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Welcome to the second This damn blog podcast.

This week we’re bringing you 5 great creative commons tracks that we downloaded from the CC Mixter site. See the blog post or the RSS Feed for the URLs where you can download these songs yourself.

All of these tracks are licenced under the Sampling Plus 1.0 license. If you download this podcast, please abide by the license.

Smitten Kitten
by Ashwan
This was the song that first opened my eyes to the potential of CCMixter music - This slow, downtempo track is as interesting as anything that you are going to hear anywhere.

StarLight flies
by Rhythm Beating Silence
StarLight flies is a 90’s style grunge influenced rock track with interesting low spoken vocals that builds into an expansive chorus.

Blood Ties
by Cezary Ostrowski
Based on the original track “Scared Of My Own Blood”, Blood Ties by Cezary Ostrowski highlights the abiltiy for a remix to be transformed into something completely new.

Clockwerk Girl
by sHORT fACED bEAR
And now for something completely different… This is the type of track that you are never gonna hear on traditional radio, but that if you did hear might just effect you.

Destination Non-Specific
by Colin Mutchler
Vocals and accoustic guitar with a few effects and a few other guitars quietly mixed in..

Thanks for tuning into this Damn Blogs Creative Commons Music Podcast, feel free to let us know what you think. Just got to thisdamnblog.com and click on the link for this post and add your comments.

As much as I bitch about TV and how antiquated the medium is, there are a few good offerings these days. Sure, the majority of the shows being produced and aired are not worth sitting through ( see ABC’s My Wife and Kids, CBS’s Yes Dear, or NBC’s Joey for examples of presentations that contribute to the overall shitty quality of network TV ) there are shows that are not only worth watching, but that are as good as the best offerings from other mediums.

Without a doubt the best thing on TV currently airing is HBO’s Deadwood. It would be a closer race if HBO was currently airing The Wire, but luckily ( for the purposes of this post ) they are not aired during the same time frame.

With its strong character development, engrossing story lines, and gritty drama Deadwood wins “The best thing on TV” hands down. The slow evolution of a lawless mining camp to civilized (?) town provides the backdrop for the most interesting character development on TV in years. While many critics are content to count the number times words that you can’t say of network TV are uttered, or to comment on how violent the series is they fail to realize or accept that this is not a show for kids - and that adults can and should decide for themselves if this is the kind of show they want to watch. For those that can’t deal with it, there is always George Lopez.

While Deadwood only pulls in about half the viewers of HBO’s The Sopranos it is arguably better, although the first three seasons of The Sopranos were at least as good as Deadwood so far, but lets face it, The Sopranos has slipped a little. This does bring up the fact that 3 out of the 5 best “TV Shows” are produced by HBO - The Sopranos, Deadwood, and The Wire are superior to everything else available. HBO also produces one of the best talk shows on the dial as well - Real Time with Bill Maher, as well as one of the best comedies - Curb Your Enthusiasm.

Outside of HBO the pickings are slimmer, but available nonetheless. FOX’s Arrested Development is as funny a satire as I have seen since spinal tap, but its days may be numbered. The thing is, you have to really watch it to get it, and it is hard to do with the 12 minutes of commercials, the animated ads for the simple life the pop up during the show, and lets face it, a majority of American TV viewers want something simple with a laugh track.

FOX knows a thing or two about producing quality dramas. FX’s The Shield, Rescue Me, and Nip Tuck are all better then any of the Dramas produced by the big networks. USA’s Monk also has its moments.

Strange, but up till now I have not mentioned the Big 3 networks at all except to point out how lame their sitcoms are. I think that is the real story - that the big 3 don’t have any of the best shows. They do have a few show’s that are not horrible, but none that I would say are good. They pander to the lowest common denominator and regurgitate the same old tripe over and over. How many CSI’s or Law and Order’s do we really need? How many times can we watch an old I Love Lucy or Brady Bunch episode recreated?

As long as the FCC stays away from cable I won’t have to find out.

I wrote a Guest Blog Post over on Tamara’s Propagasm blog about the whole John Bolton episode:

First Bolton - he’s not saying shit. When retired ambassador Thomas Hubbard called an Bolton incident in South Korea “undiplomatic behavior” Bolton declined to comment. How about those accusations that Bolton pressured intel specialists? Bolton declined to comment.

As I alluded to in my initial Firefox post, one of the coolest things about Firefox is all of the extensions that have been created for it. The Mozilla foundations defines extensions thusly:

Extensions are small add-ons that add new functionality to Firefox. They can add anything from a toolbar button to a completely new feature. They allow the application to be customized to fit the personal needs of each user if they need additional features, while keeping Firefox small to download .

I don’t even remember how we ever created web sites before the Chris Pederick created the Web Developer extension. The extension is easy to configure and includes a butload of useful features including CSS manipulation, a tool to display information about the current page, form features, and the ability to disable things like cache, cookies, javascript, and images. Don’t forget to right click on this tool bar and customize it to your liking.

Chris also wrote the User Agent Switcher that adds a menu and a toolbar button to switch the user agent of the browser.

MeasureIt is another extension that is useful for web developers. Written by Kevin Freitas MeasureIT draws out a ruler to get the pixel width and height of any elements on a webpage.

Now, don’t think that you have to be a web developer to get anything out of Firefox extensions - If you are a stock market junkie be sure to check out the AlphaTicker. Want to have icons included in your menus and pop ups. If so CuteMenus is for you.

If you do have a web site, but are not really a developer there are some cool tools that you might be interested in such as SearchStatus by Craig Raw - it display the Google PageRank and Alexa popularity anywhere in your browser. Very nice, no more checking page rank in IE!

Jeremy Gillick has created the TinyUrl Creator which works with Gilby’s Tiny URL service which takes a long URL as input, and gives you a short URL to use in it’s place. Sounds simple, but is very useful on occasion.

And finally, my favorite non-work extension FoxyTunes. Created by Alex Sirota FoxyTunes allows one to control their favorite music player without leaving Firefox. I love it because I can leave iTunes minimized and keep working and still have the ability to skip songs, turn it up, etc. It supports all of the popular media players as well as a good number of obscure ones.

Here it is, This Damn Blog’s first podcast - you can Tune in here.

Bill discusses when one should use Windows, Open-Source software, hosting, and software patents. Bill is a very smart guy and is fighting the good fight in the IT trenches every day - so give him a listen.

When I posted the Distributed IP Based Media Delivery I could have never guessed how close I was to something that was being currently developed. The are obvious differences between The Participatory Culture Foundation’s Internet TV and what I had proposed, but the similarities are striking:

Announcing a new platform for Internet television and video. Anyone can broadcast full-screen video to thousands of people at virtually no cost, using BitTorrent technology. Viewers get intuitive, elegant software to subscribe to channels, watch video, and organize their video library. The project is non-profit, open source, and built on open standards…

Bit Torrent isn’t robust enough to handle what I was talking about, but it is the same idea, for sure. While my original post had a pay per model, this one is free to watch and to publish - pro’s and con’s there. Internet Tv is being designed to support the public interest and independent media - which is noble, but they are going to need significant compelling content to bring this to critical mass. The majority of the people that create compelling content are used to getting paid for it…

That aside this is a great development, and I can’t wait to see if it catches on, and if so what type of stuff gets published, and how long until some lobbying group tries to shut it down or sue it’s users.

I’ve been a fan of the Creative Commons for a while now, and have even published some creative commons content over the past few years. It looks the like the license is picking up steam these days, what with the Yahoo Creative Commons Search as well as all of the press that it has been getting.

For those of you uninitiated Creative Commons is a non profit organization that offers a variety of licenses with “some rights reserved”. Basically is is built to allow artists to legally share their work without losing copyright protection over it - it allows for intellectual-property licenses to become much more flexible then with our current system of copyright, or even the GPL or the public domain.

Creative Commons’ first project, in December 2002, was the release of a set of copyright licenses free for public use. Taking inspiration in part from the Free Software Foundation’s GNU General Public License (GNU GPL), Creative Commons has developed a Web application that helps people dedicate their creative works to the public domain — or retain their copyright while licensing them as free for certain uses, on certain conditions.

Creative Commons was founded in 2001 with the generous support of the Center for the Public Domain. It is led by a Board of Directors that includes cyberlaw and intellectual property experts James Boyle, Michael Carroll, Molly Shaffer Van Houweling, and Lawrence Lessig, MIT computer science professor Hal Abelson, lawyer-turned-documentary filmmaker-turned-cyberlaw expert Eric Saltzman, renowned documentary filmmaker Davis Guggenheim, noted Japanese entrepreneur Joi Ito, and public domain web publisher Eric Eldred.

There’s a lot of great music out there licensed under one of the CC licenses, and even entire record labels built on the concept.

Soundclick has a list of songs that have been released under a cc license, dmusic offers Creative Commons licenses for artists hosting their music, and opsound.com is an interesting place to submit your own cc licensed music.

There are entire “albums” that have been released under a cc license such as Frame Independent, Loved Like a Milkshake - A Tribute to Wesley Willis, People Like Us and Kenny G, Subatomicglue, and the Wired CD.

Artists like The Phoenix Trap, Erik Ostrom, Black Ink, Scott Andrew, and Horton’s Choice are releasing some of their music under a cc license.

The portions of this post in italics are from the Creative Commons about page.

I think Tamara might be obsessed with Tom Delay, she just won’t quit writing about him.

The Delay scandals may be a case selective witch hunting ( much as white water and the lewinsky affair were ). What I mean is that I am sure other congress critters have pulled the same type of travel shenanigans as delay, but he is so hated ( and possibly rightly so ) in some quarters that the dogs are foaming at the mouth to get after him.

But it’s kind of like the ant and the grasshopper - you better save some of that political capital in case something unforeseen happens. Delay used up most of his good will by being a republican attack dog and by gerrymandering voting districts, and now it turns out that he could use some of that toasted good will since his ass on the line.

As Tamara says, could happen to a nicer guy

James T. Kendall
1607 Oxford Place
Oxford, MS 38655
(662) 513-3935
james@the-kendalls.com

Innovative professional with proven ability to identify, analyze, and solve problems to increase customer satisfaction and control costs. For the past 4 years I have been managing a small web development firm in Mississippi. While management was a great experience, I would like to move back into a creative position.

Experience:

10/2000 - Present D2 Interactive Oxford MS - COO
Provided project leadership to Web Team for site production, including budget control; production timetable, status reporting, client/project team coordination; and quality assurance.

Developed business plan and employee handbook. Defined and achieved company and departments needs through one-on-one sessions and on-going communication.

10/1999 - 10/2000 e-Web Corp, Inc. Tifton GA - CEO
Managing an Internet startup corporation - Website creation and maintenance; client relations, managed advertisers and employees; network setup and maintenance; manage and maintain all sites on a Linux server running Apache.

3/1999 - 10/1999 The i-clicks Network, LLC Tifton GA - Managing Partner
Created and founded pay per click network - Designed graphics and website; setup, maintained and managed dedicated Linux server running Apache; set up and maintained all programming running network. Sold interest to partner in April 1999 for a lump sum payment.

9/1996 - 3/1999 Independent Contractor Moultrie GA - Internet Developer
Website creation; logo design; NT network setup and support; computer repair; programming; Internet marketing and consulting.

2/1994 - 9/1996 - Guitar Works Moultrie GA - Manager
Implemented computerized accounting system; set up a web presence; managed day to day operations; sales and employee management.

Education:

* Pineland Academy Moultrie, GA
* South Georgia College Douglas, GA
* St. Leo University St. Leo, FL
* Moultrie Technical Institute Moultrie, GA

Certifications:

* Network Technical Support
* Linux Administration (General)
* English Vocabulary
* MPEG Concepts
* Web Design Concepts
* HTML 4.0
* Written English
* E-Commerce Concepts
* Internet Industry Knowledge
* Internet Security
* Web Design for Accessibility
* Internet Concepts
* HTML 3.2

Skills:

* HTML - Master
* CSS - Accomplished
* Adobe Photoshop - Accomplished
* Macromedia Flash and Dreaweaver - Experienced
* Adobe Premiere, Encore, and Audtion - Experienced
* Linux/Apache web server administration - Experienced

Sad day at D2 Oxford, it looks as if Charlie has sold D2 Interactive.

We met the guys that are the management team of the company that bought Charlie out and they seem nice enough, but this looks to be the last act of the experiment that was D2.

We’ve been told that the new owner plans to keep the Oxford office open and the Oxford team together, but I guess only time will tell.

But no matter what, things will never be the same. D2 lasted longer then I could have reasonably expected when Tam and I headed west 4.5 years ago, and has provided me with some great memories and experiences.

To every season…turn, turn, turn.