It’s almost time for MilwaukeeDevHouse3… it’s happening Friday, November 21st, 2008 at Bucketworks in Milwaukee, Wisconsin…

So what is a DevHouse? It’s a hackathon event that combines serious and not-so-serious productivity with a fun and exciting party atmosphere…

People show up and either have an idea of a project they want to work on, or look for ideas, or other people to work on things with… But it’s not all serious work. It’s a party atmosphere, so you can hang out and just chill with other folks, discuss whatever, do whatever…

Since it’ll be at Bucketworks, you should also be able to use the FabLab to build something (maybe a desk?) or just create some art… (I’m actually going to be working on getting the screen printing machine up and running for part of the night.)

The main project I want to work on is exploring gPhoto, which can be used to control over 1000 cameras via connecting to a Linux computer with a USB cable. I want to use my Eee PC as an intervalometer, but also see what we can do at Bucketworks using the software and digital cameras…

So come down to MilwaukeeDevHouse3 at Bucketworks. It’s a free event, put on by Web414 and sponsored by Paladin Web Services. Food and drink and hacking and geeks… what could be better?

(Update: I got gPhoto running on Mac OS X.)

I picked up The Production Assistant’s Pocket Handbook recently, and I pretty much read it all in one sitting. I’m really not that interested in becoming a P.A., but the book sounded neat, and as a PDF it was just $3 from LuLu.

Caleb, the author, has a web site for it which you can check out.

I had my last doctor visit for my elbow dislocation follow-up recently. I had stopped going to occupational therapy before that because I can’t afford it. Luckily the doctor says it’s looking good, and should heal up well, and I should get back my full range of motion eventually. (I’ve been trying to do my own therapy, but I skip the exercises too much.) The doctor did warn me to still take it somewhat easy and avoid any Winter sports like sledding, skiing, snowboarding, ice skating… anything where I could fall and smack my elbow, or get it pulled back and hyper extended. Sucks! And seriously, he couldn’t add shoveling to that list?

So in case you are keeping track, I got injured on August 23rd, 2008 (and again 4 days after that) and then got a crazy splint and then got that off and now I’m on the road to recovery. But the road is long, and the climb will be steep…. but we will never surrender, even in the face of Armageddon!

Things are gonna change I can feel it…

This is the first election I’ve really felt that things are going to change. For so many years I was convinced that voting was always the choice between the lesser of two evils, and that no matter who won, it would always be the old rich white guy.

I’ve never really been loyal to my sorrowful country, Blind patriotism always leaves me feeling ill, and after years of buying American made cars and seeing them fall apart, I got sick of it, and started to buy Japanese cars. But in the past few months, I started to turn… I’d actually like to see the U.S. build better cars, and I’d like to someday own one.

I still like to think of myself as a citizen of the world, and not some mindless flag waving fool, but maybe it’s OK to be a bit proud of this country. Sure, the U.S. has done a lot of evil things, but I like to think we’ve done some good things as well, and can do better thing in the future.

Anyway, I’m feeling very strange right now… sort of happy, sort of anxious, and sort of in a state of confusion.

I continue to hope for a better tomorrow…

Knellotron told me to check out Amie Street, an innovative music site where you pay for music with prices that correlate to an artist’s popularity. So I checked it out…

I put my album "Snowbound" from the 2008 RPM Challenge up there to see what would happen. So far it’s a bargain at 27 cents! It was free until Gabe came along and recommended 3 of the songs… Still, I think 27 cents is a real bargain, but snap it up now before the prices goes up!

I like the concept of Amie Street, where you get rewarded with low prices by finding new (and unpopular artists) and the artists get rewarded proportionately to their popularity. I told a friend of mine she could fine unpopular music for cheap and she got really excited, saying “I love unpopular music!”

I managed to get 4 albums of surf music for less than $3, and 3 of them were free. One of them is actually pretty good too.

Take a look at Amie Street if you are interested in finding new music. Hey, you can even look at my artist page if you want to…

I recorded a song, and it’s called “Process Rebuilt” and I’d like to thank KeVroN and James and Jenn for inspiration… You should be able to hear it right on this page, using the embedded player below.

You can grab it from blip.tv, and it’s got a Creative Commons Attribution License. (If you need something else, get in touch with me.)

Also, subscribe to the feed to get all of the audio automagically downloaded podcasting style…

I’m never sure if I think about these issues more because I’ve been involved in publishing for over 20 years, or if it’s because I’m a big fan of Creative Commons, or because I create music and images… or maybe it’s a combination of all those things…

Changes are, if you are reading this blog, that you are a publisher too. Most us are nowadays… If you have a blog, or a Flickr account, or upload videos to the web, you are a publisher. So my question to you is, do you think about the rights of others when you publish something you created, and incorporate their work?

I’ve seen it too many times in videos… someone puts together the visuals, the part they created, and then grabs some artist’s song to drop on top of it. Often it will be a song from a well known artist, used without permission. People often say “I’m not making money from it” or “It’s just for fun, no one is really going to see it” but saying those things dismisses the value of the artist’s work, and missed the fact that by publishing, you are showing it to the world.

Worse yet, is when people do this and re-license the work. Sorry, but you can’t just grab some Foo Fighter’s song, use it in your video, and put it under a Creative Commons license… or can you?

This is where I think things get a little gray. I mean, my old pal Dave Slusher of the Evil Genius Chronicles often uses material in his shows that have different licenses, and makes note of it in the show. So while the portions of his show he creates are under a specific license of his choosing, other parts (often songs) are not.

So the question is, can you create a work, put it under a license, and use material from different licenses in it? We start to see that whole “infection” thing they talk about in the software world.

I don’t have the answer to this, and it’s one of the continually nagging parts of licensing, and copyright, and Creative Commons I think about.

Yeah, it’s on…

MilwaukeeDevHouse3 is Friday, November 21, 2008 at 6pm at Bucketworks in Milwaukee, Wisconsin.

Join us!

We somehow managed to pull it off again, and BarCampMilwaukee3 happened without any unfortunate incidents, even though there was threat of desks being burned to the ground…

In the coming weeks I will try to follow-up on specific things about BarCampMilwaukee3, but for now I will just ramble on aimlessly…

Wifi seemed good and the internet connection worked. This probably sets a new record for Bucketworks.

I did not get to complete my robot, but it looks like Royce Pipkins may be starting up a Milwaukee Robotics Club. (Possibly meeting at Bucketworks.)

We had a desk building competition (sponsored by Bucketworks) and I did not win, despite building two (yes two!) amazing desks…

Blake Hall and I (mostly Blake!) started working on the new BarCampMilwaukee web site & infrastructure. We should be done before BarCampMilwaukee4…

We’ll be discussing what worked/what didn’t and ideas for future *Camps in Milwaukee, including some sort of “FoodCamp” and DrupalCampWI2, and WordCamp, and others I forgot about…

Discussing where? At Web414 on Thursday, October 9th, 2008… 7PM at Bucketworks in Milwaukee, Wisconsin…

So we decided to try an experiment… instead of everyone using headphones or listening to music on their own computer, we loaded up our Living Room Mac with a bunch of songs and turned it into a jukebox. It plays through the office sound system so pretty much everyone can hear it. Since everyone contributed songs, we’re starting to hear a good variety. But in order to solve that “What song is this!?” problem, I set up a last.fm account at last.fm/user/z2marketing. (It started with just my music for the first day, so the stats were a little screwy at first… well, they still are, but it will even out over time.)

So far it’s proved interesting… and it’ll be neat over time to see what the office collectively listens to. The new office is a lot larger, so this has sort of helped to pull things together and make it feel more comfortable and not as spread out, which it felt at first due to how much room we have now.)

Anyway, if you want to see what we are listening to, check it out at: last.fm/user/z2marketing

A few months back David from Korporate Media sent an email to a few folks titled “Dear Macintosh users, let’s talk apps” and a bunch of people replied. It took a while to compile, but here’s my list. Some of these I don’t use much anymore in Mac OS X 10.5 but still do in Mac OS X 10.4, and some of these I almost never use, but still think they might be useful to others…

• Adium - multi-protocol IM
• Audio Hijack - re-route audio, record anything your Mac can play
• Chicken of the VNC - VNC client
• CocoThumbX - nice thumbnailer
• Colloquy - IRC client
• Combine PDFs - handy utility to merge PDFs into one file
• Desktop Manager - like Spaces, but not… (yeah, I still use Tiger on some Macs!)
• EvoCam - awesome webcam/timelapse software
• ffmpegX - GUI front-end to ffxmpeg
• Final Cut Express - awesome video editor for under $200
• FontDoc - display fonts in their face (blows away Font Book)
• GarageBand - fun with music composing!
• GraphicConverter - can’t afford Photoshop? need to convert images?
• Growl - system notifications, including roll-your-own
• Interarchy - file transfers, ftp, sftp, Amazon S3 support, etc.
• iSquint - converts .wmv files to QuickTime
• iTerm - blows away Terminal.app, IMHO…
• jEdit - multi-platform text editor, no one likes it but me
• Linotype FontExplorer X - manage fonts the right way
• Mactracker - details on every freakin’ Mac model ever
• MetadataHootenanny - embed metadata in media files
• MPEG Streamclip - awesome video converter (easier to use than ffmpegX)
• MrDrum - simple drum machine app
• NeoOffice - word sucks, this is open source
• OmniOutliner - nice outliner, if you use an outliner
• OmniGraffle - nice grapher, if you use a grapher
• Parallels - run that crappy Windows thing
• PsyncX - automate backups on the command line
• Senuti - move music from iPod to iTunes
• SWF & FLV Player - free player for weird formats

(Oh, and Perl, which does everything else.)

It’s off… The progress splint I was using to help my dislocated elbow heal has been removed, and I am now free of all splints, slings, and other such contraptions. But I’m not healed…

Right now I cannot straighten my left arm. It gets to about 35 degrees and just stops. It’s too painful to move it anymore than that. I’ll be starting therapy in a week and a half (that too is worrisome, as I would have liked to have started right away, but some miscommunication slowed down that process.)

I’m also supposed to “take it easy” which is something I have a hard time doing. I’m pretty conscious of my arm, and if I try to extend it too much I get a (slightly) painful reminder that I can’t. You’d be amazed how many times I look at something that used to be within my reach, and then reach for it, and realized I can’t quite get it. It’s this sort of disappointment/failure thing, and it’s a bit depressing.

Of course the most painful part of all of this just started. I got the first (of many) medical bills from this injury. Ouch… I’ll probably be paying this one off for some time… hopefully my arm will fully heal before the bill is fully paid off. Who knows? Maybe we’ll soon see a change in the U.S. and we’ll get a president who cares enough about people who cannot afford good health insurance and does something about it.

Good gosh, we’re this close to BarCampMilwaukee3! The whole thing goes down October 4th/5th, 2008 in Milwaukee, Wisconsin at Bucketworks.

There’s also a Friday night pre-BarCamp party event being planned that we need to spread the word about. Details should be available soon.

This is our 3rd BarCamp in Milwaukee (hence the “BarCampMilwaukee3″ title!) and it feels like we’re in the groove of getting these things up and running. This year seems so much more mellow than last year. I’ve been keeping an eye on registration, and I’ve seen some interesting people sign up. As of writing this we’re at well over 100 people, and I’m guessing we’ll see that shoot up in the next week, and get more people who didn’t even sign up attending.

Remember to check out the proposed sessions to see what people are interested in doing. I’m pretty excited about the Hobby Robotics Make’n'Take Session and of course the The Future of Microblogging session looks amazing!

And have you see the shirt Mike Rohde designed? It incorporates tagging! How sweet is that?

So join us! It’s not too late to sign up… head over to barcampmilwaukee.com and use the signup wizard to register… We hope to see you there.

John Resig shows us the right way to complain about something… by not even making it appear you are complaining, and offering solutions.

His post on Easy PDF Sharing nails it by saying he loves something (SlideShare) but then asking how it could be improved, and and offering a solution as well (with working code.)

To SlideShare’s credit, they are pretty open to people’s suggestions. When I mentioned them last year, they commented on my post right away, which is always great to see.

I’m really liking what John did, and I’ll see if I can tie into it with my workflow of using S5.

Don’t ask me how I got this, cuz I can’t tell you… but reliable sources tell me this is John McCain’s playlist…

1. Kill the Poor - Dead Kennedys
2. Let’s Start a War - The Exploited
3. You’re My Miss Washington, D.C. - Nation of Ulysses
4. War Pigs - Black Sabbath
5. Cops of the World - Phil Ochs
6. Mount The Pavement - Born Against
7. My War - Black Flag
8. Night of the Living Dead - The Misfits
9. Suspect Device - Stiff Little Fingers
10. They Must Want to Die - D.I.
11. Hate & War - The Clash
12. Is She Really Going Out With Him? - Joe Jackson

Who knew he had such good taste in music?