Monthly Archives: March 2005

Chinese Calligraphy

Chinese CalligraphyYou know, the thing I really like about Chinese calligraphy isn’t that I have an abiding interest in China, or in learning the Chinese language, or even in trying to become more comfortable with a brush and ink.

It really is just that for the couple of hours that our classes tend to last, I literally can’t think of anything else. It really requires an odd combination of both concentration and relaxing that seems hard to achieve with other activities, even ordinary drawing.

Of course, I’m not really any good at it, but that’s beside the point too.

An aside: this character is (supposed to be) YONG (æ°¸), meaning “forever” or “eternal”. It contains eight strokes, and is said to contain all that you need to know to master Chinese calligraphy. Seems really simple, doesn’t it? Try drawing one that looks good, perhaps with some online instruction. It’s trickier than it looks.

Student Arrested For Terroristic Threatening Says Incident A Misunderstanding

One of my (admittedly many) pet peeves is when law enforcement overreacts to a situation. Today’s example comes fro Clark County Kentucky, where an 18 year old student has been arrested for writing a story about a zombie attack on a high school. He claims that he was merely writing a short story, and that it was all taken out of context. The police call it a second degree felony.

He’s currently being held in a detention facility after his bail was raised to five thousand dollars.

I’m glad that the police and district attorney of Kentucky are occupying themselves with trying to prevent their high schools from being overrun by zombies. After all, threat of zombie attack is every bit as credible as the threat of WMDs.

Idiots.

Sick of Rain

Damnit, when I was living in Oregon, I could put up with this crappy weather, but I live in California now. Can’t we just call it quits on the rain and have a couple of hundred days of consecutive sunshine? I’m tired of puddles damnit, I think my webbed toes are coming back.

And what’s with the perversity of the universe? Lately some mornings have been remarkably nice, so I put on a happy Hawaiin short-sleeve shirt, and go to work. But when work is done, it’s crappy and raining again!

I’ve had it.

Damn Small Linux Update

I installed Damn Small Linux onto one of those 64 megabyte USB dongle thingies, and walked it around to various machines to see if I could get it to boot. Results:

  • My old Shuttle SV24: no dice, didn’t boot.
  • My laptop: sadly no, doesn’t boot.
  • My HP desktop machine: yep, boots and works fine.

It’s too bad, I really wanted to boot my laptop to Damn Small Linux occasionally. Guess I’ll just have to carry one of those tiny CDs around.

Evil Genius Chronicles – Quantity vs. Quality 03 03 2005

Dave has begun to come to his senses:

…it all comes back to what I keep saying – do your best work, put it out there, serve the audience you care about well and then let it ride. Worry about your audience, not your ranking. Eventually everyone will realize the bogosity of the latter and if you burn your karma with the former in pursuit of those rankings, you are screwed.

I’d amend this only to say that it doesn’t really matter whether everyone realizes the bogosity. I care what some people think, but I don’t give a rats ass what everyone thinks.

I’ve Got The Worst Podcast of All

I’d like everyone who has downloaded one of my podcasts to run to your nearest podcasting rating service and vote my podcast down. Give it a one. Give it no stars at all. Drive it straight to the bottom.

Or don’t. I just don’t care.

Frankly, I don’t look at these things. I just look at how many people download my podcast. If that number seems good or growing, I get a little bit of a rush. If it seems like it’s falling or nobody is downloading, then I feel a bit less of a rush, but I keep at it anyway.

I simply choose to ignore sites like podcastalley for two reasons:

The first is simply that I know the numbers are meaningless. Those that beg and plead and cajole their listenership can probably make it look like they are popular, while those that don’t care to boost their egos like that will probably languish. Therefore, position in their rankings doesn’t really mean anything useful. It’s not a measure of how good your podcast is. It’s just politics and advertising all over again, two things that I sometimes talk about, but seldom try to manipulate.

Secondly, even if the numbers were accurate, I hardly care. I’ve accepted life in the long tail. That means that there will be others who are more popular than me. That’s perfectly cool with me. I just don’t care.

I bring this up again because Dave brought it up again. He’s upset that someone who talks about his poop is higher on podcastalley than he is. I wonder why he cares at all.

Dave, look at how many people download your podcasts. That’s at least a reasonable measure of your popularity. Focus on that. At least it is objective.

Next, figure out a way to judge whether your podcast is good. Sometimes this requires deep introspection. Sometimes it requires the feedback of people whose opinion you trust. And sometime this requires that you reject the opinions of the unwashed masses.

Lastly, just accept that you don’t want to be on top. It’s a stupid place to want to be. The top is full of banal, low-brow, annoying crap. And if you don’t want to be on top, then don’t sweat it when you aren’t.

To my three hundredish subscribers: bless you all. If you enjoy my podcasts, just keep downloading ’em and pass links to your friends who might enjoy them.

Damn Small Linux: Two Thumbs Up

I’ve been playing with various Linux distributions. I usually keep a Knoppix CD in my laptop bag so that I can use computers in a particular computer lab I frequent (normally running Win2k, and password protected, but they are still able to boot from a CD 🙂 ). The problem with Knoppix is simply that it’s too damned big. The answer: Damn Small Linux. A mere 50 megabytes of Linux goodness. You can even install it on a USB stick and if your computer can boot from it, voila. (Haven’t tried that yet, probably will soon). If you have infrequent need of Linux, or just like to carry a rescue CD around, you could do a lot worse.

FeedBurner Experiment

On a suggestion from a reader, I’ve decided to try to get better statistics on my RSS subscribers by managing my RSS feed via feedburner.com. For now, what this means for you, my subscriber is that instead of my normal RSS feed, you can use the URL http://feeds.feedburner.com/brainwagon to get the syndicated version of my feed. If you feel comfortable with all this stuff, try switching over to it and let me know what your experience is. If it seems to work, I’ll probably try to figure out the mod_rewrite juju necessary to send all requests for my feeds there, and then I’ll be able to get a better idea of who the regular users of my website are.

Thanks!

Robot motors have arrived!

The motors that I ordered from American Science and Surplus arrived this morning. I got a pair of Trico windshield wiper motors, originally destined for installation in a Saturn, but now pinched to serve a more noble purpose. Haven’t powered ’em up yet, next stop: a deep cycle battery or gel cell.

Nothing like the smell of fresh grease to get those creative juices flowing.

Brainwagon Radio: Oscar Review Show

Where your host teams with his charming wife to give the fashion rundown of the Oscars, and to review all the movies we didn’t see (most of the Oscar nominated) and the ones we did see in 2005. This was our first team effort: your charity in listening is appreciated for this stupendously long episode. Hope you have fun with it.

Links from the show: