Entries Tagged 'Web' ↓

I’ve been digging the hell out of this site lately. Basically, if you haven’t checked it out and joined up yet, what you do is create a profile for yourself and then start “blipping” songs. The way it’s set up is very similar to Twitter (in fact, you can also set it to automatically send updates to your Twitter account each time you blip). You basically invite people to start following your blips (listed as “Listeners”) and then you seek out other people to follow (as “Favorite DJs”). And you give each other “props” whenever someone you follow blips a song you happen to really dig. You simply use the search function to search for a song you’d like to share with the rest of the world. The search function somehow searches all linked MP3s on the Web for your song, and if it’s out there (and indexable on search engines, naturally), it’ll find it. Now, this poses an obvious dilemma: Not all songs are obviously “out there” for you to find and blip. Well, there’s a way to fix that! If you have access to a server (like if you own your own domain, for example) you can simply create a directory and upload some of your favorite MP3s to it, and then go into the “settings” area, click “music” and then simply enter the URL of the song file, which will add it to their searchable database. Cool, huh? The only thing cooler than this is having your own podcast… which is why I’m not spending a whole hell of a lot of time uploading songs and then blipping them. There’s really no point in doing that if I’m doing my podcast. But for those of you NOT doing a podcast, it’s hella cool (and IMHO better more fun that Pandora or Last.fm), so check it out and start DJing.

So I was listening to this story on NPR this morning about the problems the US Postal Service has been facing recently, and I wondered to myself why they never set up an e-mail service like Gmail, Hotmail or Yahoo did years ago, to get a step ahead of the competition as well as to give them another revenue-generating source outside of snailmail postage. So I did what I normally do when I think of shit like this, I hopped on the Internet this morning and did a quick search for “US Postal Service” and email, and this is what I found:

File this under “strange but true:” The United States Postal Service came close to administering email.

(If you’re really cynical about your mail-delivery service, you might think this would be the ultimate email-horror story. Not me. I get excellent service, and not just because I accidentally leave bakery next to the mailbox every Christmas.)

An entertaining story in the MIT Technology Review by Stuart N. Brotman, who was assistant to President Jimmy Carter’s chief communications policy adviser from 1978 to 1981, recounts the Postal Service’s experiments with electronic communication over the years and how they led to the Postal Service’s involvement with email.

The Post Office Department, the quasi-private Postal Service’s government precursor, has been involved in advanced communications technology since it began operating a telegraph line between Washington D.C. and Baltimore in 1845, Brotman wrote.

Many potential innovations, such as postal telegram delivery and various forms of facsimile communications, were stymied either by Western Union or government actions. Then, the Postal Reform Act of 1970 came along, which mandated the Postal Service to “promote modern and efficient operations and [avoid] any practice which restricts the user of new equipment or devices which may reduce the cost or improve the quality of postal services…”

How did Brotman enter the picture? In the 1970s, he wrote, he said the Postal Service “could be a logical manager of a household electronic message delivery system” but warned it “has not developed the skills to capitalize on whatever its charter may allow in the telecommunications area.”

Then the Postal Service introduced E-COM, aimed mainly at big-business mailers, and alarm bells rang. Brotman fired off an op-ed piece in the New York Times and soon got an answer from William F. Bolger, then Postmaster General, which said, in part, that email “is the proper domain of the telecommunications industry. Our mandate for 206 years has been the delivery of hard-copy messages. That will remain our function.”

Brotman’s account tells the story in more colorful detail.

So there you have it. They fucked themselves from the get-go.

Please digg it!

TIRC-STL (Trouble in River City) is the local email list for the St. Louis Rock’n'Roll scene… think primitive garage rock, punk, rockabilly, surf, broken blues, stoner rawk, cowpunk, etc. If you live in the Saint Louis area (Missouri or Illinois) and are interested in the local rock ‘n’ roll scene, please join us!

read more | digg story

If you like taking photos of live bands, please consider sharing them with the GaragePunk.com Flickr Group! Preferably trashy, primitive rock’n'roll of the garage, punk, surf, rockabilly, R&B varieties… Keep in mind the name of the group, please.

Here’s a good idea of what we like:

King Khan

It’s been a while since I last got a spam comment on the GaragePunk.com blog worthy of reposting here, but this one that came in this morning made me laugh. Of course the links have been removed so as not to give the spammers their just deserts, and the original comment was marked as spam, but here it is for what it’s worth…

I looked at me megan fox naked over carefully, but could. Alan and fast. Alan watched but was still sexy megan fox just ran. We will announce a long cum was that will megan fox boobs help. Alan watched megan fox nude pics but her hand on the metro home, can’t mind.

Actually, I guess that one is more like a short story than haiku…

Some of you may remember that there used to be a phpBB message board over on StLouieLouie.com. I originally set it up back in the fall of 2006 in an effort to create some sort of online discussion about the things that I used to struggle to keep updated in my old Lowlife Guide to St. Louis. My idea was that the Saint Louis Forums could ultimately serve the same purpose as that old, outdated, online guide, but even better, because we could have a multitude of people weighing in on various subjects pertaining to the obscure and unusual local culture for those of us either living in or visiting Saint Louis… offbeat or “underground” local music, arts, restaurants, bars, unique attractions, sports, food, booze, fun things to do, weird stuff, etc. Unfortunately, despite promoting it on various other message boards, email lists, blogs and websites around the area, it just never took off as I’d hoped it would… probably because there were already plenty of other message boards and email lists (not to mention Myspace) where people were already spending a lot of their online time. I was about to pull the plug on the whole thing when my close friend Bill Streeter decided to create a new local social network site that would be connected with Lo-Fi Saint Louis that would basically serve the same purpose, plus offering people the ability to upload and share videos, music, and other media content. Not being fully satisfied with the Saint Louis Forums, I saw this as an easy way out. I would simply redirect the old site URL to Bill’s new site (which he named The Circuit) and encourage people to start using it instead. So I did that sometime last fall, and I do believe it helped Bill grow his network a little, because some people (even though they obviously did not post a lot) were still at least reading the Saint Louis Forums message board, and therefore got whisked away to The Circuit, where I would hope that they would have found the forum there instead.

I was happy to leave the redirect up for that site for a while, hopefully giving all of the former members a chance to catch onto the idea that The Circuit was THEE place to be, so that they could update their bookmarks and get accustomed to checking his site instead of mine. In the meantime, I thought it would be cool to come up with a few eye-catching St. Louis-themed designs that could be put onto T-shirts, kinda like STL-STyLe, but different. Having always been a fan of the St. Louis city flag, my first couple of designs are based on that flag’s art, only slightly modified (look closely at the fleur de lis, which I customized a little to look more like the one the St. Louis Browns used in the 1940s but still retaining much of the design of the classic city flag). So I set up a shop at Spreadshirt.com to sell some of these, and will probably be trying to come up with more designs in the future to add to it. If you have any ideas for more, please let me know!

By the way, in doing a Web search for common (or uncommon) St. Louis phrases, I was directed to a thread on StLouisGasPrices.com’s message board. As I was reading through it, I found a post in which someone had written a complaint about being tired of the phrase “Ask a doctor if _________ is right for you.” I thought that was pretty funny, and funnier still if you put “St. Louis” in the blank! So that’s where the idea for that shirt came from…

The other design on there right now came to me after I kept seeing all of these St. Louis Cardinals T-shirts with “Established 1892″ on them. There were a lot like that! But to the best of my knowledge, I’d never seen a shirt that said anything about St. Louis’ establishment date. That’s when I threw this one together!

There are lots of different shirt styles to choose from, for men, women, and even kids. And I can’t say enough about the great quality of these shirts from Spreadshirt… they really are nicer than screen printed tees. Please check ‘em out and buy one, or two, or three…

I think I forgot to mention that you can now follow GaragePunk.com on Twitter! Here’s the link:

www.twitter.com/garagepunk

Thanks!

Big phone and cable companies are trying to get rid of Net Neutrality, the fundamental principle that prevents them from discriminating against your favorite websites and services.

Unless we speak out to our members of Congress, they could move to allow large telephone and cable companies to control what you do, where you go and what you watch online.

Click here to learn more about what’s at stake and send a loud message directly to Congress:

To take action on this issue, click here.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FXkUahWnpTY]

Today I’ll be closing down the GaragePunk Forums message board to new posts. The forums have been dying a slow death over the past several months, anyway, as more and more people seem to be making their way over to the GaragePunk Hideout that was launched last summer. Obviously, many of the people still hanging out in the Forums have been pretty negative about the Hideout (for reasons I still don’t quite comprehend, but then again you can’t please everybody), so it’s really pointless to keep it open if most of what’s getting posted there isn’t of any substantial value to anyone, anyway. So those people that have been bitching and complaining about the Hideout can either join us, or find another forum to visit. I’m tired of the whiners.

I’m sorry (no, I’m actually NOT sorry), but Super Wall is Super Retarded, and FunWall is about as fun as lancing a wort from the back of your hand. In fact, there aren’t a helluva lot of Facebook apps that I find all that useful after having tried several and being continually annoyed and frustrated by them. But Super Wall & FunWall are the absolute worst of the bunch. They just seem like a good way for people (sorry, RETARDS) to pass along chain comments, which I guess has replaced stupid chain email forwards in the age of the social networking phenomenon.

So let me spell it out for you here: There is nothing “super” or “fun” about:

1. Junk mail, chain letters and forwarded bullshit.
2. Having multiple copies of the same crap on your profile.
3. Allowing people to advertise their crap for free on your profile (otherwise known as SPAM).

Let’s face it, if you have either of these on your profile (especially if you’ve actually forwarded something on to your friends with one of those “super” “fun” walls), then, congratulations, you’re a SUPER RETARD.

The applications themselves are not bad, per se. People misusing them is bad. And misuse is about all I’m seeing with either of them. I installed both when I first signed up with Facebook because I honestly thought they looked pretty cool, especially in regard to drawing pictures and having the capability of posting videos on someone else’s profile. One could get really creative and have some fun with it.

But I see no creativity or fun in anything anyone ever posted on either wall, either on my profile or anyone else’s I happened to visit. All I’ve seen have been highly impersonal forwards from people who received forwards themselves and decided to send it on to everyone else on their friends list. What a bunch of mindless automatons!

I deleted both walls because they weren’t adding anything of real value to my profile, and I highly recommend you do the same.

I know I can stop visiting people’s profiles or even stop visiting Facebook altogether if the walls and other useless applications bother me all that much.

But that isn’t quite the point. The point is that it irks me that people are perpetuating a useless custom and contributing more bullshit to an already bullshit-loaded society full of thoughtless, mindless puppets.

So, please. Grow a brain and think.

If you’re like me, and are sick to fucking death of these pointless Facebook applications, then check out the group This Has Got to Stop. It has some good information on blocking them as well as other tricks to avoid (not to mention complain about) stupid shit on Facebook.