Author Archives: Garrick van Buren

Jeremy Messersmith CD Release Party @ Acadia – Sept 2nd

This Saturday – Sept 2nd, Jeremy Messersmith is having a CD release party at the Acadia Cafe. Jeremy and I sat down for a podcast a couple weeks back talking about his new “The Alcatrez Kid CD” ($13 Paypal). Unfortunately, life got in the way of me getting it up earlier this week. Crap. I’m …

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The Benefits of Screencasting in Software Development

Yes, I’ve been too busy working on the FeedSeeder project to write up too much about it. That said, I’ve been privately documenting it’s development with screencasts. At the end of each development day, I start at the beginning of the app, load up iShowU and walk through all the functionality as if I’m presenting …

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iTunes Podcast Directory Strategy – Divert and Distract

Based on the “Promote Your Podcast and Make Money on iTunes” email I just received from the iTunes Podcasting team, Apple’s podcast directory revenue-generation strategy is two-fold: Divert: Apple wants podcasters to point listeners to the iTunes Podcast directory listing of their podcast – rather then the one controlled by the podcaster. From Apple’s perspective, …

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Real Wages Up, Not Down – Economists Fight

A biased New York Times article on wages being down gets a fisking: “What keeps my wages high (and yours) is our alternatives…What sets workers wages are the wages of those alternatives…Workers are better educated than ever. That is why I believe that compensation, properly measured, is higher than it was five or ten or …

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Star Tribune on Muni WiFi: FUD or Just Wrong?

The Strib’s Steve Alexander is on a Muni-WiFi bashing kick. In Sunday’s Slowdown in the Fast Lane, the angle was how the forthcoming Minneapolis muni-WiFi will make the current cable and DSL offerings look paltry and non-competitive. Oh – and we don’t get the maximum bandwidth out of our current pipes anyway. Really? Muni-WiFi isn’t …

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A Recording in Any Medium Still Isn’t Buttermilk Pie

Rex Hammock doesn’t declare downloading music and video is the same as being there, but a PDF of a magazine is akin to a photograph of Buttermilk pie. All recordings are “photographs of buttermilk pie”. A pale, pale substitute for being there. It continues to baffle me how digital artifacts are treated differently – images …

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The All Commercial Television Channel is Nearly Here

A decade ago, I had this vision of a television channel – MTV for commercials. Above is the logo I drew up for it. Commercials would be presented in a structured way – by theme, brand history, actor, etc. In other words, the ads themselves would be the program. Fast-forward to today, and I think …

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