subscriptions and generally take the majority of actions that make our whole ecosystem work.

And most of them have no idea what a web browser is or how it differs from a search engine or a social network. They've chosen to be smart about other things, like building cars or making art or raising families. I'll bet some of them are terrific dancers. We have to build the Web for them, too.

This pretty much sums up how I feel about Web414's future. Web414 is for the people who are working together to make The New Web(tm). It can't be monitized or productized. It's about people who want to build cars, make art, raise families and dance in new ways using the web as a platform.

Who is Web414 for? It's for me. Its for you. Its for the community. Its for who we are who chose to be part of Web414. Web414 is the music makers, and it is the dreamers of dreams. Don't spoil it by making it into just another pointless meetup. Web414 is the magic store. Web414's like a movie, write your own ending... keep believing, keep pretending ... We've done just what we set out to do, Thanks to the lovers, the dreamers, and you.

Web414 must remain dedicated to being more than the sum of its parts. Web414 must be a place where we are free to follow our passions and are unencumbered by "making it work." Web414 works because it does. It is a group of people in a single place making great creative things happen on, for, and about the Web.

I usually have a almost obsessive urge to download app updates as soon as I see them.
I guess I'll pass on this "update." Praise Stansa for at least being honest about it.

I try not to blog about blogging-- it's kind of a silly niche, filled with fatheads offering tips aimed at tricking readers into believing their bland writing has value, however, I recently had to write a "standards for blogging" document for work, and this morning I saw the need to amend it to include some things I thought were pretty obvious, but clearly need to be explained. And so:

Here are some things you may want to consider when picking out what links you want to use in the blog post that you're writing but don't really understand or care about.

1. It's probably better to go with a "impartial" source than one who has an axe to grind. You don't want to link to coverage of a news survey, for example, that is really an editorial condemning or questioning the value of the survey (Unless that's your point).
2. The link's relevancy to the topic at hand should be obvious. If you have to explain why a link is relevant, you don't need to make the link. Unless making that relevancy is why you're posting-- which is inherent in the link, right? Arg! Circular! Here's the thing: Don't just pass links on for the sake of passing links on. People know how to search now, so you don't need to do it for them.
3. Don't link directly to a PDF (or other downloadable) unless you have no other choice. And then, you should be sure to warn people that the link will cause them to download something, either in the narrative of your post or parenthetically. Although, the good news is that in today's day and age, you probably don't need to tell them they need to download a PDF reader.
4. Try to link to permanent links. That is, try to use a source that's not going to pull its link off the Internet because its confused about how the Interent works. I'm looking at you, newspapers. This is hard when you're commenting on news, since the news sites tend to take down links after a certain time because they think you are stealing from them by showing people that you are their customer and that you find value in their product. Dummies! For this reason, avoid linking to newspapers if a more direct source is available. (If you're talking about a study, for example, link to the original publication of the study, not the coverage of the study.)

Of course, the trick to blogging, really, is that you need to care. I know, right? Crazy. But the Lack of Genuine Care (tm) is why blogging in a corporate setting is a loser's game. The main piece of advice I have to offer regarding blogging, and understand that this is, in many ways, crapping in the hand that feeds me, is that if you have something to say, say it. Don't make your marketing department say it-- they will not have the passion for your message that you have. They can help you sculpt your words into something that will perform and represent well... but they can't fake your passion. The internet can spot in-genuineness at 100 paces and will decry and disregard it before you've even submitted your link to Digg. Again, I go back to Uncle Merlin's masterpeice: "How to Blog". "Find your obsession. Every day, explain it to one person you respect. Edit everything, skip shortcuts, and try not to be a dick. Get better."

I can't say it better than that. Another post about blogging degrades into yet another love letter fueled by my raging boner for Merlin Mann. This is why I don't meta-blog, people!