In the event that we should become multi-millionaires in the future, we want to make sure we know what we’re going to do with the money.  The following is an ongoing list of major things on our list:

Establish a Commune

And by commune, you have to understand my interpretation of the word.  The usual ideas just don’t cut it – my idea of a modern commune is little more than a community of friends living in close proximity, each generally having some arcane talent.  Other than that, everybody maintains their own job.  The added benefit is that you have a community of actual friends in close proximity to help with things.  Think about some of these nicer neighborhoods going up that include parks and community facilities like a club house or picnic area.  That’s where the millions of dollars come in – someone has to pony up the money to put it together.

Establish an Olde World Arts and Crafts Guild

Look into America’s early years after the Declaration of Independence.  As was popular in Europe, guilds popped up all over the place.  Funny thing was, they never seemed to last.  The guilds cranked out some epic-level work, but rarely made the profit needed to keep the their doors open.  The Industrial Revolution was what put them out completely.  Mechanized art, while not for the purists, was the way of the future and a clear winner in the end.  Revival after revival, it was only when the the passion was washed out by insufficient funds that the guilds closed their doors.  An arts and crafts guild would work today, but only if I could poor money into it endlessly.

Create an Elderly Care Facility that Cares

Most elderly care facilities – the ones that the average senior citizen could afford – are clever facades on the same old song and dance.  There are too many horror stories to count as you look across the gamut and research their “customer appreciation.”  A big reason for this is funding.  The hired help is majority volunteer, public service workers, or minimum wage.  When you’re not paying well, it’s hard to attract good help, but that’s just what you need.

My wife is the one with real passion for this one.  She would love to pour many into a retirement home that is treated more like a spa than assisted living.  It would have to be a non-profit venture with backing.  The key is to rally support within the area communities, government, and of course, mad money.

Build the Lake Lanier Boardwalk District

How cool would it be to have a boardwalk district on Lake Lanier?  I envision long wooden decking, boat slips, a beach, and fantastic night life and retail shopping.  There should be bars with karaoke, an outdoor stage, a gallery, and much more.  Normally, this kind of thing wouldn’t need so much money to keep it up, but I think I’d have to pay off the Corps. of Engineers a hefty sum to allow it!

Create a Seafood/Freshwater Fish Restaurant on the Lake

Along with that whole boardwalk idea, you have to have some big foundations.  I purpose a fish restaurant out on the water.  It would be awesome to have its center piece being a large circle of the lake with underwater lights and sub-level glass for viewing.  Above that, have two to three stories encircling the “aquarium” for diners to look down upon.  There is some real opportunity to make a case for the environmental concerns surrounding the lake in a venue like this.

Build an Irish Pub

Another permanent resident of the boardwalk should be a good old-fashioned Irish pub.  If you know of McGuire’s in Pensacola, then your thinking along the same lines.  Good food (or bad, but traditional!) and drinks.  These relics of America’s past have always been places of fun and festivity.

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I have also recently attended a drum building workshop (mental note: blog about the workshop), and built my very first drum.  I should say, finished my very first drum shell – that is where the workshop begins.  It has been several weeks since the workshop, but I have only just been able to dedicate proper time and attention this evening to the tuning of said drum. Since I was trying somewhat to be good to my neighbors, I kept the energy attenuated.

To kick off my eager anticipation of the H2 and Thunderhead, I’ve recorded my first moments using both.  It’s completely raw and unedited.  There are also some distinctions in the three recordings that are really only meaningful to me.  Suffice it to say, I’m still working with the tuning of my drum and the use of a new electronic gadget.

Soft Saidi:[See post to access streaming content!]
Saidi, Short:[See post to access streaming content!]
Masmoudi:[See post to access streaming content!]

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I retitled it for Zazzle (Tribal to the Core), so go take a look (click the image to be taken to my zazzle.com store):

Tribal to the Core (Long Sleeve)
by

gradinDotCom

Create Custom T-Shirts On Zazzle
Browse Graphic Design T-Shirts

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Upgrading to Web 2.5
The Web 2.0 movement brought, among many other ideals, the concept of a truly “communal” Internet. We saw the entrance of communities such as MySpace, Orkut, Friendster, and of course, the blog, emerge. I maintain a regular blog and dabble in these other Internet communities, but ultimately find that they are not my thing.

What MySpace, for instance, did for me was to create a social community of friends and people with related interests. It’s a great concept, if only simple. I encountered two main problems with these solutions – set aside your particular opinion about the communities. The first, and most immediate, problem I had was that the site distracted me and my potential audience from my own blog. The other problem, something that took a little longer to become apparent, was that I was stuck into a much larger community than I was really interested in becoming “buddies” with.

My solution to these problems involves the maturation of Web 2.0 – perhaps to Web 2.5. I have heard of Web 3.0, but I don’t think the industry can make such a leap without some smaller steps in between. Web 2.5 allows the blog proprietor like myself to become part of these communities without stepping out of their home base.

The Case Study
My imagined solution looks simple at first glance. I maintain a blog. My friends maintain blogs and/or social networking profiles. I have other blogs/services out there to which I would like to drive attention. Now think of each of these things as containers to which I can subscribe, sometimes in a granular fashion. I build a collection of “friends,” “family,” and “interesting people” that I would like to have a reference to on my site. Today, you have blog rolls or even RSS feeds doing this. But what if you could access a container having someone’s profile and avatar, their blog articles, twitter feeds, and MySpace posts. From that container I can choose what I want to see, and how often I want to see it. Perhaps I just want digests. What’s more, the originator of that container can actually validate my request to subscribe to this data. They can also choose what they’ll allow me to see using templates (e.g. friends, family, co-workers), or define a custom rule just for me. The data continues to remain available through conventional means – say the RSS feed, a MySpace account, etc, but the personal container has controls.

I can extend it beyond the profile containers. Say you want to interact with your email or IM system through your blog. Think about having a single entry point to your personal web experience. The personal blog transforms into a personal dashboard with both public and private views. On the public side, you present your audience with your blog, some profile data, contact information, and perhaps a friend’s blog. Privately, you see your email, all your friends’ blogs, address book, and a calendar with your upcoming events.

There are ways to achieve most of this through conventional means, but there is no “solution” to it all. It takes a fundamental shift.

Back to WordPress
At the beginning of this post, I referred to my need for more in WordPress. WordPress utilizes a model of communal sharing already that leads me to believe that it is one of the strongest contenders to make my dream a reality. I’m jaded, of course, because I use WordPress a lot. However, I’ve also read about the WordPress.com Multi-User (MU) extension making its way to the public domain, BuddyPress. BuddyPress will make WordPress.com (and any other WP MU implementation) a community blog with integrated social networking a la MySpace. This is exactly what I’m talking about, if only on a very small scale. WordPress may have the framework to get where I want, but I still have to reach further for the over-arching API that allows WordPress to talk to social communities outside of itself. I believe WordPress has made the first move in my imagined Web 2.5.

The Solution
In brief, I imagine the final solution as being a web service that handles a centralized API for the OpenSocial, or something similar should the industry choose a better standard. Blog systems such as WordPress would have to utilize plugins to communicate with the API, but MySpace, Orkut, LinkedIn, and others would fit into the picture by being a part of OpenSocial. The custom web service would handle the “mash-up” of these different systems into a personal container. And of course, the user would manage their own container; permissions and contents.

In the end, I’d have my blog, my friends, and my choice. Web 2.0 moves forward and brings together the biggest social community ever on the Internet. Our personal sites become personal dashboards and launch points to our other interests. I think the way to Web 2.5 is clear, and someone out there is surely already working on it. You heard it here, first!

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I had originally applauded the city’s apparent progressive attitude towards new business ventures in the likes of adult novelties, though now I see this was a mistake.  Silver Stars seemed to be doing well in their inauguration into the Gainesville business community.  I know they had many customers, friends, and partners throughout the city.  Their website reports that they are still able (and encouraging people) to process online orders.  There is some glimmer of hope, I suppose, that they may be able to work out a business license through some loophole.  Should that happen, they’ll be back in business until the Council finds some other way to shut them down.

Incidentally, I’m looking through the City Ordinances trying to find the specific violation, but have been unable to do so.  If anyone can point me to the specific code, I’d appreciate it.

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• Zune Hardware:
  • Alphabet ToC Navigation in addition to click-wheel
  • Ratings categories (so I can play 4-star or 5-star music only, for instance)
  • The ability to remove songs from my “quicklist”
  • Setting EQ attributes to a song or album uniquely
  • Inline normalization
  • New category…or put a recently added link at the top of each category
  • Make playlists of video files
• Zune Software:
  • Faster *My software has long periods of unavailability, though I realize I have an over-sized library
  • Automatic playlist creation
  • Support for OGG
  • Insight into the folder monitoring – some sort of progress or status on this
  • Better album art application – album art isn’t always displayed immediately after you add it
  • Without knowing any better, I wish the album art was embedded within the ID3 tag of the file rather than being added as a hidden file in the directory
  • Perhaps support for a real database back-end – I feel the need for enterprise class media management

There were also some real problems that needed attention:

• Crashing…the software crashes, the hardware crashes. Sometimes it’s solid, but then it goes into a fit and crashes consecutively all to often. **UPDATE – I found out that the hardware is most likely crashing due to an electrical protection feature. Static electricity is not the Zune’s friend.
• Renaming/hiding MP3’s. This could be related to crashing – I’m guessing that MP3’s were being indexed and something went wrong. Then, the Zune software went and renamed a *lot* of MP3’s to their cataloged GUID and hid them. The files won’t play until I rename them back to a .mp3 extension. It will annoy me when it comes up – so far only a few of these songs have come up in my shuffle list.

In the hardware category, Microsoft did exactly zero to fulfill my wishes. The closest they came was to introduce sorting by “date added” to the software. That’s actually very helpful, but it doesn’t help me find new music on my device after I’ve left the computer. The Alphabetical ToC thing would still be cool, but I will say that the click wheel seems to be spinning songs by faster than it used to. It hasn’t bothered me as much that I can’t jump to a letter in the alphabet quickly, though it would probably make me a safer driver if this feature were added. Depending on your attitude towards the “Ratings” debate, the new software either decimated your organization, or has drug you from Ratings procrastination. I’m somewhat in the middle on this. I’m adapting quickly enough, though I had finally figured out a decent way of rating my music along the 5-star basis that helped me managing my music. The new Zune uses only a “Heart” to signify the emotion a given song lends. You love, hate it, or are indifferent. Despite the change, there is still no way to play music on the device that you’ve “Hearted” unless you create a playlist first (static). Microsoft took away the “Flag” option in the Zune hardware. I was using it a little bit, but it was so unnecessarily slow and useless that I had stopped altogether. I had hoped that the new firmware would add much needed functionality to the flagging option, but now we find it missing in action. No love lost for the old function, but I would like to see the ability to flag a song for my review back at the software. I would primarily use it as a reminder to do something with that song (e.g. add to playlist, look up artist, etc.).

The Zune software; that is, the part installed on a Windows machine for interaction with media and the device itself, is a piece of work. I mean that in two very polarized ways. Piece of Work: 1) Quality craftsmanship, exemplary; 2) opp. The worst, poorly demonstrated – syn. Piece of Shit. I may sound a little harsh, but this new software encourages me to use Microsoft’s new “Heart” ratings to express my emotions. This brings me to my earlier comment regarding the product’s shift in direction. I really get the feeling they threw the old software out and started fresh. On the love side of things, I really like the new look. While I prefer the technical features of an app to let me do all matter of evil to it (i.e. preferences, customizations, tweaks, etc.), I really do like the slimmed-down simplicity of the new Zune software. The previous software left me feeling like I should see more options, but didn’t. This software, on the other hand, gives me the impression that what I see is what I get. It took a little while to get used to – I’m still a little unfamiliar in its kid-gloves aesthetics – but I’m gaining proficiency. I also like the fact that this software appears to be running faster with fewer crashes. I haven’t had any MP3′s get renamed (and hidden) to GUID replacements. While file monitoring still doesn’t lend any insight as to the percentage complete, it does seem to run faster and more consistently.

On the negative, the functionality of the software has been grossly gimped. I am no longer able to do something as simple as edit my own ID3 tags in a simple form-based interface like before. I can’t seem to update an album against a web lookup – it happens automatically, but I don’t have finite control over the process as was given in the previous software. While I love the addition of the podcast category, I don’t much care for the level of experienced interaction given to users here. I prefer the more technical feel when it comes to podcasts. They tend to vary wildly in format and compatibility, so it seems best that I have the option of modifying URL’s, identifying what URL’s are being used, and possibly see the actual error message for a given RSS URL when the Zune software rejects it.

Ultimately, the Zune software direction has the potential of being good. I feel more like I’m using an Alpha product than something released for public consumption, but the good stuff is really good. With the negatives going against my my expectations of software for this type of work, I would actually rather use a third-party application to synch to the Zune. As I’ve stated before, MediaMonkey is my favorite (in case their developers are reading).

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Today I find the signature of the Guerrilla Tipster upon the windshield of a car in the Barnes and Noble parking lot of Duluth:

LEARN HOW TO PARK DUMB SHIT!!

The words are poignant. I only wish I could have been present when the recipient benefited from this sharing of wisdom. I’ll bet it was truly inspirational.

I’m considering having some custom stock made up with these choice words to continue the work of this Guerrilla Tipster. Perhaps with only slight grammatical adjustment:

Learn how to park, dumb shit!

…I don’t know, does a fully capitalized sentence give a sense of urgency? It certainly emotes well.

And to take the words of Ben Harper to heart, “What good is a cynic with no better plan,” some reeducation is in order. I’ve got some really brilliant ideas around this, but I should brainstorm on this to fully realize the genius. I’ll bring you more as this materializes.

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It’s my first time missing a flight. The attendant at the desk was probably expecting a volatile explosion from an irate customer, but those of you that know me know better. Pissed doesn’t begin to describe my feelings, though I am still able to rationalize my thoughts and keep cool. I contemplated taking a ride back to San Francisco to walk around while I waited, but managing luggage and time are not on my list of “good times” today. Barring sleeping on the terminal floor, I have the computer and reading materials with me to occupy my time.

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The one thing I didn’t do was create a site that would work on every browser. Unfortunately, this one was designed to work on IE 7 and Firefox 2+. I doubt you’ll get much love from previous versions of IE, though Firefox may not choke too much. At any rate, I don’t know that I’m going to spend a lot of time on making it compatible with other browses at the risk of losing functionality. I do have some minor kinks to work out, but I don’t think the average user will even notice them.

Have a look and let me know what you think – good or bad.

Cayce Terrell: Storyteller

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