The Annual Christmas Haiku

Hello my faithful Rizznites - I hope your year has been at least as good as this one has turned out being for me. It was off to a rocky start... the middle wasn't that great, but it seems to be ending with a bang! I hope you all experience nothing but the best with your family, friends, and loved ones this year.

Long time, no see.

Howdy, folks. Been a minute since I've posted, and I've got some good reasons for that. As most of you know, I'm in East Texas still, and I've got a lot of buns in the oven, so to speak. Unfortunately, I've signed a crapload of Non-Disclosure Agreements recently (which really stink when you're a blabbermouth journalist type like myself), but are probably for the best. I'll try to outline a bit of them right here and on to the interesting news after that.

ThinClients
I've been contracted by a company named 5 Tribe, Inc. here in Tyler to work for the next four months to create what's called a Thin Client solution. I can't go into the details of my project itself, but a Thin Client, if you're unaware, is a system that has very little processing or storage power on the workstation itself, and instead relies on a server somewhere to do the bulk of the processing. The Thin Client solution I'll be putting together will be about the size of a PSP, and about the price of an off the shelf PDA.

The beauty of this contract is that it not only does it pay me well to do something I'm really interested in, but it eventually will tie back in to a lot of the technologies that I developed back at BlipMedia and AACS.

BlipMedia and AACS
Speaking of BlipMedia and AACS (and their online program), what's going on with all that there? Well, once again, I've signed a lot of NDAs and started a lot of super-secret negotiations, so again I cannot get into a whole lot of details on this one, but I can tell you that something huge is very likely going to be coming down the pike with BlipMedia that is going to shake the podcasting world down to it's core. I am not exaggerating one bit when I say that I fully expect to be interviewed on CNN and the Wall Street Journal on this one.

The best part is, it's good for the podcasting community - trust me, you guys are going to love how this one plays out.

Yes yes, I know, I'm a big tease. I'll give you a hint - imagine how cool it would be if the Blip server ran as stable as our competitor's servers ran. I've probably said too much, but hey, I'll let the speculation abound on that one and clean up the mess later.

Other Future Ventures
Speaking of new ventures and podcasting, I just got the go ahead from my pocket book to fund a new venture that's going to be headed up by Leo, Ricky, Art, and myself. Again, I'm not going too far into the details on this one, but once again, I will drop ambiguous clues and let the speculation run rampant. Art and I were talking about the Adam Curry story a couple weeks ago and decided that we needed to snap into action and stop simply complaining about the sorry, disorganized state of podcast content, promotion, and marketing.

So the plan is, as soon as we come up with a name for the company, to take Adam Curry down by showing the world who the real kings of all online media are.

Happy Holidays
I recieved the following from a faithful Rizznite this week:

You know the world is going crazy when the best rapper is a white guy, the best golfer is a black guy, the tallest guy in the NBA is Chinese, the Swiss hold the America's Cup, France is accusing the U.S. of arrogance, Germany doesn't want to go to war, and the three most powerful men in America are named 'Bush', 'Dick', and 'Colon'.

John Spencer Dies
I guess we know which ticket is winning next season on West Wing - one of my favorite persons from the show has died. John Spencer, the actor who portrays Vice Presidential candidate Leo McGarry on the West Wing passed away earlier today from a heart attack.

This is upsetting, and I know many Rizznites were fans of both the show and the character (as well as the actor, who also played prominently on the old series LA Law) - we'll miss you John.

JibJab Strikes Again
Once again, JibJab makes a poke at politics both sides can enjoy (more or less). Their latest featurette called 2-0-5 was featured on CNN Headline News today.

Go check it out.

That's all I got, so you commence napping.

/rizzn

I am blessed to be surrounded by idiots, I guess.

I haven't been posting much lately. For this I apologize. I've tried to ponder the lack of inspiration for posting, but I guess it's more or less been my need to unplug for a little bit. It also could have to do with the fact I've been sick for a couple weeks off and on. It also could have to do with that I've been extraordinarily busy going back and forth between businesses here in Tyler and Dallas.

I've also been embroiled in conflict between my partners in Florida and my friend James Smith. To me, it seems stupid, but somehow it has gotten out of control. I've been subjected to eighteen individual email exchanges of escalating viciousness over the course of the last week. It started out as "please send the phone and power adapter." It ended up being "I will make your life miserable from now to the end of time." It's a bit out of hand. I would find the whole exchange a bit ludicrous and funny if I weren't forced to sign contracts exposing myself to $100,000 liability by continuing to be friends with James.

As a footnote, I suppose it should be said publicly somewhere that this hereby ends James' involvement with the BlipMedia project. This is only the first of many major announcements forthcoming around here regarding the Blip project.

Speaking of projects, we've got a few other big announcements as far as new endeavors go. There's the DBandit (no, it's not pet tags), three devices I've been contracted to engineer, a new podcasting company, and a couple of other side projects that will bear full entries of their own. Stay tuned for that stuff, it's very exciting.

... in Adam Curry is a Jerk news
Imagine my surprise, today, having been out of pocket news-wise for a few weeks at discovering that your friend and mine Adam Curry is topping the headlines at Technorati again. The first bit of research as to why revealed he was starting something called "soundvertising". I'm not sure exactly what this is since I more or less personally boycott all things Adam, but if the cludgy name is any indicator, it very likely is him trying to re-brand the concept of audio commercials and then claim to have invented them. There is no end to the man's ego. He won't be happy until there are eternal debates from now to apocalypse whether or not he or Al Gore invented the world.

As it turns out, though, the reason he's in the headlines has more to do with Mr. Curry's duplicitous nature, rather than his alleged altruism. Rather than dig through the tons of copy-cat blog posts that Technorati seems to be becoming famous for, I went to the industry source for the buzz on podcasting, Chris McIntyre's podcastalley.com. There it is, at the top of the "Podcasting in the News" section: Adam Curry Caught Trying to Inflate His Role in Podcasting?

What? Say it ain't so! According to the first post and the subsequently linked articles, "Former MTV veejay and podcasting entrepreneur Adam Curry appears to have been caught anonymously editing the podcasting entry on Wikipedia to remove credit from other people and inflate his role in its creation. When someone edits Wikipedia without logging in to a user account, the IP address is recorded to guard against abuse. Four times this year, an IP address controlled by Curry, 82.108.78.107, has made revisions involving the early history of podcasting."

I would make some drippingly sarcastic remarks about how Adam would never do that, he has way too much integrity, and could by no means be considered to ever do anything to over-extend his image as the 'father of podcasting,' but long-time Rizznites know that he has stolen just about every idea put forth by this blog, and are also aware I sell a tshirt that proclaims loudly his jerkiness, and would therefore be suspicious of my sincerity.

For the full story, see here and here.

Dawn Yang
How is it that there is no Wikipedia entry on Dawn Yang? This is like a month total that she's been in the Technorati most talked about list. I think that qualifies her for at least an entry. Hell, if Smokehouse and I have Wikipedia entries, I think that the hot chick who supposedly did or did not get plastic surgery gets at least a mention. I'm just sayin', yo.

Aeon Flux
I know you're all waiting for my Aeon Flux review here, but Darrell had a fever last night, and we didn't get to see a premiere, and as you may have heard on Leno last night, they didn't pre-release Aeon Flux for reviewers (something Ebert and Roeper claim hasn't happenned since the release of From Justin to Kelly.

The reviewers, who are all miffed they got no advance screening, taglined the film "some thought it might be "Aeon Sux," but it's more like "Aeon Lacklux." Clever, but my guess is much like those of us who saw Aeon Flux in it's original chopped up MTV format, most people just don't get it. To be honest, Charlize Theron dressed all hot for two hours in a theatre is worth the price of admission, whether or not they screw up the original spirit of AF or not.

Texas vs. Colorado
True blowout - you don't see this often. This is a qualifying game for who goes to the Rose Bowl this year. Right now there's 1:27 left in the third quarter, and the Longhorns are winning 70-3.

All I can say is, "Wow." My dad told me the score from the other room, and I had to turn it on to see what kind of game was being played. You just don't see that in football very often.

Stuff
Yeah, I've got a lot of little bits about nothing today. Get over it. That's all I got today. I'll start posting more regular. I'll start eating digi-fiber or something.

/rizzn