Strike.TV

I was listening to WEAA the other day and heard a great interview with a some people behind the scenes at Strike.TV. Their inception, mission and bottom-up approach to broadcasting are all remarkable in their own right, and worthy of your attention.

STRIKE.TV was born out of the writers strike. In December 2007, we challenged the members of the Writers Guild – create original programs for the Internet and we will provide you with a website and ad revenue. The ad revenue profits will go to the Writers Guild Foundation Industry Support Fund, now since absorbed by the Actors Fund’s Entertainment Assistance Program. The EAP has been offering financial relief and other services to entertainment industry professionals negatively impacted by the strike.

All of the web shows and films on our site – as well as the site itself – were made by people who donated their time and energy for this important cause, and in accordance with our pledge, Strike.TV will be donating its first three months of ad revenue profits.

You can browse the episode archives at Strike.TV or stream select episodes on Hulu. Check out what Wired had to say about it.

Dead Venues Map

Or, “How I Spent The Better Part Of My Weekend”. I spent most of the day yesterday experimenting with the Google Maps API for the Dead Venues project. There’s a lot of power behind this API and it’s a lot of fun to work with. Despite some holes in the Baltimore street view data, this will be a great interactive feature for the site. By clicking a venue marker on the map, it will display a present day street view (where available) and cross link to related articles in the (new) Dead Venues Blog.

Soft Graffiti

Check the refresh on Raven’s blog: Soft Graffiti. I’ve been on a design kick the last couple weeks and felt inspired to give it another pass. I finally got the domain resolved and now I’m learning how to customize the Thematic Theme Framework. Super easy!

http://www.softgraffiti.com

LIFE Photo Archives

News to me: LIFE Magazine has posted more than 10 million images from it’s archives online. Free for non-commercial usage!

http://images.google.com/hosted/life

VOTE OBAMA ON NOVEMBER 4

• Dead Venues is launched. Possible mention of it in the Sun this weekend.
• Had an awesome weekend at the beach house with Raven and the fam.
• Geoff and I settled on Soft Cement as our band name. We’re done recording the EP and only have one more mixing session. Packaging is gonna be tight.
• I launched the super secret Beatbots Digital. Currently hosting the Small Sur album and soon hosting the Soft Cement EP (Think About It).
• At work I’m redesigning the UI for Cellblock and it so far it looks mad sexier. We’ll be launching that some time next week probably.
• Speaking of work. Big things in the haps with NBC / UNIVERSAL.
• In an effort to get more involved with the IRL, I’ve joined up with the kids at the Hexagon Space. I’m real stoked on it. I’ll be working on the space, book shows, web programming, promotions, etc.
• September 8th is my 27th birthday. Feel free to buy me something awesome.
• September 13th I’ll be running a Beatbots booth at Hampdenfest (”MEATROTS”). If you have a tent that you’d like to lend me, holler!

In other news, I was watching the Obama speech tonight and who should I see on the TV in the audience, but sis Caitlin McD. Surreal!

Things have been well. I had a really nice Easter weekend with the family in OC. Raven took some great photos. We had an awesome sushi dinner at OC Wasabi, and strangley enough ran into one of my coworkers there … 100+ miles from where we normally see each other. After the fam was good and stuffed (and drunk) we met up with the neighbors to go bowling. First round Chuck got first, my Dad got second and I got third. Take that ladies! On Easter day us kids ventured to buy some herbs in West OC (legal) and then everyone at a ton of awesome food. I love the beach house.

Raven and Connor, Ocean City 2008 (Photo by me)

Jeff “The Librarian” Mewbourn and I were interviewed for Maryland Mornings (with Tom Hall) on WYPR. We talked about Jeff’s live recordings, the Beatbots A/V Club, and the Baltimore music scene. Live recordings on the show were Thank You, Double Dagger and Small Sur. It’ll be hillarious when people are commuting to work in the morning and all the sudden DD is melting their life with “Luxury Condos for the Poor”. We’re not sure yet when it’s going to air, but I’ll post again when I find out. In the even that you can’t get 88.1FM around Baltimore, it will be available via podcast on their site and shortly thereafter on the Beatbots A/V Club (they said it was totes cool to repost).

This weekend me and Raven and Big T went to Ikea and I picked up a rad record cabinet and a nice glass case to cram my horde of toys into. After that we went to Dick’s and bought some athletic balls. Big T got a basket ball and I got a soccer ball and a basketball (glow in the dark yo!). Me and T shot some hoops in Druid Hill park and it was totally awesome.

Things are kind of up in the air right now with the punk band. Geoff and I have been out of touch mostly and my search for a practice space has so far come up nada. In the mean time I’ve been jamming out in the apartment (got a long way to go) and listening to a lot of stuff. Speaking of that, my Spring Mix is just about done … I’ll be posting that soon (maybe even later tonight). Also, this just in, me and several friends are about to venture into a very awesome website that’s going to be an interactive history of the now dead underground venues in Baltimore, stretching back through the 90s and 80s. More awesome news to come.

PEASE

(I wear tight pants now)

ps The Boogans came home!

Original Posting w/ Comments

MyMiniCity is a flash game that lets you build your own virtual city. What’s cool about it is the city will grow in size, the more people that visit its webpage. Just select a country and name for your city and you’re up and running (no sign up necessary). I created Botsopolis (link below) as a virtual city for Beatbots.com’ers. Thanks to Joe VG for turning me on to this.

http://botsopolis.myminicity.com/

A while back I played a little game where I randomly picked a start point in Wikipedia and documented my path through the information, which meant following one and only one link from one page to the next. A navigational train of thought, if you will. Here’s how I got from Third Eye to the Semantic Web …

Third Eye
Clairvoyance
Astral Projection
Binaural Beats
Intelligence Amplification
Wisdom of Crowds
Web 2.0
Semantic Web