This page contains all entries posted to Manufactured Environments in April 2005.

Sun Ra Radio Playlist for April 30, 2005

Tune to KWLC on select Saturdays from 3:00pm—4:00pm (CST) to hear Sun Ra Radio.

Notes

Today’s show features excerpts of Sun Ra & His Planet Saturn Love Adventurer Arkestra performing at the 1988 Chicago Jazz Festival. It was recorded off 91.5 FM WBEZ on a Maxell XLII-S 90 minute tape.

While I know I was at this festival, I can’t say for sure if I saw this particular show. I was only a junior in high school and did not yet know who Sun Ra was. I recall being excited and surprised to see a jazz violinist. But, as I can’t find the festival line-up, I don’t know for sure if it was Billy Bang as a member of Sun Ra’s Planet Saturn Love Adventurer Arkestra or someone else.

Announcements

Warm welcome to new listeners, such as Sam and Ben.

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Ode to a healthier day

This illness has us in its grips. O Lord, bring some relief. Until we regain our youthful energies, we leave you with this New York Times article that answers the question: where the fuck is my iPod?

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Corporate Communication at Six Apart

Last night Jason Kottke posted a meditation on this essay. Towards the end of Jason’s post he took a swipe at Six Apart, the company that makes Movable Type, which is the software that powers this blog. Mena Trott, one of the founding partners of Six Apart, responded at length within hours of Jason’s post. My analysis of this situation has less to do with the substance of their argument but rather an observation about Six Apart.

Since the 3.0 release of Movable Type when Six Apart really came into itself as a company, they have moved from disaster to disaster in terms of their corporate communications. By all accounts, the 3.0 launch was executed poorly, which led to a user revolt. Some users—such as the author—stuck by Six Apart, but a sizable share left for other pastures. The inferior and spam-friendly WordPress picked up some of the slack. But while Six Apart was stung badly at that time, they seem to have not learned from that lesson.

Trott’s post, entitled “I Take The Bait,” is interesting. It is important to note that fact. Six Apart are leaders in the personal publishing field and to read about why they do what they do is patently a good time. The problem is the circumstances under which corporate communication from Six Apart happens.

What happened in last night’s instance has happened before. Someone attacks Six Apart for reason X, and Mena responds. This is virtually the only time the users are communicated with about corporate policy. Only when Six Apart is attacked do they allow a look at how they work. Months and months go by with no communication from Six Apart to the users, but then under duress they offer a view of themselves that is appealing and strangely unaccessible at other times. For a company that makes communication tools, they seem to have some pretty serious communication problems.

What is Six Apart afraid of? Their users would be better served by improved communication, which would help to spread word of mouth about their products.

But communication appears to be a systemic problem in their organization. A simple glance at the website for Movable Type reveals mixed messages. Have they figured out who is their target market for Movable Type? The copy on the page says that Movable Type is “the premier weblog publishing platform for businesses, organizations, developers, and web designers.” In other words, it is marketed as a serious tool for serious people. But look at the two photos of people on the page. Both the boy and the girl are young—they look about 20 and both are in casual attire. Are businesses going to look at this page and see themselves reflected here? Most likely not. In actuality, the two photos are parts of advertisements for other services from Six Apart and are not actually related directly to Movable Type, but that’s where the eye is drawn to.

Possible solutions to the communication problems at Six Apart need not be complex. One solution might be to hire someone to oversee corporate communications. They may already have a marketing director, but that person does not appear to be doing a very good job. The easiest and cheapest solution would be to communicate with users more often. Make Mena’s Corner a regular column—either a shorter weekly communication about the blogging business or a longer monthly round-up of what’s been going on at Six Apart. Mena Trott could write the column occasionally, but other staffers at Six Apart could chime in with columns about their product areas.

The point is that users want more communication from Six Apart, but the only time they get it is when the company feels attacked. Using triage as a primary communication vehicle for the company gives more credence to the attacks. Six Apart takes on the role of communication reluctantly, and they are only diminishing themselves in the eyes of their supporters by putting up a wall.

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A diversion

I don’t often get sick, but I’ve been hashing out a cold the past few days. Tonight I’m feeling better, but sleep escapes me. If you’re up late or reading this in the morning, click the link below for a fun little quiz to determine what type of American English you speak. Enjoy. My results were as follows:

The 15% Upper Midwestern part is probably accurate because that’s where I live, but the 10% Yankee is a bit of a mystery. How did you end up scoring?

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No Sun Ra Radio for April 23, 2005

Sun Ra, on base in outer space.
Each hieroglyphic on the scoreboard
Corresponds to a run on the keyboard.

—-from Mikhail Horowitz’s ‘Three Candidates for the Hall of Fame’

Sun Ra Radio was unexpectedly (at least for me) bumped to bring KWLC listeners an exciting double header between the Luther College Norse and Simpson College Storm. Fear not, Sun Ra Radio should return to planet earth and the air waves on April 30, 2005 from 3:00—4:00pm (CST).

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Peter Turnley, photojournalist

It’s homage week here at Manufactured Environments. First we paid homage to James Tate the poet on Monday. Today we’re going to point out that Peter Turnley is a really nice guy. Even if you don’t know who Peter Turnley is, you’ve most likely seen his photos. He has photographed nearly every conflict over the past twenty years worldwide. He’s known for his portraits of refugees. I had the opportunity to hang with Mr. Turnley this week. He spent an hour in my office, and I worked with him on coordinating his presentations. He’s visiting my department this week and next, and we’re all really thrilled to hear what he has to say on photography and visual literacy. I sat in on a presentation he did of some photos he took in Cuba, Brazil, and Argentina of people dancing. Amazing stuff. He took the photos as part of a photo essay series he’s doing for Harper’s Magazine. I’ll point out his website at PeterTurnley.com, which has a lot of interesting photos. Click on the View Portfolios link on the top and also be sure to check out his bio. It’s an interesting read. He’s had over 40 Newsweek covers, has traveled to 85 countries including Iraq, and has had his photographs nearly everywhere. So today we pay homage to Peter Turnley, the greatest photojournalist of his generation.

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Yankee Hotel Freehand

Freehand users worried about Adobe’s purchase of Macromedia should remember that this is the second time Adobe has purchased Freehand. When is the last time something like this happened? The last time I recall is when AOL Time Warner bought Wilco’s Yankee Hotel Foxtrot twice, the first time as Reprise and then as Nonesuch. Don’t wait for a documentary entitled I am Trying to Break Your Freehand to come to a theatre near you. While Wilco’s album debuted at No. 13 on the Billboard charts and posted the band’s strongest sales ever, Freehand is going the way of PhotoStyler.

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How The Pope Is Chosen

Someone reminded me today of the poem by James Tate called How The Pope Is Chosen. I looked on my book shelf tonight, and indeed did find it in Worshipful Company of Fletchers. James Tate is awesome. He did a poetry reading a few years ago on campus, and he totally blew me away. I’m totally impressed with his stuff. He’s got an odd sense of words that I really like. He’s the first serious humorist of poetry I’ve met. If you like this poem, I highly recommend Distance From Loved Ones or his collection called Selected Poems. So for all the peeps, here is the poem:

HOW THE POPE IS CHOSEN
by James Tate

Any poodle under ten inches high is a toy.
Almost always a toy is an imitation
of something grown-ups use.
Popes with unclipped hair are called corded popes.
If a Pope’s hair is allowed to grow unchecked,
it becomes extremely long and twists
into long strands that look like ropes.
When it is shorter it is tightly curled.
Popes are very intelligent.
There are three different sizes.
The largest are called standard Popes.
The medium-sized ones are called miniature Popes.
I could go on like this, I could say:
“He is a squarely built Pope, neat,
well-proportioned, with an alert stance
and an expression of bright curiosity,”
but I won’t. After a poodle dies
all the cardinals flock to the nearest 7-Eleven.
They drink Slurpies until one of them throws up
and then he’s the new Pope.
He is then fully armed and rides through the wilderness alone,
day and night in all kinds of weather.
The new Pope chooses the name he will use as Pope,
like “Wild Bill” or “Buffalo Bill.”
He wears red shoes with a cross embroidered on the front.
Most Popes are called “Babe” because
growing up to become a Pope is a lot of fun.
All the time their bodies are becoming bigger and stranger,
but sometimes things happen to make them unhappy.
They have to go to the bathroom by themselves,
and they spend almost all of their time sleeping.
Parents seem to be incapable of helping their little popes grow up.
Fathers tell them over and over again not to lean out of windows,
but the sky is full of them.
It looks as if they are just taking it easy,
but they are learning something else.
What, we don’t know, because we are not like them.
We can’t even dress like them.
We are like red bugs or mites compared to them.
We think we are having a good time cutting cartoons out of the paper,
but really we are eating crumbs out of their hands.
We are tiny germs that cannot be seen under microscopes.
When a Pope is ready to come into the world,
we try to sing a song, but the words do not fit the music too well.
Some of the full-bodied popes are a million times bigger than us.
They open their mouths at regular intervals.
They are continually grinding up pieces of the cross
and spitting them out. Black flies cling to their lips.
Once they are elected they are given a bowl of cream
and a puppy clip. Eyebrows are a protection
when the Pope must plunge through dense underbrush

in search of a sheep.

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Sun Ra Radio Playlist for April 16, 2005

Tune to KWLC on select Saturdays from 3:00pm—4:00pm (CST) to hear Sun Ra Radio.

Announcements

This was the first Sun Ra Radio show of the rest of your life. It is currently the last show of my life up until that point.

The first hour of the show featured the beautiful singing of June Tyson as well as songs from Magic City’s The June Book.

The hour and a half of overtime featured various and sundry music from another world.

Be sure to listen to Sun Ra Radio when it returns to planet earth on April 23, 2005 from 3:00—4:00pm (CST).

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In the spirit of blogging

Matt Butler thinks I delivered a low blow by pointing out that his blog had not been updated in months. Rather a gentle nudge, thinks I, to get him to post. The solution to the comment spam problem he’s encountered is fairly simple: upgrade to the current version of WordPress. Hey, it’s free (as in beer)!

One thing I do enjoy is reading other people’s blogs. I subscribe to Matt’s RSS feed (and 98 others) and have missed his entries on drunken Santa, etc. I’ve been thrilled recently by the increase in the number of people I know from offline who are blogging now. People I knew from college. People I know who work at my university. People I’ve met various places over the years. It’s all very interesting.

The question at the back of my mind is: will it last? Blogging has become something of a trend in the past year or two, and perhaps it will be nothing more than a fad. I’ve been doing it for five years, and enjoy it even more now than I did back in 2000 when there were very few people doing online personal writing.

So to conclude this rumination, I’d like to point Matt to my five year anniversary post from February that I called Ten Things I’ve Learned About Blogging. It may help answer the question: is blogging for me?

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Sun Ra fragments healed via RealAudio playlist

You may recall my inaugural post in which I lamented the grisly destruction of a Sun Ra LP depicted in Mike Lupica’s film. You may even recall that, in the midst of some overblown theatrics during Sun Ra Radio on KWLC, I resurrected tracks from the album via the WFMU archives and promised to share the process on this blog. Now, a over month later, I’m making good on that promise.

Direct from the WFMU archives, previously recorded, and in stereo, here are the last three tracks from Sun Ra’s The Solar Myth Approach, Volume 1 in a RealAudio format.

For some of you, how I put this together may be more compelling than the music. So here is how I did it.

1. I searched WFMU for shows that played cuts from the album.
2. Copied the URL of the RealAudio file for that show.
3. Noted the start and end times of parts of the show I wanted to excerpt.
4. Added those times to the URL as explained in Jon Udell’s “MP3 Ins and Outs”.
5. Added the newly augmented URL to my RealAudio playlist.
6. Repeated the above steps until finished.
7. Uploaded it for your pleasure.

Not only did I include the music, but I included an opening announcement about WFMU by Trouble as well as each DJ announcing the song used from their show at the end.

Here is an annotated version of the playlist file.

With a simple text editor, I was able to control the way I wanted to cut up and arrange material from WFMU’s vast archives down to the second. I was drunk with power. I felt like a god. It was kind of fun.

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Blog Vacation

I’m here in the lobby of the Hilton St. Louis Airport. The sign in the photo reads “Posh Dining Area”—just in case you were wondering what kind of dining area it is. Back to our regularly scheduled blogging soon.

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I’ve got something to put in you…at the Gay Bar!

I wrote about this first in 2003, but I just have to share this with you once again: it’s the song Gay Bar by Electric Six as enacted by flying Viking Kittens. Make sure your speakers are on and turn them up. Enjoy!

Let’s start a war…start a nuclear war…at the gay bar gay bar gay bar….whoew!

And once you’re done with Gay Bar, check out some of the other fun at rathergood.com.

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All Happiness. All Love. All The Time.

Welcome to the non-stop Love Parade going on here at Manufactured Environments. We love all you readers—especially the multitudes grabbing our RSS feeds. We’re happy that you’ve chosen to visit us today. Do you feel good? We hope you do. Maybe after soaking in that bubble bath, you’ll be so kind as to stop by our Contact page and say Hi!

Just to show our appreciation to all of you wonderful people, here are a couple of happiTrax to fill up your iTunes playlist:

First we have The Beloved with an awesome remix of Up, Up And Away [Happy Sexy Mix] (16.4 MB—removed). After you’re done with that one, check out the familiar Deee-Lite thumping about the Power of Love (10.8 MB—removed). Happiness and Love. Can you imagine anything so good?

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Internet2 under attack from RIAA

Internet2 is a high-speed version of the Internet available at research institutions such as the university I work at. The RIAA claims this high-end network is rife with file-sharing going on by students.

“We cannot let this high-speed network become a zone of lawlessness where the normal rules don’t apply,” said Cary Sherman, president of the recording association.

The WSJ is running an AP article (subscription req’d) with all the gory details. Update: Story freely available via CBS News.

Apparently the RIAA will be launching lawsuits against 405 students at 18 colleges. A choice quote from the article:

The RIAA declined to explain how it could detect piracy over Internet2 except to say it acted lawfully. Internet2’s corporate members include Warner Brothers Entertainment Inc., a subsidiary of Time Warner Inc., a leading music label. Even Internet2 officials said they were unaware how the entertainment companies traced the purportedly illegal activity on their network.

The RIAA said the 18 schools include Boston University, Carnegie Mellon University, Columbia University, Drexel University, the Georgia Institute of Technology, Harvard University, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Michigan State University, New York University, Ohio State University, Princeton University, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, the Rochester Institute of Technology, the University of California-Berkeley, University of California-San Diego, the University of Massachusetts-Amherst, the University of Pittsburgh and the University of Southern California.

Watch out, folks. It’s hairy out there.

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Maximizing Google AdSense

As people who have been reading this site know, I added Google text ads last summer. They’ve been paying a pleasant amount. Not earth-shattering, but it seems to keep going up. At any rate, I get a little money every time one of you clicks an ad on my site. And it should be noted that some ad clicks pay more than others. That is, you can earn more money based on the relevant keywords being tagged. So if I was talking about buying you a Best Buy gift card, which I wouldn’t do because BB sucks, but I mention a Best Buy gift card because those words mean more to my advertisers. You see? I’ve seen breakdowns at various places of high paying keywords, but this list seems to be pretty complete. [via w’xy] Based on what I’ve heard elsewhere is that it’s pretty accurate. So what do you do? You start a blog and write about asbestos lawsuits and see the money roll in. Any takers?

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feedback loops and other digiterata

Hello good fellows and misses. A new style has been designed—they say that the style it does not matter—so we have a style that does not matter—a style of white and black and gray. We ask for your feedback—do you like? Do you not care at all? We have served up a style that suits the Safari users well. It is narrow. It serves up within a small window. We are not serving up for cell phones. We are serving RSS. A new style that beguiles. Tonight we listen to the slowdive and get misty eyed. Soon we will be in St. Louis speaking of the missives for the massives. Good night.

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Frank Conroy died today

From the local newspaper’s website:

Frank Conroy, head of the acclaimed Iowa Writers’ Workshop since 1987, died at his home today. He was 69.

The University has a news release here.

I’ll update as more is published.

Update: 3:28pm Associated Press story via ABC News…Longer version of same AP story via Houston Chronicle…3:52pm AP story has been posted on 26 online media sources nationally, from Philly to Chicago to Seattle…5:01pm story has hit 40 sites…hopefully some original reporting to appear tomorrow

7 April: coverage in the New York Times…audio coverage on NPR…Frank Conroy Dies in Press-Citizen…‘Tough love’ is gone in Daily Iowan……Google News this morning cites over 125 press outlets carrying the story

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Mix Tape: The Art of Cassette Culture

This totally rocks. In a month, Thurston Moore’s Mix Tape: The Art of Cassette Culture will be released. It sounds like an awesome book. Of course I enthuse because I love making mix tapes. I’ve been making mix tapes since high school. The weird thing is I haven’t given it up. I mean, really, if you were as crazy as I am about music, you would definitely be making mix tapes, now wouldn’t you? These days I make the mix CD instead of tapes, but it’s all the same more or less (though I totally agree with Moore’s comments about how CDs & MP3s sound). Here’s a snippet over at Wired from the book. By the way, you can listen to Mixtape Vol 2 over at SonicYouth.com.

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Sun Ra Radio Playlist for April 2, 2005

Tune to KWLC on select Saturdays from 3:00pm—4:00pm (CST) to hear Sun Ra Radio.

Announcements

Happy Birthday to Mary Seffrood!! Her birthday was yesterday, April 1st.

Be sure to listen to Sun Ra Radio when it returns to planet earth on April 9, 2005 April 16, 2005 from 3:00—4:00pm (CST).

This show is dedicated to Zelda, wherever she may be.

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Red Bung Xtreme Energy Wine

Bonny Doon Vineyard, my favorite little winery from Santa Cruz, released a great new wine today. It’s called Red Bung Xtreme Energy Wine. It’s the perfect pickup when you need a little boost. Picture after the jump. Thanks, Molly.

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RIAA Lawsuits Draw to a Close

Stunning news from EFF via EFFector:

Washington, DC—The Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) this week announced that its litigation campaign against American filesharers will now end. Explained RIAA President Cory Shoreman, “In short, we sued ‘em all. All 70 million, plus their parents, grandmothers, and roommates, have been properly brought to heel, for settlements ranging from between $3,000 and their entire net worth.”

Shoreman continued, “The only logical result is that a properly chastened nation will now herd - peacefully, without protest - into the local malls to purchase from dusty, bulging shelves a dozen copies each of $18 Ashley Simpson copy-protected CDs.”

“Why a dozen? Why, one CD for every RIAA-designed, government-approved listening device, of course! And then on top of that you’ve got to buy duplicates for back-ups in case any of them get scratched.”

Twirling his moustachios and straightening his top hat, Shoreman chortled, “And they said the recording industry would never adjust to the Internet era!”

Bravo! And thanks for the laugh, EFF.

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Boring

Who needs bOINGbOING when you can have bORINGbORING? (A clever parody that begs to be linked.) [via w’xy]

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