Unfortunate, that the man at the board is the one in the office with unquestionably the worst handwriting [Brendan Greeley]
With new years come resolutions, and mine is the same as it was last year: to build a new radio website that encourages a community to contribute suggestions and commentary.
That’s crap, of course. My resolution was to be out of bed by six every morning, which has been honored more in the breach in these first seven days than the observance. On Wednesday and Thursday, in fact, I had to call a taxi just to get to work by nine to train the interns.
Who are awesome, by the way. New interns for January, who seem to have taken as their joint resolution to do exactly what we ask them, quickly. And awesomely. Welcome, Greta and Henry.
But things actually are happening on the site. After last year’s public consultation, I promptly printed out everyone’s suggestions, put them on my desk and started working on other stuff. On Mary’s urging, I spent a four-hour Amtrak ride (to my brother’s house in New Jersey, where I spent Christmas Eve helping him pull phone cable to his garage) laying out a plan for a new site that will work, as Chris likes to put it, “like a twenty-four hour cafe.” Three gin-and-tonics and four states later, I had four pages of sketches, refined this morning over doughnuts with the guys at the Public Radio Exchange who taught me all the things that I know about the Internet.
Next: we talk to Public Interactive, who suggested the new three-column design and who will actually have to build this thing.
Expect great things.
Brendan,
I would appreciate the ability to edit my posts. While I wouldn’t want to change the content of them, my occasional grammatical error and typo are in need of fixing. Is this taboo for the blogosphere?
anhhung: Try composing your posts on Word, or whatever your word-processor program is. After spell- and grammar-checks, cut’n'paste the post into the ‘Leave a Reply’ recepticle. (Almost) every post I’ve regretted were the ones I failed to compose in my processor program — lkie htis noe.
Oh, anhhung, I forgot: if you compose on your w-processor and add emphasis to a word or phrase using italicization, the ‘Leave a Reply’ receptacle won’t recognize or transfer the italics. You’ll have to use upper-case letters instead. Which is pretty much akin to a songwriter calling for maracas to accent a bar, only to find that the studio’s sole percussion instrument is a big ole kettledrum.
But I’m sure — well, okay, HOPEFUL — that Brendan can remedy this in the new website.
(Sorry, Coach!)
“Nikos”: I’m a thoroughgoing techtard–to me a computer is a telephone/post office, a library, and a periodicals mega-subscription for free. I’m wondering how the heck you separate words in these little boxes–whenever I make some space or a paragraph, it disappears when it’s posted. I can tell you’re not a professor of post-doc geek research, but you seem a sixth-grader to this kindergeek. Begging your indulgence, but you seemed to be offering your knowhow; and I’m tired of pooping a cubic yard of undifferentiated wordmass onto the screen. BTW, try using Q-tips on the kettledrum if your maracas are missing–I’ve found it works every time.
I would also like to be able to edit or correct my post. No matter how hard I try, there is always a mistake. Italic abilities would be great.
There should be a section on the blog that gives a tutorial about posting on this site that is not off-putting to kindergarteners.
By the way I have in the past started my comment in this box and then cut and pasted to a word document to continue and then re-pasted here and gotten a funny result. But what works for me, if I am not lazy, is to save in plaintext and transfer that here. STILL I make mistakes.
Love listening to the mp3 radio shows at work. keep up the good work, may the awesome get awesomer
Thanks, Potter. Unfortunately, I suffer from the same challenges…
Brendan, to take this 24/7 Open Source Cafe all the way, howzabout keepin’ real with an actual java ambience drifting out of people’s boxes at home? I speak of course about How Internet Odors Will Work: http://www.howstuffworks.com/internet-odor.htm (I’m more of a teas and waters type, myself, but we could work out the details later…) And as long as it’s all virtual, let’s have a full digital liquor license, too. Hey! A little hash smoke, and then munchies odors too! Say you will…
ALYB: I fear you overestimate me. I’m closer to tech- kinder than junior high. Worse, you’ve disenchanted me: all this time I thought your “cubic yard(s) of undifferentiated wordmass” was cuz you had a Falkner-esque gift for stream-of-thought brilliance.
Dang.
Anyway, presuming you’re writing in Word like me (although mine is Word 2000 for Windows ’98 grandfathered into the Windows XP upgrade) and you’re making spaces with double hits on the ‘enter’ key… well, I can only guess. All I know is that these techie wonders Mr. Gates has gotten us so addicted to are damned finicky, to say the least. It’s quite possible that not even the tech-sorcerors at Microsoft could immediately know why your cpu doesn’t give all the data of your digital script to the ROS ‘Leave A Reply’ receptacle.
Perhaps it’s your internet browser, or the browser’s settings. I’ve got AOL, which I believe means my built-in Windows MS Explorer is only partially operational when I’m online, cuz AOL uses some deviation of an old Netscape browser.
I think.
So, you could open Explorer and figit with the browser settings. Or, you could try firefox — a free download, if memory serves. Or, you could play with your word-processor settings. Or, it’s just some weird ‘no comprende English!’ between your medium and the Open Source interface. Who the hell knows?
My slightly older sister the saintly Greek goddess has very few ill wishes for anyone anywhere. She loves humanity like the Sermon on the Mount’s Jesus-character — but even SHE utterly reviles Bill Gates.
And I always take my cue from her (well, almost).
“Nikos”: Well, I can’t admire you anymore either, pal… Gosh, does the disappointment ever cease, or at least slow down? You know, that’s what really kills you eventually, because you just slowly shut down over time to avoid the hurt. I couldn’t begin to do any of what you’ve suggested, but thanks for trying. Besides, if you don’t mind the clumping, it really IS stream-(more like inflammably-polluted Cuyahoga River)-of-(semi-)consciencious, and it’s really just a variant of Tourette’s Syndrome that, like a diseased maple, sometimes has fascinating swirls and streaks in it, making for beautiful-looking stringed instruments. Well, I can’t take it–I’m gonna just keep playing with my Nikos action figure doll with the barroom-ambassador S.W.A.T. capabilities, ignore the real-life mere mortal, and love as though I’ve never been hurt before. ;-{) Hee.
P.S.– Can you believe that I actually thought, edited, and removed the “-ness” from the end of the word “conscienciousness” above? Sheesh… I thought, looked, listened, looked both ways, THEN pulled out in front of the semi. Dar…
OMG!!! I mean, consciousness! Damn, I did not sleep…
ALYB: For what it’s worth (and by now you know that’s not much) I do know that AOL is a very different interface when I access my account on the computers of friends who don’t have AOL.
Fer instance, I can’t make italics in emails anywhere but at home, and my cut’n'paste italics don’t transalte from my friends’ Word, either. So, if your browser is Explorer, that might well be the problem.
What would really be ducky is for some other ROS regular who has neither AOL nor any problem inserting line breaks and spaces to take over this thread for ALYB!
Until then, tell us what your browser is (i.e., how do you get online?) and what you use as a word processor. if you don’t mind, that is…
ALYB: by the way, the point of all this is that the ROS interface obviously accepts digital significations of line breaks and spaces, but not from YOUR computer. The question is why.
So, the logical approach is to analyze, step by step, your media. However, expecting the likes of me to have a ‘Eureka!’ after digesting your replies is akin to expecting a chimp to recognize that the Sun is just another of those twinkly little lights in the nighttime sky, only closer.
So even though I’ll do my best: don’t hold your breath, pal.
“Nikos”: It really is a minor matter. In this case, it is better to curse the darkness and stumble blindly than to light a single candle and see the abyss I’ll surely fall into, to wit: my box ceasing to operate altogether. The spikes and valleys in my intellect are fairly stark–you’d be amazed at how I will fail to understand and execute any instructions in this area. Thanks anyway, man!
To everyone, as an aside to ALYB: hard drives — where all your computer’s data live — are cheap, and most (or, more likely, ALL) PC’s have a secondary hard drive port, right alongside the primary. So, if you buy a back-up hard drive (Seagates are best, and warrantied for 5 years unlike all the other 1-year cheapskates, and available online from places like NewEgg.com) you can copy all your data onto the second h.d. and never thereafter have to worry about falling into that dead-computer abyss for any longer than it takes to pull out the malfunctioning primary h.d. and swap the back-up into its place.
And I should know: my writings are so precious to me that I’ve got TWO identical back-ups. The back-up will hold everything –EVERYTHING: music, photos, games — it’s all just a sequence of zeros and ones — in your computer on the day you copied it. Then, you can periodically recopy to keep it all updated.
Is that kind of security worth fifty to a hundred bucks?
The answer, methinks, is obvious.
Oh, and if I can figure out how to do it, so can you, ALYB. Then you’d have the leeway to monkey with your broswer settings (which I still suspect as your primary culprit — and accessing the Microsoft Knowledge Base may be all you need to fix your script-posts.)
Good luck. In the meantime, I’ll go back to thinking of you as a 21st Century New England Falkner.
“Nikos: Thanks for the vote of confidence, but I have nothing but OS and a couple of things like that on my empty 60-gig HDD. I really couldn’t figure it out.
From November 9th:
“I see everyone’s point, but we’re so heavily invested in WordPress right now that if I suggest a new platform right now our development company would beat me. And I would deserve it. I’ll get back to you on Drupal when Audi gives us a million dollars.”
Hmm. Too bad. It would be nice to have threaded conversations in order to scale. And real-time chat window as an additional channel. Can you give a summary of what features are to come?
Brendan: I think a good name for the schmooze (talking about everything and nothing–chat) section of the new site, the Open Source Cafe/Pub, would be Open Source Andalus, or Cafe Al-Andalus or something similar, based on the elusive ideal of a new Al-Andalus, such as the show of a few weeks ago. That is, if it were to have a name… Without overdoing it, what if the page sort of looked like a cafe/pub, or an open-air marketplace/bazaar even better?
I can’t find a place to leave a suggestion for a program but maybe here would be OK. A year or so ago Leslie Gelb who I think was the director of the Council on Foreign Relations at the time suggested that Iraq should be officially set up as three separate countries – the Kurds in the North, Shiites in the South and the Sunnis in the middle. Not sure whether Gelb seriously thought this would work or was mainly trying to spark discussion and stimulate ideas on thed subject. Of course the response was a gazillion reasons why this would not work, why Iraq should remain one country, the Turks would invade, the Sunis wouldn’t have any oil fields etc. But in view of what is going on now (according to the BBC people are starting to move to areas where their sect is in the majority or are trying to leave the country) perhaps Gelb’s ideas should be reexamined. He himself could be invited to be on the show with other relevant experts.
P.S. I tried the phone no. you give (877-673-6767) in my frustration and twice got the WGBH live studio – you were supposed to have switched something. Eventually got thru to Chris telling us to go to the website. In other words the usual runaround I’s expect in some situations but not in an interactive environment which this aims to be.
I love the program and hope I haven’t wasted my time writing all this!