A day of grief at Virginia Tech

Jeromey Balderrama

Obviously the news dominating Monday’s headlines was of the tragedy at Virginia Tech.  I think at times like these it’s only natural to be without words, to be in a state of shock and disbelief  – and ultimately be grieving the loss suffered by those students and the families affected.

Today was definitely a sad day, and I really struggled with all of the coverage that immediately surrounded this story.  My immediate reaction was that of shock, and although I do not understand what those close to the attack are going through – I know it’s natural to experience emotions tied with grief.  However, it’s sad that the need for us to understand and intellectually explain the situation, coupled with the 24/7 sensationalist news media culture is already giving way for those to needlessly pile onto this situation.

Not long after I received the news on the Internet I saw “campaignist” Jack Thompson was already blaming violent video games as the cause of this tragedy.  That’s interesting, considering that the killer’s name hasn’t been released to the public yet.  I guess that doesn’t stop someone like this guy from using the victim’s death to promote his own agenda – what a disgrace.  As I’m driving home, I’m listening to talk radio here in Denver and they’re offering the same sentiments, blaming video games and violent movies for this tragedy. I go to the gym and while I’m listening to ESPN’s PTI, Kornheiser and Wilbon are blaming the accessibility to guns as an enabler to what happened.  On the way home they cut to a press conference where the media is climbing over each other to ask critical questions, wanting the gory details. When the police chief was asked if he could describe the scene, and he simply said “It was the worst thing I’ve ever seen in my life.”  The reporter had the thoughtlessness to respond, “So you’re not going to describe it for us?” – all to get the “inside scoop”.

The above may be valid points, but do we really need to begin the analysis immediately after the tragedy?  To make these kind of accusations without any meaningful information regarding the case is not only irresponsible, but dangerous.  What make things worse, is that personal agendas begin to lace this tragedy, and they’re basically capitalizing on the victims. 

I know there’s a time and place to get the facts, analyze the circumstances and draw conclusions as to how we can prevent this, but save that for tomorrow – today is not that day.  Today is a day to step back and grieve the fact that evil exists in this world, reflect on our own blessings, and offer prayers and support for those who suffered loss.

A Jaiku exodus? What a bunch of twits!

Jeromey Balderrama

Something happened this weekend in the tech community that leaves me scratching my head and wondering where maturity and professionalism have gone.

Over the last several weeks I’ve been addicted to Twitter, the latest craze in “mini-blogging”, where you basically tell people what you’re doing at that moment.  I like it because it’s easy, convenient and fun to see what everyone’s doing.  Although I heard about it months ago from Paul Boag and his web design podcast, it really took off these last few weeks and has spread throughout the tech community.  A driving part of the popularity was that it was featured on many podcasts, including This Week in Tech or (TWiT).  Leo Laporte, the host of TWiT joined the craze a few weeks back and quickly rose to become the most followed person on Twitter.  He made multiple posts each day and was an active part in the community – up until Friday.

In a sudden change in reversal, Leo didn’t want to play on Twitter anymore, took his ball and went home. Why?  It’s what’s in a name.  He thought that Twitter sounded too much like TWiT (potentially infringing on his trademark) and Laporte thought it made things too confusing.  In 24 hours, Laporte went from being the most popular person on Twitter, to going to a competing service Jaiku.

I like Leo Laporte, and I love the TWiT podcast/netscast.  I think he does really great work, but I’m not really quite sure what happened in the case of Twitter.  This would make sense if he never used the service or protested it from the start, but how do you from promoting it on many of your podcasts for weeks, actively using it daily and drawing thousands of users – to deciding that you can’t deal with it and moving over to another service simply because their name doesn’t sound like yours.  What is Laporte trying to do here, simply make a point?  “Because you didn’t change your name, I’m not going to use your service”.  That’s not exactly a classy way to go about it. 

Maybe there’s something going on behind the scenes here, but looking at this weekend’s events this just looks shady. I do believe that Laporte and the TWiT podcasts carry a lot of influence, but this is overstretching their power.  I’m not a sheep that was told to use Twitter – I use it because it’s something interesting and it’s fun to connect with different people.  To think that I’m going to start using another service simply because someone famous told me to do it is an insult to my intelligence.  This is especially trivial when you consider the word “twit”, which is a slang term that was around long before podcasts came about.  I could see where if Twitter was named AIM-MER or GOOGLER – but come on! 

I went over to check out Jaiku this afternoon. It looks ok, but it doesn’t have the simplicity of Twitter, nor the mature API support.  I run Twiteroo on my laptop throughout the day, and I use TreoTwit for my phone – it’s convenient and exciting to watch this unravel throughout the web.  Twitter built a community which includes my friends and various columnists, contributors and tech gurus.

Bottom line, I think this fiasco is going to damage Laporte and TWiT more than any similar name could ever do.  This is going to puzzle and annoy people like me, and this whole situation is just disappointing.

Is iTunes worth abandoning?

Jeromey Balderrama

Music is a big part of my daily life, especially on my computer.  I listen to music all day long at work, then when I’m at home studying and working on various things I always have music running as well.  I’ve been a faithful Winamp user for the last 9 years, but because I stream my music from my iPod, I’ve been forced to use iTunes at work.

Last week I started having some problems with Winamp responding to keyboard commands.  It wasn’t stopping or changing songs unless I clicked off the player and onto the playlist.  I’m not sure what provoked this.  I did plug in a new keyboard a few weeks back, but it’s a standard keyboard and was working fine for the few weeks before.  However, it annoyed me enough that I decided to abandon Winamp and start looking for other solutions.  However, given the lack of new features (despite numerous upgrades) I basically let that be the straw that broke the camel’s back.

A co-worker mentioned that he used MediaMonkey so I decided to give it a shot.  I fell in love right away.  The interface looks like Winamp, taking the best features of it.  I was able to plug in my Last.fm plug-in with no problem.  The media library management was superb, and there seems to be an active developer community around the product.  After a few days, I was hooked and paid the $35 for a life-time license.

Winamp is as good as gone for me, but now I’m on the quest to get rid of iTunes.  I basically use iTunes for two functions:

  • the streaming/managing of music to my iPod 
  • Downloading and managing Podcasts

I ran MediaMonkey on my work computer, streaming music from my iPod.  When I fired iTunes back up to get the latest batch of Podcasts, iTunes freaked out and started that stupid “Gapless Playback Analysis” operation.  I understand that MediaMonkey is not a native product for the iPod and likely screwed something up in the “Gapless” information, but I still blame iTunes for being so sensitive about this, and that I cannot shut down the automatic “Gapless” scanning.  This is fast becoming the catalyst for moving away from iTunes.  MediaMonkey looks like a great alternative for area number one.  However, the Podcast handling may prevent me from fully moving away from iTunes.

It’s not that iTunes is such a great podcast aggregator as much as every other aggregator is lame.  It seems like about every week iTunes will screw up one of my feeds and try to download every single episode on that feed (regardless if I’ve already heard it).  I’d love to get rid of it, but I can’t find any other alternative.  Juice or iPodder gave pretty good competition – 2 years ago, but no one has developed on that for a loong time.  I tried messing with a few others – Doppler and Happyfish, but they sadly don’t match the functionality of iTunes.  Right now it seems that I’m stuck dealing with iTunes for podcasts.  It sounds like the next version of MediaMonkey will incorporate podcasts.  I’m anxious to try it.

 

Technorati tags: MediaMonkey, iTunes, Winamp

DMB you’re kidding!

Jeromey Balderrama

My sister just texted me, it looks like Dave Matthews Band just came out with their tour dates for the summer – AND THERE IS NO DENVER!

Argghhh!!

This is crap.  One year he comes to Red Rocks for 4 nights, then 2 years later they don’t even come (and that was after they didn’t come the previous year).  Geez.

Looks like a road trip may be in order, but I’ve already spent my concert budget for the summer already. Lame…

http://tourdates.davematthewsband.com/

Technorati tags: dmb, Dave Matthews Band, Denver

Great reflections on "Bum Rush"

Jeromey Balderrama

The guys at Financial Aid Podcast, who spearheaded helped spearhead the “Bum Rush” effort posted some great reflections on the the results.  The final numbers aren’t in, but it looks like a decently strong statement was made.  It didn’t scratch the day’s “Top 100 sales” chart on iTunes in the US, but made some good inroads internationally.

They offered some great insights and lessons-learned in their posting.  I agree with all of their points, and am specifically interested in how for a future “Bum Rush” to have more transparency or a communal feeling in the choosing of a band.  Choosing the artist is definitely a complex issue.   A good idea would have to have some kind of nomination and voting process to choose the next artist, or perhaps form some kind of selection committee put together of independent artists, podcasters and listeners that could select the band based on nominations.  My only fear would be a loss of buy-in from people who voted for a band that didn’t get selected, but I think it outweighs the concern of the current skepticism about the process.  I could see how it could come across as a scam.  I personally was pretty skeptical early on, until I heard the interview Black Lab’s lead singer on the Musician’s Cooler podcast.  Too bad more people couldn’t hear that interview earlier on.

I also agree that it would have been nice to have more work-friendly artwork.  If you go to iTunes and search for “Black Lab” you get an image that’s not really safe for work or around your family.  I can appreciate Black Lab’s artistic expression, but I think that needs to be taken into consideration if you’re looking to make the music marketable to a wide audience.

It would have been nice to continue the viral marketing, perhaps by making some badges that people could put on their web site or blog.

Overall I’m glad I participated, and bought a really cool song from it.