From Maysville, Episode 16

Best episode evah! George Clooney and Renee Zellweger were in Maysville Kentucky at the Washington Opera House for the premiere of their new movie Leatherheads. And we've got it all on camera! Join your hosts Sean George and Jeremy Parnell as we hit the red carpet for this incredible event. You won't want to miss it.

Persistence pays

Persistence pays. I was busy when they walked the red carpet, but hung out late and was able to get their autographs as they left the theater (click for larger image). George Clooney's sig is below his left leg in the photo and Renee Zellwegger's is across Clooney's right arm/chest.

As one guy in the crowd commented: "[Renee] is hotter than fish grease."

I'm like, what does that even mean? Apparently it's really hot. Think fish fry and remember that this is Kentucky and not Hollywood : )

Adventures in live streaming

These are unedited clips of the live broadcast of the Monday premiere in downtown Maysville Kentucky of the new movie Leatherheads (opening in theaters nationwide on April 4th). They were filmed on a portable video camera situated in an office near to the theater. All those aware of the live broadcast contacted their out-of-town friends and family and asked them to tune in. At the height of the event, there were more than 500 people watching the broadcast, and a total of 2,900+ viewers throughout the day (the camera was broadcasting the entire day's activity). In my estimation, that number constitutes an amazing online viewership relative to the amount of people who showed up in real life, especially considering that most of the promotion was by word-of-mouth. Viewers wanted to see their friends and family on camera just as much as they wanted to see George Clooney and Renee Zellwegger. My sincere thanks to everyone who participated and my usual apologies for shoddy camera work and dropped Internet connections (I believe the dishes from the news crews on site caused the wifi signals to become a radio soup).

Live streaming video of George Clooney in Maysville!

I have live streaming video of Downtown Maysville Kentucky, broadcasting all day in anticipation of George Clooney and Rene Zellwegger's red-carpet premiere of Leatherheads tonight (starting at 7pm) at the Washington Opera House. Okay, so right now (6:30 AM) it's just pointing out my window, but as the day progresses I'll be moving it to get a better shot. Tune in and check it out:

[Video removed after the event]

Bill Clinton coming to Maysville Kentucky too?

With all the Clooney mania going on around town this weekend due to the premiere of George Clooney and Rene Zellwegger's new movie Leatherheads on Monday (stay tuned for updates), which already has RSVPs from Kentucky Governor Steve Beshear and former Miss America Heather French Henry, and no doubt some other VIP guests who will make a surprise appearance, I was nonetheless floored to learn that Bill Clinton will also be in town on Tuesday, campaigning for his wife Hillary! I'm confused. When the heck did we become so important? The total population of this town is less than 10,000. You can lay in the middle of Second Street on a Sunday morning for a good thirty minutes (at least) without fear of being run over. I'm not making that up either. You can totally do that. So I hope you can understand how surreal it is to see Channel 5 helicopters doing fly-bys like I did today. Too weird.

Clinton coming, that calls for a cigar : )

Save the lake people

I'm not a huge environmentalist or anything, but I know enough to realize that the loss resulting from engineering disasters isn't always measured in human causalties. Here's a posted link I read today and a some selected comments about it.

Link: The World's Weirdest Engineering Disaster

Description: Didn’t anyone ever tell you that salt mines, shallow lakes and deep-earth drills shouldn ’t mix? What started as a seemingly minor miscalculation resulted in a billion-gallon flood, unbelievable property damage and the upheaval of an entire ecosystem.

[Basically, the fuck up drained the lake into mine shafts below. Comments anyone?]

paperclipsNsoup said: "Bet they didn't see that one coming... Probably killed everything in the lake too."

next came jb0nd38372, who said: "Read the article again, nobody died."

to which ElAssoWipo replied: "I don't think he was referring to the 'lake people'."

LOL. Well, hey, it's easy to forget the fish. After all, "it's OK to eat fish 'cause they don't have any feelings."

Leatherheads premiere a go for Maysville

It's official. Nick Clooney confirmed on Monday that the Universal Studios film Leatherheads, starring George Clooney, Renee Zellwegger, and The Office's John Krasinki, will be premiering at the Washington Opera House here in Maysville, Kentucky, on March 24th. I doubt I'll be able to get tickets because the place only seats 400, and 75 of those seats are apparently already taken. That's OK, though, because as WKRC reports, George and his co-stars will be hanging around for events the following day (25th) as well. I'm fairly certain I'll run into them considering the Opera House is literally two blocks down the street from where I live. I met George before when he was here for the Rosemary Clooney Festival a few years back, but I'm anxious to see Renee Zellwegger and John Krasinki -- like awesome! For those not familiar with the area, The Washington Opera House is the over 150 year old recently renovated theater we visited in Episode 8 of From Maysville. We're supposed to go back sometime next month for a late-night ghost hunt.

Prepare for the Long Now

A Christian was posting to a message board I frequent about the End Times, about how all the woes of the world indicate that society is going downhill fast and look to the skies the end is nigh. I don't know about all of that, but I prefer to remain optimistic (disclaimer: I'm not a religious person).

My friend: I see your "End Times" and raise you one "Clock of the Long Now".

The Clock of the Long Now is a proposed mechanical clock designed to keep time for 10,000 years, to get people thinking about the future, the l-o-n-g future, the long now. It's a problem-solving think-project with time as the enemy -- how do you make a clock that runs 10,000 years? how do you protect it from the environment, wars, etc.? The more one thinks about these questions, the more they imagine civilization lasting for millenia to come. It's a "counterpoint to today's 'faster/cheaper' mind set and [serves to] promote 'slower/better' thinking." From one of the founders of the project:

When I was a child, people used to talk about what would happen by the year 2000. For the next thirty years they kept talking about what would happen by the year 2000, and now no one mentions a future date at all. The future has been shrinking by one year per year for my entire life. I think it is time for us to start a long-term project that gets people thinking past the mental barrier of an ever-shortening future. I would like to propose a large (think Stonehenge) mechanical clock, powered by seasonal temperature changes. It ticks once a year, bongs once a century, and the cuckoo comes out every millennium.

- Computer scientist Daniel Hillis

Learn more

What's my age again?

I eagerly await the day when I'm old enough to wear a Fedora without looking dorky.

Preventing IT burnout

I have a lot of friends who work in IT, and I've noticed that more and more of them are wanting to pull the plug and get away from working with computers. I can't blame them. It's a bit of a drab existence staring at the screen all day in a cell, I mean cubicle, and if I had to do that in a traditional eight-hour shift, I'd go nuts myself -- and I love computers! The good news is that those suffering from tech burnout have an out, without shunning the grid. Make tech work for you!

Strategy One: Become a moofer. Mobile technology has dramatically matured to where you really don't need an office anymore. Laptops working off Wi-Fi and 3GG Smartphones allow the would-be tech burnout to go out and get some *shudder to think* sunlight! And I mean real out-door computing, not some office-surrogate like Starbucks. When the weather gets warmer, I'll probably spend just as much time in the courtyard across the street as I do in my actual office. Wired Magazine this month published a map of free municipal wi-fi, not just in large cities, but in small towns across America you've probably never heard of. Check out the interactive online version, pick a city, move there, and moof! The sun burn will eventually go away as you adapt to your new environment.

Strategy Two: Launch a startup. Sure, it's sooo Y2K to launch an tech startup, but today's startups are made smarter because the technology is finally in place to, you know, actually make some money. Maybe you won't become the next dot com billionaire, but that's not really your goal, is it? You're just looking for supplemental income so you can maybe see some sunlight (see Strategy One). If that's your goal all you need is a couple of thousand dedicated users, and the passive income earned through syndicated ads will likely earn you a living. But how do you get those thousands of users you need and still not, like, work and stuff?

Here's my formula:

1) Imitate - Find something that works well on a macro-scale and adapt it to a micro-scale. If you find yourself drooling over the ungodly amount eBay takes in, brainstorm how you can duplicate that on a smaller scale. eBay is a worldwide marketplace for everything you can think of, but there's likely a market in your own little corner of the world for items too large to ship easily. A local site that auctions large items like antique beds and dressers, items best delivered locally, if marketed well locally, may just allow you to escape that 9-5 unhealthy relationship you have with your computer.

2) Innovate - Don't just rip off something someone else did. Find ways of adding your own contribution. Make it your own. If you're adapting a macro-scale model to a micro-scale model, like in the example above, there's likely to be hundreds of features the big guys left out because they just don't work on a macro-scale. eBay couldn't incorporate a local delivery service that picks up items at one location and delivers them to another location -- that's just not going to happen. It could happen for you if you partner with a local delivery company, and take a little off the top. Adding your own novel ideas to the mix will make your micro-site more attractive to users who need features that the macro-models simply can't provide.

3) Automate - One of my favorite lines from Fox's King of the Hill is in the episode where Kahn shows up at Strickland Propane and asks Hank, "Haven't they replaced you with a coin operated machine yet?" To prevent tech burnout, especially if you're running a tech biz, you want to be replaced by a machine. Put tech to work for you by automating everything you possibly can. That's what software is supposed to do. When the machine just won't do the job because it requires human intervention, still automate. Crowd-source it.

In short: The smarter you use tech, the less time you'll actually have to spend hands-on with tech.

Lookalike?

I swear to God I just saw Tommy Chong walking down the street in downtown Maysville, Kentucky. I was like, that guy looks familiar, where have I seen him? As he got closer, he said, "Hey, dude. What's up?" and it was spot on, Tommy Chong! If it's not the real Chong, then he has a doppleganger because even his voice was perfect. If something shows up in the paper tomorrow about Tommy Chong visiting Maysville, remember, you heard it here first.

Auguries of innocence

My niece likes fairies, so I drew her as one. To the right is a quote from "Auguries of Innocence", by William Blake (one of my favorite poems). It reads:

To see a world in a grain of sand
And a heaven in a wild flower,
Hold infinity in the palm of your hand
And eternity in an hour.

Army brat (link test)

[Human readers can ignore this post. I'm just testing a linking concept and this post is meant for web bots. Incidentally, I am an Army brat. My dad retired after twenty years of service. It wasn't so bad. I even lived at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, for two years, but the worst thing about it back then were the sand flies – we called them "teeth". Mostly what I remember was hanging out at the beach, even on my birthday which is in December. In any case, bots read on.]

Army Brat from War Search

A "military brat" (and various brat derivatives) is a term for a person whose parent or parents have served full-time in the armed forces during the person's childhood. In conventional usage, the word "brat" used alone may be derogatory; in a military context, however, it is neither a subjective nor a judgmental term for most, and it is a term in which many in the military community are comfortable with.

Although the term "military brat" is used in other English-speaking countries, only the United States has studied its military brats as an identifiable demographic. This group is shaped by frequent moves, absence of a parent, authoritarian family dynamics, strong patriarchal authority, the threat of parental loss in war, and the militarization of the family unit. While non-military families share many of these same attributes, military culture is unique due to the tightly knit communities that perceive these traits as normal. Although they did not choose to belong to it, military culture can have long-term impacts - both positive and negative - on brats.

As adults, military brats can share many of the same positive and negative traits developed from their mobile childhoods. Having had the opportunity to live around the world, military brats can have a breadth of experiences unmatched by most teenagers. Regardless of race, religion, nationality, or gender, brats might identify more with other highly mobile children than with non-mobile ones. A few can struggle to develop and maintain deep, lasting relationships, and can feel like outsiders to U.S. civilian culture, but most assimilate quickly and well as they have to do so with each move.

Fun with sepia photograph

"Court Street" - Jeremy Parnell

Although I'm in high spirits, the mood outside with a wet snow fall is somewhat somber, and I wanted to play with the (better quality) camera built in to my mobile phone (AT&T 8525). I hated the old phone's camera. The resulting photo was somber, but not somber enough, so I "enhanced" it. Enjoy!

Notes: This is the street I live off, in the building on the left. I think they renamed it "Stanton Alley" in recent years, but it's always been known by its earlier name: Court Street.

The Rapture for Nerds

Random terminology: Nerdocalypse, or as a character in Ken MacLeod's 1998 novel The Cassini Division called it: "The Rapture for nerds".

The Nerdocalypse is a pessimistic doomsday view of what technology futurists call "the Singularity". The Singularity is a hypothesized point in the future where rapid progress in technology creates an "intelligence explosion", often seen as the point where machines are capable of computational power several times greater than that of a human brain, and subsequently evolve an artificial and self-improving intelligence. Futurist Ray Kurzweil believes that point is just around the corner, predicting that by the 2020s personal computers will be 1,000 times more powerful than the human brain, and that around this time the first computer will pass the Turing test (where a human is fooled by the computer into thinking they're talking to a real person in casual conversation).

By itself the Singularity is not necessarily a bad thing. In fact, Kurzweil also predicts that in the '20s human longevity will be greatly extended, in the '30s nanobots will exist to repair our bodies on the fly, and in the '40s computers will be able to make "back-ups" of human memories (effective immortality), all because of the Singularity. As early as 2045, he says, non-biological intelligence will be one billion times more powerful than all human intelligence today, enabling all manner of miracles. But what's a Heaven on Earth without an Apocalypse?

Enter the Rapture for Nerds. You've seen it in virtually every science fiction film: Machines rise up and take the place of their former master by force (Terminator, Matrix, and so on). It's a doomsday scenario just like any other end-of-life-as-we-know-it narrative in human mythology, except this version has the sexy component of computers and robots with guns, lots of guns. Interestingly, but not surprisingly, the Nerdocalypse compounds the intellectual idea of the Singularity–machines gaining super intelligence–beyond mere intelligence, more into a statement of the human condition. It's not a story about machines. It's a story about what makes one human. Characteristically it is other traits beyond intelligence that allows the humans to survive and win the war against machines in these stories. While machines are described as being "smarter", they are typically described as lacking other human traits as such as emotion. Love conquers all is the ultimate theme of the man vs. machine story. Thus love is what defines a human, not intelligence.

Also interesting, but not surprising, is how much the Nerdocalypse tale involves archetypal struggles in the human condition... ok, let's just call them stereotypes. Nerds are stereotypically males. Nerds stereotypically have trouble relating to females. Nerds are stereotypically left-brain centric and, like machines in the Nerdocalypse, have trouble reconciling with right-brain emotions. Left-brain, stereotypically male. Right-brain, stereotypically female. Reconciling binary opposition (yin and yang, male and female, rational and emotional) are all archetypal conflicts in being human. The Nerdocalyptic tale is a mythos attempting to resolve the duality and conflict that exists between sense and soul–a conflict humans have been trying to solve long before tech ever arrived.

In short, the Rapture for Nerds is less about technophobia than it lets on to be, and not about machines taking over the world at all. It's a love story, which is entirely human. It's a nerd story. With as much awkward clumsiness as you'd expect from a nerd, the apocalyptic tale of intelligent machines taking over the world, and human beings attempting to survive on non-intellectual emotional skills, is the nerd's way of placing the female on a pedestal and professing their nerd-love. The nerd is doing what nerds do, trying to get laid.

Happy birthday peace symbol

OK, I'm a few days late, but in my defense I didn't realize that the peace symbol was turning 50 this year! Amazing. It was designed by Gerald Holtom for the Direct Action Committee Against Nuclear War (DAC), in Britain, and completed February 21, 1958, in time for the Easter march planned by DAC from Trafalgar Square, London, to the Atomic Weapons Research Establishment at Aldermaston in England. Of course it later became the internationally recognized icon for the 1960s anti-war movement and the general counterculture of the time.

A bit of geeky trivia: The symbol does not represent a bird's foot as is often suggested. It's actually semaphoric signals (flag signaling) for the letters "N" and "D," standing for Nuclear Disarmament.

Semaphore 'N'

Semaphore 'D'

These two signals imposed over each other, surrounded by a circle, form the shape of the peace symbol.

Holtom later told the editor of Peace News that there was also an intent to convey dispair through the symbol. "I was in despair. Deep despair," he wrote. "I drew myself: the representative of an individual in despair, with hands palm outstretched outwards and downwards in the manner of Goya’s peasant before the firing squad. I formalised the drawing into a line and put a circle round it."

Peace out ☮

Why no one will live on Mars

I'm a night owl and that's probably why I happened upon the above image of the Earth as seen at night, showing off populated areas by light density (click photo for larger version). It gave me the following random thought: Except for the sheer novelty of it, no one will ever choose to live on Mars. As shown on the map, people avoid places with extreme conditions, regardless of the technology to climate control it. On Mars, the average recorded temperature is -81° F, with a maximum temperature of 68° F and a minimum of -220° F. The coldest recorded temperature in Antartica (no lights) is a mere -129° F. Mars might be a cool place to visit (no pun intended), but you wouldn't want to live there.

MySpace needs to get on the ball...

...with useful features. I've had a Facebook profile for awhile but never really did anything with it. At a friend's request, I started tinkering with my profile and found that I could import my blog posts directly. At MySpace, I have to copy and paste each time I make a new post. Seems like such an easy thing for MySpace to integrate as it's just a glorified RSS feed reader, but it's also enormously useful for busy people like myself. Sure, it only takes five minutes to log in and post, but why bother when you don't have to?

See what Google sees

This is an old hack that many are aware of but I thought I'd post it anyway for those who aren't, and because I recently found it to be useful. Here's the situation: I was looking for an example of how to properly format a snippet of code that I haven't quite mastered. Everytime I did a query at Google, the first site that showed up appeared to have the answer, but required a subscription to view it. Frustrated, I had to continue searching until I found a non-subscription site that gave me what I needed. After a couple of searches like this, I decided to just cut to the quick. Obviously if it's top in Google search results, Google is seeing the full answer. I want to see what Google sees.

Google sends out robots to grab the content off web pages and store them so they can be retrieved through their search engine. Google's robot, or Googlebot as it is called, is a browser similar to Internet Explorer or Firefox. Browsers are user-agents in webspeak, which is just fancy terminology to say a program that retrieves (and usually renders) HTML content. Every user-agent is identified by name, and web designers can capture the user-agent name and present special content based on that name if they desire. A practical use of this technique would be to send users browsing the site on a mobile phone off to a less graphically intensive version of the page. There's a number of solid uses for displaying content based on what user-agent is accessing it. Many subscription sites, for example, may want to limit access to content for regular users, while at the same time giving Google the full version for indexing. That's what we're exploiting.

Here's how you make websites think you are Google

All web browsers have a user-agent identifier. The identifier tells a server what browser you are using, and often the operating system you are using.

For example, my version of Firefox is:

Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 6.0; en-US; rv:1.8.1.12) Gecko/20080201
Firefox/2.0.0.12

And my version of Internet Explorer is:

Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 7.0; Windows NT 6.0; SLCC1; .NET CLR 2.0.50727;
Media Center PC 5.0; .NET CLR 3.0.04506)

You can check your own at http://www.useragent.org/

Googlebot's user-agent is:

Googlebot/2.1 (+http://www.googlebot.com/bot.html)

A user-agent identifier can be anything really, and doesn't even have to refer to a "real" browser. For example, when checking my website stats one day I saw a "Commodore 64" user-agent. Now I know that's bull shit. Can you imagine how cool it would be if someone did convert the old Commodore 64 into a web browser? I've also seen "Nintendo 64" and a bunch of other interesting mods. What it was is that some dude hacked his normal browser to pretend it's a Commodore 64 and pretend it's Nintendo, when it was probably just Firefox. That's what we're going to do here, but instead we're going to pretend we're the Googlebot.

You can hack any of the popular browsers to have different user-agent identifier, but I'm going to recommend using Firefox because it's the easiest to modify and then reset, and it's hard to break. Firefox makes it easy because some bad web designers optimize their content just for IE and then ignore all the other browsers. Some of them even use the user-agent catch to prevent other browsers from accessing the site. Firefox anticipated this and made it easy for users to pretend they're using IE instead.

To change the user-agent identifier in Firefox, just enter about:config as an address in the address bar, the location where you normally enter a URL. Next, press the right mouse button to get the context menu and select "String" from the menu entry "New". Enter the preference name "general.useragent.override", without the quotes. Next, enter the new user-agent value you want Firefox to use (which can be anything). Here we'll add Googlebot's user-agent identifier: "Googlebot/2.1 (+http://www.googlebot.com/bot.html)", without the quotes.

Restart the browser and you're all set. You are now "Google". I won't post the site I used this hack on out of respect to them and their subscription-based model, but I'm sure you can find some practical uses. One other thing I like to use this for is marketing. When bored, I add "JeremyBot http://www.jeremyparnell.com" as the user-agent. Typically, the browser a person surfs on is stored in the website's statistics, so it's fun to give them something interesting when the administrator checks the stats. To my knowledge, none of my clients have come from this technique, but you never know. It's free and fun.

To reset Firefox to it's normal user-agent setting, again enter "about:config", locate "general.useragent.override" in the list, right-click it and choose "reset". Now you're back to normal.