Good Morning Internet

I’ve never heard of this com­pany, and there is no evi­dence that they are asso­ci­ated with the out-of-business-for-decades Pan Am air­line, but Pan Am Brands has res­ur­rected the iconic globe logo for a series of slick-looking travel acces­sories. I’m par­tic­u­larly fond of the pass­port cover, but I’m wary of pur­chas­ing from a com­pany I’ve never heard of (and has no proven track record online). But an $18 pass­port cover, espe­cially one that looks this cool, might be worth a try.

Pan Am Pass­port Cover — via Kempt

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I’m totally jump­ing on this meme.

As you may or may not be aware, some clever young Inter­neter took Just Bieber’s “U Smile” and slowed it down 800% to cre­ate a 35-minute epic that sounds vaguely rem­i­nis­cent of Sigur Ros or some more experimental-sounding m83.

So, yeah, it was awe­some and I was smit­ten with the idea. I fol­lowed the instruc­tions on Life­hacker and gave Weezer’s “My Name is Jonas” a sim­i­lar treat­ment with the free­ware app Paul’s Extreme Sound Stretch. (In fact, I used the Mac OS X port.)

Jonas Epic by charm­c­i­ty­gavin

Update: I tried this with a cou­ple Nine Inch Nails songs. They ended up sound­ing like long, epic, Nine Inch Nails songs. Amazing.

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After a line of thun­der­storms blew through the area, it seemed like we’d have a nice clear view of the sky for the Per­seid meteor shower last night.

Then a bunch of stu­pid clouds and haze rolled in and blocked every­thing, even­tu­ally turn­ing into rain. I know because I woke up almost every hour, ran to the win­dow, then went back to bed dis­ap­pointed yet stu­pidly hope­ful that, if I checked back an hour later, the clouds would move out and reveal a spec­tac­u­lar pre-dawn display.

Well that never hap­pened. In fact, the stu­pid, jerky clouds are still hid­ing the sky as I write this, and I’m exhausted from tak­ing a series of one-hour naps. I’m still irra­tionally hope­ful that the weather will clear tonight, despite all weather fore­casts to the contrary. The rest of me wants to make other plans and wait for the Ori­on­ids in October.

Stu­pid clouds.

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• The Per­seid Meteor Shower Peaks Tonight
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• Thanks, Mom and Dad, for intro­duc­ing me to space

The Per­seids, an annual meteor shower, will peak tonight in the north­ern hemi­sphere. Each year, the Earth passes through the debris trail left behind by the Swift-Tuttle comet as it makes its 130-year trip around the sun. At the shower’s peak, there can be as many as 60 mete­ors per hour, so if you have a clear view of the sky tonight, all you need to do is look up. Plus, as an added bonus, there will be a thin cres­cent moon tonight, so that means less moon­light to inter­fere with the meteors.

You’ll see the most mete­ors between mid­night and dawn, since that’s the time of day you’ll be star­ing up through the atmos­phere on the lead­ing side of the Earth as it we pass through and burn up bits of comet dust, but there should be a good show all night. If you’ve never stayed up (or woken up early) to watch a meteor shower, you owe yourself.

I hoped to get a glimpse of some mete­ors this morn­ing, but mother nature decided to bring a line of thun­der­storms through the Bal­ti­more area. Hope­fully the weather will coop­er­ate tonight and early tomor­row morn­ing. If not, I’ll have to wait for the Ori­onid meteor shower in October.

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I am extremely excited to announce that my pro­posed ses­sion for SXSW Inter­ac­tive 2011 is now listed on this year’s Pan­elPicker web­site. It’s called “Why New Authors Should Think Like Indie Bands”. Here’s the offi­cial description:

The pub­lish­ing world is wrought with uncer­tainty. Tra­di­tional book sales are down, dig­i­tal pub­lish­ing is in its infancy, and pub­lish­ing houses, faced with shrink­ing bud­gets, are forced to shy away from pub­lish­ing nov­els writ­ten by new, untested authors. The rules of the indus­try are chang­ing. Before approach­ing agents and pub­lish­ers, new fic­tion authors are work­ing to self-publish and grow audi­ences with social media tools. When they approach a pub­lisher with a new novel and a built-in audi­ence, they take note. On this panel, hear from lit­er­ary agents and authors describe the way the indus­try is chang­ing and why it doesn’t mean doom-and-gloom for unknown fic­tion writ­ers. They’ll share suc­cess sto­ries, prac­ti­cal advice, and opin­ions on the future of publishing.

I really hope that my ses­sion makes it through the com­mu­nity vot­ing process, which counts for 30% of the final deci­sion, along with a 30% say of the staff and 40% of the advi­sory board. If you’re plan­ning on going to SXSW, I’d cer­tainly appre­ci­ate it if you include my ses­sion amongst those you vote up for next year’s con­fer­ence. If you’re not plan­ning on attend­ing, I still sug­gest you check out the Pan­elPicker and help shape next year’s SXSW Inter­ac­tive con­fer­ence. There are some really excit­ing ideas in there, and I hope you think mine is one of them.

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That’s my friend Josh on the left, Tom Green in the mid­dle, and me on the right.

Let’s flash back to 2001. Tom Green’s movie, Freddy Got Fin­gered, was play­ing in the­aters. Josh and I, both stu­dents at Sal­is­bury Uni­ver­sity at the time, drove to the mall to see the movie on open­ing night. Besides for me and Josh, there was only one other per­son in the the­ater. That other per­son, clearly not some­one with the capac­ity to appre­ci­ate high art, walked out mid­way through.

Josh and I loved it. In fact, we still love it. The movie is absurd, sur­real, some­times gross (yet never scat­o­log­i­cal, which is why I can call it high-brow), and very hilar­i­ous. But clearly, it’s not for every­one. Here is Roger Ebert’s reflec­tion on Freddy in his review for Steal­ing Har­vard (which is a crim­i­nally under­rated movie):

See­ing Tom Green reminded me, as how could it not, of his movie Freddy Got Fin­gered (2001), which was so poorly received by the film crit­ics that it received only one lonely, apolo­getic pos­i­tive review on the Tomatome­ter. I gave it—let’s see—zero stars. Bad movie, espe­cially the scene where Green was whirling the new­born infant around his head by its umbil­i­cal cord.But the thing is, I remem­ber Freddy Got Fin­gered more than a year later. I refer to it some­times. It is a mile­stone. And for all its sins, it was at least an ambi­tious movie, a go-for-broke attempt to accom­plish some­thing. It failed, but it has not left me con­vinced that Tom Green doesn’t have good work in him. Any­one with his nerve and total lack of taste is sooner or later going to make a movie worth seeing.

So, hear­ing that Tom Green was on a world-wide com­edy tour, we drove down to the DC Improv to see him per­form. We had no idea what kind of a crowd would show up for him, but we were delighted to dis­cover that the place was packed with kin­dred spir­its. Peo­ple were elec­tri­fied for Tom Green, and his stand-up act was awe­some. He told some sto­ries from his child­hood, the MTV days, the five months in which he was mar­ried to Drew Barrymore.

After the show, he took time to sign auto­graphs, take pic­tures, and chat with fans until every­one had left. He couldn’t have been a warmer, friend­lier guy.

I don’t want to spoil his act, so I highly rec­om­mend you seek him out if he’s com­ing to your area. If you can’t see him live, word is that there will be a tour DVD next year.

Speak­ing of next year, Tom Green has revealed plans to release a director’s cut of Freddy Got Fin­gered in honor of the movie’s tenth anniver­sary. Yes, please!

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This is prob­a­bly fool­ish of me, but I’m giv­ing the Ori­oles another chance.

First, the tough facts. As of last night’s loss to the White Sox, the Ori­oles’ record is 36–74, which puts them at a win per­cent­age of .327. That’s still the worst record in all of Major League Base­ball. The team is 32.5 games back, so even if they won every sin­gle game for the rest of the sea­son, they still wouldn’t stand a chance at get­ting into the play­offs. So, the sea­son is basi­cally over with a lit­tle under two months’ worth of games to go.

It’s been a depress­ing sea­son for Ori­oles fans. Not only had I writ­ten off the team, but I was so dis­gusted with their on-field dis­play and their poor man­age­ment I stopped fol­low­ing base­ball alto­gether. If it hadn’t been for the World Cup, I would have stopped fol­low­ing all sports. (I haven’t ruled that out. I’m still not sure the con­stant heart­break is worth it.)

But there is a glim­mer of light for the future of the Ori­oles, but it’s brief, faint, and ten­u­ous. Last week, under the new man­age­ment of Buck Showal­ter, they swept the Angels and, for the first time in a long while, were able to cel­e­brate a series of wins. They had some great momen­tum, and we saw some­thing we hadn’t seen the Ori­oles do for a long time: They worked as a team, not just as a group of indi­vid­u­als look­ing to up their per­sonal stats.

But, like all good things that hap­pen to the team, the cel­e­bra­tion was short-lived. Maybe it was a fluke. Maybe it was the excite­ment of hav­ing a new man­ager that kick-started them into a string of wins. Maybe it was because the Angels are a middle-of-the-pack team.

Last night, the Birds lost 4–2 in the first game of a series with the White Sox. Despite the fact that the team seems to per­form ter­ri­bly on Sun­days, I’m head­ing to the game this after­noon, pos­si­bly fueled by that fool­ish opti­mism that’s kept me a fan my entire life. Some call it “Ori­oles magic”. But it’s start­ing to feel a lot like an abu­sive rela­tion­ship. I’m going back to the team because this time they’ll be dif­fer­ent! They’ve shown me how much they’ve changed! They won’t let me down any­more. They won’t break my heart.

I don’t know if I’ve com­pletely given up on the team or not. Can I be accused of being a fair-weather fan even though I’ve suf­fered through 15 years of dis­ap­point­ment? Will it be worth it to come back next year for another sea­son? One thing’s for sure: I’m not buy­ing a Sun­day ticket plan again.

I guess I’ll see how things go this after­noon. Lets go O’s. Sigh.

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After a nice six-month exper­i­ment with Square­space, I’ve decided to switch back to Word­Press. Square­space was reli­able and easy to set up, but I found I missed some of the plu­g­ins avail­able on WP. Plus, the Square­space post edi­tor was a lit­tle flaky, and the iPhone app crashes every time I use it.

For some­one with basic needs, Square­space is prob­a­bly a great solu­tion, but it just isn’t a good fit for me.

So, I’m switch­ing back to Word­Press, which has proved to be a bit more dif­fi­cult than I thought. I haven’t found an easy way to export my last few years’ worth of posts with­out man­gling them, so I’ve decided to press on with the new WordPress-based site while I try to extract the archives behind the scenes.

Yes, I know this has turned into a super-geeky post, but I thought I’d give you guys an update and let you know that I haven’t fallen off the face of the Earth!

Update: I fig­ured out how to export Square­space entries to Word­Press. It’s hardly an ele­gant solu­tion, but it seemed to get my text over.

1. From the front page of my Square­space blog, I switched to “Struc­ture Edit­ing” mode, then clicked on the “con­fig­ure this page” above my most recent post.
2. A pop-up win­dow appears on the right-hand side. Under the “Con­fig­u­ra­tion” tab, I scrolled all the way down to the bot­tom to “Data Export”. As it explains, “Square­space can export your blog to Mov­able Type com­pat­i­ble for­mat if you’d like to move to another sys­tem.” I clicked on “Export Blog Data” and con­firmed the export.
3. From Word­Press, I went to “Import” under “Tools” and went through the import process as if I was migrat­ing from a Mov­able Type blog. I cre­ated a new user to help keep my imported posts orga­nized. All of my Square­space entries seemed to move over, except with­out my tags.

So, unless I feel like going though all of my old posts, the archive will remain un-tagged, which is kind of a bum­mer. Next, I need to fig­ure out how to down­load my Square­space stor­age folder and migrate the images over to Word­Press. How­ever, there doesn’t seem to be an obvi­ous way to do that.

Update 2: In the Square­space man­ual, there is no men­tion of a way to export the “Stor­age” folder, where all my pho­tos and post images live. Accord­ing to sev­eral forum posts, this kind of bulk down­load or export is impos­si­ble. How frus­trat­ing, espe­cially for a com­pany that sells itself as being super-easy to import and export posts between Word­Press. Looks like I’ll have to go image-by-image, down­load each file indi­vid­u­ally, then upload every­thing to my Word­Press site. What a pain.

I sent an email to Square­space to ask them if there’s a way to do it. Maybe I’m just miss­ing something.

Update 3: Just got it con­firmed by Squarespace.

Hi there,
There’s no set­ting to export all your file stor­age con­tent — images in gallery pages and files in file stor­age need to be down­loaded man­u­ally, sorry about this.

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