For those who don’t know, I have a Google Chat Badge on my home page. It goes largely unused, but occasionally I get a fun gem.

Guest has joined.
Raymond: Greetings
Guest: Hallo
Spreekt u Nederlands?
Raymond: No, I am sorry.
English only
Un poquito espanol
Guest: Ok. I was looking for a Dutch Raymond Berg. Thank you anyway.
Raymond:
I’m happy to help
Good luck on your search.
Guest: Have a nice day!
Thank you
Raymond: You too!
Guest: bye
Raymond: Goodbye.
Guest has left.

First, I had no intention of violating any copyright. I used Grooveshark as I understood Grooveshark worked. I took music that I OWN, and uploaded it to the servers so I could listen to it in the cloud. This seemed to big one of the big draws of the service, and so I opted for it.

Second, I PAID for Grooveshark. Well, that is until 6 minutes after I received the DMCA notice from the Grooveshark offices. I was a paying customer since June of this year.  Most people I know who are going to say “Dude, Grooveshark rocks!! What’s wrong Grooveshark?!? Don’t be an idiot, man!” probably don’t front the subscription fee to get the desktop and mobile clients.  I’m just pointing it out because I was dedicated to the cloud-cause. I want this to work, and I want it to not suck. I’d put up with crappy interfaces and buggy performance if it meant supporting the cause.

Third, the RIAA is still out there performing their oh-so-jackassy deeds to hold back mankind. As a patron of the arts, I am continuously offended by their work and general presence.

Fourth, my subscription was due to be renewed TOMORROW. How hilarious, right?!! Serves you right, Grooveshark, you tramp!

Fifth, I was under the (apparently false) understanding that any music provided to the whole was being licensed and paid for by Grooveshark. For all intents and purposes it seemed like a legitimate organization. Apparently I was wrong and missed all the warning signs, you tramp!

Sixth, I can’t believe I gave up on Rdio so soon! My life would have been so much better in it’s attractive, but simple, embrace. If it weren’t so expensive ($10 a month for mobile+web) then I would definitely switch. (How about $6?)

Seventh, I wouldn’t use Grooveshark again if you paid me. I’ll go to parties and be in the same room, but this relationship is over.

Eighth, and last, if you’re paying for Grooveshark I advise you to stop. And if you’re not paying, then I suggest you move on before you’re identified and sued by the RIAA for using the service. If the RIAA can find a way to get to you, they’ll use it.

Senator,

You’ll have to forgive me as none of the subjects in this form drop-down seemed appropriate for this email, so I picked Campaign Finance.

I sent you a cookie-cutter style letter concerning the Network Neutrality debate; and I received a cookie-cutter response back. This is fine, we both obviously deal with a lot of topics and email. We don’t have time for us or our staffers (thanks to you, by the way) to hand-type emails supporting letterhead-positions. The -only- problem was how you did it. You see, I gave you my email address, the personal line to reach me. What did I get in response? donotreply@warner.senate.gov

Look, I don’t want to tell you how to do your job, but when we enter in this new world of electronic communication it means we need to obey some standard etiquette. After the email that I sent, you had my email address to which you could respond with your thoughts and feelings in that conversation. I appreciate the email you sent, but you broke the potential for conversation and turned information into a one-way-street by sending it from this ridiculous account, equivalent to “donotreply@yourSenatorCouldntCareLess.gov”. I don’t want the email box that your wife sends you dinner with or where you get the daily sports sent, I’m just saying I’d like to be able to reply to something you shoved into my inbox.

I know the Senator’s office is a busy place and you probably never see these emails, let alone care about what email address your emails get sent back. However, I know that Senators are supposed to have an open line of communication with their constituents. In fact, this is the basis for the amazing republic in which we live. This is a brave, new world, Senator. I don’t think I’m asking for much, just that you don’t shut me down by not letting me talk back. It’s only fair.

Your empathy is appreciated,

Raymond Berg
Voter

Hey, Listen!

UPDATE: I was able to get a little better about using some of the reverb controls. Here’s something with two piano voices, and a warm bass.

Clouds on the Wing

Basically, use this (amazingly short bit of python code) to wreak havoc on your mate’s computer.

'''
Created on Mar 20, 2010
@author: Raymond
'''
import win32api
import threading
class Beep(threading.Thread):
def __init__(self,frequency,duration):
threading.Thread.__init__(self)
self.frequency = frequency
self.duration = duration
def run(self):
win32api.Beep(self.frequency,self.duration)
for a in range(0,200):
a = Beep(a*20,1000)
a.start()
a.join()


And no, I’m not even white-spacing it for you.

Here’s a fun mp3 (if you’re lazy) with picture of the audacity output. See, no volume change! Only frequency. I love science.

And the exe if you’re lazy and you don’t like to practice safe-computing.

The first thing that my professor explained to me in just such a way was the structure of a Java class. I had never had any programming experience in my life, and Java was as foreign to me as Greek. But it didn’t take long for me to memorize “public static void main(String[] args){}”. I had no clue what any of it meant, but I shouted it when I was startled from my sleep. I also got used to typing it every time I started my homework in vim.

My most enjoyable memories in the computer science field were those “a-ha” moments when the simplest of concepts suddenly made complete sense, like Dr. Bezrukov’s “public static void main()”. I admit that I used to have one of these every week. I remember standing in the shower before an early morning of class and suddenly realizing how hot and cold water piping really worked and why it took time for water to warm up. This may seem silly to you, but it’s not something I had thought about before. I encourage everyone to have these moments as often as possible at every phase in life.

The preparation is simple enough. 3 medium, Yukon gold tomatoes (I’m sure the recipe would work fine with russets or other kinds) and 1 medium onion, both chopped broadly. Come to think of it, I don’t think I know another way to say “chopped into big pieces, kind of bit-sized but maybe a little bigger”. Anyway, spread these about the cooking pan.

Warm up a 2-3 tablespoons of olive oil with 1-2 tablespoons of butter. As you are beginning to see, I’m not a big fan of measuring things. Anyways, balance this out with a tablespoon-ish of curry powder and a hefty sprinkling of red pepper and some minced garlic. This is all relative to your taste! Add pepper if you want, I don’t care, I even threw in a pinch of cilantro. How you warm this up is your business, but since I don’t own a microwave I used a cereal bowl nestled in my rice cooker. Let me shatter your belief that decent cooks (and computer people) lead glamorous lives.

Drizzle this evenly over the potato/onion mix. Then start the process to cook this bad boy in an oven or, in my case, Nu-wave oven. Halfway through, stir it up and be sure the sauce coats the potatoes. I would recommend another peppering of curry powder, but I love the taste of curry. Once the potatoes are done, eat them! Bam, who’s amazing? You are.

Look, I could give you more to work with, but I hate recipes. Even when I follow one I tend to drift off halfway through and add my own personality to it. I’ll grant you I’ve never made a souffle, but I’ve never had a bad time while cooking. Let me know if you found a way to better this recipe.

Bonus – BBQ Ham: Easy, precooked ham, cubed, dropped in a bowl of hickory bbq sauce, thrown on the grill rack and warmed up in the oven. Easy to do, and life is simple.

I made a reference list of rules to obey when using a team Exchange server or other tool supplying a calendar service. While some of the following rules may seem like common sense to you, I challenge you to check yourself against these rules and see if you aren’t violating at least one of them. Actually, in writing these rules I picked things that I do too, but I won’t tell you which ones.

Raymond’s Rules for Team Calendars (Outlook, Google Calendar)

1. All teammates must agree to use the calendar service as their primary method for personal appointment management and the collaborative scheduling tool. *
2. Each member of the team is accountable for their own calendar.
3. Calendars must be shared with openly with all teammates.
4. All calendars must be up to date to provide for efficient meeting scheduling and accountability.
5. All employees are in one of three states at any given time and their calendars should reflect this:
   • Free/Open – No scheduled events or appointments labeled as “Free” to show they do not require direct physical attention.
   • Busy – Unavailable or occupied during the time of this event.
   • Out of the Office – Time period when the employee is not located on campus. (Includes telework, alternate duty locations, vacation, personal days)
     In the event of an unexpected scheduling change the team member should make alterations to reflect that change as soon as feasibly possible.**
6. Tentative appointments should be firmly changed to “Accepted” or “Declined” as soon as meeting attendance is most likely ensured. ***
7. Exceptions are allowed in the form of incalculably, but necessary, overlapping appointments.
8. It is reasonable to accept an event meeting and cancel in the event of an unexpected change.
9. Do not add/save items on your calendar that do not serve a purpose in scheduling your day. Extraneous meetings and unrelated events that a team member does not effect the workday should be removed.
10. Notes/Changes/Modifications to events made on calendars should be performed and tracked through the calendar service to preserve process continuity and centralized storage for meeting related data on changes or additions.
11. Members who plan to actively attend meetings (i.e. offer input, act on authority, plan to ask questions) should be added by the meeting manager to the official roster and be notified of changes like other participants.

*If this a team cannot agree to dedicated use of the system then the team must agree to live in chaos.
**Enabling permissions for a second office-mate to modify a calendar would allow for support for meeting organization and last minute changes.
***All plans are tentative by nature so labeling events as “tentative” implies a further uncertainty than is experienced daily by mortal beings of this universe.

Casual Tips:

• Any foreseeable blocks of work time in which a teammate prefers to be uninterrupted should be labeled on their calendar.
• Further use of color coding to specify certain complex cases may be used, but it should be thoroughly enforced. For example, teleworking means an out of the office status but you are available for phone calls and will be responding to email just as you would if you were in the office, so a color code or tag may apply to this situation to help coworkers.

As with anything, you may disagree or agree, but I hope you’ll communicate with me either way. If I’ve forgotten something that you think belongs on this list, I’d love to hear it. This is only version one, and there will be other rules to come.

Try printing this off and sharing it with your teammates at your next meeting.

Before I continue, most of you will say “Podcast, so you use iTunes right?” Wrong. Like many open source supporters or Windows users, I find iTunes to not be a viable solution because of many reasons: digital rights policies, resource load, update mechanisms, insistence upon taking over your entire media experience,  and ostensible attitude against interoperability (aka. they don’t like to play nice with others). So let’s just drop it, and if you disagree then I suggest you stop reading now. It will be very frustrating if you think iTunes is the ‘Oracle of the Podcast’.

Regarding video podcasting (loosely defined) the first step into this area was to use the readily available YouTube subscription services.  Of course, you’re taking a pretty big hit in the “available media” department, but you’ve got to start somewhere. Unfortunately, sorting and ordering of these channels is terrible under the current configuration.  All of the subscriptions fall into a single, unruly, unsorted listing.

Also, YouTube’s community isn’t truly podcasting as it doesn’t lend itself to separation of logical flows and the content is as unreliable as the casual user uploader. Even professional providers like Google mixes categories like music@, authors@, women@ and candidates@ in their AtGoogleTalks channel instead  of separating those into separate channels. This disregard for logic or quality uploads  is systematic of this immature and unmotivated community.

The next attempt is to use RSS readers. Common RSS readers are out of the question in this problem because they lack the ability to separate the media from the post. Even with (my favorite) Google Reader‘s starring feature would force you to manually download source files or listen using their online widget. This is fine if you use Reader solely as a podcasts client, but more often than not you’ll find yourself frustrated by the break in continuity between reading and listening/watching.

I then looked at the Windows client options.  For all intents and purposes, Google searching proves there isn’t one.  That is to say that finding any stable podcast client (outside of iTunes) is far from easy in the current climate.  I wandered across Doppler, a small podcast client for Windows with ported versions on the iTouch and iPhone. This alone impressed me.  It was almost perfect, but the interface was buggy and left much to be desired.

At this point I had all but given up. I started surfing Revision3 and looking at what subscription mechanism they used. It looked a lot like Hulu‘s configuration.   It turns out they’re an all-feed shop actually, which is FANTASTIC.  On top of that, they advocate use of a windows tool of which I had never heard: Miro.

My Solution

Miro is a beautiful, elegant podcast client that sells itself as an “HD Video Player”.  In reality, it’s the exact opposite of Doppler: clean, stable, refined, and attractive.  It does just as well with audio podcasts as it does with video. On top of that, it interprets and downloads videos from almost every single media RSS regardless of format (Revision3, Youtube, Veoh, etc).

It also allows for playlist building and addition of sites so you can manually check for updates of your favorite Hulu shows very quickly, although I’ll stick with my Hulu account. Lastly, its a torrent downloader and comes with a link to “LegalTorrents” to get your started downloading videos and music and whatever else you want from that big happy world of P2P (all legal of course).

So live life, friends. Live it with video, music, and speech. Live, and learn, and download Miro. You’ll thank me for it some day.

He who finds the Holy Grail and can return the magic elixir found therein to me shall be heralded as one greater than all in the land.