onfocus

I woke up very early this morning to the sound of a thousand monkeys being slaughtered. It turns out it was just a flock (dissimulation?) of grackles. Man, what a racket. I'm not the only one who isn't in love with this bird. Ogden Nash was moved to poetry. You can hear the awful screeching here, then imagine that lone grackle cackle in a group of hundreds.

This time tomorrow I'll be in Austin. If you are going to be in Austin for sxsw and would like to discuss issues of the day, drop me a line. Since I've been out of work for a little while, I haven't been interacting with many people in real life. If I stare blankly while you are addressing me, simply shake vigorously.

News Flash: US marijuana supply to decrease by 0.0001%. Mexico confident it can make up the difference.

So I'm reading McLuhan's Understanding Media. His classification of any medium as either hot or cool is especially interesting. He says a hot medium is high definition, low on interactivity, specialized, and usually limited to one sense. Examples of hot media he gives are radio, film, and books. Cool, on the other hand is low-fi, interactive, generalized, and engages more senses. The telephone, comics, and TV are classified as cool by Marshall. I realize this distinction is a continuum, not black and white. (I think read somewhere that Baudrillard, using this scheme, called all media cool.) But it's still useful for thinking about a system in general instead of focusing on content. So I asked the following question to try to understand this metaphor better:

Are weblogs a hot or cool medium? (there are arguments for both.)

Hot

• primarily text
• one-way
• immediate (thought to publish)
• structured (loosely by time)
• one sense (visual)

Cool

• chatty, spoken word
• interactive
• expressive
• casually constructed
• not usually "packaged" (random observations)
• non-specialized (thanks to weblog tools)

Based on this, I think I would call weblogs a cool medium that used to be hot.

He goes on to classify cultures as either hot or cool, and makes predictions about how temperatue clash can affect them.

I'm still having trouble with the clissifications. Shows like X-Files or ER seem to make TV a hot medium, while talk shows and "reality" TV seem to make it a cool medium. But then I'm missing the point about not focusing on content.

Anyway, great book. :)

secret word for today: somnambulism: an abnormal condition of sleep in which motor acts (as walking) are performed.

I didn't go to the O'Reilly P2P conference. But I feel like I have after reading Graeme Thickins' conference wrap-up. [via Doc] I especially like his list of quotes. One of my favorites:

"All the web logs should be able to work together intelligently."
-Rob ("CmdrTaco") Malda, co-creator, SlashDot.org

Here's a view of posts that mention "sxsw" from this blog in chronological order. (why? because I can... ;)

I'm going to miss not going to sxsw music this year. I've been going for quite a while. Every year I see some amazing shows and hang out with geographically dispersed friends. Here are some of my favorite shows that I experienced through the years:

• George Clinton and the P-Funk All Stars at Austin Music Hall '95 - Amazing. It seems like every musician in Austin for SXSW joined the P-Funk on stage that night. I remember that Chuck D and The Fugees were really good. And the love. I remember the love.
• Soul Coughing at Austin Music Hall '97 - At the end of the show, M. Doughty said, Goodnight People of Austin and Jaded Music Industry F***s Alike. At one point the guitar tech came out on stange buck naked when he handed Doughty a new guitar. It just seemed to capture the spirit of the whole thing somehow. Oh, and the music was great as always.
• Tragically Hip at Liberty Lunch '94 - Gordon Downie was constantly creating automatic poetry between and during songs...pacing back and forth onstage.
• Gomez at La Zona Rosa '00 - You just have to see these guys live.
• Propellerheads at La Zona Rosa '98 - Super plus electronic fun. Who knew two guys with turntables, drums, and a bass could put out so much energy?
• Buffalo Daughter at Liberty Lunch '98 - This was a retro techno rockshow. They have a great groove, and I felt like I was hearing something completely new. Or something I've always heard in a new way.
• Posies at Waterloo Brewing Co. '95 - Because I like the Posies and the beer at Waterloo.

Each year I discovered at least one great band that became a personal favorite. Ahh well, there will be others.

I picked up an amazing book the other day, Une semaine de bonté by Max Ernst. He takes pieces of Victorian engravings which all have a similar look and reassembles them into surreal images. It's split into several sections, and each has a loose theme. Before each section are a few quotes from other surrealists. This is my favorite: "Enter he said and there was light no one had knocked." - Tristan Tzara.

Need another web application developer around the office? Look no further. I'm one of those...and more.