slamboard

I am a very jaded person. When I saw this news item about McCain getting an endorsement from a rapper, I assumed that the rapper must be an ass. I was not familiar with Yankee Daddy or his work. My first impressions have dissuaded me from my assumption. I do think that it is a case of them seeing eye to eye on a single issue, immigration. My jadedness has me thinking that McCain’s immigration stance is all about courting voters. The people who are opposed to his stance will probably vote Republican anyway.

I understand that we now live in a global economy. I don’t understand why some items can’t be made by small local businesses and supported by loyal customers based on quality. I was looking around the blogosphere and I saw a picture of a nice freshwater fish caught by a nice lady in some nice American stream or lake…

The trout was over 15 inches long. Congratulations

The ruler is made in China.

My parents have a wooden yardstick that was made decades ago in Canada. The three feet of wood contains more than inches, it is also printed with some advertisement. You may still be able to get this kind of thing at a farm supply store, I don’t know.

One exception to the virtual disappearance of small time manufacturing of household items is the washboard. The last washboard company left standing in the USA is doing well. They have a program where they take donations to go towards the cost of sending laundry kits to soldiers. Clean socks are pretty important to a soldier.

…When Prince complains.

I wanted to listen to an acoustic cover of Purple Rain on YouTube today. I found out that Prince and his record company have silenced all the videos (or forced the uploaders to silence them).

One resourceful guy who had produced an instructional video on how to play the song simply put an off-site link to his audio in the description.

Over the last few years, many musical artists have reacted to the copyright infringing reality in different ways. Radiohead let people pay whatever they wanted for their recent release. Metallica sued Napster and also some universities.

Some artists that are not in the mainstream have tried adding personal extras to albums that are purchased legally.

If you NEED to listen to a Prince song, you can do a keyword search and then sort your results by the date added. Prince has to sleep sometime.

A successful marketing campaign on other media, such as television, can have people flocking to Google with search terms that almost nobody is optimized for. It hasn’t happened to me yet. The Kimkins thing wasn’t an accident. I stumbled upon a blog today that is enjoying a peak in curiosity about ’silencing your rooster’ the site is called DeadRooster and it is just some guy trying to be funny. He owes a debt of gratitude to people who make drugs and create wacky advertising campaigns for them.

I live in a neighborhood with actual roosters and they wake me up sometimes. It’s not funny.

Frank Zappa was on CNN back in 1986. He was talking about censorship and he told Robert Novak that the USA was going down a path to becoming a Fascist Theocracy. Robert Novak appeared to be incredulous at the time. In recent years he has been a messenger boy for an administration lead by a guy who calls the constitution a goddamned piece of paper. George Bush is on a mission from God, that’s a bit theocratic. Frank Zappa is dead.

War veteran James Blunt is flying high on the US airwaves (occasionally), while in much of the rest of the World he is fucking high. Recording artists often self censor at the behest of their management in order to be radio friendly. Warning labels help steer responsible parents away from violent, explicit and/or profane music. Many parents who would claim to be responsible let their kids buy video games that have worse content than any music CD.

Google has so many features and beta bells and whistles that many of us aren’t even aware of some of them. I just discovered the bar graphs in the news archive pages. I randomly picked a search term and then non-randomly chose a term to use for comparison. Apparently news items about Smart Cars have been holding steady in recent years while the Hummer is getting less attention after a peek of interest a few years ago. Both automobiles were introduced in the mid 90s.

This guy isn’t asking for much…

A web site, which would have following functionalities:
1) Login
2) Any user can upload its story on net. So we need to give a full fledge functionalities like Microsoft word. All major word class languages can be used…like French, German, Chinese, Hindi, Tamil, Punjabi, English, Urdu etc.

3) Any user can broadcast live video anywhere across the world. We want to give a user functionalities if user wants to broadcast to selected user from his/her own list of users or broadcast to whole world by broadcasting on our site. For example, if any function take place in India and relatives in Canada want to see live this function in Canada on our site.

4) Forum functionality: user can create there own forums. For example thread like Technology, Personnel Advice.

5) User can do any type of conferencing using our site to sleeted users in his/her own users list.

This isn’t from Craigslist. It is from odesk, a place that usually features some pretty decent jobs. This one comes from someone who has high hopes. They want to pay somebody $1500 to build them their very own YouTube. I also saw a guy who was paying $10,000 to have a MySpace clone built for him. He might get some serious takers on that, but he will be throwing his $10,000 away. Maybe he just wants to be Tom.

“That started in New York, calling her obese at a size 4…”

Gerren Taylor’s Mother

Gerren Taylor is 6′ tall and weighs 140 lbs. Her stint as a top model was brief and started at the age of 12. Now 18, she is on tour promoting a film that documents her brief career as a model.

This is a race that should not be as close as it is…

Karl Rove on Hannity and Colmes

This very interesting comment was not worthy of examination as far as Hannity and Colmes were concerned. My link goes to a page that is still in ‘rush transcript’ form. The quote might get changed to (INAUDIBLE) by a fair and balanced editor.

John Cow is a blogging success story. The pseudonym is a sarcastic coat tail maneuver that must irk the relatively humorless but very successful John Chow. I have John Cow on my Facebook (which I never use) and I check out his site on a semi-regular basis. I subscribed to his blog in order to qualify for a contest with amazing prizes. They are being provided by the makers of a cool new software package called StoreStacker, which it basically a tool that allows for extremely effective and efficient managing of a niche online affiliate store. I have one blog that is fitted out with an aStore from Amazon. I have earned exactly $0 from it in the last year. I am not a poster child for affiliate sales. I only ever feature a product when it is on topic with my post, and I have even been known to advise against buying the thing.