Interesting MP3 for Friday Night

[this post contains paid placements]

I do so enjoy Friday Nights. This is the second Friday night I've had recently that involved recording strangers playing music in my home.

This one is by a fellow that if I remember correctly is named Justin. Percussion is by me, all else by him on his acoustic (and produced, of course, by yours truly).

If your podcast client doesn't download it automatically, click here to download.

As a side note, I try to work these paid placements in somewhat unobtruseivly and humourously, if possible, but this next one is so freakin' obvious it's sad. I mean, it is true that my car insurance is coming due here in the next few months and I will be needing to switch insurance companies. It's even true that I'll likely be switching to CarInsurance.com soon, because I've used CarInsurance.com in the past, and they're generally the cheapest in the business.

But who talks about automotive insurance in a blog? It's really hard to work into conversation. Try it.

"So the other day, I was shopping for an online car insurance rate that was affordable, and I thought, hey! when I think of online auto insurance, I think of CarInsurance.com!"

It sounds like a damn infomercial!

Oh well, there you go. Corporate whoring!

/rizzn

Life is Rosey

Today has been an extremely productive day. It's amazing how well a week goes when the previous weekend is one of the best in recent memory.

I've been really busy with what has been a real roller-coaster of a week. I was dealing with being stiffed for over $3,000 in late-paying clients this week (as well as being screwed for even more money by my landlord - I won't go into the gory details except to say that Powell Properties of Tyler Texas is by far the worst property management company in the world). Then my girl Iris called me on Tuesday, and suddenly things snapped back into perspective for me - everything was copacetic.

I'm really diggin' this girl. I don't often talk about my romantic entanglements on here, mostly because they usually end in tragedy. At the moment, though, I'm really enjoying where this relationship is going, and she really seems to as well. It colors my days rosy and leaves me with a good feeling when I go to sleep. This weekend spent almost exclusively with her was a whirlwind of romantic gushy goodness.

So after the phone call with Iris, things started really looking up for me. One of my clients informed me they had dropped a check off for me at my office. Subsequent to that, I had an interesting session on iRP, in which my kobold Rizzn almost (or may be in the process of dying), but my bubble would not be burst (see later posts this week regarding that whole story).

Wednesday and Thursday were busy days for me. I've begun really cranking out these sites in earnest. I had monumental amounts of junk going on Wednesday - I sat down with the studio and Darrell to iron out our shooting schedule for the Podded Meat project. That whole thing is really gelling. I'll be talking more about that once I get a chance to put up a site for it (yet another thing on my very long list of things to do). Smokehouse is prodding me to get the ModPodder thing done as well. These things will be soon coming up on my todo lists and coming to fruition in a way that doesn't involve just preperation and things that the public can't see.

It occurs to me that my writing style has become a bit convoluted and hard to follow - I'm really out of practice of writing a lot. This is due to the fact that I've generally got about five contiguous minutes at any given point to do any serious writing - and I've got some sort of interruption going on that has me going off in a different direction, and then it's save to draft and come back later. Looking at my list of unfinished posts is a little depressing. For every post I have for the last three months, I have three unfinished drafts. Doh!

At any rate, I have a few paid placements to get out of the way. I've got this credit cards and Orlando Vacation Home keywords to do. I really don't do much in the way with using real credit cards, and my Florida vacation home is in Miami, so I truly can't relate this to my life in a meaningful way. Instead, I'll just mention the following facts to fulfill my legal obligations:

• Orlando welcomes more visitors than the state of California each year: 43.3 million
• A credit card is a great way to enhance your daily life, if it's used responsibly (much like beer).
• The current population of Orlando is 185,00 (roughly the same as the Greater Tyler area).
• When visiting Orlando, you'll find that most car rental companies and hotels will not let you utilize their services without a credit card (that's a two for one factoid!)

Yeah. I'm done. Back to churning out websites like a good little monkey.

/rizzn

Florida: Not There Anymore

I just want to say that I didn't really have a great time on my trip to Florida. The trip was more or less an utter failure, and but for hanging out with Michael and Rachelle, it was almost entirely filled with work that I was doing Pro Bono. Pro Bono work is not fun.

On top of that, most of what I went down there to accomplish did not occur. As if that were not enough, my days have been filled with utter idiocy since I've returned - dealing with the cable company and my various landlords is not a treat. Pile onto that family issues and a current budget deficit (i.e. more money going out this month than coming in)... I'll save you the gory details - it's become tiresome even to me, so I know it's not entertaining to anyone I unload my misery upon. It's safe to say I've got some stress.

The high-point of my day so far has been a conversation I had with what I think may be safe to call my girlfriend now, Iris, out in Dallas. She is going to come out and spend a week with me either the first or last week of August! This is good.

On the upside (financially speaking), the Finkelsteins have closed a deal that will net a substantial sum over the next three years, as I understand it. I'm sure I'll be kept quite busy with that in the near future.

In Business News
It's going to be a busy week for me. 5Tribe is going to keep me busy here for the next few days, as will the next round of blogs. At the moment I don't have the time to look up and match names with domain names, but I will give you a teaser of the ones I remember from memory:

boobbrains.com - Kate Phinney is finally joining the network! Her Double-D's are very likely to feature prominently on the page.

reeltruthyness.com - KC Morgan has been writing my column, “Twenty-Something
and Single” for Hot Psychology magazine, with much success. She's intengint to cover celebrity gossip, movie reviews and movie news.

brushfires.net - Ben Thompson from New Ulm, Minnesota, the most German town in the U.S. Interests and areas of expertise are: social and political issues, sports, Constitution, American History, psychology and religion, to mention a few.

thedrakeslair.com - This belongs to a future blogger named Diane. At the moment I've having a hard time finding her bio info, so I'll just leave this generic sentence in for the moment!

infectiousinsanity.com - Darrell's new blog domain name.

poddedmeat.com - the main site for the new Vodcast station. For the moment it's included in the blogging project.

iwishicouldthinkofaclevernameformyblog.com - Joel Finkelstein is migrating from his Alternative Energy blog over to a more general format blog.

I've got more to say, but no time to say it at the moment. More later!

Florida: What vacation? (news roundup)

It's been a minute since I've had enough free time to do one of these, but guess what!? It's a news roundup from your old pal Mr. Rizzn. That's right. Today I actually have enough free time to devote to a little R&R. What is R&R for Rizzn? Posting on his blog. On the upside, I am doing this from a wireless laptop from the beach outside my house here in Florida, so I'm not a total recluse.

For those of you keeping track at home, I've had 0 drinks on this trip, and I'm headed back in the morning. Smokehouse wins the vacation drink-a-thon.

Resident's 18 TV's might have caused high-rise fire
This story makes me rethink my idea for the video wall I had planned for my livingroom. I just like the retro look of oldschool pawnshop TV's stacked on one another. Incidentally, this story takes place a few miles from my house here in Florida.

Picture this: you're kicked back watching several of your 18 televisions while propping your feet up on one and holding the door open with two others -- and then your room catches on fire. Strangely enough, something very similar may have happened; the precise cause of the fire that lit up Florida's Hotel Versailles -- forcing the Red Cross to relocate 150 residents -- is still being investigated, but there's no way having that many TV's plugged into a small army of power strips can be safe. When firefighters arrived, even they commented on the difficultly of extinguishing flames while wading through over a dozen CRT sets. So the next time you think about rigging up an insane multi-monitor setup, keep your protective gear
close at hand.

[via engadget]

Recording VoIP
Does this story mean that I am violating the law everytime I record my conversations with my insane landlord?

There are a ton of reasons a company might want to record its own VoIP calls, starting with Sarbox compliance and running through points like customer service, security and even CALEA. Witness Systems says its running on a third of Cisco's Unified Contact Center systems, and AudioCodes's SmartWorks IPX collects voice packets and reports D-channel information. But be careful about running afoul of privacy laws, which differ from state to state.

[via vonmag]

Skype Hacked
My thought on this is that now Skype is owned by eBay instead of Skype, their attitude on hacked pieces of software is likely to be a lot less liberal than when hacked versions of Kazaa got certained unnamed CEOs millions in startup capital.

Regardless, it will be interesting to see how eBay handles this. They've got a bad reputation in some circles in how they handle the PayPal end of things, but every company that handles money in a bank-like fashion tends to irk people quite easily. This will be the first software product I'm aware of they'll be having to deal with a problem like this with. Their responses will be telling.

There's a report that an unnamed Chinese company has developed software that can place calls over Skype's proprietary network. The software doesn't use Skype's Supernode peer-to-peer feature, which routes calls over computers and networks to relay calls--a feature that alarms system admins and has caused many businesses to ban Skype. On one hand, being able to bypass Supernode would be attractive to business customers. On the other hand, too many customers bypassing Supernode would degrade Skype's throughput.

[via vnunet]

YIM/MSCHAT Interoperability
Old news, yes I know. But movement on the story indicates it's actually going to happen.

Limited public testing that enables users of Windows Live Messenger and Yahoo Messenger with Voice to connect to each other through either service. Users can register to sign up in a limited public beta at Yahoo or Microsoft. The process had een expected to be available in the second quarter of this year. Once they gain access to the beta, users can exchange instant messages across the two services, as well as see their friends' online presence, view personal status messages, share emoticons, view offline messages and add new contacts between the services ... Microsoft declined to comment directly on whether it would soon have a similar deal to make Windows Live Messenger interoperate with AOL's consumer IM client, but said that the company "anticipates more of these relationships in the future."

[via computerworld]

The End is Near
Certainly this is a sign of the apocalypse?

Bill Tancer over at his HitWise blog has data that claims MySpace Moves Into #1 Position for all Internet Sites. This is incredibly important, MySpace.com is more popular that Yahoo Mail, and MySpace's growth of visits has surpassed Google towards the end of May of this year. But as Bill points out, what is most revealing is that the "top search terms driving traffic to all Internet sites" is MySpace and MySpace.com with 1.28%, compared with last years top search term being eBay at .31%. See all the details at HitWise.

[via searchenginewatch]

In Florida - What? a Vacation!

Well, I'm here in Florida, Day Whatever. This driving 24 hours straight thing has really fubared my sense of time. I'm pretty sure today is Wednesday, but yesterday I was sure it was Monday. Who the heck knows.

I sit here in this folding chairs and ponder the pleathora of projects ahead of me. As soon as I get to a machine that doesn't have sixty million pieces of spyware, I need to turn on the new blog sites I've designed for the new bloggers, I've got to get a line on some new furniture for the sets in the studio. Right now we've got a metal-legged newsdesk, but for our tech show we need something other than a green-screen for the backdrop so that we can reduce the set-up and editing times for the show itself.

We shot the pilot for RunTime, a software and tech show coming out on the Podded Meat network. The co-producers are wanting to essentially scrap all the ideas for shows and start over because of production time, and I'm of the opinion this is unacceptable. We've got to be versatile and be able to produce a wide variety of shows, or we're not going to succeed at this. I'm also of the opinion we've got to be flexible and adaptable, and work without a net, a concept which seems to be bothering other parts of the team.

Apparently, I'm not doing a good enough job of impressing my vision to the other members of the team since things aren't evolving as organically as I had hoped. I'm trying to reach out and pull the talent out of those I've chosen to work with, and it's not as easy as it was in the beginning. I'll have to do some deep thinking on this concept and see where it takes me.

I was going to take this time to finally explain all the bits and pieces of the new blogging network, but as has been the case the whole time I've been down here in Florida, I'm being called to do more work. Even on my vacation, people can't let me relax.

In other news, I did get the brakes fixed on my Florida car, and I'll be driving it back to Texas this week. If anyone wants an Infiniti G20 in reasonably good condition with 114,000 miles on it, let me know. I'll let it go for a good price.

In Florida, Rested and Ready to Go

I arrived in Florida around 11pm Sunday night. My time here has been filled mostly with eating, recovering, and making phone calls. I've been irritated with the PR firm recently because they have been paying very little attention to the group and not sending the promised amount of paid placements. Despite this, I'm confident we'll get this worked out, and if not, there is a back-up plan that could be a bit more promising.

This entry is likely going to be quite short - the computer I'm typing this on has what I could only describe as a DefCon 5 level spyware infection. Every 30 seconds, three pop-ups come up. This is after I've run my best utilities on the machine to remove everything. On my first run (and this is AFTER I removed about 100 pieces of spyware manually) of AdAware, the detector found around 6,900 pieces of spyware on the machine. It was able to remove all but 214 - still a serious issue.

Because of this issue, I'm having problems getting the sites designed. At this point, I'm doing good to answer emails.

I'm headed over to the AACS office today to do some work and get the client intake website running. I'm also at the same time attempting to determine whether or not my car is worth saving or not. I just found out yesterday that it's going to take substantially more money to fix the vehicle than I previously thought. Almost too much. If I can find another, cheaper, solution to fixing the car this afternoon, I might do it. Otherwise, I may donate it to some charity, or see if a scrapper will take it of my hands for a small chunk of change.

I had other things to say - At the moment, they all escape me. I just got a phone call from Iris, and my brain has emptied of all the important things I needed to mention.

I'm sure they'll all come back to me if they're as important as all that. Hopefully I'll be at a non-popupped computer soon, and can speak more.

Good legal teams like the ones at simmons jannace & stagg and the local ones in the area don't show up often enough on channels like that........Although that would make sense on channels like CC and Sci-Fi....Because they don't really belong.

[This entry contains paid placement]

On my way to Florida

I'm currently en-route to Miami at the moment. Pompano Beach, to be exact. At the moment, we're about 15 minutes outside of Baton Rouge. Rabbi Finkelstein happenned to be in Tyler, and had some business back in Florida, while at the same time the need to go retrieve my car from my place down there became imperitive.

So now I'm headed back with him, and am scheduled to return to Tyler between Wednesday and Friday or so.

Fortunately, Rabbi has a T-Mobile aircard, so I'll likely be available to chat and answer email during the bulk of the trip. My phone lines are all forwarded to wherever I am, so if you need to get a hold of me for any reason, call all the normal numbers.

Gas is particularly expensive down here in South Louisiana - common are prices above three dollars. I have a feeling the price of gas will be much more down in SouFla. Good thing I've got money in silver.

At the moment, I'm hungry, tired, and distracted by a few chat windows at the moment, so I'll be signing off now, but we're scheduled to go hit a 24 hour Chili's in Baton Rouge in a few, so I'll try to get back to you after that

/rizzn