I got an early birthday present today from the Bionic Teacher, and all I can say is thank you, thank you, thanks you. Tom is not only one of the most creative dudes I have had the pleasure of working with in this field (despite him being K12 and everything ), but he may very well be the funniest. Here’s to bringing down the CMS on the eve of my 37th (see all you edupunk critics, I’m no where near 40 yet, you suckers). Let the CMS burn, baby, burn!!!

photo credit: Criterion

For the first part of this semester I was in over my head with UMW Blogs. We had come up with the idea (through covert communication with other schools not to be named ) to use FeedWordPress as a syndicating engine. Quite simply, that students create their own blogs and tag posts for their respective courses, which would automatically republish them in an aggregating course blog.

For example, Sue Fernsebner’s History 299 course would tag relevant posts 08fern299, and those posts would be automatically re-posted in the course blog. How are they re-posted automatically? Well, Donncha’s Sitewide Tags Pages plugin collects all posts, tags and categories into one blog  http://tags.umwblogs.org), that by extension gives a single feed for all tags through the WPMu environment. You can see all of professor Fernsebner’s class blog posts one that blog here: http://tags.umwblogs.org/tag/08fern299/
And if you just smack the term “feed” at the end of the above URL you then have an RSS feed for every post in UMW Blogs that has the tag 08fern299: http://tags.umwblogs.org/tag/08fern299/f…
Now, FeedWordPress just consumes this feed and republishes all the distributed posts in one blog and allows the permalink to point back to the students original blog post on their blog. Perfect, right?

Well, almost. Fact is that the .2.x version of the Sitewide Tags was not actually working with FeedWordPress that well. What was happening was that FeedWordPress was not updating correctly and the permalinks would only point to the post on the course blog, effectively erasing the link back to the student blog. The only way to fix this was to go into the course blog and delete the posts that didn’t link back to the student blog, and update the feed again which works when you manually pull the feed but not when it is automatically pulled in (which was the root of the problem). Well, this issue is no more, the latest version of Donncha’s Sitewide Tags Pages plugin 0.3.1 fixes the issue with FeedWordPress and has put UMW Blogs back in the Syndicating cloud (I was worried there for a second, and I don’t miss all the duct tape fixes at all).

The moral of the story? It didn’t take long for the WPMu community to make things right, and it didn’t cost UMW anything but a little bit of experimentation, patience, and sharing. I mean who’s afraid of the open source wolf? These times demand many things, and one of them is cooperation and sharing, not fear and closing down. Open source is not proprietary

So, this got me thinking about Jefferson’s idea of permanent revolution, or that “every generation needs a new revolution.” A true mark of genius given the moment he was living. So last night I actually came across a scene in the HBO minseries John Adams (sorry Luke, I lied, I have forsaken Mad Men for John Adams -ironic?) which proffers Jefferson’s informal articulation of this idea, which is a fascinating one for me given the times we live in.

“Number of the Beast”

Or “Killers”

I think it would have to be “Killers” because I was younger and more impressionable. Not to mention the fact that I would stare at it for hours wondering about all the shady happenings in the windows behind Eddie and his victim (click on image for a larger view of some of the window crazies).

And, if I were forced to choose a single album cover it would have to be “Aces High,” Eddie as a WWII fighter pilot confused me for years after wards, I mean wasn’t he a murderous monster?

Update, I maye have to reprise my Aces High idea after re-discovering the “Somewhere in Time” single album cover, a little bit of “Maiden Runner”?

The only man ever to play a perfect game on Pac-man

Link love goes to the Judges for sharing this gem on the Facebook.

Crumb's Hereoes of Blues, Jazz, and Country

Crumb’s sketches of the artists are wonderful, my favorite is the one below of Sleepy John Estes. And each image is accompanied by a very short (one to two paragraph) discussion of the artist and their particular musical strengths along with how many “sides” they recorded ( a side of a 78 album was anywhere from 2:30 to 3:30 minutes long, which basically meant the length of popular song).

Sleepy John Estes

Anyway, along with the amazing assortment of Crumb’s interpretations of the artists there is a CD that features a sampling of their songs. I hadn’t heard any of them before except one, which was part of the soundtrack from O' Brother Where Art Thou, which was Skip James’ “Hard Time Killing Floor Blues” found for your listening pleasure on YouTube here, and embedded below:

Skip James’ career is fascinating, here is a brief excerpt as told by his Wikipedia article:

As is typical of his era, James recorded a variety of material — blues and spirituals, cover versions and original compositions — frequently blurring the lines between genres and sources. For example, “I’m So Glad” was derived from a 1927 song by Art Sizemore and George A. Little entitled “So Tired”, which had been recorded in 1928 by both Gene Austin and Lonnie Johnson (the latter under the title “I’m So Tired of Livin’ All Alone”). James changed the song’s lyrics, transforming it with his virtuoso technique, moaning delivery, and keen sense of tone. Biographer Stephen Calt, echoing the opinion of several critics, considered the finished product totally original, “one of the most extraordinary examples of fingerpicking found in guitar music.”

Several of the Grafton recordings, such as “Hard Time Killing Floor Blues”, “Devil Got My Woman”, “Jesus Is A Mighty Good Leader”, and “22-20 Blues” (the basis for Robert Johnson’s better-known “32-20 Blues”), have proven similarly influential. Very few original copies of James’s Paramount 78s have survived.

[[The Great Depression struck just as James’ recordings were hitting the market. Sales were poor as a result, and James gave up performing the blues to become the choir director in his father’s church. Skip James himself was later ordained as a minister in both the Baptist and Methodist denominations, but his involvement in religious activities was sketchy.

For the next thirty years, James recorded nothing and drifted in and out of music. He was virtually unknown to listeners until about 1960. In 1964 blues enthusiasts John Fahey, Bill Barth and Henry Vestine found him in a hospital in Tunica, Mississippi. According to Calt, the “rediscovery” of both Skip James and of Son House at virtually the same moment was the start of the “blues revival” in America. In July 1964 James, along with other rediscovered performers, appeared at the Newport Folk Festival. Several photographs by Dick Waterman captured this first performance in over 30 years. Throughout the remainder of the decade, he recorded for the Takoma, Melodeon, and Vanguard labels and played various engagements until his death in 1969.

The release of his song about “hard times” coincided precisely with the Great Depression, making the market for his recording evaporate and his musical career that much tougher. Yet the song captures the haunting uncertainty of difficult times, while simultaneously providing a reassuring voice of someone who has not only endured them, but created something great within them.

photo credit: Invisible Hour

With questions looming about our post-modern malaise despite increased connectivity, the hyped hive mind, ever greater access to resources online, we still often find ourselves paralyzed agents in the undertow of information. With such realizations at times like these I try to take refuge in the little battles that are fought and seemingly won.

For example, over the last year TorrentFreak has been covering a focused, yet distributed, network of people that are fighting for their rights to share and access our digital culture freely. It’s a fringe battle (and it has been criminalized accordingly), yet TorrentFreak’s coverage of the rise and fall of MediaDefender is always an uplifting story for me, kinda like the Rudy of the 21st century piracy stories.

In short, MediaDefender is (and by the looks of their stock, soon to be was) a goon anti-piracy company hired by the MPAA, RIAA, and several other media production companies to “stymie peer-to-peer (P2P) traders through a variety of methods including posting fake files online, recording individuals who contribute copyrighted material, but also marketing to individuals using P2P networks” (link). They launched their very own video upload service called “miivi.com” for the sole purpose of trapping people into uploading copyrighted material, and then nailing them for it. A massive leak of MediDefender’s internal email correspondence over a year ago brought some of their highly questionable methods to light, and has since crippled the company to the point that a year later they are on the verge of bankruptcy (a process aided and abetted by their own missteps). This suggests the power of a distributed network to stand up and fight back. I’m often inspired by this story, yet at the same time I’m not a hacker nor a pirate. I’m just a meek instructional technologist who works at a public institution and wants to see the web as a space where culture can be shared and discussed freely so that we can better critique and understand the world we live in —is that so wrong?! I mean, what can I do?

Well, a recent series of articles on TorrentFreak by Ben Jones dealing with tackling campus piracy offers some ways of thinking about this. I particularly like his most recent article titled “Tackling Campus Piracy with FUD,” wherein he traces the use of Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt (FUD) at universities as a means of dealing with piracy on campus:

In many ways [FUD] is the cheapest and easiest anti-piracy method. It doesn’t rely on facts, but on careful releases of information, and calculated small acts.

A small act could be starting a rumor or giving an interview to a student newspaper. Such tactics are cheap and often have much better returns than costly (and ultimately useless) technology-based methods. They also have the added advantage that if they don’t work, it doesn’t tend to count against you. That is, unless you’re caught at it.

The article goes on to detail the recent use of FUD at Elon University in Greensboro, NC.

In a file-sharing piece last week in the student newspaper, the strategy of intimidation was plain to see. If you are unaware of the law regarding copyright infringement, however, you might be taken in.

The article starts with talk of rumors, concerning all manner of things designed to instill fear; RIAA reps roaming the campus, being able to backtrack to things that happened years ago. Rumors that lead to uncertainty (how far back? Will that include something I did?) as well as doubt (anything I can do about it?).

Throughout the article, Assistant Vice President for Technology Chris Fulkerson makes it clear that students should be very careful. However, he’s not afraid to tweak the facts a little, or tell outright lies, for that matter. At one point he states that the fine is “$250,000 per infraction” which is a complete lie. As regular readers and followers of US copyright infringement cases know, the maximum damages that can be awarded per infraction is $150,000 not $250,000 (USC Title 17, § 504 (c)(2)). The most they have managed to get in these cases is $9,250, but even that turned out to be too much.

Of greatest worry was his position on the details of students. Fulkerson has said that when/if the RIAA asks for names and details that correspond to an IP, the university will hand them over if the person can be identified. As the RIAA’s strategy is to file many lawsuits, and try and force a settlement (by making it cheaper to settle than to contest), handing over details is in the worst possible interests of the students, and may be illegal. Regardless of its legality, or how true the statement is in practice, the impact of the statement is chilling to many students.

It is alarming that universities might increasingly become the space for the cultivation and dissemination of Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt (a reality they are arguably designed to counter). The American people are no strangers to such a method recently, to be sure, for we have been deeply embedded in the politics of FUD for the last 8 years, a logic which is flowering in its most horrific logical extreme currently. So, while I don’t understand the economic crisis and I can’t see my way through the current malaise of national leadership,  I can be an advocate for fighting FUD on campus. it should be an integral part of my job, given that I am in the business of teaching and learning, of helping to open up the classroom viz-a-viz the web. So, I’ll leave despair for another day, and be on my merry fighting way.

Hollywood: Two Words

from WFMU’s Beware of the Blog by Brian Turner

Check, please.

That’s right, Beverly Hills Chihuahua grossed $29 million this weekend, taking the top place.

Beverly Hills Chihuahua, Disney’s canine comedy, edged out Shia LaBeouf’s Eagle Eye to take the top spot at the U.S box office this weekend.

The film about a wealthy pooch from Beverly Hills who finds herself lost while on vacation in Mexico stars Drew Barrymore, Jamie Lee Curtis, Andy Garcia, and George Lopez.

North American Box Office Top Ten:

1. “Beverly Hills Chihuahua,” $29 million.
2. “Eagle Eye,” $17.7 million.
3. “Nick and Norah’s Infinite Playlist,” $12 million.
4. “Nights in Rodanthe,” $7.4 million.
5. “Appaloosa,” $5 million.
6. “Lakeview Terrace,” $4.5 million.
7. “Burn After Reading,” $4.08 million.
8. “Fireproof,” $4.07 million.
9. “An American Carol,” $3.8 million.
10. Religulous, $3.5 million.

This is why I look forward to the release of video games, or recent additions to UBUWEB and the Internet Archive.  The era of our pop culture as told by Hollywood is dead. The Wire is without question the best series I have seen in the last 20 years, better than anything from Hollywood or even all the other series from HBO. Moreover, the recent sensation over AMC’s Mad Men is over rated in my opinion. I watched the first 9 episodes of season 1, and by the fouth episode was burnt on how “correct” the show is. It tries to implicate the viewer by re-framing all the racism, sexism, and religious intolerance at work in the late 50s, early 60s, yet it is far too academic. It’s argument is clear, and there is none of the moral ambiguity and more complex examination of a system that frames the impossibilities of a moment like The Wire. The push to make sure the viewer doesn’t mistake the 1950s and 60s as the good old days, seems empty when it erases the complex realities of those who lived then, just to capitalize on the issues that make good drama now. I don’t know, Mad Men justs seems like a paper some one wrote about advertising in the golden age, and how screwed up it was from our vantage point, and then decided to adorn it with some two-diminsional characters and turn it into a TV series. A blanket critique of the 1950s and 60s is as much an interpretation of that moment as an unchecked glorification of it, and neither make for a comeplling narrative.

So with that preface out of the way (which is the basis of a much longer post I have brewing), I just wanted to share something I recently discovered via UBUWEB in my incessant search for all things related to Survivalism. This one is tangential, yet central at the same time. The Survival Research Labs (SRL)

…has operated as an organization of creative technicians dedicated to re-directing the techniques, tools, and tenets of industry, science, and the military away from their typical manifestations in practicality, product or warfare. Since 1979, SRL has staged over 45 mechanized presentations in the United States and Europe. Each performance consists of a unique set of ritualized interactions between machines, robots, and special effects devices, employed in developing themes of socio-political satire. Humans are present only as audience or operators.

I love the whole concept, and the video below, Virtues of Negative Fascination “is a documentary covering the performance activities of Survival Research Laboratories, Mark Pauline, Matt Heckert and Eric Werner, from 1985-1986.” It features a number of these mechanized presentations as well as an incisive look into the political logic behind such a group. Yet, another gem from UBUWEB, and more fuel for the survivalist fire. Enjoy.

Download Virtues of Negative Fascination