Posted on by mwhybark

J and B etc.

ROX – The World’s Most Independent Television Series:

Bart’s done it. He’s got the whole show online (well, not the whole thing, but it sure likes like he means to). And a comprehensive database of familiar faces, this time, many, maybe most, of whom I DO know. It’s like a video wiki, almost!

Please note that both Bart and Scooter appear in this website as well as in the previously-cited NecroKonicon. There may be greater overlap as well.

UPDATE: The late-nightness of this entry leaves it overly terse. To clarify, then.

J&B On The Rocks, later simply Rox was/is a cable-access show about two young men making drinks and consuming them on camera. Supposedly.

In reality, it was/is an experiment in television, oriented to humor but firmly focused on the goal of creating capital-A art from the raw material of life in my hometown of Bloomington, Indiana, a place very conducive indeed to this specific variety of ingenious strangeness.

B, or Bart Everson, is the mastermind behind that mind-boggling website I link above (it’s sort of like I imagine WAX or the Discovery of Television Among the Bees was intended to be – I say imagine, because I never had the bandwidth to check it out back in the day). As it happens, it helps that Editor B is not only a truly inventive editor who poured his ambition and interest into editing into the show, but also a gifted writer unafraid to put his muse in the service of such a silly idea.

I’m sure that J, the other half of the show, made his own, powerful contributions, but I am unfamiliar with the show in detail, and so can’t identify them. But I certainly heard about the show from folks back home for a few years. I even accidentally attended Bart and Christy’s wedding, just over ten years ago, which was a public party in the former police-station John Waldron Arts Center. It was at that event that I learned that Jake and Freda of the Mysteries of Life had gotten married and were expecting, steps from the place I’d sat as a just-busted 18-year-old, waiting for my folks to come and get me.

It was surreal, because, although I’d vaguely known Bart years before through my ex-wife, he’d been out of town for a significant part of my college career, and then later, we each repeatedly took a video-art class but not together. By the time of the wedding, Bart was a fixture in the local alternative art scene and therefore the people involved in the wedding / puppet-show were all dear and close friends of mine.

Years after that, Viv and I spent a bucolic afternoon hanging out at their near East Side home, playing bocce and shooting the shit about computers and video – Bart was finishing his masters in instructional technology.

So go, watch some clips. Here are two, not-characteristic, ones to get you started:

The pre-ROX Robitussin Rap and also: Carpe DM.)

My favorite boss of all time, Paul Smedberg, brings you some Expert Advice.

(This was originally posted at around 1 am, but then it wouldn’t rebuild and I extended the entry, and… and…

Could the problem character have been that ampersand? Hmm.

No, it appears to be associated with links to the video clips. WTF?

AHA!

Bart links to streaming media clips in his site architecture with a URL formed like this:

http://rox.com/media/$clipnumber/direct/

However, being a video-oriented guy, he’s configured his server to present media assets, in this case quicktime clips, as index documents, or something along those lines. MT, expecting to be able to analyze the text-based content inbound from that http request, stalls waiting for the document-request to complete.

I shall call it to his attention but don’t know if it’s reasonable to expect a change. Inline links to the clips on the program summary pages would be optimal, I think, and allow him to keep traffic without encouraging deeplinking, as I’m trying to do here.

Ergo, the links now link to the ‘viewer’ 320 x 240 quicktime assets.)

Posted on by mwhybark

Mt-Blacklist build slowdown temp fix

Wizbang: MT-Blacklist Slowdown Fix: Jay Allen’s comment spamfighter can slow down rebuilds. This temporary fix turns off filtering of extant comments (the functionality will be included in the next release).

I’ve been fighting a sudden, and extreme, slowdown on this site since early this morning – I do not know if it’s due to MT-Comments or some other cause, such as a character embedded in the post I’m fighting with that’s causing the hang. I’ve seen something vaguely similar happen on account of SmartyPants, which I use to perform regexp like neatening of posts for, for example, quotes.

Posted on by mwhybark

Bad News indeed

Local hero Anita Rowland faces some hard news on the health front (this is actually the second bad bit of health news to float by this week; the other, however does not concern a blogger and so I’m shushed on the topic).

Good luck, Anita and family. And good luck to my anonymous friend.

Posted on by mwhybark

NaDruWriNi

MeNoWriFoNaNoWriMo: B2 proposes an alternative to NaNoWriMo, to which I say, what the heck, I do it anyway, right?

Plus, I’ve always found it a soothing way to employ WiFi.

Let’s choke this chicken, Brother B2! I’m ready to follow you to the land of glory! But is B3 aboard? Perhaps he’ll only be able to participate pseudononymously, perhaps as “Possible Pseudononymous Participant” or as I like to think of it, “PoPsuPa,” or, more likely, P3.

To which I can only say I hope Bill picks up the obvious setup I’ve just given him and runs with it.

Mmm, perhaps the lack of food is affecting my judgement.

Posted on by mwhybark

World Wide Webley

I had cause to Google on some of Jason’s lyrics and found some stuff I’d not seen before, maybe it’s new to you as well:

Laying Down by the Tracks, by Sergio Pastor – reflection and narrative on Halloween 2001, one which I found moving and which I think is a more careful and personally emotive piece of writing about that show than my own.

Jason Webley is a track selection review of songs from the show that Pastor describes by an East Coaster who hopefully made it to the NYC shows that Jason put on this summer.

Seattle Weekly‘s preview for that same Halloween, 2001 show.

A Seattle Times piece previewing the November 2002 show (I had spotty luck with the Times, with the link sometimes working and sometimes not. Also, they’ve just added an NYT-style reg-req).

Lukewarm review of Counterpoint at Delusions of Adequacy.

Posted on by mwhybark

MT-Blacklist update at jayallen.org

Jay Allen notes a couple of bugs and an overzealous regexp in the default distro of MT-Blacklist.

I hope Mr. Allen takes the time over the next week to set up a board to centralize user-experience, bug reports, and the like.

The install here went smoothy, albeit I had to install Storable.pm (‘sudo CPAN’ and then ‘install storable,’ for those undergoing the same head scratching I was for a moment or two, wondering why ‘install Storable.pm’ was failing).

I was concerned on being able to get in to the blacklist admin UI apparently without logging in, but was mistaken – Blacklist uses your MT login info.

I believe I will still install the captcha-style mod as well, but I haven’t taken the time to disentangle the issues with getting GD to install.

Posted on by mwhybark

Two on VeriSign

CNET News.com: VeriSign to revive redirect service

VeriSign will give a 30- to 60-day notice before resuming a controversial and temporarily suspended feature that redirected many .com and .net domains, company representatives said Wednesday.

AND (no coverage on this yet that I’ve seen) I got a notification email from VeriSign announcing the sale of Network Solutions, the registrar part of VeriSign we love to hate, to “a new entity formed by Pivotal Private Equity.”

(Here’s a Google News search on “verisign to sell network solutions”)

The note describes the buyer as “a provider of equity for middle market corporate acquisitions,” and links to a press release.

So, I guess the venture boys called in their chips?

It seems odd that the sale would be taking place at the same time as the announcement of the intention to reinstate that redirect service. Could it be that the venture money was seeking the redirect service and when the ruckus started, wouldn’t budge?

Hm, maybe not. The San Jose Business Journal notes that Verisign split the old NetSol registrar biz off from the registry proper, and that the registrar is being sold while the registry remains with VeriSign. The registry is the part with the genuine control over the behavior of the TLDs, and therefore the 404-redirect doohickey as well.

Posted on by mwhybark

Bart—

Waxy.org takes a look at the Cubs Fan brouhaha. He’s even linked to a Usenet search of the poor sap’s postings.

This is by way of the amusing and insightful thread over at MeFi.

I also called Ken who pointed out that we now know, with certainty, who is the single-most passionately rooting person in favor of the Cubs to win it all as of this moment in time.