TedRoden.com

Out with the Old

samreich:

Tonight I had coffee with Rob Cohen, an all around awesome guy and writer for the Simpsons who’s directing our shoot tomorrow.  We were startled to discover that we both dropped out of high school at 16 and never had any other formal education.

Rob, who has been working in television professionally for two decades, says I should stay on the internet as long as possible.  He thinks that television and film are bureaucratic nightmares.  He’s had a movie that he’s sold five times in ten years and has never been made.

This sentiment has been echoed by a lot of my friends in traditional media.  Michael Showalter says that us internet guys are on the tip of an iceberg and, if we stay, we’ll remain on top as it lifts.

The budgets on the internet are mediocre, but the product is attractive, the audience is infinite, and, more importantly, we answer mostly to ourselves.  There’s rarely more than a month’s wait from concept to execution.

Sam is a smart guy, if you read my tumblr, you probably already know him and know that. I totally agree with him and the advice he’s been given. I just wanted to add that it seems to me that this is true for both moving pictures and general business on the internet.

This is true for college humor, who can easily compete with the biggest names in both written and filmed hilarity. That’s because on TV, the stations compete with the other stations. On the internet, sites compete with pictures of me when I had a really sweet mustache. To my friends, and friends of friends, my mustache is far more compelling than Friday Night Lights. You see, some random TV show can’t touch what your friends have done, but somehow, the phantom of the office can compete with the glory of my mustache. Even if you don’t know the phantom.

This stuff is true for free interent-based things, but it’s also true for “little” book stores in Portland. Powells.com comes to mind. Shoot, you don’t even need a store to have a successful book store anymore. It’s easy to compete, because you can’t get monster hoodies at the Gap, and you can’t get intergalatic goods at the mall. My father has run a picture frame shop for the past 30 years, if he knew the amount of people who stopped by my store in a single day, he’d go nuts… luckily he thinks that I still work at Jiffy Lube. Can I interest you in an engine flush?

Upping the nerd ante on tumblr.

Aquamacs 1.3

After several long nights and weekends, I'm happy to say the new Aquamacs.org site has launched. This also happens to coincide (more or less) with the release of Aquamacs 1.3, so you should probably upgrade.

Around Christmas, I decided that I should try to time pushing the new site with the next release of the actual software. So I spent some time redesigning the site during my holiday break. After my initial mockups, I spent a lot of time on the development list finalizing the design and working out most of the quirks.

I didn't save a lot of the iterations, but here's how it looked along the way. (Click for bigger images).

This is how the site looked initially.

My first mockup.

The final version.

Less is More

In this particular instance, the lower the graph goes, the better.

It was a good day at work.

Blue Screen

I'm sure many of you know this, but it still makes me smile every time.

When browsing the network on any mac (with leopard), all of the icons for windows computers have some fancy blue screen.

Fancy

I Sold Out

A couple of weeks ago someone contacted me about advertising on my blog. My old blog. On one post. One post, on my old blog.

I jumped at the chance, finding out that I'm only in this blogging thing for the money. Which, I assure you, is a fortune.

The money shot

The post was announcing a beta version of a Usenet Binary Search, which I've since taken down. Perhaps I'll set it up and run it for a few days so that everyone can bask in it's glory.

Wall Street Journal

The Wall Street Journal linked to me! Ok, so it's only a related blogs listing on some article, but it links directly to my post about windows blue screen icons on a Mac. The WSJ article is here, I'm all the way at the bottom.

I may be gone by the time you check, so I got some screen grabs just in case.

Walt Mossberg links to me (he just doesn't know it)

I just had to weigh in on this important topic

Little Snitch! Quit it!

I installed Little Snitch today to see if it would let me limit the network speed of a certain application (VM Ware). At the end of the installation process it is trying to force me to reboot. No option to quit or cancel. But I'm not going to reboot now. I'm in the middle of a lot of other stuff. So now I have to sit with that window open all day.

I understand if some software won't work until a reboot, but it should accept that I don't need to use it right away. So, if you're ever writing software that requires a reboot at the end of installation, you'd better have a really good reason not to let me do it "later." Because I'm going to do it later either way.

Sorry for the rant.

Thanks!

Wedding DJ

Our wedding DJ showed up today. He will also play music for us in the kitchen before and after the big day. Not bad for $100 (after iPhone rebate).

Seriously though, this little box is the Altec Lansing T612, a speaker system specifically for the iPhone. It works any reasonably new iPod, but it also has shielded cables or something. Which means that the iPhone signal doesn't interfere with the speakers and cause that awful buzzing noise. It sounds good and works flawlessly (so far). I wish it looked a bit nicer, but it does the job.

A new addition to our kitchen

The Bluegrass Seekers

My brother lives in Germany. A while ago, he joined a bluegrass band with a bunch of germans. He plays the fiddle.

Check it out.

Uptimes

When I restart emacs (aquamacs) for whatever reason, I'm always curious to see how long it's been running. I've included the list of uptimes¹ below. My record for this computer seems to be 15 and a half days. I'm sure I can do better on other computers, but that's pretty good for a laptop that I abuse pretty regularly.

Uptimes

1. If you have uptimes.el, and (require uptimes.el) in your .emacs file, meta-x uptimes will show you the uptimes screen.

About Me

My name is Ted Roden.

I realized that I don't have an about page on this site. So this is that.

I live in New York City, but I grew up in Illinois and spent several years in Portland Oregon. I am getting married to a sweet texan. I work at vimeo.com.

I like music, computers and various sports teams. If you want to contact me, you should be able to find my email address on every page of this website.

This is what I looked like in September of 2007.

Ted Roden, 09/2007

This photo was taken Justin.

I hope to update this page, I'll probably repost this to the top of the site everytime I do.

Meaningful Reviews

I went to download an album on eMusic. The album had pretty good pitchfork review and I had credits to burn, so I figured I had nothing to lose.

However, I was saved from spending my cash money by an eMusic user who seems to disagree with the pitchfork review. I was so moved by the well rounded and insightful critique of the album that I've posted it below. ¹

Thanks for contributing.

1. "Sorry" for the sarcasm.

ReadWriteWhat?

This is a lesson that I have learned more than once. A lesson that I never seem to remember. I'm going to document it here with some hope of trying to remember it. Here it goes: People that I respect read various publications, I am not required to respect those publications.

For example, I subscribed to ReadWriteWeb's RSS feed after seeing it referenced by a few people I respect. Let's check out selections from the latest 400 word, five paragraph masterpiece.

• "hosting hasn't changed much, but it has become a commodity service"
• "web hosts haven’t really done much in ten years"
• "web hosts ... squandered the decade offering the same old thing with little to no innovation."
• "hosts haven't changed much"
• "hosts have squandered an opportunity to innovate"

Just in case you don't want to do the math. In five paragraphs, they actually said the exact same thing five times. I am not saying they spent five paragraphs supporting their argument. The argument wasn't even theirs. They spent five paragraphs actually saying the same thing over and over and it was somehow less interesting than this post.

Needless to say, I'm unsubscribing.