A recent screen capture from FOX News. Moussaoui looks like he’s enjoying his latte.
FOX News alerts are missing only a couple of things, otherwise they’d be perfect:
Luckily for us, we now have the theme song: FOX News Alert, performed by artists unknown [3.0MB MP3]. Enjoy!
This weekend, I’ll post more about my appearance on MTV Live last night, but in the meantime, here’s a photo of me enjoying the free rock star snacks in the MTV green room…
“Damn, it feels good to be a gangsta,” as the song goes, so I’ll celebrate by sharing the song: here’s the Geto Boys’ Damn It Feels Good to be a Gangsta [7.1 MB MP3], which you may recognize from the Office Space soundtrack. Enjoy!.
…which means that the waking-up experience on Monday morning’s gonna feel like this:
Bonus reading: Infoplease’s page on Daylight Saving Time.
Immediately after my appearance on MTV Live, I’m going to go to the Greater Toronto Area Bloggers’ Get-Together, which starts tonight at 7 p.m. on the second floor of Paupers Pub (539 Bloor Street West, about a block east of Bathurst).
There’ll be a special guest tonight: Matt “Photomatt” Mullenweg, founder of WordPress, who’s here in Accordion City for the iSummit 2006 conference.
This’ll be the first official GTABloggers gathering in a while, and I’m looking forward to having some drinks and convo with my fellow local bloggers. If you can make it, c’mon down! We’ll be the table with the accordion.
Yesterday, I got a phone call from Toni Thomas, Talent Coordinator for MTV Live, the flagship talk show for the newly-launched MTV Canada. She told me that she’d been referred to me by Shelley “Burningbird” Powers and asked if I would like to appear on the show and talk about blogs. Seeing as Tucows pays me to talk about tech and that I rather enjoy the whole appearing-on-TV thing, I said that I’d love to show up at their studios — the old Masonic Temple, a.k.a. “The Concert Hall” for those of you of a certain age like me — and talk about the strange hobby in which I’ve been partaking for the past four and a half years.
This morning, I got email from Toni asking me if I could bring the accordion and what songs I could play so that they could get about the business of clearing the rights. I emailed her back a list of the songs which I can play even when three sheets to the wind. Those of you who know me well have probably already guessed the songs on the list. I wonder which one they’ll pick.
A little talking about blogs, a little playing the ol’ squeezebox, all on a new TV channel that’s getting a fair bit of fanfare. Business, pleasure and shameless self-promotion. What could be better?
My thanks to Shelley Powers for the referral!
The “No Parking” signs in New York City are pretty cool — they certainly convey the attitude for which the city is famous:
Of course, what would be much cooler would be if they had these signs…
As a special bonus, here’s a musical biscuit for you: Nina Hagen’s New York, New York [4.8MB MP3]. This was on fairly heavy rotation on my walkman back in high school.
If you don’t work in the internet industry, you might be wondering what I’m talking about when I refer to “Web 2.0”. It’s a bit of a problematic term, as its definition is rather amorphous: ask a dozen different people in my industry what it means and you’ll likely get a dozen different answers. That being said, in those dozen answers, I’d be willing to bet that there would be one underlying commonality: that it’s more people-centric.
(For some good layperson-friendly articles about “Web 2.0”, I suggest checking out the cover story of this week’s Newsweek, Publish’s article on Web 2.0 and computer book uber-publisher Tim O’Reilly’s piece, What is Web 2.0?)
One of the side effects of Web 2.0 is the joke of adding “2.0” to all sorts of things. I myself have referred to married life as “Life 2.0” and at geek gatherings I’ve excused myself to use the bathroom, claiming “I have to go do number 2.0”. What can I say, sometimes I’m easily amused.
Over at Kathy Sierra’s blog, Creating Passionate Users, there’s an entry that talks about Manager 2.0, which talks about two different types of management — the “1.0” version and the “2.0” version. If it seems familiar to you, it should — as Kathy herself points out, Tom Peters has been talking about this for years, and I can direct you to something of the same vintage: Theory X and Theory Y.
My line of work — I’ve been doing the “developer relations” thing since 2000 — is one of those jobs that didn’t even exist in a formal sense when I was in high school (when $3000 got you a 64K Apple ][ system with 143K disk drives). It is often changing to meet the demands of an industry that was in its infancy ten years ago, in a larger field whose basic definitions — computable, computer — aren’t even 100 years old (they were defined formally in the 1930s). It requires a “flatter”, more participatory office structure than most of our parents were used to, and perhaps even our generation, depending on where one works. I tend to thrive in systems where I’m given the authority and autonomy to shine, which is why I’m rather fond of the company for whom I work — Tucows, the position I hold: Technical Community Development Coordinator and the “Manager 2.0” treatment I’m given.
What is “Manager 2.0”? Here’s a chart:
