I spent some time this week aggressively listening to and writing a review for Matthew Ebel’s latest album, Goodbye Planet Earth.

WARNING (Spoiler Alert!): I was going to post the album review here on the front page (I normally despise being forced to click-through anything), but the review could be construed as containing spoilers about the album. Therefore, I am offering my readers the opportunity to avoid the retina-scarring sight of the review and said spoilers if they so chose. You may consider yourself warned, and any complaints about spoilers after reading the review will be met with a public flogging using the closest suitable means, which around here generally consists of overcooked pasta noodles covered in jam.

Click here for the album review.

Technorati Tags: Matthew Ebel, Goodbye Planet Earth, review, album review

It seems odd for me to write a blog post about writing blog posts. On the surface it goes against some base principles of mine about not making the process of something bigger than the end result of said process. I feel like after I post this I should go verbally flog myself on another blog somewhere in penance.

The truth is, though, that I’ve been quite uninspired of late with blogging specifically and writing in general, going on several months now. I’d even go so far as to say I reached a point of hating writing and dreading the presentation of a unblemished, white screen with a blinking cursor.

Burnout? Perhaps. Boredom? Much more likely. Overwhelmed? Absolutely. Inferiority complex? Most definitely.

I’m no new media superhero, and I really don’t have any aspirations of being one. Such labels only bring on more baggage and responsibilities that I have no interest in lugging around. That being said, though, I realize that when people I’ve come to know, respect, and care about are battling things such as cancer, it sure puts my stupid little mental blocks on writing in perspective in a damn hurry. It also pretty much eviscerates any excuse I have for not writing and not writing more than I have.

I also understand, while I enjoy Twitter, some of the things I want to say just won’t fit into 140 characters without making me a tweet-spammer. Twitter also lacks a permanency that I would have if it were posted here.

I’m not going to set myself up for a failure by saying “I will post X posts per week” or other such silliness you might get from a “new media professional”, but I do need to write more, and I will do that by finding and holding the drive to write more often than once a month. Thankfully I have some behind-the-scenes motivation on this that will help in this regard. The rest I’ll just have to take as it comes.

To those still subscribed or still reading despite my irregular post schedule and pixelated melancholy, you have my sincere thanks. Your continued support will make this adventure quite a bit more tolerable.

Technorati Tags: writing, blogging, burnout, posting, schedule, reset

The story goes that Walter O’Malley, then-owner of the Brooklyn Dodgers, desperate to replace the aging Ebbets Field, reached out to representatives of the city of Los Angeles after the Dodgers won the 1955 World Series for the purpose of relocating the team. Los Angeles had been desperate to get a baseball franchise in California and the Los Angeles area in particular. With expansion to divisional play still years away, the best chance of landing a team on the west coast was to have an existing one relocate.

The problem with O’Malley’s original plan was that it would have created a scheduling and travel nightmare for the other teams in the National League. Even as cross-continental air travel was coming into style and affordability thanks to technological advancements made during World War II, having a single team in California and the closest opponent in St. Louis would have presented an significant burden on the rest of the National League. As such, baseball officials conveyed to O’Malley that they would not approve the move unless a second National League team made a commitment to a California relocation or until an additional expansion franchise could be placed there.

The popular legend has it that the next spring, O’Malley took a trip to California with New York Giants owner Horace Stoneham. In the early light of the Pacific morning, both men surveyed a patch of land in the southeast corner of San Francisco named Candlestick Point, which had a very scenic overlook of San Francisco Bay. O’Malley pushed Stoneham hard to abandon his plan of moving the Giants to Minneapolis and instead join him in relocating to the west coast, virtually guaranteeing baseball would approve both moves, if for no other reason than to keep the existing Dodgers-Giants rivalry in tact.

In the summer of 1957, both the Dodgers and the Giants announced their plans to relocate to California. Both owners were subsequently vilified by both the fans and the press, so much so that to this day some people still have not forgiven either team for abandoning New York.

What nobody knew (or realized) at the time, though, was that Candlestick Point was about as inhospitable to baseball as a place could be. The early morning calm betrayed cold, swirling and unpredictable winds and fog that came in from San Francisco Bay during the day and evening. Catching a fly ball was an unique adventure for nearly every ball hit in the air, and there were countless accounts of doubles landing in between three fielders less than 200 feet from home plate. In addition to the fielding nightmares, a plethora of balks were called on pitchers literally blown off the mound while delivering a pitch.

The point I am making with this story is three-fold. First, be very careful of your first impressions of people, places and things. Many times the first brief view does not convey all there is to see in a situation. Don’t be afraid to give something a second, or even a third, look before forming a permanent opinion. In other words: don’t look at things in the morning light - it often betrays what the rest of the day will bring.

Second, be careful which star you hitch your wagon to. O’Malley’s interests in having the Giants relocate to California was more for his benefit than it was in Stoneham’s. By convincing Stoneham to move to California, it served O’Malley’s primary purpose of getting a brand new stadium and a major metropolitan fan base all to himself. Take a moment to consider whether the people in your life offering guidance and assistance have your best interests at heart or theirs. Don’t be tempted or taken by the vampires in your life.

The final point, which is the most subtle of the three, I suppose, is that most things in life can be explained through baseball, given the chance.

Technorati Tags: baseball, Brooklyn Dodgers, New York Giants, relocation, San Francisco, Los Angeles, California, morning, first impressions, self-interest

As I write this, I’m snacking on leftover ice cream, several days past another birthday.

Normally, I try to avoid making my birthday anything special, mostly due to the way birthdays were treated throughout most of my childhood. Add these childhood experiences under the sliced bananas of a stark reminder of the reality of getting older, and I would just as soon sit home alone, quietly, than make my birthday a huge production.

This year’s birthday was a bit noisier than I would have normally cared for, having accepted an invitation to dinner with my in-laws who were in town, and then making the mistake of selecting one of the few places here that carried the Packers-Cowboys NFL game.

As I poked at my salmon dish while sipping on a rum and coke, I realized that even in a restaurant full of people, at a table full of family, with birthday messages I am humbled by and grateful for on my Blackberry from literally all over the world, it’s still possible to feel as if you’re alone on an island, waiting to be rescued.

The saying goes “nobody can know you as well as you know yourself”, and, for the most part, that is true. The problem is getting to know yourself, and then coming to terms and accepting what comes from that. That is something that, despite all my years on this planet, I haven’t quite grasped yet.

Until then, I’ll continue to sit at that table, alone with my thoughts, waiting for the screaming silence that is inner peace.

Technorati Tags: birthday, musing, inner peace, loneliness

My friend, Eban Crawford, writes recently about new media “pirates” and the ostracizing of one in particular. I consider Eban about as good of a friend as one can have in this medium, so I know he’ll understand my writing a response here is a continuation of the conversation and not any form of personal attack.

I write here often that we in New Media should be the new pirates. I don’t say that just to be spouting inane rhetoric. I really believe that we should embrace the spirit of the pirate radio types that came before us. We need to be brash and confrontational, not Touchy-feely. Danny Golden understood that side of podcasting, and his show reflected it. (As much as I hate to admit it, he seems to have understood this even more than me)

I’m all for using the blunt approach and “calling it like you see it” (for lack of a better term). This is one of the many reasons I enjoy reading and listening to people like Eban, Dave Slusher, and Eric Rice — you’re not going to get anything sugar-coated, and they respect other people of the same ilk.

Sadly, podcasters and other new media producers are in a piranha tank where calling these things out or otherwise being critical of intents and results gets you labeled a wet-blanket cynic, simply dismissed out of hand, or actively attacked for daring to speak out. When you take disagreement with an idea personally or outright refuse to accept someone might hold a valid contrary opinion, you immediately close off all avenues of discussion and understanding. From a maturity standpoint, it’s the functional equivalent of a child holding hands over ears while chanting “I am not listening”.

Another thing Danny said in the last WWoD episode that strikes as true is most podcast listeners are from the podcast world. I will take that a bit further, Social and New Media consumers, no matter what form, are usually also producers of said content as well. We need to break down the walls and stop with the support group mentality. It is somewhat incestuous. We have to get out there and get the eyes and ears of those that do not look to New Media for their entertainment at this time, not those already converted to the cause.

Again, spot on. I’ve said before that the ego-chamber is alive and well, still, in podcasting, and it continues to run its circular course through the non-forking family tree that is the so-called “podcast community”. Podcasters (and their network overlords) are still too interested in patting themselves on the back for an infinitely small increase in the infinitely small coverage rate they have in the overall grand scheme of media consumption.

Notice I said millions of other viewers. How many eyes or ears does your new media product reach? They pull in millions with mindless crap. Even the best of the New Media products only pull in a fraction of those numbers.

This is exactly why most of the Top-20 podcasts in iTunes are dominated by old media conglomerates, folks. They already have the eyes and ears of millions. If you think your new media content is going to go mainstream and make you a star, you’re doing it for the wrong reasons, and you’re in the wrong business.

We have one group of new media citizens that seems to be trying to do things the way old media does things. That won’t work for us, it has been done and we don’t have the resources to compete.

Another group is those New Media folks that are looking for profits and revenue before we actually make the cut and get into the eyes and ears of the masses. I don’t completely disagree with this as the old adage it takes money to make money is true in most cases. But we do have to be wary of putting the cart before the horse and building an unworkable model.

Sadly, both of these groups include most of your hierarchal podcast networks. With their 30-second ads, the pre-rolls, the post-rolls, and the over-rehearsed advertisements for other in-network shows, they are trying to take chapter and verse right out of old media’s playbook, without the corresponding astronomical marketing budgets. Preaching to the converted, indeed.

I produce for Podshow, and while not perfect, Podshow does not deserve a lot of the crap directed in their direction. There are exciting things going on that will be announced in the future that will impact the world of New Media. I find Podshow to be in the something totally new crowd and I am happy to be there.

While I’m glad that Eban is happy with Podshow, this is where I must disagree with my friend. Podshow, and every other for-profit podcast network out there inclusively, deserves every bit of the criticism they receive. These companies put themselves out there as the so-called “torch bearers” for new media, promising to lead the unwashed masses out of the desert to the promised land. Such brass not only invites critical watch over and review of your actions, it encourages it.

Most of your for-profit networks are set up with a few big “stars”, a lower tier of minor producers, and what can best be described as the steerage. It’s the job of the minor producers to promote the big stars (in hopes of one day being granted membership in the court) while helping the stars hold a carrot out in front of the the port window of the bottom deck. Keep eating your vegetables and saying your prayers every night and you too can some day make pennies on the dollar for your content.

In other words, it’s one very murky (and sadly, very legal) pyramid scheme. Only the first-class content producers at the very top (or the early entrants, which are usually the same people) will ever make any real money from being part of the network. The rest of the content producers will continue to chase an unreachable dream that is nothing more than a highly subjective moving target which may not even be there at all when (if) the end of the rainbow is found.

These schemes are not good for podcasting, but they are good for the podcast networks and the first-class content producers, which is why they continue to flourish. The sooner these schemes sink to the bottom of the sea the better off podcasting will be for all of us. Sadly, when that does happen, a lot of good content producers and a lot of good content are going to go down with the ship while the upper classes row away towards the next round of angel funding.

There’s nothing wrong with being a new media pirate. Go forth, sail the seas and explore all there is to see, hear, and do in the new media world. Just make sure you’re on the right boat, lest you be left rearranging the deck chairs.

Technorati Tags: new media, podcasting, podcast networks, pyramid scheme, pirates, new media pirates, podcast networks, Podshow, Eban Crawford

Those of you who know me best know that often I’m not an everyday writer - in fact, there are more days I do not write than I do, contrary to the popular idea that one should write as often as possible.

I apologize for the extreme delay of late, but I’m in the middle of what can be described as a serious family crisis. Until I get some resolution, or hint thereof, there isn’t going to be much activity in this space.

For those of you subscribed and remain so, as well as to all the well-wishes I’ve received on Twitter, I want you to know how much I appreciate all the positive mental energies in this middle of this disaster.

I’ll be back to writing when the time is right to do so. Thanks for waiting for me.

For 95% of people out there, the FeedBurner FeedSmith plug-in is a great way to automatically redirect your feeds over to Feedburner’s tracking system.

The problem with the plug-in is it redirects ALL feeds over to one FeedBurner feed. If you’re like me (or others) and have a podcast with two different feeds for two different types of files (like audio and video, or MP3 and AAC), you can still use FeedBurner for stats tracking, but it takes some manual hacking.

Requirement: You must have edit access to a file called “.htaccess” in your Wordpress root directory and your web hosting provider must support redirects. Some web hosting companies, such as GoDaddy, intentionally obfuscate access to “.htaccess” or just plain disallow redirects from it, usually under the flimsy guise of “security concerns”. Your mileage may vary, so check with your web host provider if you have issues.

Disclaimer: There are multiple ways to skin a cat, so there may be better ways of doing this. This works for me on my provider. I can’t be responsible if you break your feed, unsubscribe all your listeners, kill a kitten, or cause Twitter more downtime using this method.

Using my podcast as an example, here’s what a basic redirect looks like. You would add these lines BEFORE the Wordpress code-block that usually starts with “# BEGIN Wordpress” or the like:

RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} !FeedBurner
RewriteRule ^feed(.*) http://feeds.feedburner.com/SufferingFromSanity [R=302,L]

Here’s how this is translated by the web server:

RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} !FeedBurner

This tells the web server that the rewrite condition we’re trying to perform only applies when the “user agent” isn’t “FeedBurner”. In other words, this rule only applies if we’re not FeedBurner. Side note, without this exclusion, FeedBurner rightly complains of a rather nasty circular reference trying to pull your feed.

RewriteRule ^feed(.*) http://feeds.feedburner.com/SufferingFromSanity [R=302,L]

This is the actual rule. It redirects the prefixed website (which covers someone typing in “sufferingfromsanity.com” or “www.sufferingfromsanity.com”) accessing “feed” with or without the trailing slash “(.*)”. It redirects that access to the FeedBurner address with an HTML 302 code. HTML 302 is called a “temporary redirect”, which means web spiders and search engines (like Google, Yahoo, etc.) won’t permanently replace “http://sufferingfromsanity.com/feed” with the FeedBurner in their indexes. The “L” tells the web server the rule has ended.

To do this for different Wordpress categories, just change the appropriate feed being redirected:

RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} !FeedBurner
RewriteRule ^category/podcast-main/feed(.*) http://feeds.feedburner.com/SufferingFromSanity [R=302,L]

RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} !FeedBurner
RewriteRule ^category/podcast-enhanced/feed(.*) http://feeds.feedburner.com/SufferingFromSanityEnhanced [R=302,L]

When you set up FeedBurner, simply give it the regular feed to look at (e.g. “http://sufferingfromsanity.com/feed/”) and it should handle the rest. With this method, the number of available redirects is theoretically limitless — although if your “.htaccess” file gets really big it might bog down your site’s load times just a bit.

I hope you’ve found this useful. If you found a better or different way of doing this, feel free to leave a comment below.

Technorati Tags: Wordpress, Feedburner, redirect, category

Things were never easy for me.
Peace of mind was hard to find.
And I needed a place where I could hide.
Somewhere I could call mine.

Genesis - No Son of Mine (1991)

Three years ago today my father died. It only feels longer than that.

My father was a simple man — simple in the fact that what usually motivated him in life was whatever particular thing he wanted in life at that particular moment, even if that was to the detriment of everyone else around him. It would incense him to no end to see his oldest son outwit and outthink him on pretty much any academic subject you could conceive. Unfortunately, it wasn’t that burning hope and desire for parents to see their children do better than them. Rather, it was, I would figure out later, pure jealously that drove this reaction out of him.

His death stirred up a tropical storm of emotions within my family. The memorial service was a somewhat anti-climatic and unemotional experience for me, however, which led to a rather nasty post-service year of the silence between my brother and sister and myself. My loss had already been mourned many times, twenty-plus years after I stood on the front porch of my childhood home and screamed at him to get out of my life and stay there. My brother and my sister had managed to make peace with my father prior to his passing, so their loss was real, here, and now. They didn’t quite understand how I was handling things so unemotionally, and quite honestly, I’m not sure I understood it at the time either.

For all the nights left to my own devices, not even old enough to drive, to watch over a brother and sister, I always thought, naively, there was a chance we could repair things. After all the belts and boards and bounces off beds and walls for not getting things done exactly the way he wanted, I always thought it was just a phase. Even after I overheard him detailing the plan he was hatching to gain custody of me not because he really wanted me, but because he could use me to cancel out child support obligations on my siblings, I thought things could be different if only I tried a little harder.

Yet, after all that, all I really ever wanted in my adult life was a phone call from him and a true, sincere apology. The problem was we had ourselves a little cold war going on. His pride would never let him admit he was wrong, and my self-protection instinct would never allow me to make the first move of reconciliation. As much as I wanted that phone call and apology, I knew deep down it would never happen, and secretly I was glad I wouldn’t have to deal with it in this lifetime.

My demons are my own, of course. I have never in my life saddled the blame for my own shortcomings on anyone but myself, and every day I try to make a step away from those demons. I can’t help but wonder, however, how much of my lack of confidence, my indecisiveness, and my self-deprecation come from the salts of having my childhood boiled away the way it was. Perhaps I’ll never know how much of it was part of me and how much of it was imprinted on me. Perhaps it doesn’t really matter anymore.

In a weird, twisted way my father taught me a lot about being a man, a husband, and a father, but in the negative. I spoil my family at nearly every opportunity and am patient to a fault with them most of the time. Maybe it was the grand plan of fate to put that experience in my life at the time knowing I would need it in the future.

I go through my days now doing what I can and what I must to provide for my family. I only hope in the end I’ve done enough to ensure sins of the father never become the sins of the son.

Technorati Tags: father, son, fatherhood, death, domestic violence, confidence, patience, family, fate

Was it just another day? Perhaps to many, and in some respects also to me. I’ve said before that the further away we are from an event, physically and in terms of time, the less impact it has on us.

Today many people will remember and pay their respects to the 2,974 souls that were lost on this day six years ago and the millions of lives that were changed forever in the aftermath. I have no interest in discussing the politics of the events of September 11, 2001 and the subsequent worldwide ripple. I have no interest in being an alarmist, an isolationist, or a xenophobe, then or now. I have no interest in waving a flag or shouting rhetoric. I have no interest in being angered or frightened in general or avoiding travel in particular.

The only interest I have today (and I try to not sound like a motivational poster when I say this) is to begin accepting that within each of us, individually and collectively, lies the power to change our world, both in the positive and in the negative. Self, family, neighborhood, city, state, country, planet, and all points in between: they are all very small hops from each other. How we, as individuals, a society, and a species, use this power in the immediate future will speak volumes about us to future generations.

Last year I did a podcast featuring one song, Phil Ayoub’s “White Feather”. This year, however, I will defer to the much-more-talented Ed Roberts and his Kansas City Weather Podcast tribute to September 11. If you normally don’t subscribe to KC Weather, I encourage you to take a listen to his show for today.

Remember, but keep moving to make the future better, one person at a time.

Technorati Tags: September 11, 9/11, Ed Roberts, Kansas City Weather Podcast, Phil Ayoub