Weekly Summary, 2/21/10

Well, I’m late posting this weekly summary, but I figured I’d go for it anyways.

Foxconn Workers Don’t Get Mad, They Get Even (By Burning Their Factory Down)

Gun Ban in National Parks Ends on Monday – The little blurb on this blog posts highlights what’s wrong with our legislative process. Congress passed a bill on credit card reform last summer. Someone attached a rider to that bill to allow guns in National Parks. How are those related, why was that allowed to be attached to this bill?

Confirmed: Google Reader is Going Real Time (Updated) – I use Google Reader a lot, and it going real time has been nice. All of my blogs are now using PubSubHubBub so they’re practically real time now.

Radiolab Product Safety Announcement – I thought this was funny. I loved to listen to Radiolab while driving, maybe that isn’t the best thing to do.

Tumblr Screws Hipster Underclass to Appease Hipster Overlords at Pitchfork – Depending upon who you listen to Tumblr took a subdomain/user name from a user to give to a company for their own use.

Verizon and Skype make sweet music together with new mobile app – I was sort of excited for this, until I read that they’re not going to allow for domestic Skype-Out calls and that it won’t work at all over 3G.

I snapped this picture at The Abbey Theater.

I wonder who shoveled this? And if that free Daily paper is that much better than the other two in there.

Weekly Summary

I haven’t been posting on this blog too much. I have a lot of other things going on but I’m hoping to start a little something new here. I spend a lot of time online throughout the week, I read a lot on line, and watch a bit of online video as well. Every week on our radio show, This Small Town Life, Kinsee and I have a little segment called This Week on the Internet. I always tend to scramble at the last minute to remember what happened and come up with things to talk about. My plan is to start posting weekly summaries here, on either Friday or Saturday, both to comment a bit on what’s going on, as well as to help me with the segment for the show.

CollegeHumor Back to the Future Sex Scenes Parody — I’m a big fan of Back to the Future. And I think Collegehumor makes some of the best quality online videos (they can be juvenile at times, but the production quality is always great).

Facebook Denis All Wrongdoing in Beacon Data Breach — I remember when Beacon came out, I consider myself pretty tech and privacy savvy, so I read about Beacon, and how to disable it. I (thought) I disabled Beacon with Facebook’s instructions and then bought something from an online store that was part of the program. Sure enough it showed up on my Facebook wall. I never figured out what I did wrong, but after that I think I took a more technical approach and used a browser extension or script to disable it.

NPR on Richard Brautigan — I only heard of Richard Brautigan a couple of years ago, while at a wedding near Redwoods National Park. Someone told me I looked just like him on the cover of Trout Fishing in America the way I was dressed. I picked up a copy of the book not long after. I can’t remember the last time before this that a book has had such an impact on me. Reading The Pill Versus The Springhill Mine Disaster, while backpacking in the Sierra Nevada with friends was an amazing experience.

Net at Night Episode 139 — I listen to a handful to TWiT shows each week. I can’t stand Leo Laporte, he glosses over so many details and doesn’t research things before talking about them on the shows, it’s really annoying. But typically the guests and co-hosts are more informed. Jeff Jarvis and Gina Trapani on TWiG and Amber MacArthur on net@night all impress me. I liked this episode for the guests though, two people involved with streaming music online with differing views in regards to curation vs discovery.

Google Is Being Evil, Music Bloggers Say — Under the DMCA (or other laws), is there any recourse if a company (in this case a record label) files a false DMCA complaint and your hosting provider (in this case Google/Blogger) deletes all your content?

New Header

If you’re reading this in a RSS reader, visit the site to see the awesome new header image my brother made for me. It’s replacing a pretty bad header that has been up there almost a year.

Thanks Chris!

Blogging and San Diego

I haven’t been blogging much here, but I’ve been doing a ton of blogging over at BeerNBikes.com Durango, CO (and the surrounding Four Corners area) is an awesome place for both craft beer fans and cyclists.

I still read up on things happening in San Diego every once in a while, especially all the wonderful beer being made.

I saw this post on Draft Mag’s blog about the SDCityBeat Festival Of Beer coming up in May, and their summary of San Diego pretty much sums things up for me:

Occasionally, we consider moving to San Diego. It’s warm. All the time. It’s beautiful. All the time. The people are attractive. All the time. Honestly, what’s not to like? Then you visit, however, and realize it’s essentially a city devoid of culture, unless you consider being a stop on the way to Tijuana an important cultural experience. We don’t.

They do have good things to say about the CityBeat Festival of Beers though.

Beernbikes.com

I started a new blog yesterday. Beernbikes.com

I’m hoping that it will be less of a personal blog than this one and more about news and things going on relating to beer and bikes. It’ll probably be focused on the Durango, CO area but I’m sure there will be a lot of info about San Diego and other beer and bike regions and news.

The other reason I set it up is because I recently bought some web hosting and wanted to get my feet wet with hosting my own stuff. It seemed too daunting of a task to move this blog (and something I might screw up the first time) so I decided to come up with a new blog. Craft beer and bicycles are two of my biggest hobbies so it’s a perfect fit. I’m hoping to play around with all sorts of things you can do when you host a blog yourself rather than host it with wordpress.com (like this blog is).

So go on over to beernbikes.com and check it out. I’ll be cross posting personal stuff relating to beer and bikes to both blogs every once in a while. But go check it out and tell me what you think.

Welcome to Colorado!

If you haven’t heard, Kinsee and I moved to Bayfield, Colorado! Kinsee grew up here and I’ve been anxious to get out of California for a while now. I don’t know when I fell in love with the Four Corners Region (probably around the time I discovered Edward Abbey) but Durango (the “big” city nearby) seems like the perfect place for me. Four breweries in Durango, one with a location in Bayfield, lots of cyclists and plenty of other outdoor enthusiasts, Durango seems like a good place.

I’m just getting settled in, but Kinsee’s already been blogging about what’s going on in Durango at her new blog, Durango Dirt.

The weather has been beautiful ever since we got here, I’ve heard that we’ll get more days of sun per year than San Diego (330 vs 300).

We went to Ska Brewing for the release of their new IPA Modus Hoperandi, not quite a West Coast IPA but not bad at all. Kinsee wrote about it here. One of my new favorite blogs, Beer at 6512 (the elevation in Durango) also was there. Turns out Durango has quite the blogger community because Hank at Songs From the Wood was there also.

I just got back from my first Colorado bike ride. I rode from our house in Bayfield to Ignacio and back. It was about 19 miles, mostly flat, but my sea-level-lungs need some adjustment to the altitude up here (we live at 6900 feet). When I left it was about 22F, I averaged 17.5mph and it had warmed up to almost 40F by the time I got back. And I did that on my fixed gear because my road bike is still in the shop getting assembled and tuned.

We’ve been here less than a week but so far so good. Once I get a little more settled in expect a lot more blog posts from me.

Audience Atomization Overcome?

Audience Atomization Overcome? That sounds overly complex to me. Fortunately, the article the name comes from: Audience Atomization Overcome: Why the Net Erodes the Authority of the Press by Jay Rosen on The Huffington Post isn’t nearly as hard to understand as the title given it.

The first part of the article focuses on the inherent and often unacknowledged bias of political journalism. I think in some ways that bias can be carried out to more than just politics and more than just journalism. Anyone acting as an expert or authority on a subject fills the role described I think.

But it wasn’t the first part of the article that got me to read it. I wanted to hear how the net is changing things. That is the focus of the second part of the article, it talks about how blogs allow like minded individuals to network and share their ideas.

It’s all well and good, I agree with a lot of the article more or less, but I was disappointed that it didn’t touch on the fact that this benefit that comes with the internet, how easy it is for people to share news and their opinions also places a burden on the consumer of that information. Because anyone can have a voice the reader must determine if the author they are reading has any authority on a given subject at all. It’s easy for someone to create a professional looking website or blog and then spew total nonsense while acting like an expert.

That is what I see as one of the biggest hurtles to online media. The consumer has to be much more vigilent about what they read and how much they scrutinize it. I’m not saying it’s a bad thing. But because there is hardly ever anyone fact checking blog posts I think news and media must be consumed online in a much different fashion than with the traditional medial.

Halloween One More Time

Kinsee and I dressed as Trout Fishing in America made it on to The New Yorker Book Bench Blog’s Halloween costume post. I really like the two costumes above us a lot also.

Thanks to Chris for taking our picture.

SDBloggers Meetup

Last night I went to the SDBloggers Meetup at Modus Supper Club in Banker’s Hill. I never know what to expect when going to these things, the first one I went to was a Twitter meetup a few weeks ago. Both times I’ve gone with friends so I’ve had someone to talk with as we mingle and meet people. The point behind these meetups is to get people with common interests (blogging and twitter for instance) together to meet and talk.

Last night I talked with a few people, Daniel from a local startup called Pelotonics that makes group collaboration software (which I haven’t had much time to look at). But he was a nice guy.

But as I was leaving a guy came up to us and introduced himself. The easiest way to start a conversation with someone was to just walk up to them, introduce yourself and ask, “So, what do you blog about?” This guy, Dennis, said that he started out with a food blog, which he turned into a restaurant. That sounded pretty cool to me, then he said the restaurant was Sea Rocket Bistro. I recognized the restaurant, it’s on 30th St in North Park near where I used to live, but as a vegetarian I never gave it a second look because it is a seafood restaurant.

We started chatting with him about that, and he told us what vegetarian dishes they do have, there weren’t too many, but they all sounded great. Then he mentioned that their focus is on local sustainable foods. I thought that was really interesting, especially with seafood, it seems like it would be so easy to do here in San Diego.

I took a look at their website today and loved it. I wish every restaurant had this much information as readily available. They have a list of their food sources and even an interactive google map of where specific items come from. And they still blog, I looked at some of the recent posts, and it’s not just filler to draw attention to the restaurant — there is interesting content about local food issues, like this post about Prop 2 and egg farming.

While I can’t comment on how good the food is, and I probably won’t ever become a regular because of their focus on seafood, I do want to check it out sometime.

Books

I’ve been reading Bright Shiny Morning by James Frey for a few weeks now, and I was only about 200 pages into it. Which is a sure sign that I’m not enjoying it too much, which is causing me to read a lot less than I should. So I took it back to the library and picked up The Elementary Particles by Michel Houellebecq. I’m hoping I can get more interested in this book.

I recently signed up for a book based social networking website called Goodreads. You enter the books you’re reading, want to read, and have read. It lets you rate them, recommend them to people and even offer to give away/sell them. Then you connect up with your friends (or strangers with similar interests) on the site to get book recommendations.

After I signed up for it I was looking at my “to read list”, and realized I kept a list of books I read for most of the year I lived in Santa Cruz. I read a lot that year. Then I stumbled upon this woman who is reading a book a week for a year and blogging about it, the 52 Books Project.

She just got done reading Keith Gessen’s All the Sad Young Literary Men, a book I read a few weeks ago and really enjoyed. She also enjoyed it. But what really stood out to me was this quote: “I probably shouldn’t mention it because I refuse to actually read any more than the excerpts, but The Average American Male (and its popularity) made me lose just a little hope in the male subset of the human race. All the Sad Young Literary Men redeems it, makes me realize that, while the average male exists, his existence necessitates the existence of above-average men. And there are men (possibly not only fictional) who think women are attracted to them because, “for all your problems you still read books, you were still a thumb in the eye of the way things were.” They have female counterparts, too.”

Now I haven’t read The Average American Male either. I haven’t even read the excerpts. But a friend recommended it to me, while we were talking about Bukowski (which I’ve learned to always be weary of reading anything anyone compares to Bukowski, because in my opinion it’s never as good, and almost always terrible, Fante excepted). I went out and read a review or two and realized I wanted nothing to do with this book. I hoped (and still do) that it was just perpetuating a stereotype about “the average American male”, but more and more I think it’s not just a stereotype. I obviously can’t speak for the book since I haven’t read it, but I have a feeling I know the general theme, and I just don’t like the idea of men, myself included, portrayed in such a way. And it’s a comfort to know that people recognize not every American male is like that. (Call me narcissistic, but I’m including myself in the “above-average men” category).

Looking quickly over the list of books she’s read, and those she liked, I think I’m going to follow along and get some reading ideas for myself.