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Two big surf swap meets this weekend. I might stop by them both if I can justify the $20 gas bill for the trip. I've never found anything worth buying at these things. I have a board project (thank you swaylocks) that needs some parts, so who knows -- maybe I'll find a finbox.

Both events are on Saturday, 5/17.

Log Shop
It's time again for the Fourth Annual Surf Gear Swap Meet - Come Buy, Sell and Trade on Saturday May 17th from 8AM to 12PM noon at the Log Shop Parking - 640 Crespi - Pacifica.

Aqua Surf Shop
2830 Sloat Blvd., across from the SF Zoo
415.242.9283 aquasurfshop.com

Heita3 makes musical instruments out of vegetables and performs. Yes, vegetables. He's become my recent favorite food-warrior by mixing two of my favorite ingredients: food and music.

He's taking the locavore thing to a new level. Watch all 31 of his videos and prepare to have your mind blown.

Somehow this mugshot made my day.

From The Smoking Gun.

Factoid about me: I earned a degree in geography from Boston University. I love maps, but I'm pretty lame at geo-trivia. Beat my 442K on this game:

I knew we won the cold war when I saw this:

We woke, we saw, we ate. Here are some of the highlights:

Artichokes from our garden:
The first harvest from our artichoke plant was amazing. So tender, I need to use a lighter touch steaming our next batch.

Shrimps:
This was attempt number 2 of trying the tableside salt-baked shrimp that I saw on tv a while back. The salt-baking technique didn't work out too well, but they are SO tasty. That last picture is a bowl of the shrimp roe that we collected from some of the shrimp. My oh-so-brave daughter ate a bunch of the roe as an appetizer, saying 'mmmmmmmm'.

We got the shrimp live at Ranch 99 which is like an aquarium that does take-out to my girls.

I wish I had pictures of the waffles we made on Sunday morning...

April in Carneros is happening this weekend. We stumbled upon a few really nice wines when we went last year. The vineyards along Las Amigas in Los Carneros is turning out to be one of our favorite spots in the whole Napa/Sonoma area.

Our favorites from the last April in Carneros included:

• Bouchaine (web became members there)
• Ceja (head there every chance we get)
• Richardson (the 'garage in the field': barrel tastings of tasty Pinot )
• McKenzie-Mueller (outrageously tasty Cabernet Franc from their library)

Just caught an interesting panel discussion on 'widgets and gadgets' at AdTech. Jeremiah Owyang moderated the panel, here are a few comments.

Jeremiah Owyang from Forrester Research

• On the Facebook platform: fish where the fish are
• But not all widgets are successful!
• How many Facebook widgets have business utility?

Hooman Radfar from Clearspring:

• Need to understand that widgets have different uses:
  • Public vs. Private consumption
  • Browser vs. Desktop
  • Social vs. Not
• This (widgets) is a platform
• Success metrics are tricky to identify. Treat it as a web channel.
• Cross platform compatibility and measurement is tricky (e.g. Netvibes had no uptake/usage data until recently)
• Challenge: it's a new medium. Old approaches don't always apply.

Kent Schoen from Facebook:

• "we call these applications"
• open up the field to allow other folks to design/deliver engaging interaction
• what do you want to get out of your application?
• Yes, the net is bigger than your site. Get your brand out there.
• Success depends on how you define it: reach, interactivity, installs, active users on some regular interval.
• Examples: Trip Advisor's map.. NYTimes quiz. Branded show & tell about the user.
• Success is: something that provides value.

Jane Felice from ComScore

• reach matters, we measure reach
• measurement is still evolving
  • some function of repeat people over some number of days viewed
  • started with tracking SWF (flash) files, moved toward Facebook, just starting to measure javascript.
• we can report on views, can't report on perceived value.
• FREE: tag your widget in a certain way and we'll report on it.

Ed Davis from ESPN

• 'the internet is our playground'
• widgets are inventory
• It only works if people like what you're doing. You need to see the viral usage which happens when simple useful things are found valuable.
• low barrier to entry: try things out!
• Monetize: drive awareness for other ESPN offers
• SEO lift is another amazing benefit from a rich widget offering
• For us, more frequent data updates (scores) helped drive the uptake of our widgets
• Uptake is like an impulse-purchase

Folks agree that valuable widgets tended to be successful, but couldn't really describe anything specific about what tends to constitute value. Seems also like these folks are struggling to define ways to measure the elusive 'engagement' metric that folks have been writing about recently.

...and not the police log this time. My Uncle Charlie scored a profile on their local ABC affiliates morning talk show. Take a peek at the video on their website: http://www.abcactionnews.com/

There are a few of his illustrations floating around the net too... take a peek.

Congrats Unka Charlie!

Brilliant!

So if you happen to find something in your access_log that mentions GFSearcher, it's me. Apologies if this is a nuisance. I'm running some tests with Nutch on a small number of sites for my day job.

GFSearcher/GFSearch-0.9

I'll follow up this post with some info about how everything works out.

No, not my dad. Robert Greacen was a poet from Northern Ireland. He had the same name as my father and grandfather. He lived in the part of Ireland my family left at the turn of the century. He died today.

While studying in Galway, my sister had correspondence with him: a brief letter neatly typed on a card. My brother too, several letters. But Robert Greacen wasn't really family, just a familiar name.

Here are a bunch of poem excerpts on goog-books.

Somehow it worked out. The people fell for it.

The plan was to run the Olympic Torch through a gauntlet of protesters along the embarcadero. The pro-tibet and pro-chinese folks were robed in flags and ready to meet for a chant-off. The two groups met, temperatures rose, men with shaved heads pleaded for nonviolence...

Then someone said that the torch was heading up Townsend St. The crowded headed off the Embarcadero.

Then someone said that the torch was being taken from McCovey Cove to the Ferry Building by boat, then a runner would run toward Bay St. The crowds turned and headed toward the Ferry Building.

THEN it turns out that the torch was whisked toward Van Ness by bus. The runner jogged unnoticed into a convenience store, bought a pack of cigarettes and jogged on. All the protesters (and the unfortunate few who just wanted to see the torch) fell for it.

Paige & David got all the good shots.

Some fun things noticed along the way:

• When in doubt, follow the police choppers
• How did the flashmob fail?
• Lots of cameras everywhere
• The Darfur folks all in green
• The guys chanting for the Golden State Warriors
• We missed our chance for millions: should have rented a hotdog stand for the day to sell 'doggie lamas'

Well, I did it. I tossed a little pile of code onto google's open source site.

A few years ago I wrote (in my spare time) a little test harness around some simple command-line utilities. I wanted something to help me answer some simple questions about what was going on some large clusters of servers. Rather than clicking through a bunch of nicely formatted pages, I wanted something to make a bunch of http requests and give me a 'yes' or 'no' about the response. The trick (for me) was to try to run it on some server in the cluster which was running a really lean installation of Linux. No frills.

I could have probably compiled a jar & dropped it onto the server... but I couldn't edit & recompile a class on the server. I could probably have run a perl script, (geeze why didn't I just write it in perl?) but I think the WWW-Mechanize module wasn't installed. Who knows... anyway, I ended up stumbling upon curl and decided to write a wrapper around it using simple bash scripts.

Guess what? It worked. It was handy. Guess what? I used it at a few jobs since I wrote it. Guess what? It's still (somewhat) handy. So today (or yesterday) I give something back to the internets and interwebs that haz given me so much. I offer:

• http://code.google.com/p/bashwebtest/
• Installation Steps
• Example Tests
• WTF - 'what's that function?'
• FAQ

Tests are pretty simple. I'll toss a few test examples on this blizzog and onto the wiki on code.goog over the next few weeks. If you have any interest at all in using something klunky, and somewhat functional, please contact me and I'll help you get started.

Code.goog doesn't have a way to select it, but I planned on distributing the source under the 'MSL' license.

Anyway, enjoy!

I love to browse off-the-shelf tools and doodads floating around the net. Recently I was looking for a widget to publish our corporate news titles on the gofish.com homepage. Sure, I'd love have time to write this from scratch, I don't... but I have about enough time to try 5 and see what works the best.

Quick summary of the features I'd like to shoot for:

• MUST: browser compatible
• MUST: pull corp feed
• MUST: be easy to implement
• SHOULD: customize colors
• SHOULD: customize dimensions
• SHOULD: be quick to load (<3secs)
• SHOULD: not give up too much info to a 3rd party
• SHOULD: serve it in a 300x250 RECT size.(why not?)
  • 305x215 Whole corner
  • 305x40 The heading
  • 305x175 List area
• NICE: pull & mix several feeds
• NICE: sort multiple feeds
• NICE: Re-syndicate the widget

Our Raw Feed
Looks like I can grab a feed of each category. This might make for some handy intermingling of headlines. The downside is that it looks like I'm pulling a whole-article feed. I'll see if I can get this to just pull the titles. I'll set up a feedburner feed at http://feeds.feedburner.com/GoFishCorp before using one of these doodads.

Yourminis

www.yourminis.com seems like a neat platform for building and syndicating a flash widget. They allegedly have some relationship with brightcove, I'll see if there's anything worth exploring there.

WidgetBox widget
This looks like a javascript/xhtml implementation. Kinda nice, but let me check it out in a pile of browsers first. Seems like the widgetbox is chock full of other presentations. Would be nice to find one that can handle a few feeds at once.

Some javascript doodad
It's a freebie, kinda simple: http://itde.vccs.edu/rss2js/build.php. Kinda simple, but it looks like I can style the output pretty easly.

Another javascript doodad

Nice javascript-only implementation, doesn't seem like it's working though.

Feed Sweep
Feedsweep is free for noncommercial use, handles a bunch of feeds at once, and is super-simple to put together. Creates a nice dhtml presentation of the title list. I think this

rss-to-javascript
Another freebie, not sure I can get this into the dimensions of the content area on the homepage.

What do you like? The other folks on the team here seem to like the yourminis the best. I'll put a POC together soon.

My first exposure to coppa was an amazing sandwich from Molinari's in San Francisco's North Beach. My second introduction came in 1998 while working for DoughNet a startup that provided financial services for kids. The federal government enacted the Children's Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA) 15 U.S.C. § 6501-6506 during the boom years to assert some controls on the way the new crop of dotcoms collect and handle data from minors. The ftc didn't want to let the DoughNETs prey on kids.

What is COPPA?
COPPA requires that web site operators offer the following provisions to its members:

• Post a privacy policy on the homepage of the Web site and link to the privacy policy on every page where personal information is collected.
• Provide notice about the site's information collection practices to parents and obtain verifiable parental consent before collecting personal information from children.
• Give parents a choice as to whether their child's personal information will be disclosed to third parties.
• Provide parents access to their child's personal information and the opportunity to delete the child's personal information and opt-out of future collection or use of the information.
• Not condition a child's participation in a game, contest or other activity on the child's disclosing more personal information than is reasonably necessary to participate in that activity.
• Maintain the confidentiality, security and integrity of personal information collected from children.

The laws describe specific measures and remedies in order to comply. Even with the FTC-provided how-to guide they're not entirely black and white. There's a 'sliding-scale' for determining appropriate parental consent related to the type of engagement on the site. This grey-area, introduced in 2002, allows a less-thorough check for parental consent based on how the site operators want to use the user's private information.

Nick & COPPA
Nickelodeon describes in detail how they use this sliding scale to gain consent appropriate with their site: watching vids, interacting with Nick. characters, and playing games. For example, Nick wants to offer "points" or incentives to kids for playing games, this requires an account with a login, which can be created without any personally-identifiable information.

Additionally, Nick employs two "email exceptions" which say prior parental consent is not required when:

• an operator collects an e-mail address to respond to a one-time request from a child and then deletes it; and
• an operator collects an e-mail address to respond more than once to a specific request. In this case, the operator must notify the parent that it is communicating regularly with the child and give the parent the opportunity to stop the communication before sending or delivering a second communication to the child.

More information like the comment from Nick is collected on the ftc website, worth a peek.

Further reading...

• Wikipedia mentions a few companies who have been fined by the ftc for failure to comply.
• More detail on the ftc site.
• A site the text of the law and tips on complying.
• The text of the law on law.cornell.edu:
  • http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/15/6502.html
  • http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/15/6503.html
  • http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/15/6504.html
  • http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/15/6505.html
  • http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/15/6506.html

I'll write more about COPPA in future posts and how it relates to specific features common to popular websites.

St. Paddy's is an important time in the Greacen household. Our family was started right around St. Paddy's, Netscrap.com was started on St. Paddy's too. A good friend considers it his new year, performing all the retrospection and top-10 lists that you'd expect on new year's eve.

Though the beancounters will remind you that Saturday was really St. Patrick's day, celebrate it tonight if you haven't already.

We'll have a netscrap birthday sometime this week.

I've heard the word "widgets" mumbled around the office a few times in recent days. Seems like we're ready to put some thought/planning into publishing content on our sites (a few new ones in the pipeline) as well as syndication ofcontent to sites across GoFish's network.

Social features aren't super-high on our priority list, but since I have a bunch of info on-hand I'll start with a quick survey of a few 3rd party social widgets. Subsequent posts will include more info on content syndication and other publish-y widgets.

JS-Kit: http://js-kit.com/
I installed JS-Kit on http://greacen.com and http://29.netscrap.com in about 15 minutes. I didn't do anything tricky with the styling, but it looks really easy. The admin is simple and clean.

JS-Kit is a "social widget" with these main features:

• comments
• ratings
• navigation (featured content)
• reviews
• polls
• user accounts (extremely minimal)
• user avatars
• user reputation management
• spam filtering
• email notifications
• platform: javascript/css-based
• syndication: rss
• admin: ban
• admin: remove comment
• integration: EASY

Negatives include: not a lot of reporting info available out of the box. Also, I'm unable to participate in the discussion with the lame browser (palm blazer) on my phone (opera mini works however). No ad-units anywhere in these community features.

Can't beat the price or the ease-of integration though. Seems like they're open to white-labeling the feature for some undetermined fees.

All of these features seem COPPA-friendly since there is no requirement to provide personal information.

Intense Debate: http://intensedebate.com/
Another threaded discussion widget like JS-Kit's comment tool.

• threaded discussion
• top commenters
• stats (comment count)
• user accounts
• user profiles (avatar, links, etc)
• user reputation mgmt
• user relationships (friending)

Neat use of openid! This is much more profile-y than JS-Kit, since users can add links to their blogs & social media pages, etc. They get their own profile page on the intensedebate site as well.

Does it play well with COPPA? Not sure, need to dig a little deeper.

Kickapps: http://www.kickapps.com/
A whole platform for widgety syndication. This seems pretty rich. I need to look at this much more closely. Looks like Brightcove's storymaker on steroids. I'll cover this more when I get into publishy widgets.

• ad units
• media players
• user accounts
• user profiles
• blogs
• videos
• photos
• threaded discussion
• platform: Java, customizable.
• syndication: embeddable in other sites
• syndication: rss

Kickapps has existing partnerships with some big content producers (like Rachel Ray!). They claim to have some reporting info available to publishers. The pricing model is interesting: they run ads (and keep the rev) or you buy out their costs on a CPM basis. Seems like a turn-key social media solution.

Tangler: http://www.tangler.com/
Another "social widget" whose main features let a publisher quickly integrate a forum:

• real-time chat
• threaded discussion
• user accounts
• user profiles (avatar, homepage)
• user relationships
• notifications
• embeddable (social syndication)
• privacy controls

Seems like a more immersive and 'whole page' presentation than the discussion widgets listed above. Users get their own profile page

Cocomment: http://www.cocomment.com/
Seems like a browser plug-in first, but it's integrated with their "social widgets". Similar features:

• comments
• tag cloud
• user accounts
• syndication: rss

Kinda neat stuff, I'll get into Brightcove Story Maker, Kickapps, and some of the doodads I've seen on Widgetbox in a future post to this blog.

Maybe I should toss these into my last post about the get-together. Just a few mire words on this before I return to posts about vertical ad networks, qa and the like.

I didn't really make it to 29 songs as planned, but I'm ok with it. I have at least 10 (ok, maybe 6) decent songs to refine which is way more than what I had at the start of the month.

I uploaded a bunch of tunes from the wrap party to the 29 site (finally). I have stereo versions of the full band experience. Email me if you're desperate to hear those recordings (then please turn yourself in to the kookoo police).

Soon I'll lock down the files that make up the 29.netscrap.com site. Derek's comment about keeping the record of the month in tact is right on. I'll move those things somewhere else. The site will continue to work of course. In fact, it needs a few changes.... Gotta have better control of the player:

• play in order (as opposed to random)
• play a single artist if you want
• play a single song if you want
• make it easy to embed all of these into other internets.

So what's next? I'll be spending some make-up time with the fam (and work) in the meantime. I also need to rehab my leg which was bonked one recent Saturday when I should have been finishing some songs. After that? I learned that I like recording tunes and I need to keep rolling with this. I learned that my main blockage with songwriting is more in the commitment department than the execution (except maybe the verboligization that accompanies the rock guitar). Even if it's just a slow simmer of experimentation, I need music to be happening. Maybe some 29'ers will get together to jam. Maybe we'll get to collaborate in each others studio to help get Greenberg's recordings recordings LOUDER... I DEFINITELY need to thaw out and finish a few blert songs that haven't been heard by many. Maybe I need to launch http://52.netscrap.com to be home of our new song-a-week lifestyle.

Who's in?

We're almost done. I just have a few more things to upload. The whole 29 songs/days crew came over on Wednesday to listen & play some tunes (and wake up the neighbors). I'll upload those songs soon.

I REALLY had a great time chatting about music struggles & successes with folks. Couple of things I learned:

• Peter's gear (sweet tube amps + scumbacks + vintage prs) sounds as good in person as his blog claims.
• My If You Ever is really in 7! Even though I played drums for this I hadn't counted it out.
• Seth rocks on bass!
• Bruce really plays all that stuff! It's amazing!
• The Chorus from Derek's Warriors was based on the exact way the actor delivered the line in the movie (repeated in the bizarrely authentic Warriors video game).
• Peter puts a LOT of thought into his tunes. They still rock.
• A few folks noticed my bird on some of my recordings. Bruce claims that he buried some sounds in a bunch of his recordings. Listen with headphones.
• Seth's been focusing his songwriting on soundtracks, he got his pop-song-hat back on just for this month.

Here's everything so far.

Take a listen!

We're getting near the end of February and the 29 Songs project. We're planning on having a get-together this week to listen to or play a few songs in my garage. Email me if you want to come by. Wow, what have you missed?

• Creeps Out - is a ditty about a guy I saw on the bart. He looked like the usual nerd commuter until he started blathering about some nonsense. This promptly made everyone around him get up, move to the other end of the car, and call the cops.
• love - so everyone else was doing it, banging out these love songs. Now, if you know me (and if you're reading this you probably do) you know that the verbal arts do not come easily. I am but a brown belt in verbissitude. Anyway, I always loved the direct allular intensity of Decendents' "ALL", so I borrowed it. That and the 'one love' from Bob.
• digberg - is a pet name for Ginger. I put the rhythm together on the bart ride home, recorded the noise around it and fell asleep before I could deal with anything lyrical.
• the day - well. This isn't really a ballad, but that's what I was shooting for. I completely stole some harmonic thing that I used to play on piano. What was that stuff? I'll find out.
• that girl with brown hair - more lyrical help from Eve. We were playing with polly pockets. Eve's a little aggressive about determining the rules of our doll playing. Tonight, I had to be 2 girls who saw her girl, didn't know who it was, and had to figure it out. Eve gave me some clues, "She looks like she's been to Spain and France."
• break it down - More from the rockpile. What was I thinking? Dunno. I started writing this on the bass, I was thinking about Jawbox. The rest falls a little flat, but it's fun. I made the lyrics up on the fly and just recorded with a SM58 because I was too lazy to set up the condenser mic. The rest of the Engineering (and playing for that matter) is all Greacen formula. Have I spelled this out? Should I?
• nu - (not to be confused with nude you up) It's a riff I was playing on the acoustic guitar for a few days. Boy I wish I could keep a consistent tempo when I toss these out. I think I poured on the distortion a little too thick on this take, but it was fun. I gave myself 2 minutes to write something down lyrically, which seems to have helped the sitchmo. Used the SM58 again due to lazyness.

Why all the rock, Chris? In all, I think I'm taking a slight (I like creeps out) quality nosedive, but what I lack in quality (and variety for that matter) I'm trying to make up for with VOLUME. Also, that kinda comes easy to me. The wall of sound comes easier than writing a clever or pretty lyric.

Peter brought up a great idea about trying to get these tunes into the hands of similarly masochistic filmmakers for a 31 films in march marathon. Who do we talk to about that?

I'm still playing catchup with the 29 Songs project this week. We have a lot going on in the Greacen household these days so I'm grateful to have a few contiguous minutes to toss some ideas around the studio. Last night I tossed 3 song ideas up there.

• ding ding dong - this is another mini part I've been playing around with for a little while. I started playing this with ding ding ding as part of an imaginary soundtrack to an imaginary podcast (which still could happen). I'll write a few more variations, pick one as the theme, then use the rest as intros and outtros for sections of the program.
• nude you up - is a phrase I picked up somewhere along the line, spoken by a mother preparing her daughter for a bath. When I said it before tossing Eve in the tub, Amy laughed and said 'there's your song'. Yes, I listened to Hall & Oates and Flight Of The Conchords in the hours preceding the recording. As it turns out, I am clueless about using effects on guitars. I had a few to play with during the post-college time in Boston, but I've learned that I'm kind of a chaotic purist about just playing what I want to hear (ironic given the limits of my technique).
• valentines - I started this one by recording the drums without a song, riff, or melody in mind. I threw down guitars & bass afterward and let the song stew in its juices for a few days. By the time I got around to working on it again, it was Valentines Day so I figured it was only fair to offer this up to the holiday godzes.

I have one more tune in the pipeline that I'll try to launch tonight. It was just getting too late for drums last night.

GoFish spilled some more info about its Vertical Ad Network on Friday with the updates on its video destination website's homepage. Media Post and Adotas broke the embargo on the press release on Monday, though you may need to view-source to read Media Post's.

By the time the announcements officially hit the wires, GoFish will have the 3rd largest reach in the kid and teen segments behind (#2) Nickelodeon Kids & Family and (#1) Disney Online.

Should be cool to see what kind of splash this news makes given the other ad-network and mega-merger announcements gobbling up the press lately.

After the last post about my lack of audio engineeritude, I came home to find the mic in the same absurd position as I left it after recording ' 2 i5 b3tt3r than 0n3'. As you can see, I wasn't really aiming it at the kit AT ALL...

Better Drum Recording: So I literally dusted off my recording gear and tried to use my standard shortcuts and equipment (D112, Oktava C-12s, SM58) to record 'Doomed From The Start'.

Guitar stuffs: More from recording 'Doomed'. I played the Fender Lead II into the Zvex Nano Amp into the Mesa 4x12. I think that thing is packed with celestions. I'll have to doublecheck tho. I'm using the Zvex instead of the dual rectifier because it sounds nice and because of the late-night recording sessions.

I recorded 'Doomed' with a SM58 about 6 inches away from the speaker.

Vocals went through the Pacific Pro Audio - LD-2UBE and I think I heard what Derek was singing about in his song about the microphone. There's something almost too transparent about the sound. I'll muck around with this a little more.

Lots of new stuff to listen to on the 29 songs site, so get started! I won't link directly to songs, just go click on the player.

Bruce: what's your deal? You're getting incredible guitar tones. You're playing all over the place... hitting jan hammer, buckethead, and tbone burnett in the same week.

• Black carpet fuzz - I loves me some fuzz. What are you using here?
• Sunshine - really polished, nice build.
• Smile - what am I listening to here? This sounds great.

Seth: You are cranking winners out at what, like 3 at at time? You'll have 2 years of material to refine by March at this pace.

• you leaving - very catchy, I sang that one for a few days.
• In fifths - fun!
• Something on me - I love the Billy Joel vibe: "I got you right where..."
• Simply meant... - I especially like the b section.
• Valentine - nice, quiet, sweet lyrics... oh yeah, it's almost valentine's day isn't it.

Peter: You're in the week 2 doldrums but you can bust through!

• This thing - you cranked that out on the fly? I love the woodwind arrangements.
• Long Road - deep & dark.

Derek:

• Bugs - I know 30 thousand people in india who will stand up in their cubicles and cheer when they hear that song
• Bird - roolz of course. Props for playing to the ad-lib'd a-capella vocals. Exploit those kids!
• Anne Hamburger - It's stuck in my mind now too.
• Microphone - You can have it if you really want it.

Derek & I had a funny chat about engineering voodoo the other day:

I'm uniquely unsuited for handling engineering responsibilities of any complexity because of my short attention span, lack of familiarity with the physics of sound, and penchant for shortcuts. I'm not recording engineer, but I played one on the web:

Check out the Clubbo Website for more about the Lazarus project and learn how lazarus keeps rock legends alive.

I decided to surf this am instead of sit in my garage and write music. This was some long overdue activity that helped to clear my head even if it put me behind on my 29 song schedule.

The surf was decent! Winds were still offshore by the time I got to the beach (around 10am). There was swell! I think there were some 7+ foot sets coming in on the north end of the beach. I caught a few rides in front of the north parking lot then walked up toward those big waves around Crespi. My arms were out of shape after a surfless month, but I was eventually able to make it outside. Folks weren't really diving into those waves the way I expected. I think I could have done more with them, but I was distracted by a toy I had around my wrist.

I got a "Digital Hero" sports wrist camera for the holidays and took it out for the first time. I was able to snap some pics from the water, but didn't really shoot much surfing. I probably could have ridden some really nice (and really big) waves if I paid less attention to the doodad.

I'll upload some video another time. The camera captures some pretty trippy things during a wipeout.

Yeah, so I admit to doing exactly what I mentioned earlier: I went through a bunch of old albums in my kodakgallery account. I realized that I got a booster applied to my gallery premium account at the last DIVCamp, take a peek:

http://www.kodakgallery.com/greacen

Also, here's a pile of scanned historical photos I've collected along the way:

Kodak and Slide revealed their integration the other day. Now Kodak users can fill Slide widgets with photos from their albums. Yahoo!'s Flickr has always had (and continues to have) more web 2-dot-0-y choices for integrating photos, feeds, and streams of photos.

Personally I'm psyched to see this finally happen, and not just because I have a ZILLON ZIGABYTES of image data on the gallery (from the old ofoto times). Kodak has secretly had an XMI interface available on the net for years. Why didn't they want to exploit this 3 years ago? Their bandwidth costs can't be anything next to their storage costs. Seems like the surest way to lead people toward a cart (and conversion-event (print purchase)) is to have as many eyeballs as possible on the pictures.

Hopefully the Slide integration and recent Firefox plugin signal a new interest in opening up petabytes of photo data. Hopefully that lures a few old customers back to the site to dust off some of their long-forgotten photos.

I offer a few recordings tonight: Sing the wolf song is to the lyrics that eve wrote me the other day. Apologies in advance if you listen with dogs in earshot. I added a few more tonight since Eve & I were sitting around with the mic on. We recorded "Always on the Sunnyside" which is something she sings at school, you're supposed to tell some kind of joke in the breaks... something I screwed up of course. This led us toward the banana knock-knock, which I also screwed up horribly.

Last night's tune 'i had nothing' was recorded at a rehearsal space with my bandmates (weekly jam-mates?). I basically said, "When I hit record, just start playing." woomp! there it is.

Thanks a bunch for all the notes you've sent me on these things.

Finally, I updated that web page. It's a klunker, but:

• you can get to everything without digging through directories
• you can listen to everything through the doodad.
• the feeds will let you get a ping if there's a new tune.

I think I'm somewhat caught up on the listening now.

Bruce-

• porches is just getting uploaded now. Really nice. I'll spin this a few more times tomorrow.
• migrain my brain is severly migrating my brain right now. Please tell me there was some loopation involved in that. The micro hemiola in the hectic part might induce seizures.
• wallevatoR nice touch here. I like the mood.
• silence is not too slient with that guitar erupting over there. Neat!
• thoughts almost takes off in a lee ranaldo direction. I like it. This made a great first impression.

Seth-

• Thanks for putting that itunes doodad together today, if the RSS thing I responded with won't work to pull in the latestgreatest, let me know and I'll cook up a dynamical version of your xml file.
• the biggest risk is great. I like the way the energy kind of goes from 0-60 in the prechorus. Also, nice organ moment, I missed that first time around.
• eve had a comment on decelerating repetition: 'that's not funny' when I played it for her right before bedtime.
• free from me is so nice. isn't it amazing how just an additional vocal track can kick up a demo recording?
• Also, sweet & flavorful AND in my right time AND the plan in the same upload pile? wow. send more, what are you waiting for?

Peter-

• I'm in touch with your blog. I enjoy catching the recording detailz over there. I'm not really making too much of an effort to engineer any of my recordings. I'll start to pay a little more attention to this and put some factoids together.
• Lyudmila works! Is that a love song about this betty?
• I enjoyed statement of too. It comes across as very thought-out and deliberate.

Derek-

• It's been a treat to hear these gems. I mentioned this to you in an IM the other day, but I'll mention it here for the groop: Your recordings are so hi-fi! In a rush, I downloaded bakersfield to my phone while I was on the bart. I listened to it on the .5 inch speaker and wow... I heard all the backup vocals even...
• down the hole- I love it. It's serious! I don't think I've heard you open up like that before! Beautiful.

I'm on the Aquarius Records mailing list which mentions that James Blackshaw will play tonight at 6pm: 1055 Valencia Street, San Francisco, California 94110 U.S.A.

Aquarius described his music as "Appalachian Ragas", a phrase that made me want to spin a few songs, here's what I found:
SeeqPod - Playable Search

Yes, there's a lot of great stuff to listen to in addition to the Song-a-day action (which is pretty hot right now).

So I flaked out a little tonight. I was under a schedule crunch today... so I dealt with it through some guitar crunch: partial rock, maybe I'll finish off Drums & Vox along with another song on another day. Here's something... zvex nano head in the house! More to Come

A few other notes on the recent gems:

• Derek- Bakersfield -- makes me want to hop on the 99 and head south. Way to go! Ruby On Rails makes me want to get this java crap out of my life. I think the ROR folks will go nuts about this one.
• Seth: better or worse -- We were all singing along with this one at breakfast. Amazingly catchy.
• Peter: I haven't heard Discipline (I lack) yet. I like Malice and Caprice more with each listen.
• Bruce: Thoughts and Silence -- I haven't spun your tracks yet, but I'll send some notes when I get to it.

I have a bunch of notes from when I was putting together the hiring process at Kodak Gallery. I dusted these off recently to help a friend screen candidates for a QA position he's looking to fill.

I think back to our problem at kodak: we needed to hire super-geniuses to work on a completely custom-built system. This was before hibernate, before spring/pico, I think it was before the JSP 2.x spec even. We needed to hire people who could 'hit the ground running' and contribute without a hige ramp-up. We needed to perform a thorough search without booking the whole team for all-day interview sessions.

Part of our solution came with a formal phone screen. Once we started applying a standard approach to all candidates we were able to do (something approaching) an apples to apples comparison between the top candidates. We were also able to weed out some bozos who had 10+ years of experience but never encountered an application's error log.

Through these questions you can get an idea about how seasoned a candidate is: have they encountered a metrics program? Have they worked on a performance testing project? Do they understand the challenges with managing software deployments in the testing cycle. The 'what's in a good bug' question can open up discussion in a number of areas: is the candidate aware of the connection between a feature, the server source, the browser's role... You can learn a lot from this one.

Sure, this is another section I'll usually skip unless there's lots of time.

The goal here is twofold: first, to see whether the candidate can handle themselves in a 'go get it done' environment. Inevitably, there will come a time (daily in most of the places I've worked) when there's a bug and someone has to do the 'deep dive' to find out details about the problem (one bright QA guy coined the term 'qa forensics') by ssh-ing to the server, finding and watching all available logs while reproducing the problem. Can they search google to get themselves unstuck?

Second, if they mention LINUX or UNIX on their resume, they better damn well know that ls -l is how to get a timestamp of a file. It's worth having a few easy questions about topics that a QA engineer should encounter on a daily (hourly) basis.

The HTTP method question is something you can use to make sure the candidate fully answered the earlier section about performance testing.

Yes these are pretty lightweight questions. Someone who aces this section should be pretty comfortable getting test results from a database. If you're lucky, you can also find someone willing to own the application of db changes to your test environment. The really good candidates will be able to give you a bunch of ways to complete the second tasks: joins, sub queries, etc.

I would generally only ask these questions when dealing with a team lead candidate or someone going on the manager track.

It's worth noting that I'll usually tell a candidate the answer to a question if they get it wrong or can't answer. It's the interviewer's call about how to deal with this. It doesn't hurt to always sell your company, and a company that supports its team is a company where people want to work.

The interviewer has the option of scoring the candidate as a whole (1-move now, 2-interview after the other 1s, or 3-pass...) or by section. I'll let you come up with your own scoring system.

By the end of this line of questioning, the interviewer should have a pretty decent picture of your candidate, the accuracy of their resume, and most importantly whether it's worth calling them into the office for a face-to-face interview with your team -- which is usually a big investment!

I'll put together notes on the resume-sorting and interview processes for future posts.

Ok, so technically my 2/3 entry arrived on 2/4. But it's there. I was too beat to drop in the rippin' guitar solo in the 3rd verse so please imagine something good.

• Derek: Ruby On Rails -- it scales in so many ways.
• Peter: Malice And Caprice -- I REALLY liked this one.
• Me: If Yes, Then No -- more confusion.

Website housekeeping note: I moved everyone's ftp directories from /29/you to /29/players/you. I'll delete the other directories soon. This will help with a page that will do automatic updation as the files come in.

Seth + Peter: I too am really digging listening to everyone's songs. I can't express how psyched I am that youses (an EXTREMELY talented bunch) are kookoo enough to try this with me.

This week will be tough! It'll be our first time balancing this with work. Anytime you sit down to write, try writing two. Have a few ideas in your back pocket for those time crunches. Also, no penalties awarded for digging up something a few years old too.

Speaking of a few years old -- when I told eve about this she was interested in helping. She asked me to transcribe a song she wrote which I'll try to put to music on 2/6:

http://29.netscrap.com/29/players/greacen/lyrics.txt

Finally, Michael Tornatore dropped off a drum kit today, a loaner for the month. I didn't have a chance to use it yet but I'll likely switch from recording exclusively on the laptop to start using my 'studio' (finally) which means some elec-trific-o-rock-i-fication in my (and therefore your) near future.

Good luck this week!

I probably should be writing songs about rain today, but instead I had some quality time with Ginger, who turned 1. The moment she went to sleep, all attention went to you-know-what (no, not a bottle of wine (this time)) and 'On The Other Side' came to me.

Sure it's barely demo quality, lyrics are jumbled and someewhere between pointless and sketchy... I still kinda like it. Like yesterday's, I'm wishing that I had my drums handy, I think it would be fun to work out the rhythms for these tunes.

I wasn't the only one who was in the studio on Saturday.

• Seth: I Am Now -- Wow, Seth goes for the 'whole band' recording. And it's catchy!
• Peter: Call This Song -- I like it! Clever! I like the 'use the song to deal with the songwriting' form (like Derek's) too.
• Me: On The Other Side -- This came from nothing at all today. Yes, I noticed there's still a thin line between it and nothing at all.

Plus, I have ideas for the next 3 songs. Hopefully, I can trend toward completing a song a little earlier in the day.

Also, I've been really lame about putting a page on http://29.netscrap.com. I think I may need to move the directories containing mp3s on http://29.netscrap.com to make it easier for the web page to update itself. Yeah, I don't do code pushes for content updates if I can help it.

If you link to a song there... you may get an email from me about updating it.

Lastly: 6 more weeks of winter? Phil, you're killing me. Oh yeah, that and Supabowl tomorrow!

Sheesh!

I just barely made it in before midnight. This is gonna be tough.

I came up with the verse on guitar & vocal melody idea over breakfast, but didn't get a chance to sit down and record until about 9pm. A little over 2 hours later, and 'Took To The Air' popped out. I was really itching to record drums for this one, I wish I had my kit in my garage.

• Seth: Can't Get Over Love, the sweetest 50 seconds you'll get today.
• Derek: 29 Days, wow -- the theme song.
• Me: Took to the Air

Peter, there's still time! C'mon!

I recorded this on my laptop which is completely wrong for the job. Sure, I have the multitrack on there, but I was installing a mp3 codec at 11:15... Gotta get this in shape.

Also, Jim's Samson USB Mic is right for the job. Extremely handy to have this working with the laptop.

We're doin it. Tomorrow.

I'll put a page (and maybe that js-kit forum (yes techcrunch nerds, I'm lazy)) at http://29.netscrap.com to track the progress.

At this point Derek, Seth, Peter, and possibly Mark will join me on a quest toward sketchyness: sketching out song ideas and recording them every day for the month of February.

Seth took the first splash last night:

Derek responded:

You can beat that Derek! Beat it!

So yes-- I like to give new tv shows a chance. Eli Stone premiered tonight after LOST. The promo looked a little on the silly side, but I decided to give it about 10 seconds of a chance. I've been burning the candle at all ends lately and the last thing I need is a new show.

What do you know, in the first few seconds of the show there's some soundtrack that sounds familiar & cool. I think the song that played was Jon Brion's Knock Yourself Out, which I tossed into the playlist below.

SeeqPod - Playable Search

I first heard Brion with the Greys (or maybe it was just post-greys) when back in Boston. He's done some awesome stuff with Aimee Mann among others.

The covers in the playlist are kinda fun. Jon played a bunch of covers ('boys are back in town' on ukelele was awesome) when Seth & I saw him with Evan Dando many years ago in SF.

Fun! Not sure I'll catch Eli Stone again soon but I'll dust off the Brion mp3s on my drive.

I roasted a chicken for our Sunday night family sit-down dinner. As the cook's perrogative, I opened up a bottle of 1995 Directors Cut Russian River Chardonnay from Niebaum Coppola. I'll be completely honest with you, I bought this on sale; Cost Plus priced this wine to move. It was such a bargain I had no expectations about this wine.

Two quick observations up-front, then I'll list some details. First, this turned out to be a really solid Chardonnay hitting all the notes I like: fruit, malo, oak. Second, even next to the schmaltzy mirepoix from under my chicken the wine held up. The wine's acidity (though barely noticable in balance) shined through the rich aromatic veggies.

• creative packaging
• tpir: firesale
• color: flaxen
• a little on the sweet side
• mild acidity
• oaky but not overpowering
• malolactic
• drink now - though I need to learn more about how these traits age.

I'll go back and clean out the rest of the inventory.

Wed: Westin: diff logo: whine

GoFish took another step toward stating its new business today with some spring cleaning to the corporate site: http://www.gofishcorp.com.

This is the first hint about the members of their network:

• miniclip
• hallpass
• gamececko
• cartoon doll emporium
• Rocket on
• Cookie Jar

10.3 mil unique users per month puts GoFish's Network comScore numbers at the 3rd largest youth-oriented network right behind Nick & Disney.

Lots more to come, you know it.

Hello friends, here is a quick update on the voting trends on netscrap.com. Looks like the 'do nothing' camp has jumped ahead by 6.4% in the past few days. They're clearly trending higher lately. This trend seems to coincide with the dow dip (or is that dip dow? (sha na na would be proud)). Cause? Effect?

The Geo-breakdown tells an interesting story as well. Most of the 'buy beers' camp are in the bay area. This makes sense since they're the most likely to taste some of that beer. I've put a vague invite onto crush3r.com recently. Email me or post a note below if you want to be notified when it goes live.

Additionally, it seems like the folks outside the US are more interested in seeing a new feature as opposed to anything else. Personally, I find this refreshing. Let's pretend for a moment that there's a population of yet-to-be-jaded users floating around the net out there. Let's pretend that a few of those folks landed on netscrap.com and cast their votes for more scrap. End simulation.

Here's a sneak peek at the admin screen from vizu.

Is it possible that I've designed this poll in a way that naturally splits the audience unfairly? It seems like fans of the site will want a t-shirt as well as a new feature... some interesting reading ...

• 23.1%: share some swag
• 24.1%: launch a feature
• 21.3%: buy me beer
• 31.5%: continue lazyness quest