Drive 105 Repo’d. Replaced with Love

The last hold-out in the Twin Cities commercial ‘alternative’ radio dial succumbed to Love today.

“Every mini-van driving soccer mom with a 15 year old will be pleased as punch when she turns on her radio and hears this festival of shit pouring forth from her speakers.” – Sornie

Two choices remain; The Current, or some mythical online service.

My first experience with a format change:
Back around 1986 104.1 FM changed from something boring to heavy metal. I thought the world had split apart.

But, I stuck with the format change and had the hair to prove it. Then had the same reaction when they mellowed out four years later and switched to “college” or “alternative” or “modern” or “progressive” rock.

Again, I stuck with them. And still have a cassette recording of their live broadcast of Too Much Joy in concert.

I stopped there. Not following them into Country or beyond.

10 minutes from now, I expect the FM dial to resemble the current AM dial, with AM completely abandon. Like suburbanites migrating to newer construction further out. All while iPod capacities grow exponentially.

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Ear Travel Tip

This is a note to self: take a decongestant pill an hour before before take-off and landing.

How Stuff Works says it’ll minimize earaches, nausea, and headache. The former has been the cause of some of my worst flying experiences. The latter 2 I’ve got right now. Unpleasant.

Update: My mom said when I was a kid, they’d dose me w/ decongestant 2-3 days before a flight.

Planting Flowers for a Walled Garden

Peter Fleck is asking about content guidelines for Minneapolis’ wireless portal. My initial thoughts…..

Some of you may know I worked on a similar project (same idea, but in the private sector) back around 2000. All the problems we struggled with then are non-existant now (syndication formats, wireless equipment, etc). Since the U of M’s Wireless Communities conferences, I’ve been thinking about what should be available “for free” within a Muni-WiFi network.

I’d rather the city not play favorites or give the impression of playing favorites, so I recommend – only web-accessible city services (pay parking tickets, check on library books, pay water bills, city council meeting dates, opening hours of public buildings, that kinda stuff. For three reasons:

  1. The wireless network is from the city. There’s a real need to increase the accessibility, usability, and visibility of city services online. This will drive that demand.
  2. There’s no good metric to determine why one private publication should be included and not another (i.e. StarTribune.com vs. NorthEastBeat.com vs. MNstories.com vs. etc). Some worthy publication will always be excluded. Better to excluded everyone than continually argue who gets in. Even if the neighborhood groups get to pick what is presented on their nodes – relevance isn’t geographic. Neighborly gatekeepers are still gatekeepers.
  3. Directing energy at improving electronically delivered city services helps all internet using citizens, not just those using the free portion of wifi network and is therefore a more effective use of tax dollars than managing which private publications are within the portal.

In the comments, Peter clarifies some more of the current vision.

I’m holding my original position. No current online publication provides enough community value to actually belong there. If TCDailyPlanet is in the free zone, than PFHyper.com/blog should be in the free zone. As should newpatriot.org and every other Minneapolis-based blog…..and that’s absurd.

Instead, we should give neighborhood groups the skills and tools to publish new and services directly. Otherwise we’re just giving them the choice of vendors that won’t actually serve them.

First Crack 99. Jeremy Raths and the Search for Extraordinary Coffee

We catch up with Twin Cities coffee legend Jeremy Raths and talk about:

  1. Moving The Roastery from a coffee shop in the middle of St. Paul to delivering coffee from an abandon convent.
  2. The history of the speciality coffee market – nationally and locally.
  3. How the coffee market is changing to benefit the small, local, coffee farmer.
  4. The flexibility to choose just the coffees he finds interesting.

Listen to Jeremy Raths and the Search for Extraordinary Coffee [28 min].

Make Me

“I’m what’s next baby! I don’t need them to tell me that, and I sure as hell ain’t gonna pay them to tell me that.” – Chuck Olsen

Which would you choose;

  1. Paying money to site quietly in a chair while someone reads PowerPoint slides and makes your chosen profession sound lame, boring, pointless.
  2. Chasing soap bubbles in the yard.

I don’t go to many conferences. Hardly any. I’ve even dramatically scaled back on the paid, professional events I attend. Yes, it’s because a toddler is far more exciting than most conferences or other professional-type events.

The MinneBar and MinneDemo events are the exception here. They’re invaluable in seeing who’s doing what locally. Plus, they’re informal, free, and full of infectious excitement. Just like a toddler.

Less like a disciplinary action.

Elsewhere:

“…most things they call unconferences are not…Further, I don’t think the kind of unconferences I like are actually growing.”- Dave Winer

“…despite all the odds against it, we actually are growing up.” – Dave Winer

“My big point – 15 minute breaks are too short because I spent two days in a constant state of starting a conversation and then getting herded into a room.” – Dave Slusher

I’m reading J Wynia‘s copy of Open Space Technology: A User’s Guide. While I’m only ~40 pages into it, the model for competing with a 2 year-old is already very clear.

First Crack 100. How to Cup Coffee with Jeremy Raths

Jeremy Raths, from The Roastery, teaches us how to cup – the traditional process for tasting and choosing coffee. He walks through:

  • The cupping process
  • How he teaches others how to cup
  • The need to be emotionally self-aware when cupping
  • How to get the cupping experience at home
  • The responsibility and integrity of a good cup of coffee

Listen to How to Cup Coffee with Jeremy Raths [14 min].

How To Deploy Rails with SVN and Capistrano to a Secondary Domain on TextDrive

I just deployed my first rails app to one of my secondary domains on TextDrive’s shared hosting space.

If that sounds like a recipe for disaster….you’re right!

While Rails is a great development tool, there’s lots of work to do in simplifying, stabilizing, and documenting the deployment process. The app in question is very, very tiny for the express purpose of getting deployment nailed. In fact, it’s taken me longer to deploy than to develop.

For you, and Future Garrick, here’s the process.

  1. Freeze Rails so you’re not plagued with different-version-itis:
    rake rails:freeze:edge TAG=rel_-2-3
  2. Create an Subversion repository in your primary domain,
    Not in your secondary domain. If the repository is in a secondary domain, your primary account can’t see it. Using your primary domain and primary account is easier – if not as tidy as I’d like.
  3. Give your primary account access to the new Subversion repository.
  4. Grab the TextDrive deploy.rb from nuby on rails. Verify deploy_to and server.document-root are /web and /web/public respectively.
  5. Do the initial import into the repository and an initial checkout back to your local machine.
  6. cd to your local app and run cap setup. Confirm you now have a /web/shared directory. It should contain the following directories: log, pids, and system. In log you should have at least production.log and fastcgi.crash.log. Create and chmod them to 666 if they don’t exist.
  7. Follow TextDrive’s instructions for setting up lighttpd, rails, and a proxy.
  8. Change the /web/public/ paths in APPNAME.conf and rails.sh to /web/current/public/
  9. Follow TextDrive’s instructions to start up lighttpd and rails.
    Running their rails.sh file didn’t work for me, editing and manually running the script did.

After all this, cap deploy will deploy your app for you as advertised.

After I tweak a couple more dials and flip a couple more switches I’ll point you to the app.

A First Step

“…take 100 great journalists, give them small HD camcorders and laptops and say ‘here’s your camera, there’s the door….They could upload their stories and feed them to a web site, 24 hours a day…..and it would not cost all that much…say we paid each of our 100 reporters, $140,000 a year. Where would you get the money from?… take the $14 million you’re paying Katie Couric and guess what… you’re there.” – Jeff Jarvis