Been messing around with a little web app and I think I’ve finally got it to a point where it’s worth sharing. The code is an absolute mess, featureless bugs infest every function, playback is super temperamental (just hit refresh) and you can’t pause (yet). But it works:
It’s nothing fancy or particularly useful. In short, you watch (and listen) records uploaded to YouTube by some amazing reggae collectors: firebladerr1, oldwah and mrrk. I first came across this community last summer and what struck me about them was how successfully they’ve been able to digitize the experience of being a record collector. By recording their collections as video, instead of audio, some amount of ownership over the music they’ve collected is maintained. When you watch one of their 45s, you’re very much aware that you’re watching a specific record owned by a specific person. And in so far as that’s the case, I hope some sense of fulfillment as collectors is preserved. Because as much as we talk about property and ownership in information economies and the such, we continually forget to address the emotional aspects of those things. read the rest of this entry »
Excerpt from Grass Collective’s Rivers of Light - 2 hours of continuous footage over the Los Angeles basin. I watched the entire DVD while listening to Supersilent 7, and it was awesome.
About 3 weeks ago CNN experienced a Denial-of-Service attack from computers thought to be located in China. Briefly, DoS attacks are a method of making a website or service unavailable to its intended users by flooding it with traffic from automated systems (or to put it in more personal terms, imagine someone setting up an auto-dialer to constantly call your mobile phone so as to prevent your friends and family from reaching you - that’s a DoS attack). However, more interesting than the attacks on CNN are the ones that targeted SlideShare, the YouTube of PowerPoint presentations, only a day later. These attacks, also based out of China, were thought to be in response to some politically oriented presentations hosted on the site. And while it’s hard not to sympathize the assailants of a site working to make business presentations ubiquitous in ways they probably shouldn’t be, it’s startling to consider that these cyber-militants found user generated content hosted on SlideShare credible enough to warrant attacks equal to those that targeted a major international news corporation. read the rest of this entry »
If you’re not familiar with the amazingness that is, what I consider to be, the greatest thing to ever happen to NYC, let me fill you in: someone bought a cargo barge, built a pool in it, docked it a couple blocks from my apartment and let me swim in it for free last summer.
Sadly the Floating Pool Lady seems to have found a permanent home in the Bronx, which is unfair since they already have a baseball team. I’m gonna miss rolling out of bed and stumbling to the Brooklyn shore for some Saturday morning laps.
And for what ever reason, this song sounds like my inconsolable sorrow over the floating pool’s departure.
Between last week’s cyclone and the protests in the fall, there have been a lot of reasons to talk about Myanmar. And recently, non-governmental aid and political outreach have been absolutely everywhere: Architecture for Humanity, Shilo, and celebrities, among other initiatives. read the rest of this entry »
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