Internets

Time To Update You

If you haven’t heard yet through the social network grape-vine(s), I’m co-hosting a new podcast with three friends I met on the internet called Generation Tech. The team is comprised of yours truly, Matsie, Matt, and Mike. We gather on skype each week to record our thoughts and feelings about the tech world today and it’s implications on our lives, all the while talking trash. It’s truly a remarkable endeavor and it’s been nothing but a blast these past few episodes. Granted, we’re only coming up on our fourth episode, but don’t let that deter you. Get in on the ground floor and check us out. We also write articles throughout the week and spend copious amounts of time on twitter, friendfeed and facebook. (Add us, please….or else)

I’m also working on various writing projects and generally keeping as busy as I possibly can. Don’t really want to spoil anything or give away too much too early, but I think there is some promising content coming your way. Anyway, that’s really all I have for you this evening. Before I go, here’s a song that’s been running through my head all night. Ciao.

Weighing In On Rev3 Changes

Big news today in the world of New Media. Revision3 decided today to cut back some of it’s shows as well as a few of it’s employees to persevere through this economic downturn. While I’m saddened that such talented people are out of work, I’m not too terribly disappointed that some of these shows are no longer a part of the Rev3 lineup. Of course, I’m referring to Internet Superstar, Pixel Perfect, and Pop Siren.

Internet Superstar. A lot of problems exist with this show, in my opinion, and they all seem to stem from Martin Sargeant’s very first show with Rev3, Infected. I gave that show a chance when it first aired, and just didn’t get it. I understood what was supposed to be funny about it, but I lost interest about ten minutes into the first episode. I also couldn’t get through episode two, or episode three, and stopped completely ten seconds into the fourth episode. It was the kind of humor that I don’t subscribe to, and the lack of focus for the show only served to piss me off.

When Web Drifter came into the fray, things changed for me. The show had Martin Sargeant in his element: out and about with all the “weird” internet people he could find. It was a promising concept, and as the series progressed, it started to take a form that I really enjoyed.

And then it was dropped for Internet Superstar (or Infected 2.0: Where’s Joey?). Despite being more focused in scope than infected, it just couldn’t make up it’s mind about where it wanted to go. This was quite evident when the full length version of the show got cut down to just it’s daily “bytes” only. Really, how much longer could this show have gone on anyway? Personally, I think cutting this show down was a wise choice, and should have happened even before this economy crunch occurred.

Pixel Perfect. I really liked this show, but as it continued, I noticed that it just didn’t really fit into the Rev3 lineup. Maybe I’m the only one who thinks that, but there was a definite vibe that this show was kind of outside the core content that Rev3 was producing.

Pop Siren. Now here’s a show with promise and a lack of vision at the same time. I remember watching it a few times between the older (longer) version and the updated version. It lost a lot in the translation, and it only showed me that like Internet Superstar, it just wasn’t finding it’s place in the core lineup. A shame, because I was definitely into it for awhile there.

All in all, it’s a shame to see these shows go. Wine Library TV and EPIC FU will of course find their footing again, considering they were established before Rev3. I can only hope that the talented people from these dropped shows will find their next big thing and give it their all. Best of luck to everyone!

Instant (hard) On

Was poking around on Valleywag and noticed a small piece about Microsoft probing it’s users in regards to an “instant on” feature for their computers. The question asked if they would be willing to part with a majority of features of the Windows OS for an 8 second boot time. I don’t know about you all, but I’m wondering why this has to be so “gosh darn” complicated.

It’s this simple: All the current instant-on solutions involve packing the computer with a flash memory chip, one that contains a downsized operating system.

Why can’t they just figure out a better way to manage resources and not load all of them on startup? Granted, I’m asking these questions as someone who doesn’t know a lot about “OS startups,” but as a simple consumer I have to wonder if things aren’t just arbitrarily complicated. Any light shed on this for me would be super.

My Life As An Intern At A Failed Startup, Final Part

There’s not much more to this saga of my life as an intern at a failed startup. A lot of the usual bullshit of idea plus democracy equaling lameness. It’s hard to be more specific about scenarios at that place because a lot of it blended together for me. That, and a lot of time has passed since they let me go without any sort of warning. I don’t want you to get the idea that my intent was to bash this place. I just want you to see my frustration at an amazing opportunity gone south due to “too many cooks in the kitchen” and “no vision.”

If you want to see a lack of vision in action, start at the following youtube video and progress through the multiple episodes. You can also check out all of the videos from the site on the youtube page, which I heartily recommend over the site itself. Take from these videos what you will, and feel free to ask me about it. God knows I love to bitch about this place. See if you can’t spot me in these videos somewhere with a few buddies of mine! :)

First video in the youtube series:

My Life As An Intern At A Failed Startup, pt 2

There’s a specific moment in any new job or situation when the honeymoon officially “ends” and for me it happened when we started doing group pitches. I remember being quite excited about this at first. In theory, pitches sounded like a really good idea. A chance for me to prove I had ideas, that I could truly contribute to the company, so to speak. When I found out that they had scheduled them for Wednesdays (my class time), I was bummed but I gave them my ideas anyway. I’d skip classes next week and make sure I was there to be heard and to give my ideas.

Well, that second week turned out to be something special, alright. I entered the office first thing in the morning, and felt the nervous excitement of everyone around me. A few people were running back and forth between their computers and the printer, making sure they had enough copies of their scripts to go around.

“Scripts?” I asked no one in particular as I went to find my desk. When I got to the place where I usually sit, I found someone sitting there, typing away at the keyboard. Not one to make or want a scene I simply chilled around the office.  At first I wandered around the little island of computers in the middle of the office, and then I moved over to the animators and chatted with them for a bit, awkwardly seeing what was up and making sure to get enough “drool time” in regards to the Cintiq. I moved along and eventually found myself back near my station. One of the guys looked up from his computer and gave a double take.

“Oh, um,” he said. “We’ll figure out something for you to do after the pitches.” I nodded, and repressed a little unease. I sat down at the computer desk which would eventually become my main station in the final months of working there and made light chit-chat with Caitlin, who I hadn’t talked to much before then.

One of the guys finished printing his copies early and started stapling them together. Thinking fast, I took over his station and printed my ideas out for the pitch. There weren’t many of them (much like the ones I had handed in the week before) so the process ended just as quickly as it had started. I certainly didn’t have any scripts prepared, a fact which stayed with me until the meeting started. Had I missed something here? Was I supposed to have written a script? As everyone gathered into the room, I tried to rack my brain to see if I had blatantly missed what had been said to me a week before, or if something had been said to me a week before.

Um, nope.

I hadn’t missed anything.

Hmm. Weird.

I guess they had spent some time on these ideas. An emotion not unlike awe and respect crept up on me. I thought, (and I cringe at this nowadays) “My god, these guys are real writers. This is what it’s all about.” Suddenly, my puny little education at Columbia College felt small time. Here I was going to school to learn how to one day write an amazing script, and these guys were actually writing these on a week to week basis.

These feelings of awe and respect went away within the first ten minutes of the pitch session. By the end of it all, I felt sick to my stomach. What had happened certainly wasn’t a pitch session in any traditional sense. The guys with the scripts passed theirs around and we read them one by one and voted. Only one person talked about each story, with the writers of the ideas pitching in every now and then to correct or try and win everyone’s vote. As it turned out, my ideas were panned on account of not being fully fleshed out.

“There’s just not enough here,” at least one person mentioned. Another gave me a look, which I took to be that of condescension. I had seen it before in my previous internship from the regular, full time staff, so I picked up on it almost instantly. It’s that look of “Oh, you’re new at this. It’s okay. We appreciate your help.” Oddly enough, it’s not that dissimilar of a look to the one you get when you tell a real bomb of a joke at a party before anyone starts drinking.

The scripts that made it through the pitch session weren’t all that great. I remember stepping out of that room feeling a mix of agitation, confusion, irritation wish just a dash of embarrassment. Didn’t I just consider these guys writers not an hour or so ago? Hadn’t I been ready to discount my education completely because they had printed out scripts? Now that I think about it, I was probably more embarrassed than anything else.

A sirloin steak with a giant penis?

Really?

This was going to get us our hits?

“What the fuck is this place?” I remember whispering to myself at the end of my shift.

Chrome Dome

Didn’t really notice that Google was making their own foray into the browser market until I read this over at Dvorak’s blog. Shame on me for living under a rock, and double shame on me for not noticing that one of my favorite comic artists had drawn it. Oh well, I can’t be everywhere at once. My thoughts on this new browser can pretty much be summed up in a noise: “meh.” Also, was it THAT much more expensive to get ahold of a design team to make the browser look, you know…nifty? Don’t get me wrong. It seems cool. But considering I’m using 5 very competent browsers at the moment with no significant problems, I’m just not all that impressed.

Wish I Had Seen These Yesterday!

Found this on Boing Boing. It’s probably the coolest thing I’ve seen today and I plan on making at least one of them tomorrow. I’m thinking of perhaps posting pictures chronicling the event. Woo! will more than likely put this off and never ever do it. We’ll see.

Get Over it Already

Valleywag reports that Biden wants to spend $1 billion to monitor P2P activity. Whether or not all P2P activity is piracy is not what I’m most interested in here. What’s caught my eye is that Biden wants to spend THAT much on such a trivial issue, and to protect an industry which has proven time and time again that it doesn’t have the chops to evolve with the “internet age.” Why not put that money to better use and fix our fucked up education system and give us better health care? Why not use it for something other than to save the RIAA from dying completely?

The opposing argument, I suppose, is that we live in an age where the youth expect music and movies for free. That may be so in the youngest of us. But what about a big portion of us who actually support content and go to concerts and shows and help the artists out? What about those artists who wouldn’t be where they are now without giving away their content initially?

I’m curious what other people think about this.

You Can Never Have Just One

This article from Valleywag goes commando on Scoble and makes an interesting point that internet buzz is too random to make bloggers useful in advertising a brand. Or at least, any one blogger. I guess a question I have is why does this makes bloggers a “waste of money?” Not much of a post on my part, but it’s something that’s got me really curious now.