Author: Tim Jarrett

Hating your customers, part (n + 1) : Anti Deep Linking

Wired: Site Barks About Deep Link. Jeez, what is it with these people? “No, go away!” says the Dallas Morning News. “Don’t link to our stories! We don’t want people to be able to find what we’ve written!”

I think that the New York Times through their partnership with UserLand has shown a much more enlightened mode of operating—if you want to build a reputation, make your content more visible, not less. But then, that’s why they are the Times and the others are the Dallas Morning News.

Oh, and by the way, here are some deep links to the DMN articles. The same deep links that got BarkingDog.com in trouble. Link them from your site, won’t you? Let’s push back on this one a little.
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Hating your customers, part n

Slashdot: Turner CEO: “PVR Users are Thieves”. Why are users of Personal Video Recorders such as the TiVo criminals?

“Because of the ad skips…. It’s theft. Your contract with the network when you get the show is you’re going to watch the spots. Otherwise you couldn’t get the show on an ad-supported basis. Any time you skip a commercial or watch the button you’re actually stealing the programming.”

Anyone out there remember signing a contract with the network? Obnoxious question: did the cable industry hear from the music industry that heaping abuse on their customers was good for business?

Serious question: Does watching TV really constitute an implied contract? If so, my TV set stays off starting today.

The wheels of law grind slowly…

…but exceedingly fine. Washington Post: Judge Rejects Jailing of Material Witnesses: Ruling Imperils Tool in Sept. 11 Probe. Since September 11, Ashcroft’s Justice Department has been throwing people in jail who are not accused of any crime “to guarantee that [they] will testify before a grand jury.”

Thank goodness for those “unelected judges” who keep sticking their nose into the law and upholding niceties of American justice like “probable cause.”
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Rocking for Mother Earth

Just got back from the 2002 Earth Fest at the Hatch Shell in Boston. Johnny A, Garbage, Lisa Loeb, Midnight Oil, and Bonnie Raitt. I’m a bit sunburned and dehydrated, but happy.

Garbage played a short set, maybe seven songs, but rocked pretty well. Lisa Loeb seemed to play on forever. I’m sort of a fan, but I had to agree when my friend Carie said to me, “She tries to sound really happy, but she’s got all these Alanis Morrisette lyrics.” “Yeah,” I said, “She’s like what if Alanis went to Mt. Holyoke.”

Midnight Oil rocked my world. I had forgotten that there was a period of time, starting around 1987 or 1988, when I listened to this band quite a lot. The CDs are long gone but the band is still going strong. One of our friends, a banker-to-be from Europe, was enjoying the show. He confessed, “I used to be really into this band, but then I used to be a Communist too.”

I was too tired to take in much Bonnie Raitt; when I found myself almost falling asleep I decided it was time to head back. Good show, though, and well worth the money I didn’t pay for it (yeah, it was a free show!).

The weekend is here

Lisa is home from a business trip. We’re about to check out Mamma Maria, a restaurant that we’ve lived up the street from for a year now and have never been to. Tomorrow I’m going to see Midnight Oil and Garbage, among others, for free. That’s about it for me. Hopefully I’ll have more blogging soon.

A cappella in the NYT? Quick, call our publicist

New York Times: Campuses Echo With the Sound of a Cappella. It’s true, it’s all true.

But it’s not new. I graduated from Virginia in 1994, and in the time I was there the scene went from four groups (Virginia Gentlemen, Virginia Belles, Hullabahoos, and Sil’Hooettes) to six with the addition of the New Dominions and the Academical Village People, not counting the “graduate and professional school groups” (there was a group at the Med school whose name, shamefully, I can’t remember).

Now I’m directing a young group at the Sloan School of Management, the E-52s. In many ways our group is more typical. We don’t have 50 or 60 people trying out; we don’t sing in championships or Avery Fisher Hall. We just hang out and sing and have fun. And joke about singing songs like Radiohead’s “You and Whose Army” or the Velvet Underground’s “Rock and Roll” a cappella. And occasionally we stop joking and start learning a song or two.
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Brent, here it is…

Brent says that doing a Cocoa weblog editor “should be a piece of cake.” Maybe he and I should get together. Manila Envelope, after all, is AppleScript Studio, and that’s Cocoa with some AppleScript to glue it together.

What about it, Brent? Want to lend some Cocoa knowledge and help out?

Not too busy to rock

I’ve been a bit quiet the last few days because I’ve been getting the Sloan E-52s ready to rock the house. Our Spring Jam is May 9 and we just signed one of the best MIT a cappella groups, the MIT/Wellesley Toons, as our guests.

I’m really excited about this show. It will culiminate more than a year of hard work for me as director of the group and a lot of sweat on the part of the group members. Plus we’ll be doing an a cappella arrangement I did of a Velvet Underground song…but I won’t tell you which one. (Hint: you’ve seen it on this page today.) After I graduate I’ll have to start making some of my arrangements available over the web; a lot of them will never be performed because they’re too weird.

Listening day

Happiness is a new Elvis Costello record and finally having Yankee Hotel Foxtrot in my hands. EC: return to form. So far, with the exception of the song with samples, sounds a lot like “Brutal Youth.” Wilco: it’s a miracle the album came out at all, what with all the mess around its release. More later. Must listen, must listen.

Zoe:email::Radio:Web?

Check out this person’s Zoe. Then think about it a lot. What does it mean to have a highly indexed mail store? For a technology with as high a signal to noise ratio as email, a lot. Cross platform, browser based interface (personal web server a la Radio, this one in front of a fully functional email server and a highly indexed mail database). Early beta still. But a lot of promise.
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