Good Morning Internet

I met Matt Kraft (known in some cir­cles as Krafty, K-Box, K-Rock, Kraft-o-mattic, Kraft­mat­tic, and some­times Matt) at Sal­is­bury University’s vari­ety show in the fall of 1998. He, along with our good buddy Josh, played in a band called Release, and I had some­how been con­vinced to act as one of the shows emcees.

A cou­ple weeks later I replaced the gui­tar player in Release. By the spring, Krafty, Josh and I had re-formed as local leg­ends of late-nineties rock, Three Track Mind. We released one full-length album called Throws Like a Girl (which you can still find on iTunes).

I’ve known this guy for just a shade over a decade. We’ve been through a lot, and he’s one of my best friends. So I was thrilled that he recently started a photo blog called, fit­tingly, Kraft­mat­tic.

His daily pho­tos are really fun, and his accom­pa­ny­ing posts just crack me right the hell up. Recently, he had a photo of portable toi­lets dan­gling above a con­struc­tion site, and in another entry he turned a well-known piece of art into a Kids in the Hall ref­er­ence. I love him, so go sub­scribe to his feed!

Related Posts:

• No Related Posts

Look, you guys. I don’t want to brag or any­thing, but I’m cur­rently in first place for the NCAA Tour­na­ment Tweetup.

Okay, that was a pretty bla­tant lie. I totally want to brag. Here is a visual aid:

Related Posts:

• No Related Posts

For the first time I can remem­ber, I’m not in a sit­u­a­tion to join a pool for the NCAA men’s bas­ket­ball tour­na­ment. I filled out brack­ets in high school with friends, in col­lege with peo­ple on my floor, and every year in every job I’ve worked since college.

This March, I find myself seek­ing reem­ploy­ment. Bright side: I’ll be able to watch every sin­gle open­ing game of the tour­na­ment. Dark side: I have no office mates with whom to com­pete and trash talk. Another dark side: no spare cash with which to enter a pool.

So then I got to think­ing. A good por­tion of my friends are on Twit­ter, Yahoo! pro­vides free brack­ets, so why not set it up and invite all my Twit­ter friends? March Mad­ness is only truly mad when you’ve got some­thing rid­ing on it. In this case, that would just be brag­ging rights, but still. (Remem­ber the part about being poor.)

I present the NCAA March Mad­ness Tweetup! (Not in any way affil­i­ated with Twit­ter, the NCAA, CBS Sports, or Yahoo!) To join and fill out your brack­ets, just go here:

http://tinyurl.com/ncaatweetup

Once you sign up, be sure to use your Twit­ter name as your bracket name so we can find each other. Even if you’re not on Twit­ter, you’re more than wel­come to join us in the fun, but you’d be miss­ing out on all the conversation.

Be sure to sign up and fill out your brack­ets now. The games start tomor­row. And feel free to pass the link around!

Related Posts:

• No Related Posts

Yes­ter­day, in the span of an hour, the clouds parted, the sun warmed the Outer Banks, and my Inter­net con­nec­tion was repaired. I went for a walk on the aban­doned, wind-swept beaches of Waves, North Car­olina. Along my walk, I encoun­tered an odd, yellow-orange shape pro­trud­ing from the sand.

When I got closer, I real­ized that it was an over­turned hot tub that had either washed up on the beach or been dumped there by some thought­less local. Either way, it has an odd and inter­est­ing shape, so I took a pic­ture with my phone and sent it to Twitter.

My friend Sam was the first to sug­gest it looked like a giant cake. And you know what? She’s totally right. Other peo­ple on Twit­ter unan­i­mously agreed, so I thought I’d share the odd­ity here.

So, enjoy this over­turned hot tub that looks a lit­tle bit like a sponge cake with plugs that look like it was once hooked up to the Matrix. You prob­a­bly won’t see another one of these today.

Related Posts:

• No Related Posts

On Thurs­day, March 5th, the night before my 29th birth­day (for those of you keep­ing track), I shaved my win­ter beard. There had been a cou­ple of really nice warm days that week, and with a lit­tle bit of wish­ful think­ing, I decided it was time to get myself ready for spring. I have to say, my beard was really a util­i­tar­ian suc­cess! Never before has there been a win­ter when my face was kept so warm.

The next week, I had din­ner at my par­ents’ house with my grand­mother again. She was delighted that I was back to my default clean-shaven look. Beam­ing, she repeated things like, “It’s so much bet­ter this way!” and, “That beard was ter­ri­ble!“

Now, judg­ing from the photo above, it’s time for me to get a hair­cut. Yowza. What’s going on up there?

Related Posts:

• No Related Posts

It’s really tough to get work done if you’re an out-of-work web designer or con­tent pro­ducer and your only com­puter breaks.

I learned some­thing about myself last week. If I’m cut off from my three major cre­ative out­lets (writ­ing, music, and design), I go a lit­tle bit crazy.

I think I first noticed it Tues­day. I got up at my nor­mal time in the morn­ing and sat down at my desk with a spiral-bound note­book where my lap­top usu­ally goes. I’m not entirely sure when my hand­writ­ing started to look like that of a psy­chopath, but after two or three pages of scrib­bling down ideas and lists of things I wanted to accom­plish, I had cre­ated some­thing that looked like it could be admiss­able as evi­dence in a court of law.

Next I moved on to draw­ing. If I had to put my web design projects on hold until I got my com­puter back, I’d spend the time draw­ing. At that moment, I drew robots They started off inno­cently enough with rec­tan­gu­lar heads and recessed head­lights for eyes. But each itra­tion became a lit­tle more men­ac­ing and angry-looking. I drew about a dozen before that started to frighten me, too.

I won’t even go into detail about the noises that came out of me and my gui­tar when I tried to work on some unfin­ished songs.

Everyrhing went wrong. My cre­ative process was thrown for a loop. I left my apart­ment and walked down to the Inner Har­bor. Did you know the high school kids like to hang out down there after school? Like, every sin­gle high school kid in the greater Bal­ti­more area? I turned around and came back home.

And that was Tues­day.

Then, a few things hap­pened at once. My par­ents got a great last-minute beach house on the Outer Banks of North Car­olina and invited me to come down for this week. The rental com­pany promised free wi-fi. I fig­ured it would be the per­fect oppor­tu­nity to get a change of scene, apply for some jobs, knock out a cou­ple free­lance projects, and get myself gen­er­ally back on track. I ordered a net­book that arrived Fri­day, the same day Apple unex­pect­edly called to tell me my Mac­Book Pro was fixed a few days ahead if sche­fule and ready for me to pick up. Two com­put­ers and broad­band by the beach? Not mak­ing it to SXSW didn’t seem so bad. Good things were hap­pen­ing. I was on track for some seri­ous pro­duc­tiv­ity!

I’m writ­ing this from my phone. The Inter­net never worked here. They promised a fix by 10:00 am yes­ter­day, then bumped it to 3:00 pm today. Not a prob­lem, I thought. I’ll just go walk on the beach and play with my par­ents’ dog.

But it’s been colder and rainier here than it’s been back home in Bal­ti­more. So here I am, sit­ting at a table, catch­ing glimpses of an angry gray ocean through blurry slabs of rain, scrib­bling in my spiral-bound note­book and draw­ing robots.

But you know what? I love it. Sure, the weather and lack of Inter­net are annoy­ing set­backs, but there’s noth­ing I can do about them. Maybe I’ll grab my cam­era, bun­dle up, and take the dog out for a walk any­way. If I’m going to be forced into a manda­tory vaca­tion, I should just relax and enjoy it. I can get back to blog­ging, pod­cast­ing, and job hunt­ing next week. The free­lance work can wait a few days. Until then, maybe falling off the face of the Earth for a lit­tle while is exactly what I need.

Related Posts:

• No Related Posts

This morn­ing, the dis­play on my Mac­Book Pro died! I took it to the Apple Store up the street, and they told me they’d get back to me within 24 to 48 hours with their diagnosis.

In the mean­time, I’m writ­ing this from my iPhone, but I had a bunch of posts saved to my machine I planned on putting up tomor­row morn­ing. Looks like they’ll have to wait a few days.

Also, I was really plan­ning on ramp­ing up the job search this week, too. That’ll have to wait until I have my machine back in my hands, too.

On top of that, I was on a roll with a music project and two web designs I was pretty excited about. I hate hav­ing to stop work when I’m in a really good groove!

Today I thought about pick­ing up an Asus Eee PC as a backup/writing machine (specif­i­cally the 1000HA). Has any­body had expe­ri­ence with one of these? It seems to only be avail­able on Ama­zon and not in any of my local big box stores.

Any­way, if you see me wan­der­ing around the streets of Bal­ti­more aim­lessly tomor­row, you’ll know why.

Related Posts:

• No Related Posts

The tra­di­tional model of broad­cast tele­vi­sion is becom­ing obso­lete. More and more peo­ple get TV shows, news, and weather from their com­put­ers and mobile devices. In fact, the very def­i­n­i­tion of “TV show” is get­ting mud­dled by sites like Hulu and the iTunes Store.

It’s clear that, when given the option, many peo­ple choose to watch con­tent orig­i­nally intended for their tele­vi­sion on a vari­ety of other devices. Lately, I’ve been treat­ing my tele­vi­sion like a com­puter dis­play. I stream Net­flix movies to it and con­nect my com­puter to watch down­loaded pro­grams and video pod­casts. Sure, the tech­nol­ogy isn’t seam­less, but with each gen­er­a­tion of hard­ware and soft­ware, it gets eas­ier and more intuitive.

Live tele­vised events, specif­i­cally sports, lag behind the time-shifting power of down­loaded episodes on a com­puter, iPod, or mobile device. But that’s not entirely sur­pris­ing. There are band­width costs to deal with, and the actual tech­nol­ogy needed to deliver a live, scal­able, high-quality video to mil­lions of view­ers online hasn’t quite been per­fected yet.

How­ever, it gets expo­nen­tially bet­ter every year. The National Foot­ball League exper­i­mented with stream­ing select games last sea­son. I watched a few Sun­day Night Foot­ball games online, and I was pleas­antly sur­prised to dis­cover that the video qual­ity was very good. There were some nice extra fea­tures, like the abil­ity to switch cam­era views to dif­fer­ent play­ers and parts of the field.

But there were plenty of prob­lems, too. The video player was plagued by an obscene amount of ads, some that even inter­rupted plays in progress. I must have seen the same Sprint com­mer­cial a hun­dred times. Some­times the stream suf­fered from dropped con­nec­tions, video and audio didn’t always quite sync up, and the few games the NFL streamed online were also avail­able for free, over the air, in full HD. It was a neat exper­i­ment, but there was no real advan­tage to stream­ing the game online.

Enter Major League Base­ball, with an impres­sive set of fea­tures in its MLB.TV ser­vice this year. In addi­tion to stream­ing every base­ball game live on their ser­vice, they’re offer­ing HD-quality video, DVR func­tion­al­ity, multi-game view­ing, picture-in-picture, live game radio, and a player tracker for fan­tasy base­ball updates. The ser­vice costs $106 for the sea­son, or $20 monthly.

If MLB actu­ally deliv­ered all these fea­tures as adver­tised, it would be a killer prod­uct. Unfor­tu­nately, your local team’s live games will most likely be unavail­able to you.

Here in the city lim­its of Bal­ti­more, the only way to watch all of the Ori­oles games is to sub­scribe to Com­cast, which car­ries the Mid-Atlantic Sports Net­work. Not all of the games are broad­cast over the air, so we’re forced to pay for cable if we want to watch the entire sea­son. For some­one like me who loves base­ball but doesn’t have cable, I’d hap­pily pay the $20 each month to MLB.TV to watch my beloved Ori­oles, for access to the other games across the league, and the player tracker to keep tabs on my fan­tasy lineup. That’s much cheaper than a monthly cable bill, and it gives me exactly the con­tent I want.

Sadly, the great fea­tures adver­tised on MLB.TV clash with the rules and con­tracts of old-school tele­vi­sion. Because of local exclu­siv­ity con­tracts, there are mas­sive black­out restric­tions that ruin what would oth­er­wise be the per­fect ser­vice for a base­ball lover.

If I signed up for MLB.TV, I’d be able to get reg­u­lar sea­son games except for the Bal­ti­more Ori­oles and Wash­ing­ton Nationals.

Games will be avail­able for view­ing 45 min­utes after they’re over, but what’s the fun of that? The ser­vice is use­less for any­one who lives near their favorite team. It’s a stu­pid, obso­lete prac­tice that must be re-thought if the prod­uct is to thrive while Inter­net and tele­vi­sion con­tinue to converge.

The black­out restric­tions force cus­tomers to sign up with cable or satel­lite providers, the only source for national games on ESPN and many local feeds of home teams. Dur­ing the post­sea­son, all games will be blacked out online in the United States. Your $106 doesn’t even grant you live access to the most excit­ing part of the season.

There are other really weird black­out con­di­tions that make it seem as if they’re pur­pose­fully mak­ing MLB.TV an impo­tent, use­less ser­vice, unavail­able when you would want to use it most. From the fine print at the bot­tom of this page comes this gem:

Reg­u­lar Sea­son Week­end U.S. National Live Black­out: Due to Major League Base­ball exclu­siv­i­ties, live games occur­ring each Sat­ur­day with a sched­uled start time after 1:10 PM ET or before 7:05 PM ET and each Sun­day with a sched­uled start time after 5:00 PM ET, will be blacked out in the United States (includ­ing the ter­ri­to­ries of Guam and the U.S. Vir­gin Islands). Live Audio of such games is avail­able as part of any MLB.TV sub­scrip­tion or as part of the MLB.com Game­day Audio Pack­age. Each game will be avail­able 45 min­utes after the con­clu­sion of the game as an archived game (archived games are black­out free).

Do you want to kick back and watch some out-of-market week­end base­ball? Odds are, you’ll run into dif­fi­culty even with that at some point this sea­son with MLB.TV.

Why is there such a dis­con­nect here? Why would Major League Base­ball go to the trou­ble and expense of build­ing a feature-rich, high-quality ser­vice, and then dis­able the fea­tures that would make it attrac­tive to the major­ity of base­ball fans?

If you don’t live in the same city as your favorite team, if you don’t care about watch­ing week­end games, and if you’re pretty sure your team won’t make it to the play­offs, then maybe MLB.TV would be a good ser­vice for you.

It’s as frus­trat­ing as it is idi­otic. I can’t be the only fan ready and will­ing to shell out $106 for a sea­son of unre­stricted base­ball, and MLB is refus­ing my money. Wouldn’t it be a win-win-win for the net­works, local cable chan­nels, and MLB? More sub­scribers means more rev­enue that can be paid out to the net­works and local affil­i­ates. More sub­scribers means more eye­balls on ad spots dur­ing the game, in turn mak­ing those adver­tis­ing spots more valu­able. Every­one makes more money, every­one gets a big­ger audi­ence, and the audi­ence gets all the con­tent they want. Every­one ends up happy.

Except for the cable and satel­lite providers. So the stick­ing point might be with them. Since they’re the only ones that stand to lose money, per­haps Com­cast and the oth­ers strong-armed their way into con­tracts and obso­lete agree­ments with MLB. How­ever, the cable providers are gen­er­ally the same com­pa­nies that pro­vide broad­band con­nec­tions to sports fans that would access MLB.TV, so wouldn’t they still reap a profit?

This old way of doing busi­ness has to stop, and it has to stop soon. MLB has cre­ated a ser­vice with the poten­tial to be rev­o­lu­tion­ary, but the out-of-date busi­ness model puts it behind bar­ri­ers that make its core sell­ing point inac­ces­si­ble to the major­ity of cus­tomers and fans.

In order to stay rel­e­vant, let alone com­pete, black­out restric­tions must be lifted from MLB.TV and the entire adver­tised ser­vice must be made avail­able to all cus­tomers, regard­less of geo­graphic location.

When com­pa­nies divorce them­selves from out­dated busi­ness mod­els asso­ci­ated with tra­di­tional media and update their prac­tices to embrace new tech­nol­ogy rather than resist it, they’ll be the ones to usher in a new age of con­tent deliv­ery and re-shape the way con­sumers get (and pay for) pro­gram­ming. If not, the entire indus­try will con­tinue to stag­nate and even­tu­ally choke to death on its own ineptitude.

Related Posts:

• No Related Posts

It started inno­cently enough. I wanted to eat a banana for lunch. And then I hap­pened to attach a video cam­era to my com­puter. And then I hap­pened to start tak­ing pic­tures. And then I grabbed a Sharpie. What does it all mean? Your guess is as good as mine. Maybe it’s for future gen­er­a­tions to appreciate.

I was going to write music for it, but then I’d really be in crazy shut-in artist ter­ri­tory. I need to go for a walk.

If I don’t get a job soon, I’m afraid there’s going more stuff like this in the future. You’ve been warned.

Related Posts:

• No Related Posts

We took my grand­mother out to din­ner for her 85th birth­day yes­ter­day. I men­tioned ear­lier that she told me repeat­edly through­out the day she wasn’t a fan of my win­ter beard, but I think it’s bet­ter when you get it firsthand.

Related Posts:

• No Related Posts