is fun. In the states, it has pretty much been reduced down to a day of eating as much as you can while hanging out with relatives, taking bets on your crazy uncle bobs drunken shenanigans, and trying to avoid embarrasing the rest of the family with any overtly non-mainstream comments.
Or getting in fights with the right wing libertarian types. It depends on where you come from I guess.
It's also a day of massive culinary carnage. Billions of birds give up their life on this day so the States can celebrate having survived their initial stupidity once long long ago. Some birds a relucky though. Those birds are pardoned by powerful holders of public offices. The President for example.
Or the Governor of Alaska.
Yes, today's webtip is about THAT video. The video featuring a post pardon interview. An interview that has been so brilliantly framed, I seriously suspect the camera person might be harboring some secret hopes of working for the Coen brothers.
So kick up your feet, pop open a brew, enjoy the following images of surrealist mayhem and join me in giving thanks for Sarah Palin.
was a sort of silly way of showing suport for web standards. web standards are pretty cool, and doing as much as possible to make sure your sites information remains accessible is even cooler. But finding a cools excuse to do something really silly is pretty much the coolest.
And trying to get as many people as possible to photograph themselves in a blue beanie is pretty darn silly. Ecouraging them to then use those photos for their profile pics is just the cherry on top.
So.
Get ready for Blue Beanie Day 2008. It's next Friday. You now have sufficient notice to start tracking down some blue headgear, and getting yourself photographed.
The Men of Monty Python have just sent the pirates of the planet a very bad message. Either that, or they have acknowledged that the market also consists of people who aren't willing to pay the current price of your product, and that even a price of 0 has to be taken into consideration when establishing market equilibrium.
In other words, Monty Python is now posting teir own clips to YouTube.
Not all of them. Not yet at least. But it's a start, and considering the fact that most of the media consuming public has probably not recently had the chance to see their show on TV, it might be a good idea if they want to protect themselves from the death of their market. THeir fans aren't certainly aren't getting any younger. Trust me, I know this.
Anyway, I guess their idea behind it was that by providing their clips themselves, they might be able to profit from the clips popularity and turn those views into potential sales of their videos.
Anyway, looks like the market really is starting to sort things out.
My music collection is almost completely fixed. After a catastrophic back-up action from hell a couple of years ago, (one that ended in 2 dead hardrives, thousands of corrupted files and an suddenly erased Ipod), I have finally managed to get my music cleaned up. The duplicates are gone, recovered files that lost their filenames are clearly labeled, and I finally have the appropriate cover art and release date for almost all of my tracks.
Happy happy joy joy.
The only thing that still isn't quite right are the genre tags.
Genres are one of the weakest point in the whole music metadata experience. There are no longer any agreed-upon standards, they frequently change with time and relation to the music, and the id3 tags don't allow for multiple genres or nesting. These are all things that need to be worked on.
So what's a boy to do?
Well, I have decided to go with the wisdom of the crowds. Scary thought for someone who can't stand a sold-out concert at a small bar, much less a field of strangers at an average festival. But it really does seem to be the best. With the massive number of people out there tagging music on sites like last.fm (still a fanboi) taking a look at their top tags would at least guarantee that a good portion of the music listening audience would be able to identify whatever the top genre tag was. And considering some of my files where ending up with genres like "leftfield" (Band? okay. Genre? I'm not so sure) "108" (???) or "b_soul", it certainly can't be any worse than what I already have.
I might even try to get so fancy as taking the top three or four tags and adding them to the comments field so I can at least pretend to be able to work with things like subgenres and put together some extra clever automatic playlists. Of course, those are just my plans. I'm still not certain how to implement them.
I spent some time trying to track down an applescript that does just what I described, but I havent been to crazy about the results. 633k.net has been of some help though.
There you will find a nifty little program that reads a playlist and will give you the tags associated with it on on last.fm. You can then click on any of them and set them as the genre tag in the music file.
It's not fully automatic (this is good) and it doesn't let you do multiple tage (not so good) but at least it keeps you in control of the process and it's actually sort of fun to run through your collection and see what the rest of the planet has tagged it with.
The biggest problem with the program is that it can only tag based on artist and not song. Depending on how OCD you are, that might not be enough. And to be honest, after all of the work I have put in to trying to get my collection cleaned up, I don't know if I will be able to remain satisfied.
So Mac users with similar problems can go check it out. Windows users are on their own on this one, but if anyone has any suggestions of better tools for this job PLEASE share them.
Ok, it never went away, but after it was a webtip ages ago, I sort of forgot about it. Which was a shame, because it looks as though the sinfest was doing some pretty god strips during the whole campaign.
Fun Fun Fun, and I missed it.
Until Sunday. On Sunday I took a look at the comic again, and was confronted with a lovely little full color account of Mr. Obamas first look at the machine he was going to get the keys to.
Wien | 22.11.2008 | 12:14 
