Chatting live just now using mIRC (how the heck did this work again, now?) in
us.undernet.org (whatever server works for you, but Undernet)
join channel #MajorityReport
Monthly Archives: April 2004
Well, Finally
There’s a new entry up, at last, under the September archive for the England travel journal. I forgot to set the temporal displacement/flux capacitor thingy but the entry is now in it’s rightful place and time on September 20th. It covers just one day and night spent in Carlisle.
The next entry after that will be the one with all the pictures of walking in Yorkshire, and that means (shudder) lots of Photoshop Elements. Fortunately, not too much fixing, futzing, and cropping, just adding frames. I’m regretting (now) using the rather tacky “photocorners” provided with Elements, and will stick to plain old drop shadows in the future.
I’ve also had some fun in recent days converting some of my favorite “permanent links” over to stickers either swiped from Taylor McKnight’s Steal These Buttons, or creating new ones of my own over at Kalsey Consulting Group’s Button Maker.
Probably one of the first things I noticed when I started looking at other people’s blogs (and while “the blog bug” was still incubating merrily along at the back of my brain) was that many people seemed to have different stickers or buttons or graphical doodads on their index pages. And I wanted me some. So now I’m starting to fool around with putting some up.
It occurs to me that these stickers (or buttons, such as over at ***Dave’s)are like personal totems, charms or heraldic badges – they indicate immediately to a first-time visitor how the blogger feels about things; who they are, what they like, and sometimes what they dislike.
I created a couple of stickers of my own just for fun. I’m not quite ready to start fooling with Elements or Paint and add graphics, although I would love, love, love a Mutts sticker, rather than the graphic the Muttscomics.com provide, because they’re a little fuzzy, and bigger than I’d like.
On the other hand, maybe I’ll have a corral of bigger, more graphical buttons below the stickers.
I tried to get an AIM link working, but nothing happens… possibly because we have a firewall here. However, there’s AIM Express, I suppose. Start things off with a hearty “Land shark!” or I’m likely to assume a strange IM is from a pr0nbot.
Majority Report News
MAJORITY REPORT RADIO, the last live show of the day over at Air America Radio.
I’m kind of glad I missed the fart machine, but I did get a kick out of “backwards day at the White House.”
That’s “http://www.majorityreportradio.com/”, everyone, they don’t announce the URL of the weblog often enough.
The comments for each day are the place to be just now, but someone named Dave at ISU started an IRC channel for easier chatting:
For the IE users:
irc://us.undernet.org/MajorityReport
otherwise, in your IRC client
/server us.undernet.org
/j #MajorityReport
Interesting note from the website provider, from today’s thread (601 comments and counting)
It’s Brian from I Stand For, we’re doing the AAR website.
We’re so sorry things have been buggy, nobody could have anticipated the response we have received.
We’ve broken records people… We are Real Audio’s #1 stream. We were at 50,000 streams during Al’s show around 2:00 EST. We got 350,000 unique visitors from 8:00 last night to 2 this afternoon. That puts us on pace to be a top 50 site…on the entire web. We’re talking Bank of America, Dell Computers numbers.
You guys are awesome, this is amazing and we’re so proud to be a part of it.
I assure you were working round the clock to bring you the best community website possible. Were getting new servers set up to handle the incredible response. Next week we’ll be rolling out new functionality: membership, blogs, newsletters, and in a little bit, audio archives for all the shows.
So keep keeping on! We can do it. It’s time to show everyone that we love America as much as anybody, and were not gonna sit by and watch George Bush poop in our porridge anymore.
LIBERALS RULE!
-b
Posted by brian at April 1, 2004 09:36 PM
Rats
Man, this doesn’t look good. Guess I’ll quit packing for now.
We’re moving!
David’s sent his resume’ off to a major Internet company and thinks he’s got a realistic chance. We’re shooting for the moon here, but
“There is a tide in the affairs of men,
Which, taken at the flood, leads on to fortune;”
Sorry what I said earlier about it being an outrage. Hope this doesn’t screw up his chances.
Edited to add:
Here’s the email David sent off with his resume’…
And here’s mine…
And so now all we do is wait for the call.
Outsourcing Outrage!
Google climbs on the outsourcing bandwagon – it’s sheer lunacy, I tell you.
Bob Edwards Backlash Building
Chicago Tribune | :NPR’s replacement of host Edwards met with wide criticism
Yep, and there’re at least two online petition drives. One of them is SaveBobEdwards.com
I’m still hoping it’s an extremely elaborate April Fools’ joke, but it doesn’t look that way.
I wonder if my cousin Bill will make good on his threat to rescind his :NPR pledge over the issue?
Amazing Race – When??
Some links to watch while waiting for CBS to announce when The Amazing Race 5 will begin (rumored to be sometime after Survivor: All Stars finishes).
TARflies Times
Josh’s site
Amander ‘n Chris’ site
Television Without Pity | Amazing Race Forum
Google “The Amazing Race” sorted by date
Arghhh. And no, I didn’t fill out the application, which for some reason is already for TAR 6. There is much speculage on the TWOP boards about why they posted the new application before the 5th installment even airs.
Renaissance Music Links
I wish I’d seen this siteMedieval and Renaissance Instruments back in November when I was promoting the Renaissance Christmas concert we hosted at church with Phoenix Camerata.
That was a fun concert – we’ll have them back again, but they’d like to do a springtime/courtly love type of program. Among the instruments they played were hurdy-gurdy, a variety of recorders, and they made quite a rackett, too.
The Phoenix Consort was a great group to work with and if you live in northern Illinois, they’re available to book by contacting Kim Katulka.
On Your Radio Dial
Woops, here’s a cool thing or three:
MAJORITY REPORT RADIO, the night show on Air America with Janeane Garofalo and Sam Seder, has its own blog. They mentioned Atrios by name, but there was some confusion over whether Atrios or someone else was interviewed.
More radio news – hey, WXRT has a live feed now!! I’ve been looking for this for a while – the last time I checked was a few months back. Maybe I missed it, buried as it was in the lower left corner under all the screen chaff. But they’re an AOL broadband partner, and I finally fingered out that they’re right there on the little AOL radio tuner under “AOL Recommends.” They also have a separate player on the website.
Hah! They’ve got their April Fools hat on. They just bleeped out half the words of an innocuous Beatles song. Earlier, some guy was breaking in and saying “hi.” Some other guy keeps coming in and saying something else. Dang, they got me, I just posted a complaint about it on their “feed feedback” link. Their entire broadcast is santized for your protection today. Watch the blinking “Chicago’s Finest Decent Rock” banner. They just played “Eight Miles High In The Sky”
I forgot that they mess very elaborately with listeners’ heads today, of all days.
That reminds me – I really, really hope the news item I heard on :NPR this morning about the Republicans suing the Kerry election people over illegal campaign contributions by a large liberal conspiracy is another Fools’ contribution. I was half asleep when I heard it.
Come to think of it… dammit, Bob Edwards’ leaving the show had better be a really good setup for the greatest :NPR spoof of all time.