Note to Self: Stop Using Eric Rice’s Brain

Listening to the Joyeur podcast on Twitter, I made a note to look into fictional Twitter accounts.

Then I see this post by Eric Rice:

“By setting up a character-driven, fictional Twitter account, not only can I do a sultry little dance on the fine line of ARGs (alternate reality gaming), but that 140 character limit is the BEST thing to ever happen to the creative process.”

The time between when I wrote this and he hit publish: ~30 minutes.

Luckmaking in Place

“Placemaking takes time and sometimes just plain dumb luck. No planner envisioned it all, first laying out the grid of streets and creating a zoning code for Dinkytown, then deciding precisely that an alley was to be converted to become the location of a breakfast counter and a legendary, delicious business.” – Sam Newberg

A nice reminder that things like MySpace, CraigsList – while not ‘designed’ – are more valuable places than some of the more ‘planned’ places.

Postponed Due to Lack of Vision

I’ve been fighting with one aspect of FeedSeeder for quite a while now. None of the approaches I’ve taken ended up solving the problem in a useful way – many of them just mucked it up worse. The imaginary screen in my head that tells me ‘what it should be’ was blank and it was sucking up all the energy.

So yesterday, I dropped the feature. For now.

Removing it made everything else fall into place much easier. The imaginary screen flickered back on.

The need for this feature will still be there and I’m pretty sure it’ll sort itself out quite nicely when the time is right.

LATER:
Oh, so this new approach is called ‘procrascipline’.

First Crack 95. Darrin Homme on Improving Local Competitive Bicycle Racing

Darrin’s raced bicycles for probably half the two decades+ I’ve known him. Inspired by Darrin’s USCF My Way post, I asked him to unpack the problems in local competitive bike racing that his points would solve.

Listen to Darrin Homme on Improving Competitive Bicycle Racing [24 min].

iTunes Music Store Replies – More than Two Years Later

Dear Garrick Van Buren,

Thank you for your interest in iTunes.

After careful consideration of your application, we believe that the most efficient way to get your content up on iTunes in a timely fashion would be for you to deliver the content through one of the several digital service providers with whom we currently work.

For your information, below is a list of several companies that can encode and deliver your music content to iTunes. Should you be interested, please determine which digital service provider is appropriate for your particular content. For Audiobook content, see below.

Please note that the companies listed below, regardless of their location, may be able to deliver content for global Artists and Labels
…

Huh, where the did this come from?

The best I can figure:

Sometime between October 2004 and June 2005 – before iTunes had a built-in podcast directory – I filled out an browser-based iTMS application to sell the First Crack Podcast through their store.

Not getting a response in a timely fashion – say, within 27 months – I forgot about it. Completely.

As you see, the email give no context (i.e. ‘RE: your the application – submitted on Nov 23,2004’) and it even has a ‘do_not_reply’ in the ‘Reply-To’ field.

My opinion of iTunes has dramatically decreased over the past year and getting bizarre emails like this don’t help.

I wonder if I’d feel the same if Apple bought Audion instead of SoundJam.