Nels Wadycki The Original, Still Undefeated, World’s Greatest Copycheater

I was thinking about Live Blogging this or something, but it’s not like anyone is going to read it in real time. So, I’ll just write my experience here.

By the way, I am really only installing Silverlight because NBA.com wants me to. I can’t watch their Windows Media videos in Firefox, so I’m hoping that if I install Silverlight and am able to watch those videos, the NBA web admins will see their numbers go up and start putting everything in Silverlight. Then I’ll be able to watch it all in Firefox and not have to go to IE anymore. That’ll be the day.

So far, I’ve downloaded the executable and that’s it… Note: I’ve got 8 tabs open right now, so if this requires a browser restart, it could be a problem. Moreso if it’s an auto-browser-restart (which I can see Microsoft wanting to do).

Letting it through the firewall…

And I will have to restart my browser for these setting to take effect… but I get to do it when I want. So, I’ll use my secret “crash Firefox” session saving technique (in which I end the Firefox process from the Task Manager, thereby saving my tabs).

Back in a sec…

Okay! NBA.com says it’s successfully installed, and it looks like the video is there. Playback time!

Overall, not too bad. A little bit of skipping along the way, but that happens… Rewind was not so kind. Clicking on the playback bar results in the video stalling while the audio rewound and then played. If I used the scrub bar, then it worked okay after about a second. I’ll take that over Windows “Buffering” Media Player, any day, though.

Filed under: NBA, Silverlight on April 23rd, 2008 | No Comments »

1. Since when does PayPal require that you surrender money to them in order to use their service? I’d thought that honor was reserved only for Premium Members. Evidently it doesn’t cost anything (and can actually be cost effective) to become a premium member. I just found this out when trying accept a $25 payment for Give Me The Rock.

2. I haven’t even opened Google Reader today. I don’t check it as much on the weekends, but today is only Friday! I hope I’m not missing out on some content I could use for the Friday Five.

3. NBA Playoffs start tomorrow. In case anyone besides me cares about that. I’m psyched. I’m going to be working outside most of the day, but I’m pretty sure I can at least break away for 2 hours to watch the PHX-SAS game on ABC at 2pm CST.

4. Friday should be Official Smoque Day. Well, every day should be Official Smoque Day, I suppose.

5. Blogger’s Autosave keeps failing, and it’s worrying me a little, so I’m going to go ahead and just publish this now. That and I need to hit that publish button so I can get back to writing stories about people who aren’t real. (ed note: Moved back to Wordpress. Don’t need to worry about this anymore!)

Filed under: Friday Fifteen, Friday Five on April 18th, 2008 | No Comments »

I just tried BlogIt. It couldn’t post to this blog. It said it would try again later, but how is that going to work? Do they have a message queue, and will just keep trying until it goes through? I will be interested to see if it does get posted here.

In case it doesn’t, here’s the video I was trying to post. And yes, I do know that the title of this post rhymes. If I sounded like Biggie, I’d be all over making my own Web 2.0 raps.

Keep it Twitterific.

Filed under: Blogging, Facebook on April 16th, 2008 | No Comments »

via [Lifestream Blog (who else?)]

Nuno Mariz has developed a Lifestream that you can host yourself using Django (a Python Web Framework). How long before someone develops a Wordpress plugin that does it all for you me?

I mean, the Python code doesn’t look too bad (and I don’t even know Python)… but I’ve been working for almost 11 hours today, and I just want someone to make a one-click install hosted Lifestream for me. Is that too much to ask?

Or I guess I could just make better use of my FriendFeed…

Filed under: Lifestreaming on April 8th, 2008 | No Comments »

Lifestream Blog has found a new Lifestreaming service aptly titled Lifestream.fm. From the Twitter stream of the founder, it looks like they added 3 new services in the one day since the post on Lifestream Blog. It looks like just one guy developing it, but if that’s true, it’s a very impressive service.

So far, I believe it’s the only Lifestreaming service to support Xbox Live. I’ve got HeadlessNels’ Halo 3 games in one of my Lifestreams (Jaiku, I think) via plain RSS feed, but with Lifestream.fm, now I can have that + my most recently played game that’s not Halo 3.

Filed under: Lifestreaming, Xbox 360 on April 6th, 2008 | No Comments »

I knew I should have saved those other two awesome posts this week for Friday. I’ve been working too much this week to even care about trying to assemble 15 things for today. I do have a few…

1. Couldn’t whether to go with this first or leave it for last… so, first it is.

via [Whatever]

2. As a tech note for this post, the original video is on History.com, but it doesn’t look like there’s any way to embed that one. Clearly someone ripped it from there and posted it to YouTube. I don’t like embedding YouTube vidoes in blog posts because, while the video is there now, who knows how long it will stay up there. Videos on YouTube still seem very ephemeral (to me, at least). I suppose I could rip the video myself and upload it to Blogger, but then I’d most likely be in violation of the law, and History.com could just as easily make me or Blogger take it down as they could the person on YouTube.

3. Pursuant to this twitter and this follow-up: Davy Jones is in Money magazine this month advertising GorillaTrades. Davy says:

I’m a Believer! Why trade like a monkey [sic], when you can invest like a gorilla?

4. ArchPhoenix links and quotes from a new study on water. How long will the reprieve from 8 glass a day last until another study comes out saying we really need 16 glasses a day?

I’ve already had a 12 oz can of Coke Zero an 11.4 oz can of water, today. I could probably handle any amount of water the scientists throw out there as long as Coke Zero remains 95% H20.

5. See, I don’t even have a #5

Filed under: Friday Fifteen, Friday Five, Twitter, YouTube on April 4th, 2008 | No Comments »

Thanks to the RSS feeds Hulu provides, I was notified that there were a new Heroes videos available (I’m subscribed to what I guess you could call the Heroes Channel). I like this one with the Dylan song, but there were a couple others with different artists.

This is evidently an ad for the Heroes soundtrack (there’s a brief hint of it at the end), but I also feel it’s probably a little bit of a “Don’t forget about Heroes” thing (yeah, like that’s going to happen), and it may also be a test just to see how many hits the videos get.

Two things to note:

1. When you embed the video from Hulu, they actually let you select a start and an end time, so you can embed only part of the video. That would have been nice for this video of Dirk Nowitzki where the fun doesn’t start until close to the end.

2. Google tells me that Hayden Panettierre’s natural hair color is actually blonde, but in the clip she has the darker hair from “the future” (if I recall correctly), and it makes her look like she could be a much more mature actor - like someone who could be in a Jane Austen type period piece, or something like Closer; not sure if she could pull that off with the blonde hair…

Filed under: Heroes, Hulu, Video on April 1st, 2008 | No Comments »

Yes, I know they have added a Status Feed, and a Notes Feed. But all that really demonstrates is that we know that they can produce RSS feeds.

The easy way out is to boil it down to money. My guess is, Facebook wants their millions of users to see the ads that Microsoft paid for, as well as advancing their Social Ad platform. That is certainly understandable; internet advertising is big money. But…

Shouldn’t (or maybe, at least, couldn’t) Facebook continue to be a pioneer of web technology as they did when they created the Facebook Platform for internet applications? While I probably overestimate the adoption of RSS, I think part of the reason for that is because, as it stands right now, there is no money to be made from it. The closest I’ve seen is Feedburner’s integration of Google Ads (and being as Feedburner is owned by Google, this is not a big suprise; Google has also provided integration of their ads into Blogger, as well as integration of Feedburner and Blogger). In Feedburner’s page about the Google acquisition, there’s this:

Google believes that feed-based content and advertising is a developing space where we can add value for users, advertisers and publishers.

Now, perhaps Facebook does see feed-based advertising as a space where they can add value for advertisers, and it’s possible that they’re working on it internally before revealing a solution publicly. But…

Facebook is going to let users insert additional RSS content into their News Feeds. Yee to the Ha. Let’s add a few more bricks to the wall around the garden. How about let’s work on getting my content out? If the Facebook argument for not creating RSS feeds from members’ News Feeds and Mini-Feeds is purely based on advertising, then how come they can’t:
a) Just keep putting those ads that are already in the News Feed into the RSS version of the feed, and/or
b) Insert ads at the bottom of RSS items as some publishers currently do

Now, I certainly understand that Facebook may be keeping the News Feed to themselves in order to keep members coming back to the site for reasons that are only tangentially related to advertising. The lock-in provided by making members come to the site to check the News Feed is something I can understand, but it also seems narrow-minded. If you can get people to subscribe to (or add to their My Yahoo) a feed that links back to your site, you will be feeding them reminders to go to your site more often than they’re likely to ever think of it themselves (yes, I know this doesn’t apply to that category of people who check obsessively, but I would still wager that aggressively encouraging the use of an RSS News Feed would actually increase the amount of traffic on the site).

The other advantage to such a feed is that, because it is connected to a network of a member’s friends, it’s unlikely that people would unsubscribe from it. Facebook already has the algorithm in place to sparsely populate the News Feed so as to not overwhelm members with News Items. (This would work well for RSS readers, but while I’m at it, I’d like to suggest that Facebook also offer an RSS version of a full News feed, for people like me who don’t have hundreds of friends, and want to keep track of more friend updates than just what is provided in the News Feed; but, really, that’s a whole different post)

So, really, the point of the post is this: WRT News Feed as RSS Feed… Make It Work.

Filed under: Facebook, RSS on February 25th, 2008 | No Comments »