Month: April 2008

One Place for Your Many Online Lives

I’ve been using FriendFeed for a couple of weeks now and absolutely love it. FriendFeed allows you to subscribe to FriendFeed accounts set up by your friends that aggregates all of their Flickr and/or Zooomr photos, their blog posts, their Twitter Tweets and Pownces, plus about 30 other social sites where people might post data.

You can selectively hide info that you’re not interested in on a single post or whole site basis. I may love someones Flickr photos for example but hate their Tumblr posts and so I can filter those out.

My favorite part about FriendFeed is how it handles photos. It’s so much smarter than Flickr or Zooomr. With Flickr when you go to look at your contacts photos you can either choose to see their last 1 or 5 photos. With Zooomr it’s their last 5 photos through Zipline.

The problem is that people oftentimes upload more than 5 photos at a time. I know that I do. And I hate it when someone uploads more than 5 photos at a time and I have no idea without manually going to their stream to investigate. So a lot of great photos that I’d like to see by my friends end up getting buried.

FriendFeed handles your contacts most recent photos much better. With FriendFeed they show you 7 photos from a recent upload session by your friend (not 1 or 5), what’s even better though is that they have a little icon button if your friend uploads more than 7 that you can click to expand the thumbnail out and see the rest of them. Awesome!

The problem though is that a lot of people on Flickr and Zooomr aren’t on FriendFeed yet. If you are a contact of mine and are on FriendFeed please drop me a comment with your FriendFeed page. This is where I’m going to be spending a lot of time looking at my contact’s photostreams in the future. If you aren’t on FriendFeed yet, consider signing up for it. Even if you don’t use it this will allow your friends who do the ability to see your Flickr/Zooomr photos over there.

FriendFeed does have the ability to build “imaginary” friends even if your Flickr/Zooomr pals don’t sign up. I’ve set up a bunch of these already for some of my contacts, but that’s a lot of work and I’d much rather just add you if you have a friendfeed account.

If you’d like to add me and my photos on FriendFeed my account is here. Leave yours in a comment and I’ll add you.

If you’d like to look through my contacts to see if there are other people you might want to add you can do that here.

I hate having to do this but today for the first time I turned on comment moderation on Thomas Hawk’s Digital Connection. Even with Blogger’s captcha’s turned on the comment spam was still just getting too bad. Literally hundreds of them a day. Unfortunately I’m not aware of any sort of akismet type tool for Blogger and so this seems like the only solution at this point.

I hate comment moderation and will try to stay on top of moderating comments as quickly as I can. Sorry about the inconvenience on it. Maybe if the comment spam dies down in the next few days or so I can try turning moderation back off.

I just finished installing Power Playlist on my Vista Media Center PC. Power Playlist allows you to add a strip to your Media Center start screen that includes custom music/slide show combos.

Watching slideshows with music is one of the top things that I do on my Media Center PC. Typically I’ll put on my WMP Smart Playlist of my 4&5 star rated songs and then watch photos from either my art shots, my family snapshots, or both combined.

With Power Playlist I can integrate these custom combinations and have one simple button that I press from the main menu screen. This saves me a lot of time as I don’t have to navigate to my desired playlist in the music folder and then my desired slideshow in my photos folder.

Power Playlist lets you add up to 5 music/photo combos from your start screen. It can also handle visualizations. It comes with an editor where you simply type the paths where you want to point Power Playlist to and it takes care of the rest.

You can also designate specific photos that you want as your thumbnails on your Media Center Start Screen.

This is a very smart and efficient add on to improve your Media Center and Media Center Extender experience.

I’m still thrilled with the performance I’ve been getting from my Media Center PC and extender set up since upgrading my primary home Media PC to the Dell that I bought a few months back. At present I’ve got a Vista Media Center PC in my attic which doubles as my home office PC and three XBox 360s in my home. One in the living room with the big 58 inch plasma (Media Center slide shows *rock* on a big plasma), one in my kitchen and one in my bedroom.

These extender units can play XBox 360 games, play DVDs, and most significantly handle my Media Center PC in the attic. Media Center (in addition to doing my music and slide shows) also handles my TV. I’ve got a dual tuner HD Homerun OTA (over the air) HDTV receiver that can record two shows at once grabbing free over the air HDTV signals.

The best thing about the TV that I get with my current set up is that it’s all free. I canceled my DirecTV and have never looked back. HDTV in three rooms in my house, the ability to skip commercials, my music library and pictures, Netflix DVDs, and XBox 360 games — all in a single unit. And all without paying a dime to a cable company or satellite provider. Not bad.

Anyways if you haven’t already, grab Power Playlist to make your Media Center experience even better. You can get it here. It works with both 32-bit and 64-bit Media Center PCs.

Thanks as usual to Charlie Owen up at Microsoft for the heads up on Power Playlist.

Marginal Revolution: Netflix pricing

Marginal Revolution has a blog post out asking the question about why Netflix seems like such a good deal for people doing the 3 disc at a time plan but if folks want to increase their disc plan there seems to be no appreciable discount.

“It looks kind of screwy; 3 movies at a time is $16.99 a month but 8 movies at a time is $47.99 a month. After three movies, the average cost of a rental (see the link for the numbers) is either flat or rising. Why go for the 8 movies deal instead of setting up separate accounts and queues, thereby saving money? Why is Netflix encouraging everyone to do the 3 movies a month version of the plan? Why are there no quantity discounts past the 3 movies a month margin? “

I’m not exactly sure why this is the case but there are a bunch of answers that people give on the post.

My own personal guess is that Netflix plans are optimized to provide the most money to Netflix as possible.

Netflix’s main variable cost is postage. So an active user costs them more than an inactive user. Netflix loves the person who signs up for the three disc plan and then takes three months to watch their discs. Likewise they probably hate the customer who watches (or rips) their DVDs on the same day they get them and always returns them the next day.

They probably lose money on their most active customers, but make it up with their inactive customers. People who want to push the limit beyond three discs are probably the more active customers and the reason why there is no appreciable discount for taking a greater disc plan is probably due to the fact that they don’t want to encourage those active users at all. Heck, they’d probably in fact love to have them quit Netflix and go over to Blockbuster.

In fact, there is an especially steep jump in price when you move from the three disc at a time plan to the four disc at a time plan. My bet is that four disc at a time users are much more active than the average three disc at a time users.

Personally for me three discs is just about right. I think I’d rather have four but three works for now. I’m not willing to pay an extra $7 a month for one extra disc at a time.

“I believe strongly that art should be a medium for politics and ideologies, not just a commodity. I think that I’m creating a project that lives up to the standard of what art is supposed to be.”

Aliza Shvarts

Yale Daily News – For senior, abortion a medium for art, political discourse Ok, now I’m still not convinced 100% that this story is even true. It’s published in the Yale Daily News though and at least the Kansas City Star has published on it so I’ll go with it for now realizing it could very well be a hoax.

The situation is this. Apparently Yale Art Major Aliza Shvarts for her senior art project artificially inseminated herself as many times as she could over a nine month period. Then she used abortifacient drugs with each insemination to induce miscarriages. She videotaped her experience going through the process and this is her art project.

Certainly this is going to set the Prolifers off to no end. But I’d hope really that most human beings, both Pro Life and Pro Choice, would have a problem with this one.

Reproductive rights and the whole abortion debate is a really tough subject ethically to start with. But even if someone believes that a woman who ends up with an unwanted pregnancy has a right to terminate it, it’s one thing to have an accident and see abortion as the only way out of a bad situation, it’s quite another thing to purposely create life with the sole purpose of destroying it in the name of art over and over again.

Shvarts says that her a art was not made for “shock value” but rather is a legitimate exploration of the interaction between art and the human body. I think this is bullshit. I think she absolutely did this to create shock value.

I also wonder about the art advisor at Yale that would approve such an art project — if there even was one. If Aliza Shvart’s project was approved by Yale faculty, I’d also question their judgement with regards to this undertaking.

I love art. I make art every single day. Much of my life is dedicated to art. This is not art in my opinion. This is poison. As much as I’m sure that Shvarts pulled this PR stunt to get into the news and gain her 15 minutes of fame, I wonder what sort of long-term effects that this course of action will cause her.

I worry that for Shvart’s sake that there may be psychological consequences to go with her actions that she has no idea about yet.

I also worry that in a world where Pro Life people can take things far enough to murder doctors, that she might even be setting herself up to be murdered. This will enrage many people to no end.

Personally I think it’s sad. And I think she’s sick. And a big part of me really hopes that this article from the Yale Daily News really is one big hoax.

Update: More from Michelle Malkin here. More from the Washington Post here.

Update: Fox News is now reporting that Yale University claims that Shvart did not impregnate herself or induce miscarriages as part of this “art,” based on a statment made by Yale associate dean and vice president for public affairs Helaine S. Klasky:

“Her art project includes visual representations,” Klasky wrote. “[Schvarts] stated to three senior Yale University officials today, including two deans, that she did not impregnate herself and that she did not induce any miscarriages. The entire project is an art piece, a creative fiction designed to draw attention to the ambiguity surrounding form and function of a woman’s body,” she wrote. “Had these acts been real they would have violated basic ethical standards and raised serious mental and physical health concerns.”