The Sixth Layer: A Business Blog

Building an example of how to build a churning queue for blog posting bandits on the internet... this Blogger blog on blogspot.com is a good example of a content channel, the basic "news output," the first step to recognition in any sort of publishing company. The most you can ask for in the realm of consumable content (here we're talking newspaper articles, not video games) is a content author who provides content in text, audio, video, and URL formats.

Visit the Posts (Atom) feed link on the bottom of the front page and find the FeedBurner RSS frontend which shows the content in this blog: I am generally not posting MP3 or Video content, but the capability is there between Blogger and FeedBurner to add media files for a rich feed viewer such as iTunes to recognize and retrieve. You can include podcast content in your blog postings!

Text articles with embedded content can be viewed in a web browser and podcasts can be scanned in a podcast aggregator. Now, what about those URL-based posts with titles, text summaries and tag data: they're all coming from a particular account on the del.icio.us service, and if you have the account name you can request the set of tags by URL. But, what if you want to edit these tags?

What if you want to collect a group of posts, and tag them all a certain way? What if you want to drill down inside a large set of already tagged posts, and update the tags for a subset? The interface to handle this behavior has already been developed with tagging for gmail, but the feature described here is not available on this database... yet.

I'm on a mission to build this feature into my workflow. Anybody want to stop me? Please, I'm begging you, tell me this feature already exists before I write it myself!

NOHO-NYC Adventures

We're on a trip to The Moon, says Remy D... with a mild diversion on the way, a stop in Pluto. Eben Moglen of the Software Freedom Law Center and Columbia University Law History department, has asked for a meeting with the founding members of The Causemaker Foundation, and it's just a little out of the way: we came out this way to see the show for Umphrees McGee in Northampton Massachusetts, and that was a bust for me. We went to a nice restaurant (The Dirty Truty) instead of that, Mike said that the concert was a rockin good time!

Have been enjoying Northeastern hospitality and the beautiful weather and scenery of New York and Mass, we're taking a train into NYC and I have yet to contact anyone for lodging or more serious scoping out of the area. We've got enough friends in NYC, and Remy has made some links, that I'm not worried about it. I could come out of this trip with an incredible story or even an internship with one of the great heads of the Free Software movement, with doors leading to Law school and worse: real political activism.

Wish me luck! My phone is out of service, if you need me call Amy Gavin at 585.781.4145, we're in Northampton for a day more, after that you can try my number or Jeremy DeCausemaker at 315.945.1601 -- he's got a Cingular phone, my Cricket has been out of service since near Syracuse. I hope it works in NYC!

Tackling Tickets

These are all of the things that I mean to do in the next short span of time. The plan is to run down the list and generate a file for each issue, then either prepare a note on my schedule to remind me of the time for action, or write another note expanding on the task at hand, or mark it as thoroughly completed. First priority is to fulfill my government-mandated obligations, I have two tickets on the books.

• Judge in Avon

Court date early in November, some time before the court date in the town of Henrietta. This was a simple speeding ticket, 75 in a 65. The officer told me that I was actually going 88 according to his laser, but the ticket was actually written for 75.

My own observation of the speedometer indicated my speed was between 80 or 82 MPH, though admittedly my first reaction upon seeing the reaction of the cloaked state trooper to my passing was not to check the speedometer, but to reduce my speed and prepare to pull over.

• Pay Bills (Check Bank Balance)

Do it now. Nothing to say about this.

• Set up Home Office at 204-1

No Go. Moving out of 204-1, as I'm still not sure how to pay the November rent. I'm about comfortable and moved into 149, but the arrangement with the computers and the furniture is not really finalized to this point.

• Clean out Trunk of Car

Still got a bunch of crap in it. The last thing I want when traveling over a border is to have to endure a lengthy, protracted search. If they are going to search me for guns or drugs, I'd rather make it easy for everybody involved!

• Take out the Trash

We generate more trash than anything in the world. I didn't generate half this much trash before I started cooking. Make an extra effort to minimize waste food and save on trash output. Also remember, if you're going to empty the trash, replace the bag so the next person who tries to use the trash doesn't have a conniption!

• Do the Dishes

Finally got everybody to participate in doing the dishes, thanks to delicious food. The trick is a repeat performance, and the better trick still is to make it sustainable. I do have high hopes for 149 Waterloo.

• Video Software

Provide a synopsis of tools I've learned that save you from buying expensive packages (both MRR and NRR), enabling content consumption and production for Audio Video geeks.

• HP Warranty Status
  

Fuck HP! I spent at least 3 hours on the phone troubleshooting and the result was they told me there was nothing wrong with the hard drive. I can't afford to drive out and see my dad again next weekend, if the machine is not fixed, I will be spending more of my own time on this issue that has no benefit to me!

End result: I bought a new hard drive and put it into my Dad's computer. A little white lie, I said it was covered under warranty, but really I couldn't stand to spend another 3 hours on the phone with HP to prove that the drive was faulty and get a replacement shipped.

We've got til February to orchestrate a catastrophic provable failure on this drive and get a new one under warranty. Maybe I can get Dad to load it up with porn and keep writing to it over and over again?` It probably will not crash on its own, hooked up in configuration as a secondary drive like it is now.

Would you ever know if videos, instead of system data and configuration files, were losing bytes due to corruption? There's no reason the system should crash because of incoherent data files. Is there any great symbolism to the idea of corrupting pornography? Kind of funny I guess, ha ha ha.

The unhappy conclusion to this story is that my new cheaper HP Slimline does not seem to have user-serviceable parts. I have no idea how to remove the hard drive, and if I had to replace it with another from Western Digital working on my own, I think I would become a slave to the HP warranty timetable. That sounds awful.

• NYS DMV License Plate Replacement for CVP1942 - Stolen?

Paid an $18 fee and spent 2 hours at the Brighton DMV to get the stolen plate replaced with a new set. I lost my cool plate number, and now I don't have the number memorized anymore. Bummer. Would have only been $3 if I had filled out a police report and brought it to the DMV.

Morning Activities

Today, yoga and the mac. I can sacrifice my second monitor from the office, it's kind of fuzzy anyway and would make a much better TV in the main room.

Lets see if I can hook up the cable modem via USB to the mac, and set it up as a router... yeah, on second thought lets not do that. It could be a good idea. But then I might still might need to hook up another hub or router in lieu of just the Airport Express.

We're going to need a hub one way or another, unless I get another Mac Mini or hook it up with wireless. I do have that spare wireless card at Tuesday Studios...

Next option for something to do is to move Blackruby to the home office, and made it into a server/router combination. I want to make one machine responsible for the VPN, so the rest can just auto configure by means of DHCP and be "on the network" as if connected directly to the main office LAN. The future is hazy with regard to how this is actually going to fall together.

Current location: Home Office
Next stop: Tuesday Studios Main Office

Outbox:

• Ubuntu 7.04 Desktop LiveCD

Inbox:

• Wireless MiniPCI Dell TrueMobile 1150
• 2 More Monitors (from Warsaw: for BlackRuby Primary Head, Notebah x2 Heads)
• Internet Stealing Device (from Waterloo)
• VPN Link (from Home to Tuesday)


• Secure Remote Access

That is all, until later.