WombatNation

When I first read about podcasting music, or even podcasting talk with a little bit of music in the background, I didn’t think about the copyright and licensing implications. I also didn’t consider what happens when a podcast becomes popular, but the RIAA has shown with webcasting that they won’t stop until they have extracted every penny they can get from anyone who has at least one penny, so don’t think your safe just because your listening base is small.

Matt May and assorted commenters cover the podcasting and licensing issue well on Matt’s bestkungfu blog. Read Matt’s post for the details, but the short summary is that it’s going to cost you a lot if you want to include most forms of commercially released music in your podcast. Just for starters, the first song will most likely cost you more than $100. Once you get the songwriter rights out of the way, then your costs will be significant only if a lot of people are downloading your podcast. Yes, you read that right. You have track how many people download your podcast, because you have to pay these organizations a cut for each download.

So, what do you do? For starters, check out music that has been released under a Creative Commons license. Good places to start are the Audio section at Creative Commons and Matt May’s own Staccato podcast.

Matt’s article was brought to my attention by my wife, who runs the radio station at UC Berkeley. She said that Matt’s coverage of the issue basically looks correct.

I finally got around to watching The Triplets of Belleville. Before the film started, all I knew was that it had been nominated for Oscars for best animated feature and original song, was French-made, and was kind of quirky. I had absolutely no idea what the plot was. If I had only known just how quirky the movie was, and that the Tour de France was involved, I would have seen it long ago.

I absolutely loved the film. How could I not like a movie with a caricature of Jacques Anquetil and a cameo appearance by Einstein’s Field Equations? This film blew me away in a similar fashion as did The City of Lost Children.

Although ostensibly a French film, there is so little dialogue that subtitles were not necessary. As the movie was starting, I was finishing off a veggie burrito. This resulted in two mistakes. First, the veggie burrito wasn’t nearly as good as the carnitas burrito that I normally get at Taqueria Los Comales. Second, between the facinating visuals and the lack of dialogue, I found it hard to take my eyes off the film for even a couple of seconds to finish my dinner. I know this is a small point, but I recommend you not try to eat or attempt any other form of misguided multitasking while watching this film.

About two weeks ago, I posted about the MGM DVD Class Action Settlement. As in my last post, this one will be half about MGM DVDs and half about speech applications. And if you are looking for a really meaningful discussion of the technical details behind the settlement, you should stop reading my blog immediately and go to The Digital Bits.

Yesterday, I received the Proof of Claim. It’s pretty simple to fill out. After providing some basic contact info, you enter the number of DVDs you are returning and you check the box next to the titles. You can return only one copy of each title. The Proof of Claim comes with a prepaid shipping label.

You then choose whether to receive $7.10 for each DVD or an equal number of replacement DVDs from a list of about 330 DVDs. No mixie-matchie. It’s either all cash or all new MGM DVDs.

While I have four DVDs from the trade-in list that were purchased during the relevant time period, I really didn’t see anything from the Exhibit “A” list that I wanted more than what I already have. Sure, both “Breakin 2: Electric Boogaloo” and “Candyman 2: Farewell to the Flesh” were major hits at Sundance and Cannes. Also, Lambada and Showgirls have a lot going for them, but, dammit, I do like my copy of “24 Hour Party People”. After all, I did buy these DVDs for a reason.

Actually, the DVDs on the exchange list aren’t that bad. Choices include:

1. 12 Angry Men
2. Elmer Gantry
3. Henry V [gets my vote for best film with English as a foreign language]
4. Mississippi Burning
5. Ronin
6. How to Stuff a Wild Bikini

Er, uh, maybe I should have stopped at five. There are a few other good movies on the list (though not many good ones from after 1995), but it’s mostly slim pickins (though I don’t think any Slim Pickens).

And now about that speech app. Like I posted before, the speech app did not try to automatically capture my address. Lo and behold, and I have to say that I told you or somebody else so, the “make a recording and have someone transcribe it later” trick didn’t work so well. While I obviously did receive the letter, the address wasn’t correct.

The street I live on has two f’s. The address on the envelope replaced the f’s with s’s. There is no Tissin road in Oakland. Any decent address verification algorithm should have picked that up, especially since they captured the zip code properly. While you might not think that an automated speech application would be very good at capturing addresses, they actually can be extremely good at it.

For the applications we develop at work, we use a USPS database for all addresses in the US. Our speech apps are very good at taking an ambiguous utterance from a caller and very quickly examining a large number of possible matches. If a person were performing this work, it would be such a mind numbing task that errors would very likely creep in. But, speech apps don’t get tired or bored. Since the app already has the text of what was recognized, validating that address against streets in the zip code is very easy. And, if it turns out not to be valid or if it gets multiple matches, the app can easily and quickly reprompt the caller for more info. Yes, I, for one, welcome our new speech application overlords.

While I was doing some research before posting about my experience at the House of Chicken and Waffles, I ran across an article in the San Francisco Chronicle titled “Oakland in midst of soul food renaissance”.

I’ve now been to 3 of the 4 restaurants mentioned in the article. The Southern Cafe is only a few blocks from my house. Their fried catfish and fried chicken are fantastic. The rice with pork gravy is mighty tasty, too. The only thing I don’t like are the greens. I normally like greens, but they cook theirs with really salty ham hocks that I think completely overwhelm the taste of the greens.

The Purple Plum is only a couple more blocks from my house. They serve California-influenced soul food. Or maybe it’s soulful California cuisine. Either way, their fried chicken is about on par with the Southern Cafe’s, which is a mighty high standard for fried poultry.

If you think the Colonel serves up good fried chicken, you must go to either the Southern Cafe or the Purple Plum and try theirs. The House of Chicken and Waffles also has excellent fried chicken, but I would have to rate them a close third. Fried chicken doesn’t have to be so greasy it slides down your throat, but that’s what you will get at KFC, Church’s, and Popeye’s.

The other wonderful thing about the Southern Cafe, Purple Plum, and HCW is that the people who work at each restaurant demonstrate the sweet Southern hospitality that I do miss from Mississippi.

So, next up for me is Sweetie Pie and Poppy’s Southern Cuisine in north Oakland. I’m very curious as to whether they really can deliver traditional, tasty Southern cuisine that is also healthy.

Update June 19, 2005: The Purple Plum has closed. I went to the Blackberry Bistro, which is on the same block of Park Blvd., this weekend and my wife asked the chef/owner Robert what happened. He said that the owners of the Purple Plum decided to take some time off and relax. The Blackeberry Bistro, by the way, is pretty fabulous. Breakfast is fantastic, and they even serve shrimp and grits.

Update October 29, 2008:The Southern Cafe has closed. There is a For Rent sign on the building. My top two fried chicken destinations are now closed. Very sad.

Trustic, the maker of the fantastic Bloglines service, has been acquired by AskJeeves. [Official press release] After trying out several different syndication feed readers, I settled on Bloglines many months (a year or more, even?) ago. While Bloglines offers much more than just a feed reader, I highly recommend Bloglines even if just for that.

The Bloglines news reader is great for me, since I read my news feeds from several different computers. By keeping tracking of everything through an online service, I don’t have to manually synchronize what I have or haven’t read. They also offer a lot of great tools for developers and blog owners, such as a button generator to make it easy for people to subscribe to your blog feed. While there’s no magic here, it saved me a couple of minutes, and every minute counts. The button below will subscribe you to the Atom feed for my blog:

And the next button subscribes you to the RSS2 version of my blog feed. Pick your poison, or neither.

I haven’t posted about my Treo 600 in a long time, but I finally got around to doing something I’ve meant to do for a long time - syncing my Treo to Evolution.

Just over a year ago, I got my Sony Clie to sync to Evolution on Red Hat 9. Though I had already purchased the Treo by then, I didn’t try to sync it until tonight. It turns out the Lazy Web works both ways. Someone posted a comment to my post about my Clie asking me for advice on syncing a Treo 600 to Evolution. That comment caused me to stop being so lazy and to see if I could get it to work. Happily, it works and it was easy to set up. Well, assuming that you consider creating files as symbolic links as the root user as easy. The real easy part was that someone else had already provided all the instructions.

The first stop on my path to Treo syncing enlightenment was at Carsten Clasohm’s blog. Then, it was on to the awesome FedoraNews website for the gnome-pilot tutorial and its simple step-by-step instructions. Be sure to change the type from serial to USB and feel free to change the speed to 115200. I don’t have the spare time or the interest to confirm whether it really makes it sync faster than at 57600, but at least it doesn’t make it not work. And, as far as I can tell, it doesn’t make it noticeably slower. And, one of my high school teachers once told me that anytime you can set the speed to 115200, you should.

I can now confirm that syncing a Treo 600 with Evolution 2.0.2 (using gnome-pilot) on Fedora Core 3 with kernel 2.6.10-1.741 works. I even did it twice to make sure it wasn’t a fluke. I synced my address book, To Do list, and calendar.

So, if you happen to be interested in the technical viability of any of the other items on my ToDo list, please ask away.

I suspect that many of you are oblivious to the Southern delicacy of fried chicken and waffles. The chicken isn’t actually served inside of the waffle, or even on top of it. And the waffles aren’t deep fried, either. Just the chicken, which rides side saddle on the plate with the waffle. And getting a little maple syrup on the outside of the fried chicken ain’t so bad, either.

This seemingly unusual pairing of chicken with waffles actually works extremely well, especially if you find yourself in the mood for breakfast food in the late evening. It’s even better with grits on the side.

Fortunately for Oaklanders, the Incredible Isaac (waffle, grits, and a drumstick or thigh) is just one of the many delicious options at the House of Chicken ‘n Waffles. HCNW is a very cool place in Jack London Square just across the train tracks from the Barnes & Noble bookstore. It’s located next to the Jack London Inn, right where the Jack London Diner used to be. Fortunately, the owners of the HCNW totally overhauled the interior. The new place is a very colorful, funky diner.

And if that wasn’t enough gravy on the biscuits to begin with, HCNW is open Sunday through Thursday from 8 am - midnight and Friday and Saturday from 8 am - 4 am. You gotta like the idea of having a very late dinner of chicken and waffles at 3:30 am on a Saturday night, and then again for breakfast just over four hours later.

I wish I had taken photos of the food and the restaurant, but fortunately someone else posted photos with a review on his blog, MeatHenge.

As a nice accompaniment to my recent post about the dangers of multitasking, someone recently posted an excellent article on personal productivity at Kuro5hin. And who should the article have quoted, but Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi. Once again, the concept of “flow” reigns supreme.

The author of the article at Kuro5hin provides several excellent suggestions for improving your personal productivity. One item he included came from another article at Dexterity.com.

It recommends you keep a time log where you write down when you start an activity and when you stop it. At the end of the week, you create a tally so you can know exactly where your time is going.

Scary. I’m afraid that I would spend a cumulative hour each day just trying to write down all the start and stop times. Nonetheless, it’s hard to know just how productive, or unproductive, you are without attempting to measure it. I’ve been working hard on lengthening the times between my task switches, but I still have a lot of room for improvement. So far, it’s been as simple as being disciplined about checking my email less often and not starting on something else just because the compile I started won’t be finished for another 12 seconds.

While Kuro5hin doesn’t have as many annoying trolls as Slashdot, there are still quite a few who drag their knuckles across their keyboards to post comments. There were several comments along the lines of, “You’re just a pawn working for the Man. Why do you want to learn how to slave away in a dead-end job at an even faster pace for someone else?”

The list of reasons these dolts are misguided is lengthy, but here’s a few:

• Some people actually have substantial ownership of the company they work for. They are working for themselves.
• Some people actually enjoy what they do for a living.
• Some people would simply like to complete their work with less stress by finishing well in advance of deadlines.

I guess I should feel sorry for the commenters who want everyone else to be as miserable as themselves, since they are obviously trapped in mindless, unpleasant jobs. But I don’t. While many people truly are misfortunate enough to be in a position where the only jobs available to them are unpleasant, most of those people don’t sit around posting rants to Kuro5hin.

Update Jan. 18, 2006: Another negative article on multitasking recently ran in The Globe and Mail.