Controversy! So, This American Life, the astoundingly good public radio show, finally got around to ditching the irredeemable RealAudio format for its online offerings and put everything up as mp3s. Geeks, doing what they do, immediately created podcast feeds out of this newfound bounty. Then the trouble began.

TAL seems to be run by nice and generous folks, but they sell their episodes through iTunes and Audible.com. They also give royalties to their contributors and the folks they license music from (they have good taste in music). These entanglements mean that they can't endorse the free downloading of permanent copies of their shows — although they seem to be okay with old episodes being streamed off of their website (they wrapped the new mp3s in m3u playlist files; for the non-tech-savvy, this would conceal the downloadability of the underlying mp3s and appear to be a stream-based offering).

TAL has begun contacting the folks who put up the podcast feeds and politely asking them to take their feeds down. The feed maintainers have all complied, so far as I know. But folks aren't uniformly happy about this, or convinced that TAL is unambiguously in the right. BoingBoing has been operating a clearinghouse for the resulting discussion. See here, here, here and here. Folks seem to be backing off due to their fondness for the show, but the copyfighting contingent isn't particularly happy.

That sums up my position pretty well, too. I'm conflicted about this. I love This American Life and I want it to survive. And, after reading this glowing profile, I'm pretty much ready to pledge my undying allegiance to Ira Glass.

On the other hand, I don't really believe in the idea that content producers have a right to restrict how their work is consumed after it's been given away in one format. Consumers shouldn't be begrudged the right to time-shift programming and consume it as they see fit. That's the underlying idea behind DRM, and it'll produce an incredibly irritating system for interacting with our culture if it's allowed to take hold.

So what to do? Compromise — and be discreet. The dopes who submitted their homebrew TAL feed to the iTunes Music Store had precisely the wrong idea. If TAL doesn't want other folks to decide their distribution system on their behalf, I suppose that's fine. So long as they don't bother those of us who quietly make use of technology to more easily enjoy their show, everyone should be happy. I'll admit that it's not a very democratic solution, but it seems like the best one available at the moment.

And on that note, if you happen to have a web hosting account available to you that can run PHP scripts, you might be interested in the one I whipped up this afternoon (you'll probably want to secure it from prying eyes). Also: shhh!

check out this photo from miss andnotu. i've been obsessed with it since she posted it. it might be my favorite photo...EVER. it simultaneously breaks my heart and makes me happy.

second fave, of course, is the crazy apple car.

i hope my brother's sub base in san diego is a wee bit more welcoming than this freaky russian one. (this link and the one below via waxy)

can you believe it?

just a note to say that i see that cappseus has been uploading pictures from his fine, fine trip to chicago at the end of april. (what kind of flickr delay is that, anyways? i start getting the shakes if i don't upload stuff to flickr in under eight hours.) this shot? we're probably posting to effing zunta or something. regardless, it's what we look like 75% of the time.

the party? was teh awesome. a smaller crowd than we were anticipating showed up, but that was actually good because a) more time to talk to wonderful people and b) lots of leftover beer that we'll need help killing the rest of the week. highlights of the evening included seeing all the great regular zuntaparty folks plus a few new faces, getting to know some of the lovely echoditto crowd that have made tommy so happy these past months and meeting the absolutely charming becks, one of my favorite bloggers. i mean, any night that ends around 4:30am with a bottle of whiskey being passed around and a rousing episode of karaoke revolution can't be a bad one, right?

emily was particularly gung ho with tommy's camera last night so you can expect some flickr action soon. thanks so much to everybody who came out!

UPDATE: drew comes through with the first photos.

UPDATE II: here's tommy's set.

tommy and i had the pleasure of attending ryan and lisa's wedding last night at the arts club of washington, and it was looooovely. everything about the ceremony was wonderful, including the vows that each of them wrote, which i usually pshaw. but tommy pointed out that it helps vows if you happen to be excellent writers. anyway, they both looked gloriously happy, the arts club was a beautiful setting, lisa was beautiful, the dinner was incredibly delicious, the cake (which was actually artfully arranged cupcakes from cake love) was actually....really good. i guess when you do let them sit out long enough they are, in fact, yummy, contrary to my previous thinking. the open bar was very open, and the dancing was fun. and one of my favorite parts of the evening? ryan, on his wedding day, was kind enough to bring me a stack of dcist temporary tattoos. god bless the boy.

photos here. frankly, a lot of them are really terrible - some because i didn't want to blind everyone with flash, some because i went on to get kinda drunk. but peruse freely!

my days lately:

aforementioned bear suits...yup.

pretty sailboats.

sand on the beach.

rehearsals in the forum.

trying on found necklaces.

packing.

being incredibly, incredibly sad about leaving chicago.

sigh.

i also just uploaded a bunch of photos to my flickr stream - most of me looking like a drunk ass, as usual, and i can't imagine you really want to see those. but i was walking around downtown chicago this afternoon on my way to a dinner party, and took some shots of that. the location of the dinner party was, i also thought, photo-worthy, as it was the corner condo of a building next to the drake hotel on lake shore drive with the most amazing view. here's the set of the evening.

I've finally got all of my photos from the beach uploaded — you can find them here, if you're so inclined.

And of course, I'd be remiss if I didn't link to DOG V. CRAB, the video sensation that's sweeping the internet. The two combatants both struggled for victory. The real winner? The viewing public.

The video portrays just a small part of the overall fight. Credit to Genevieve for capturing as much she did; Wreck had already cornered a ghost crab behind some fencing earlier in the day, but nobody expected him to find another one. He sniffed and jabbed for a while as the crab warily snapped at his nose — I thought it could go either way at that point. But one quick lunge from Wreck wrapped things up decisively.

because i don't have enough to do as it is, i suddenly got the urge to upload all of my photos that live on the blog to flickr. just for safety's sake. the first ones to go are some taken in italy over the past three or four years - you can see the beginnings of my uploading effort here. they're pretty disorganized, though.

sigh. what did we even do before flickr?

UPDATE: there are just a crapload of new pictures up there, so you may as well click through on all of them. this one is a favorite. I LOVE TED LEO.

what happens when some medill folks head to the sketchiest bar in evanston on cinco de mayo? well, actually, not that much. mostly they drink a ton of beer and play pool badly.

photographic evidence that the two lads were here and duly squired.

the weekend also provided the opportunity to meet up with several unfogged folks and dan from iconoduel, and everyone was wonderful. have i mentioned how much i love the internet?

the only crappy thing was the sucktastic experiences both tommy and kriston had getting out of the city. kriston's account is here; tommy took a cab this morning at 5am to ostensibly catch his 6:30am flight...which ended up being instead at something like 11:30am. fabulous.

so a lot of the el stops as you go along the purple line up to evanston have murals hung on the platform walls. i don't know who commissioned them, who painted them, or when they were put up, but they all have one grand unifying factor: they are so awful, both in painting and in subject matter, that they make your eyes bleed. but i think this one, at the dempster stop, is the worst offender:

what in the world is going on here? we've got a floating rhienoceros head, an enormous evil rattlesnake, weird silhouettes and faces, and some landscape that looks like a second-grader painted it. what exactly might have been going through the artist's mind during the creation of this shot? the answer is probably: lots and lots of bad acid.

so some brave classmates and i attended a a milwaukee brewers game yesterday, where the following things happened: the brewers tied an MLB record for the most homeruns hit in one inning (five); we went on an epic hunt for wisconsin custard; and catherine drank 32 beers. the backhanded compliment of the day? from a 22-year-old: "you sure can hold your liquor for somebody who's been out of undergradute for so long!" yes, i'm cementing my reputation as the old lush, thanks very much. anyway, it was a rollicking good time. photos may be perused here.

if you're into photos taken from a weird perspective from a boat, or stained glass windows, i think i might have just the thing!

You can watch the progress of today's immigration protest via DDOT's traffic cameras. Looks like the crowd has made its way down 16th to Scott Circle as of now (3:50 PM).

We have to talk, fellow children of the internet. I think that, by and large, you're all doing a bang-up job of building out this new digital commons. It'll soon come to define our planet's culture for the foreseeable future, and we're off to what I would call a solid, monkey-punching start.

But we do have a big problem. The images, people. Many of you abuse them shamelessly, as if you somehow don't know or care about the difference between a GIF and JPEG. I have a hard time even conceiving of this possibility, to be honest. But since I run into this a lot, both with new DCist contributors and with submitted press releases, I thought I might as well write something up explaining how different graphical formats work, and what situations you should use them in.

It turns out that the replacement Sidekick I got a few weeks ago has a much better camera than the old one. Not resolution-wise, mind you, just not-having-a-purple-tinge-on-one-side-wise. Of course, crappiness wouldn't have stopped me from foisting these shots on an unsuspecting world. But now, even if you find them boring, they're undeniably not that purple.

First, barbeque-sauce-shopping: harder than you'd think.

Canadian Club? Are you sure that isn't a brand of terrible whiskey bought by high school kids? Perhaps this sauce is a horrifying byproduct of the distillation process. I just don't know. But Canada seems to be asking for us to put our BBQ trust in them. I'm sorry guys, but you haven't earned it. Nobody talks about Quebec-style ribs.

I can imagine the meeting behind this label perfectly:

Person A: We need to sell people on the great taste our new recipe.
Person B: Yeah, but I'm worried about losing people who like the taste the way it is.
Person A: Hmm. Yeah. Seems like we're kind of at odds here.

Six dry-erase-fume-filled hours later

Person B: ... So yeah, I totally think we can say that.
Person A: Yeah, when you think about it, flavor and taste are really two distinct things.
Person B: Right.
Person A: Right. Totally. Okay, great, let's get Person C to do some comps.

"Celebrity Cleaning"? "By Referral Only"? I'm mystified. What, do you think they show up in, like, costumes? I'm thinking it's like in L.A. Confidential, but with mops. Huh. I honestly don't know what celebrity I'd most like to have clean my windows. Seems like the kind of question one should have an answer for.

spell with flickr. this makes me happy.

catherine.

i wrote about the weirdness/awesomeness of tilt-shift photography a little while back. now, the flickr blog points me towards a whole group dedicated to the effect, which makes real-life subjects look like tiny, creepy miniatures. it's super neat.

My SMS project remains in limbo — the Gammu project maintainer and I have been emailing back and forth, but I'm not optimistic about getting the software working with my phone. Most likely I'll have to buy a cheap, old, maximally-compatible model off of Ebay. Oh well. I'll give him another week.

Other projects are also frustrating: my VGA to NTSC converter has mysteriously died, putting the planned Linux reinstall on hold until I collect a monitor. I owe everyone a final Python tutorial, but more for the sake of completeness than anything else — I think I underestimated the scope of the project. I'm not feeling up to it quite yet.

So, lacking anything immediate that I can work on (or, more accurately, that I want to work on), I'm thinking about learning ActionScript, Flash's built-in language. Mostly I just want to screw around with Flashr and write something that talks to Flickr — a little slideshow for the sidebar that automatically grabs new photos from Catherine & my photostreams, maybe? That'd be kind of neat.

Anyway, in the course of looking through other people's code I came across SimpleViewer. It's not what I want — it's a full-featured photo gallery, not a sidebar widget. Besides, what I'm after most is a learning exercise. But it is a pretty slick slideshow app. And it's free! Any photographers out there (I know there are at least a couple) could do worse than to use this on their portfolio sites. Those of us unconcerned with publication rights and hotlinking ought to eschew the razzle-dazzle and stick with permalink-able formats, of course.

a few of my photos from the trip to d.c. are up, if you're into that sort of thing.

Weird, weird, weird.

Via Emily, Justin, Metafilter, Internet, France, etc.

tommy's got a bunch of great photos up. unfortunately, my flight was delayed so i missed all of olivia mancini and the housemates' set. i would like to say i had an opinion of the hard tomorrows, but frankly, i was too busy being one of those annoying people who talks at concerts because i was so eager to catch up with everybody. so i didn't really pay attention. but everyone else thought they were excellent. hooray!

these photos are double good: they're adorable, and they really, really make me want a chocolate eclair.

(via waxy)

This was projected on the outside of the YMCA tonight, as the radio station held an "open house" in the lobby. I really think I should get a discount on my membership dues for this. I go to the gym in an increasingly feeble attempt to feel like a badass. It's not going to help matters if my chosen location for manly endeavors starts trying to associate itself with John Mayer.

normally, knowing about negative two cents' worth of art, i leave all the linkage and commentary to the capps (happy birthday, by the way, old man! join my ancient ranks!). but i recently came across two photographers whose stuff is, i think, pretty awesome, so i wanted to put them here:

the bizarre/beautiful child portraiture of loretta lux

creepily fake-looking aerial photographs of cities and other structures by olivo barbieri (via waxy)

it goes without saying that whatever shows up on the flickr blog is going to be a good shot, but this one is particularly beautiful.

my flickr contact mafaldablue posted a beautiful set of photos of matera, which is one of my favorite places in italy. it's the cave town. you can read some info i've wriitten about matera here, and see some photos i took here (captions include "you've got dead monk on your ass," so you know it's worth it).

my new year's eve photo set is up. there are captions, so click through on them!

updated my flickr stream with some holiday photos, if you're into that sort of thing. yay christmas!

last night was my grandfather's 81st birthday. he and my grandmother (who celebrated her 81st a month ago) are in town for the holidays. so my family and my uncle's family got together to celebrate the only proper way: with a crapload of food and a bouche de noel sent straight from the devil:

hello, i'm the bouche de noel elf of death, and i'm going to ride this candle like a rocket straight into your face.

the bouche was so tasty, as much as the elf scared me. you can see a set of photos of it here.

today involves some last-minute shopping (i thought so smugly i was set, but i should have known better), maybe some viewing of the redskins game, and then another big ass meal. merry christmas to you and yours!

Yesterday we went to Pentagon City Mall to do some Christmas shopping. I was a miserable failure. All I managed to buy was a bag of chocolates for Catherine, then a stack of DVD-R blanks and an SD card reader for myself. But I now have plans! Good plans — no, very good plans. In fact, I'd go so far as to characterize them as some of my best laid plans. Doubtless everything will go flawlessly.

But on the off chance that it doesn't, it will be because I don't deserve for it to. Christmas shopping is a karmic investment, and yesterday — since we were shopping in the middle of a weekday — simply wasn't bad enough to earn me a happy holiday. Normally my yuletide mall experience transitions smoothly and rapidly from laserlike focus; to fatigued despair; to agoraphobic dread; to bottomless hatred for my fat fellow consumers as they amble mindlessly into my way, their meanderings every bit as slow and pointless as the path of a child's bowling ball as it slides down a lane with closed-off gutters. It's not that my own materialistic existence is any less existentially depressing, it's just that it involves walking quickly and in straight lines.

But like I said: there wasn't as much mall-based misanthropy this year. I didn't get anything but pictures, though.

Who else thinks L'Occitane changed the spelling just so they don't have to give Borf a cut?

If someone told me that "Dawson Fit" means something unrelated to the television show, I would probably believe them. Still, surely there are other ways to express whatever it is that "Dawson Fit" expresses. But no — the sickness deeply rooted in the brainpans of the Banana Republic corporate office chose to go with "Dawson". Man, I hate that store. The clothes are fine, but the aesthetic is strange. J Crew: comfortably in the "look, my dad can fire your dad!" aesthetic, it can be safely ignored. Gap: expresses the "I wish I wished I was a rock star" ethos/hypocrisy that fits me so well. What is BR's driving theme? Clothes that won't make you look out of place in the hi-tech, totalitarian city-states of the not-too-distant future? That's the best I can come up with.

I desperately want someone to read this, head to Barnes & Noble, and make a terrible mistake.

Today: Best Buy, aka "throwing money at the problem". Wish me luck.

if you're sick of cute butterstick, you can go to this site, devoted exclusively to photos of adorable little animals. ben wolfson, are you in the habit of checking out kitten pics?

after tommy posted that enormous, terrifying, veiny-handed, panda-psychosis-induced photo of me below (thanks boyfriend!) i feel compelled to link to my flickr stream, where just this afternoon i uploaded a backlog of photos of me and my eminently photogenic family and fat doggie from thanksgiving. i can't believe my brother's in the navy and my sister will head to uva soon. lord, i'm old!

tommy, charles and i hit up the butterstick exhibit today, and boy howdy, it was great. not that i'd have expected anything else. we had to wait in line for about ten minutes, and there was palpable tension between the 12:20 group (us) and the 12:30 group when it seemed apparently that some from the later group might try to sneak ahead of us devotees who DESERVED TO BE FIRST. i thought a panda riot might break out.

anywhere, when we got in the viewing room, butterstick had apparently ensconced himself behind a rock, impossible to even get a glimpse of, and the guide told us to wait for a few minutes for he would surely come out. my heart sank when nothing happened, because i definitely thought the zoo would shrug and say, tough shit, panda lovers, you'll have to come back another time because we are sure not as hell going to disturb our goldmine of panda fur from his beauty rest. but they did! yay! a zoo worker came in, scooped up butterstick and brought him to the front of the glass for a walk-by viewing. the collective "OOOOHHHH" that escaped from everybody's mouths, from the 3-year-olds to the grandpas, was truly adorable. i told tommy that if only we'd send baby pandas to iraq, everything would be hunky dory there in a few days. then the zoo worker placed him on a rock where he rolled about and collapsed his head in his paws, like, "holy CHRIST, these people, with the camera flashing, do they EVER FUCKING STOP?" then he rolled himself off the rock into a pile of hay and went to hide behind a different corner. butterstick was sleepy. we all went to the panda video monitor station and watched him on the tv as he tried to find a comfy position to nap in. he was beyootiful. then i went and bought a butterstick magnet from the shop, though i could have had my choice of 32 billion iterations of the stuffed panda. not to mention butterstick xmas cards. too bad i already bought mine.

after the panda viewing tommy and i went a little crazy and visited the great apes, the small animals and the reptiles, along with the bonkers toddler elephant who spent the entire afternoon maniacally playing with a hollow metal ball chained to the wall. guess things get lonely when you're not the adored baby panda. aw.

UPDATE: unrelated, sort of, but the flickrblog pointed me towards these amazing monkey photos - go here, enter the site, and click on the monkey photo. go through them all - they're really profoundly strange and beautiful.

Yet more content! Sort of. I've finally gotten around to dumping some pictures onto Flickr. Including:

• Pictures of the Nice Jenkins/Truman Sparks show at the Grog and Tankard.


• A set from last week's attempt at football at Meridian Hill Park (about which I've been meaning to write an embarassing account).


• And of course the much sought-after "miscellaneous other junk".

the one good thing about this?

getting to wear this (purchased over the summer in florence. in fact, i pretty much based my entire decision to move to chicago on the fact that i own this hat):

i am fully aware of the ridiculosity, but am also fully aware that it feels like i'm wearing an awesome, warm, baby panda on my head.

(when in reality is really just a baby rabbit and cow)

Alright — I think everything is working. Not only are we on MT 3.2, but I've upgraded from using the filesystem-based Berkeley DB to MySQL. What does this mean? Basically nothing. But backing stuff up will now be marginally easier. Also worth noting is that 3.2 is supposed to cost money, but I somehow downloaded it from Movable Type's website without them remembering to ask for a credit card. And the download shows up in my account "purchases" section and everything! So: shhh!

In other news, Charles bought a fish. We're not naming him until he proves he can make it through the weekend without dying.