I used to own a windup phonograph player. In what must have been a coincidence, it broke down in the midst of the Y2K hysteria. This left us with no way to enjoy the 78RPM records that we had picked up at an estate auction.
I eventually took it apart and rigged it up so that it would kind of work, but the piece that had worn out was designed to regulate the speed. I wish I still had those records with me now that you can buy something like a
USBTurntable that enables you to easily make a digital recording of those rare musical performances.
I was fascinated with audio recording as a teenager and I once had a very inconvenient and complicated system set up to enable me to overdub a few separate tracks of my guitar playing. It involved several portable cassette players a reverb box from Radioshack and a LOT of cables. These days there are free virtual sound studios available for download, so all you need is a PC and a microphone. With something like a USB turntable, you could come home with some funky yardsale records and amuse yourself for days making mashups.
The video below has nothing to do with my post, I just enjoy it.
I don’t watch Fox News, but I have been frequenting their website over the past week. I am amazed at the tone and tenor that pervades there. I think they should relax a bit, since everyone who uncritically consumes their media is going to vote for McCain.
Wait, that’s not right.
Many of the people who uncritically watch Fox are going to stay in their houses watching Fox on November 4th.
I have almost given up on John Moody, the guy who announced the end of McCain’s run for President of the USA.
The Executive Vice President of Fox News is too busy vice-presiding over an outfit that is lobbing everything imaginable at Obama in the hopes that something will stick in a meaningful way. It’s not working, but it has helped to bury Moody’s prophetic blog post.
I wasn’t paying enough attention to be able to corroborate the assertions that Fox also worked to move the story of Ashley Todd’s Hoax out of sight. I think it is the kind of story that you would expect to disappear after a few days. In a few more days there will be a HISTORIC election and all the kitchen sink stories will disappear as well.
George W. Bush inherited a lot of cynicism and scheminess. Many people believe that George Bush senior made clandestine arrangements to delay the release of American hostages held in Iran so that the news would coincide with the inauguration of Ronald Reagan (oh, and also to reduce Carter’s chances in the election).
When I heard the news that there was an incursion into Syria by the American military, I got very paranoid. Are orders coming from the top in an effort to provoke some international incident? Does the Republican administration hope to milk the fear cow for four more years?
I just deleted a few comments that were all from somebody who supposedly has some blogs about helping Fight World Hunger. The comment spamming and the suspicious looking urls didn’t inspire confidence. Anybody who wants to spend their money easing the suffering of the hungry can easily find reputable, effective organizations online.
I still remember collecting for UNICEF during Halloween night as a child.
IZEA, the artist formerly known as PayPerPost, has begun brokering affiliate marketing opportunities to its network of bloggers. I haven’t been paying attention to IZEA for the late 3 months ever since paid posts ceased to be worth my time.
I am not a big fan of SocialSpark. I personally think that the whole thing is an unwieldy hodgepodge of social media and marketing stuff. I never felt comfortable on the site. That being said, I was intrigued by the affiliate opportunities. I have never been an affiliate marketer and I think my main disincentives were lack of trust in the schemes and my own poor organizational skills. Jumping into an affiliate relationship through SocialSpark is easy. I have never had an issue with receiving funds from the company and they track page views, clicks and conversions from the moment that I add their code to my blog.
I hope the companies that are participating in this new sales arrangement meet with success and that others join them.
The vice president of Fox News published a blog post recently. Here is a screen cap of most of it…
I didn’t read about the story at all until after the alleged attack was determined to be a hoax. In retrospect, we would have all been better off not hearing about it until the true facts had been determined. I can imagine that a lot of McCain volunteers are driving around in their cars feeling disheartened these days and that a small number of them suffer from mental illness. McCain should offer them some words of support at this time so that other crazy shit can be averted.
If John Moody deleted his post and tries to pretend to the core audience that he never wrote it, he will have confirmed a lot of the opinions that I have about his organization.
This blog had its PR removed last year during the action that Google took to combat paid links. I didn’t talk about it much back then because I would have been but one quiet voice amid a deafening howl of indignation. I don’t actually fault Google. I think it was a sound business decision. The fact that their actions incensed hundreds or thousands of WAHMS and semi-pseudo-professional bloggers was unfortunate. Better communication may have been helpful.
My post Google-smack strategy was to continue milking the paid blogging thing until it petered out and then move on. I kept blogging the some degree after that. I deleted a slew of sponsored posts in the hopes of regaining some PR. Now I am going to look into what further steps I can take to regain some Google Page Rank.
My first project will be to add nofollow to any remaining links in my old posts. The problem that Google had with paid posting was that the transaction was really just a tarted up version of buying relevant links that would pass PR to the buyer. PayPerPost reacted to Google’s crackdown by launching a second generation paid blogging marketplace that complied with the nofollow thing.
I also plan to update to a newer version of WordPress so that I can take advantage of some plugins that have been created recently that might make it easy to get back into Google’s good books. Here is an example of a useful plugin.
I made light of the appearance of a certain appointed official way back when things were just kinda bad. He isn’t very telegenic and we didn’t see him much until lately. My joke seems even less funny now.
Back in the mid 90s, I was visiting the house that I was in the midst of purchasing and while I was talking to the owner his kids were destroying his cherished record collection in the basement. I didn’t come to their defense at the time, but they are a lot like Frisbees.
I would advise anyone who has cherished music on vinyl to make digital backups. If you want to share the music, you can easily post it on YouTube. Use Windows Movie Maker and import the audio, grab a cool still image of the artist from Google and add the film aging effect and boom, you’re done.
The USB turntable pictured above makes the process very easy. Click the link to find out more about this innovative product. It’s where it’s at.
