Twelve Black Code Monkeys

Those of you who have been here before may have noticed a small change in the appearance of this blog. Ok, a large change. For about five years, almost since I started blogging, I’ve been using a blogging host provider called Blog City. BC has served me very well over the years, but it was time I moved on.

I originally chose BC when there weren’t any really mature blogging platforms, and BC had just as many if not more features than many of its competitors. Also the idea of setting up my own blogging software and having to tweak it at that time, while not a big deal, seemed like enough of a nuisance to at least be a factor in my decision.

Over the years, BC came out with new functionality, new widgets, and whole new administrative platforms. The amount of personal attention was also great. They are still a good choice for a segment of the blogging or potentially-blogging community.

Still, there are a few things that have motivated me to move to Wordpress, and I finally made the jump, after lots of prep work on the back end over the last month or so. I am still a relative newbie at Wordpress and will be continuing to add new content and functionality, tweaking the look of things, etc., etc., over the next few weeks or even months. But I believe with this new blogging software will help motivate me to get back into the rhythm of blogging, even if it’s just to post a link and a short paragraph here and there as I come across something interesting and want to share my thoughts.

For those of you who don’t know much about blogging, Wordpress is an open-source application that one can install on a huge number of hosts out there. You can easily take your entire blog, save it to your local computer, then reimport all that content on a new host if you decide to go from one to another. The software stays the same. The software is also very easy to use, with lots of customization via “plugins” and “themes” to change the look and add functionality. There are lots of these available for free, plus you can program your own if you are so inclined, or just tweak the ones that are available. Some of these plugins are extremely powerful, adding very significant new functionality. Since the software is open-source, it will never go away due to a company going out of business or switching tactics, and becuase it is so popular, your data is in a format that can be imported into many other software platforms if you ever choose a different one. And if it isn’t now, chances are that some developer will create a migration tool for such a huge market.

Its popularity as well as the open-source nature of WordPress ensures many advantages, as well as a few small burdens which other blogging platforms, especially ones that do your hosting for you as well, do not. For anyone with technical savvy, such software is a pretty obvious choice, although like I did five years ago, you might decide on a solution that avoids the added work of installing and configuring such software simply due to time constraints and a busy life. WordPress does have a fully-hosted version as well, similar to Blogger and Blog-City, and like the others it comes in both free and paid, more premium versions. If you ever want to get a feel for these different software platforms, the best place to start would be to create one of these free accounts on the various choices and play to see which one fits your style best.

Ok, well, maybe not exactly, but more or less. At least that’s my fervent hope. As readers here may have noticed, I have not posted an entry here in over a year! That is a long time to go without blogging, especially for someone who tended to post not every day, but at least a couple times a month in most months, and often more than that.

2007 was a busy year for me personally. My daughter turned two, and rapidly demanded more attention as she became totally super-mobile as well as agile enough to climb tables, leap tall buildings, or at least cushions with a single bound, etc.

I also started a new job in 2007 where I’ve been kept very busy. Previous jobs have almost all had some serious downtimes, especially the job previous to my current one. The business at work means I’m sometimes working late and/or on the weekends. Since many of my previous jobs were for government contracts where you really couldn’t work overtime, this is definitely different!

But the blogging bug has been gnawing at me for a while. I’ve actually been keeping my writing going by participating in a number of discussion forums, and a recent reply to a message asking me if I was a professional writer (incredibly flattering to someone who’s never had a piece of writing printed other than a couple of college paper editorials!) has given me that much more motivation to get this thing back on the tracks again. I really want to put some thoughts down here and there if only in a paragraph or two. Unfortunately - or perhaps fortunately for some of my readers - the long tomes you may encounter by viewing the archives here probably will not occur again, or only on very rare occasion. I’m going to attempt, however, to at least start scribbling down a disjointed thought or two on a more regular basis - well, hell, on ANY basis – and we’ll see what happens.

I did feel like I needed to write SOME kind of intermediate message, though, explaining my absence for over a year, so here it is.

I just got in the mail an offer from Sprint that might be of interest to anyone thinking of switching over to them for their mobile phone. Basically, when you get your account with Sprint, within the first 15 days after you activate your phone, you give Sprint the name and number of a current Sprint customer who referred you, and you get credited $25. So, if you have a friend who has a Sprint account, tell them to go to sprint.com/referralprogram, from which they can email you the offer, and not only will you get $25, but your friend will too. If you can’t find anyone with a Sprint account, I’d be happy to refer anyone, but they limit you to 12 referrals before the end of 2006, and I’m not sure what kind of offers will be available after that.

I know the entries haven’t exactly been spilling out lately. Chock that up to parenthood I guess, which tends to take up most of the free time at home I used to devote to blogging, and the time that is left over is just an opportunity to catch up on sleep!

However, I have been up to some other things besides parenting, specifically as it relates to what I am listening to these days vis-à-vis digital audio. First a quick bit of history:

I got involved with audio books and what might be called a forerunner of podcasting (at least in terms of subscribing to feeds of magazine, newspaper and radio shows) about 6.5 years ago when I subscribed to Audible.com. I’ve listened to a lot of books and other programming, but after I got involved with my now wife back in late 2001, the listening slowed somewhat.

Then in late 2004, I started listening to what was then the very new phenomenon of podcasts. Because there were so many, they completely pushed out my audio book listening. Sure, I could have alternated. But as kind of a news junky, it’s hard to start reading history books when there’s lots of current event non-fiction or news articles, etc. I also have this tendency to want to complete lists of listening, and the method that seems easiest is to do the shortest things first, thus getting through a large number of list items right away. Unfortunately with podcasts, they just keep piling up! You can subscribe to just a couple, but I was subscribed to 20-30, and even though these were on average a small fraction of the length of an unabridged audio book (and also that I was speeding these up by 50% or so), I was still barely keeping my head above water. All this time my audio books sat dormant, and continued to pile up. I was also spending a considerable amount of time just doing the processing that would speed these podcasts up, organize them in the proper folders, downloading them and transferring them to my iPod, etc.

Back last December I finally axed my Audible account because I simply wasn’t listening to books at that point, and didn’t want yet another growing pile of content that I was ignoring. Several months later, though, I took advantage of an offer to become a member again for $10/year with a free audio book offer. There was a book that had just come out, Michael Pollan’s The Omnivore’s Dillema, that had just come out and was available unabridged at Audible. I thought I’d spend $10 on it, or half the price I would have had to normally, and gain back some of the priveleges of membership - such as the ability to take advantage of sales, to gift audio books, etc.

In August, I burned out on my podcast habit, and felt like the only thing to bring back a bit of calm was to quit cold turkey and go back to my kindler and gentler days of mainly just listening to audio books. It’s odd, since I now have over 100 audio books that I haven’t read, most of them unabridged, that I wouldn’t feel the same compulsion to finish them as soon as possible. But I guess the difference is that these are not podcasts of news events that I feel compelled to be familiar with or else be “out of touch.” Many are novels, but there are plenty of non-fiction titles as well.

I think the seed for this move was generated when I bought my Treo 700P back in May. I was surprised to see that it had come with a $100 off coupon for some types of Audible memberships. I was resisting the temptation because at the time I was still totally committed, nay addicted, to podcasts, and so feared digging myself an even deeper hole! I wanted to have some chance of actually finishing what was on my plate! But by the time I had burned out on podcasts, I think I had given up on the thought I’d ever be able to keep up.

The $100 off an Audible.com makes each book “credit” cost about $5.42 (most books are 1 credit), at least if purchasing Audible’s Annual Platinum plan. This price is great when you compare it with what you would normally pay at a bookstore or online, save for maybe a used version of some book on eBay. Then when I was actually trying to sign up when I looked a little more closely at the offer. There’s some fine print at the bottom which says “Offer valid for new Audible customers only.” Doh! The only way around this is to actually create a new account with Audible and apply the coupon to that new account. Yes you can do this. Theoretically you can have as many accounts with Audible that you want. I don’t think Audible cares, as I know many who have multiple accounts. The one problem with this scenario is that if you want to have all your audio books on your iPod (or other compatible player), you can’t. Well, unless you have only one, or at most two accounts. You can’t activate more than two accounts on a given player. I suppose you could buy two or more iPods and then rack up accounts in order to take advantage of these discounts, but the added price of the player would kind of defeat the purpose. In any case, my problem was that my wife had an account as well, which had a number of books I hadn’t read and really wanted to. So I managed to dedicate most of my free time towards reading some of those books, and a few others I ended up skipping after I determined that I wasn’t enjoying them enough after the first hour or two to devote another 10+ hours.

So I signed up for the new account that gave me 24 credits. What do I do with those credits? So far, the only ones I’ve used were for a podcast! Well, that’s what Audible calls them anyway. They are basically the same type of subscriptions that Audible gives you the choice of downloading in the old more manual way or via a feed address. Unfortunately, as I’ve found, when you set it up in iTunes as a podcast via the feed they give you, it downloads a file that cannot be sped up as all other Audible content can be on the iPod. Yes, I still speed things up! Although I do this via the iPod’s built in ability that will only speed a file up by 20% or so, not the 50% I was doing in a much more belabored process with my podcasts earlier. I signed up for a subscription to The New Yorker magazine. Then I discovered a couple of free audible shows, one of which only comes out every month or two called Ear to the Ground, the other which comes out twice a week, called This is Audible. Both of these contain excerpts of audio books, interviews with authors, publishers, and others who talk about the books. Then just a week or two ago I discovered that my new account came with a complimentary subscription to the New York Times! So now I have around 27 hours of subscription/podcast content via my Audible account! I can’t escape the podcasts!

In an effort to try to organize things better, I went through my very long wish list on my old account to look for stuff that I could get rid of. I hadn’t done this in a while and I had lots of old stuff, and as it turned out a good amount of abridged stuff which Audible never did offer an unabridged version of. I made the rule that I wasn’t going to have anything abridged on the list, nor books that were more than 100 or so years old, since that would put them in the public domain and I could possibly get versions for free via Libravox or the Guttenberg Project. I used to add books to my wish list because they seemed interesting, and that’s fine, but after 2 or 3 or more years if they had no reviews and a rating of 3.5 or less, I didn’t have the confidence that these were books worth listening to. I was able to get my list down from a whopping 308 to a much more manageable 60 or so. Of course, I’ve also been adding new ones to this list due to hearing some of the books on This is Audible or Ear to the Gound which really interested me. But I’ve also paired things a bit by actually buying a few titles via special sales that Audible has had in the last month or so - they seem to be having sales pretty regularly now, maybe gearing up for even bigger ones towards the holidays in an effort to make some big sales numbers by the end of the year?
The point of this is that I’ve been listening to a lot of stuff, and have even managed to post a bunch of short reviews on an Audible Yahoo Group, but I thought I’d start posting them here as well, since I’m not posting much else these days! So watch for a bunch of these reviews as I have time to find them, spruce them up slightly and post them here.

Growing up as I did in Manhattan, just a few blocks from the Empire State Building and with the World Trade Center visible through my apartment Windows, everything seemed big. Even as an adult, I still hadn’t grazed the surface of what that big city had to offer. My mom would read the entertainment section of the New York Times, but I never got a sense of how much the city had to offer, other than movies, plays, restaurants, street fairs and museums. Eventually I learned about concerts, and of course there were events at our building or at our schools, etc. But I’m sure there were countless other events going on that we just didn’t know about. The thought of having a list of all of these in a pre-web era wasn’t really imaginable, at least to a young kid.When I moved to the Washington DC area, I marveled at all the events that were taking place on a daily basis. While DC is smaller than New York, if you take into account all the outlying areas, which had their own community events, you couldn’t do half of what was out there even if you didn’t work and dedicated all your free time to going to these things around the region every day.

Yet, whenever I had guests come to visit, I would often look in the Washington Post and not really find anything that interesting. Sure, there were museum exhibits and concerts, but after a while, trekking through the same museums gets a bit tiresome, and concerts can get expensive, and the smoke and noise eventually made them not the best venue, especially for older guests.

A couple of years ago we moved out to a suburb of DC called Vienna (Virginia). It’s a cute town that isn’t filled with the big box stores that you find in many other places. It does have some small strip malls, but about the only chains are a few grocery stores, and fast food restaurants, a Michaels, and that’s about it. Most of the stores are small one-shop deals. While it’s not old compared to many New England towns, at over 150, it also isn’t like some of the newer suburbs not far away that are filled with townhouses and McMansions. Among the more unique businesses in Vienna is a place that’s a coffee shop, music store, and concert venue in one, called Jammin’ Java. There are a couple of high-end wine stores that have just opened up this year. There are some great bicycle stores (The W&OD bike path runs right through the center of Vienna), some wonderful bakeries, a surprisingly large collection of ethnic restaurants, and also more high-end gourmet places in addition to the fast food, diners, etc. There are a number of gardens and parks in Vienna, some of which host outdoor concerts or movies, and there two weekly farmers markets. Vienna hosts street fairs, parades, a large variety of classes and events at its community center, town hall, library, and various businesses around the town.

The feel of Vienna to me, at least, is that of a “small” town, but it has a lot of resources, and things to do and see. The charms of this town weren’t lost on Money Magazine, which recently named Vienna it’s 4^th best place to live in the country.

Vienna’s website lists some of the more official events like parades, town meetings, etc., but I always thought there should be some organized list of events that was more comprehensive. Of course, we don’t just stay in Vienna all year, but travel around the region, and to other states, but the idea of having a list of things to do within walking distance or slightly more had some odd appeal to me. Maybe this had to do with growing up in Manhattan and being able to walk to many things. Or maybe it was just the fictionalized places on TV that charmed me – like Sicily, Alaska, or Everwood, Colorado.

Still, even for this small town, compiling such a list would have been a big pain. There have been online calendar systems out there for a while, but when Google launched theirs earlier this year, it impressed me as being easier and more powerful than previous ones. You can create your own calendars for private use, or use with a select group, or have one that’s completely public. You can have as many calendars as you want displayed, or you can “filter” out the ones you want to see at any given moment.

A bunch of people or businesses have started public Google calendars meant to help promote a business or resource and aid clientele. So, I thought, why not create something for Vienna? I searched for something like this but couldn’t find anything. I searched for calendars by Vienna businesses or associations and the only thing I found was one for the large concert arena called Wolftrap, whose address is technically Vienna, but which is still even further from the Vienna town center than the large business and commercial center called Tysons Corner whose postal address is McLean, VA.

So, I decided to start my own Vienna Google Calendar. Luckily some businesses like Jammin’ Java and the local Wholefoods at least have an online calendar, and of course there is the Vienna Virginia website’s calendar. To these I added some other events that I found from the local Michael’s, the Vienna-Tysons Regional Chamber of Commerce, Fairfax County Parks & Recreation, etc. I’m sure I’m missing a lot, but even so, it seems there’s stuff going on just about every day of the week, and usually multiple overlapping things, forcing you to pick and choose. Now I’ll admit that some of these things may not be of interest to many people, but still, it’s nice to know that there are lots of things going on just a few minutes away.

I’m trying to update the calendar as often as time allows, but for one already busy person, it can be a challenge. That’s why I’d like to make a request for some help. If you are a Vienna resident and come across this blog entry and would like to help out with the calendar, I would be grateful!

You can view an html version of the Google Calendar by clicking on the following link:

http://www.google.com/calendar/embed?src=0819geutosia1q06k831pnokv8%40group.calendar.google.com

But I recommend a more powerful way to view the calendar – create your own Google Calendar account. You can create your own calendar(s) for personal/family/friends, etc. And then you can search for public calendars of some interest and add those as ones you “subscribe to.” In addition to my Google Calendar, I also subscribe to Wolftrap’s, to one for Washington Cultural Events, and one for another eclectic coffee shop in Falls Church, VA. To find the Vienna Google Calendar, just go to Settings/Calendars/, hit the Add Calendars button at the bottom of the page, and then enter “Vienna, VA” in the Search Criteria, and it should be the first one that comes up.

In any case, it is kind of ironic that I’m doing this now, since I have an 11-month-old child that demands most of my free time and the only place she likes to be taken to is the neighborhood park!

Oh, I forgot you can actually embed Google calendar’s in web pages, so here’s an embeded version of the calendar:

Well, not quite, but I think this is definitely the longest hiatus since I started this blog two and a half years ago - over two months of no entries! The reasons are somewhat obvious from the last entry, huh? But of course there’s work as well. A new job has meant less free time at work to get personal things done - can you imagine, what nerve they have expecting me to actually work! Hopefully, I will make time to post something new and useful on at least a weekly basis, though. I think I can at least manage that!

So for starters, I have revamped the links section at left - specifically I’ve updated it with the podcasts I listen to now. Many are the same, but there are a lot of new ones, particularly NPR podcasts. If you’ve been following this blog, you know that I have been rooting for NPR to get most or all of its shows out there as podcasts. A couple of months ago they did add a whole lot of content, but not exactly in the way I expected.

Most of the new content added is actually clips from various shows they produce (Morning Edition, All Things Considered, Day to Day, etc.), but categorized. So you have lots of movie-related content strung together from different shows into one regular podcast. Another has lots of health-related clips, and so on. It’s definitely a different approach than simply taking an entire show and plopping it down into podcast form. In some ways it’s better for the listener because if they have no interest in a given subject, they don’t have to fast forward every time a segment comes up on, say, the bird flu pandemic. It’s of course a lot more work for NPR itself, so I’m a bit surprised they went to that level. On the other hand, there are also these “Story of the Day” or “Most Emailed Stories” which aren’t a specific category. Because they overlap other categories, and even each other, I very often have to fast forward through stories that I’ve heard before.

Then there are all the great shows that are put out by the individual stations rather than NPR headquarters. Shows like Good Food, Le Show, Leonard Lopate, Morning Stories, etc. NPR is finding it needs to adapt to the ongoing change in technology and distribution channels. Unlike the recording industry or the movie industry, it doesn’t have to protect its outlandish profits or price scale of $20-30 Million for many of it’s top performers, let alone the high costs of advertising, marketing, and executive salaries. And so it doesn’t have to put everything into a DRM package, continue to charge outlandish prices for its content, nor arrest children because they downloaded some copyrighted content off the Internet.

NPR affiliates still rely on two main sources of funding. One of these is the involuntary donation of every tax-paying citizen, although Congress has continually whittled away at this. The other source is through voluntary listener donations. In past years I have given to my two local affiliates as I used to listen to them daily. But now most of my listening is in podcast form, and my local affiliates don’t put any of their shows into that form. So I’m seriously considering, at the end of this year, dividing up my allotted amount between the various stations that produce the podcasts I listen to, including KCRW, WNYC, WGBH, and others. I think this really does make sense because not only does it thank these stations for what they are offering and help defray those costs, but it also, I would hope, motivates other stations to get in their to offer their own content in a free, downloadable form. Some of my favorite shows, including Marketplace, This American Life, Metro Connection, and others) still aren’t in this format. At this point there is just far too many shows that are freely available to worry about the shows that make it harder for me the listener to listen to them (whether that is due to lack of a downloadable version, or a downloadable version that one has to pay for - such as through Audible.com). I would even be ok with a subscription fee to all public radio shows, but I’m not going to subscribe to individual shows as I fear the price would add up significantly after only a few.

Sorry about the dirth of entries recently. I’ve been a bit preoccupied as of late. Namely, we were expecting our first child early in August, but she just didn’t want to come out! She was finally born last week and since then I’ve been burping, changing diapers, and fetching things for my wife. On top of this work has become a bit more hectic recently, so all this means that time is even a more pretty precious commodity than it is normally. One day I will get back to posting here on some interesting tech or diet/nutrition-realated topics. But things need to calm down just a bit first!

While our birth adventure was underway we were somewhat dead to the outside world and so only learned a bit second hand about what was going on in New Orleans, but we still haven’t watched any TV for over a week. Just hearing about it on the radio occasionally or from friends is bad enough! We know some people who moved to New Orleans just two months ago. They got out with some essentials, but lost everything else, including a car. Another family friend’s family is from New Orleans. They got out safely, but their houses are gone. Another friend’s family is from New Orleans and he hadn’t heard from any of them as of a couple of days ago. I’m not going to bother to put up another link for donations, as these are everywhere on the web these days, but I will just say that my heart goes out to all those who were effected by this tragedy and I will be trying to help out in some way myself.

Vienna 4th best place to live in the U.S.!

Money Magazine has come out with its top 100 places to live in the U.S and my town is #4 on the list. I knew there was a reason we moved here! To be fair, though, I’m sure lots of deserving towns were not in this list and many in this list are probably questionable. The problem is that the criteria are all weighted the same, whereas for different people some criteria will by far outweigh others. So while my town might be a great place for me to live, it’s probably not the right place for a whole lot of people. At least money lets you program your own criteria on their site (from a limited list) so that you can produce one that might be more customized to your own needs.

The other odd thing about how they judge towns in this article is that they do it based on the post office address. So while Vienna’s city limits comprise a fairly compact area, it’s official address stretches much further, encompassing some areas that are very different from the main parts that most people associate as Vienna. The same is true of all of these towns, so I’m sure this had a big effect. There could very well be incredible places to live, but their city name also encompasses areas on their outskirts that may have crime problems, or bad schools, or perhaps where the houses are astronomical in price.

Still, I can’t help but to be glad that my town won something like this. The last time I recall there was a big news story that featured Vienna was when Robert Hannsen was caught passing secret documents to the KGB via drop-offs in Vienna parks. Hannsen also lived in Vienna.

For anyone who is already a Vienna resident or who is thinking of moving here, a few weeks ago I set up a Yahoo! Group devoted to things Vienna. It still hasn’t quite gotten off the ground, but maybe this #4 placement will be the start of something?

Back to blogging.

After the longest hiatus in months, I’m finally trying to get back to posting a bit more. Not that I’ve suddenly got a lot of time on my hands, but after a pretty hellish week where I was doing some work for my old job and working at my new job for a total of somewhere around 70 hours, I at least FEEL like I have a lot more free time! I’ve actually gotten some things around the house and yard done I’ve been wanting to do for WEEKS! My new job also has had be a bit busy, but now that I’m finally starting to get used to the new environment and develop a rhythm, I’ll actually get to take a short break once in a while and maybe not write per se, but at least get some things done that I otherwise would have put off till after work.

I’m sorry about the quietness here over the last couple of weeks. It’s one of those times in my life when real-life events are superseding a lot of my time online. Damn you, real life, damn you to hell! To be more specific, I’d been searching for a new job as my current job’s contract is ending, and I found one, so I’ve been trying to wrap things up at my now old job – my last day was yesterday. In the mean time, me an my wife are expecting and we’re starting to approach the home stretch. With that comes lots of business with juggling decisions about birth attendants, pediatricians, and childcare providers, as well as taking childbirth classes, figuring out what we need to buy (or ask for) for the baby, etc., etc. I wish I could tell you there is a light at the end of the tunnel, but that light seems like it might be a ways off. My new job will require me to learn some new programming skills, and my old job wants me to come in on my “spare time” at least until the contract is officially over in a couple of weeks to finish a couple of projects. And then of course there’s the baby, which will probably preoccupy most of my free time once she arrives! But, I will at least try to steal 20 minutes here and there and post something interesting. Indeed, I may look into ways of posting quick links and very short comments, since that should be a lot faster. I fear my days of the epic-long treatises may be behind me – at least for a while!