Thursday, 06/27/02
My replacement Tivo arrived yesterday and almost instantly I stumbled over the Ian McKellen Richard III, in letterbox on IFC. Hooray for Tivo! While I was watching X-Men, I tried to pretend that Magneto was Richard in a silly hat.
When my cousin Rich got married a few years ago I tried to get him the domain "plantage.net" so he could be "richard@plantage.net". Alas, it was owned at the time by Plant Age magazine, which also owned .com and wasn't even deploying on .net. They ignored my offer to take it off their hands with promises of noncompetition. Now, I see, the domain has fallen into the hands of the Capetian and Plantagenet Historical Society, which, content with cool email addresses, has not yet turned it into any sort of a site. 11:15AM «
Monday, 06/24/02
Two days ago I received a novel piece of demi-spam, addressed to "info" at my domain. "Jamie Boldon" wanted to know if I was interested in acquiring bumppo.com.
When I registered bumppo.net, none of the other suffixes were taken, but within a year or so they'd been snapped up by domain name resellers, presumably to sell back to me (I got some offers). The message from Mr. Boldon said he had bumppo.com, was selling it through "cenion.com", and wanted $89.95. There was a cenion.com URL I could click on to seal the deal.
As it happens, I'd like to use bumppo.net for something commercial and higher-profile in a couple of months, and when that happens, it could be cool to appropriately redirect those people who just enter "bumppo" into their browser.
I fired up a whois search to see if Mr. Boldon was the owner of record for bumppo.com, and to my surprise, whois indicated that the name was unregistered. Whois sometimes lags behind reality, so I checked with my domain registrar, which has more timely data. Sure enough, it was available, and I snapped it up.
I had a strong suspicion that, were I to have clicked on that cenion.com link, a robot would have reached out and snapped up bumppo.com, then resold it to me for a 600% markup. That's sneaky, but darn clever.
Having reviewed Cenion since I got the domain, it turns out that they're not that smart. A human (possibly the "seller") reviews my Cenion request for bumppo.com and gets back to me after sewing it up himself.
Postscript: While I was verifying that my registration of .com had gone through, Network Solutions helpfully suggested a long list of "similar" domains, mostly bumppo with oddball top-levels, but a few that were just delightful on their own terms: "bumpspo.com", "bumpedpo.com" and "bumpingpo.com". Say them out loud, you'll probably start to giggle too. 06:23PM «
I've had conversations with several of you recently about the sick politics of webcasting audio. I had most of the story, but not all of it, and the parts I didn't have are worse than I dreamed. Jamie Zawinski has the whole story. Following a horrifyingly lucid litany of the hurdles one needs to leap:
What's going on here is that the music industry establishment are absolutely terrified of the internet, and are trying to prevent any kind of progress that might require them to evolve and change their business models to keep up with the times. They are pretty much trying to legislate the internet out of the way, and force things to continue to be done as if early-20th-century technology was still all we have to work with.
And after all is said and done, what happens to your fees? The media conglomerates take your money, keep most of it for themselves, and then divide the rest statistically based on the Billboard charts. That means that no matter what kind of obscure, underground music you played, 3/4ths of the extortion money you paid goes to whichever management company owns N'Sync; and the rest goes to Michael Jackson (since he owns The Beatles' catalog.) All other artists (including the ones whose music you actually played) get nothing.
02:07PM «
Sunday, 06/23/02
Because I'm looking to move without breaking (or even denting) any banks, I found this story about creating "fabulousness" in tiny studio apartments partly inspirational. Of course, these people broke several banks renovating, not to mention spending $3.80 per square inch on the apartment itself, but their walls are the color of my closet. 07:43PM «
This morning I mistakenly broke an egg on my thigh. One of three slipped out of my hand while I was standing in front of the counter, and my razor-sharp reflexes prevented it from falling to the floor. I'm sure this happens to Emeril all the time. 03:15PM «
Yesterday I learned that KEXP morning DJ John Richards has a record label. Actually a pretty good record label. I've been meaning to pick up a Los Halos album for a while now. Impressive display of restraint that I've never heard him mention it on the air, and I listen to an hour or two of his show most weekdays. 03:15PM «
Monday, 06/17/02
Three things for today, here we go:
05:14PM «
Namesake dept: four years ago Pamela Anderson started a post-Baywatch syndicated TV program called "VIP", in which she played an implausibly lucky private eye with implausibly large breasts, and my last name. It's not a common name, and I was afraid the program would eventually challenge Jeremy Irons in public consciousness. (At least three or four times a year I'm asked if I'm related to him, and people who forget my name usually guess Jeremy. It's a good gig.)
Fortunately, though "VIP" didn't have to good graces to tank, it was never successful enough that anyone felt compelled to reference it in my presence, and now, thanks to some sort of implosion in German media companies, it's finally going off the air.
Hurray! Now the only competition to Jeremy and myself (aside from my family, at any rate) is a ridiculous program called Witchblade that's still a big step up from Pamela. The villain is named Kenneth Irons, and he's an aloof, manipulative, power-crazed billionaire. He dresses well, gets most of the good dialogue, and kills people for reasons the show doesn't bother to explain. Everything's coming up Milhouse. 04:34PM «
Thursday, 06/13/02
My drug of choice for the summer months is a metal bowl full of ice cubes and cold water. About three times an hour I place my hands in it, first just halfway up the sides of my fingers, then up to the wrists.
I know it's cold enough when after about a second I can feel my biceps constricting slightly on their own. I leave my hands where they are until about five seconds after it stops being comfortable, remove them without shaking off the excess water, and place them on my lower back for the few seconds it takes most of the water to absorb into my shirt. That's enough that I can go back to work without murdering anyone or starting to cry.
Yesterday was the first day this year it was necessary. 02:28PM «
Friday, 06/07/02
Three things I have enjoyed this morning while I glower at the phone and will it to ring:
Simple tastes, yes, I know. 10:48AM «
Wednesday, 06/05/02
Nicholas pointed to Jamie Zawinski's debate with himself about the merits of webcasting, and makes some very cogent points about the wretched CARP spec thankfully rejected by the US copyright office, but he misses the real news -- Zawinski alluded to Curve to describe some band I'd never heard of. That's terribly exciting. I had the Kidneythieves album on order half an hour later.
It's pretty darn good. Apart from the two slower tracks lacking the early Nine Inch Nail guitars, it's less Curvy than Puracane-y, occasionally verging on Medicinal. I'm partial to the tongue-in-cheek cover of Willie Nelson's "Crazy". The Kidneythieves show at the DNA Lounge show was last week as well as being 800 miles to the south, but they're touring all over with KMFDM this summer. 06:08PM «
EFF has a good writeup on the problems with the Broadband Protection Discussion Group report. The BPDG is a group of entertainment and technology companies trying to come up with a means to "protect" digital TV from people who want to treat it like a digital stream, which would be unprecedented, because it's impossible. Fortunately, as you'd expect from foxes drawing up visiting hour rules for the henhouse, the participants can't agree on much (NYT link). 05:18PM «
Saturday, 06/01/02
Today I got some spam promising me "Revolutionary Filtering Software" that "Keeps Junk Out and Important Email In -- 100% Guaranteed". Clearly, somebody's diet seems irony-deficient.
I keep meaning to set up SpamAssassin, and a few days ago I figured out a fault-tolerant way to do so without risking the loss of any mail. Perhaps tomorrow. 07:18PM «
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