Pass a Biyull

It’s the same shirt every time.

Oh, Stewardess! I speak Cracker.

Okay, I’m calling Kaufman on this. The penultimate second is the tell.

I’d hit it.

@Benedick: I would too. With an aluminum ball bat. It would probably only stun it for a second.

To make you all feel better, this guy is the caliber of the vast majority of the gene pool whose end product flows through the door of my institution of learning each day. In fact two such specimens were elected to the local school board and at the BOE meeting they would sit there with their ball caps on spitting into styrofoam cups, until I finally pointed out that state statute prohibits any tobacco products on school property (i.e. socialism, nanny-state).

Love the lawn chair furniture too. He could be the next big Beverly Hills interior designer.

Dude had a hotplate on top of his stove. So: methlab, or faker trying to mock up a methlab. I think the latter.

But also: dude says “fuck” (and derivatives of the same) a lot for a guy who hasn’t been on the business end of a good lay in a long time, if ever.

@chicago bureau: Promnight thinks it’s working-hotplate-atop-broken-stove. I’m with Occam.

Speaking of meth, any guesses how Dude pays the rent? Trucker blowjobs?

TJ/ Yo. New blog post about teh krazee, and more importantly, I’m trying to reconstruct my blogroll that disappeared when I deep sixed my blog in a paranoid panic. If you’d like me to add you to the roll, hit me up in the sandbox or on twitter.

You know what he is? He is the species-definer, I don’t know the word, but isn’t there a concept of the specimen which defines the characteristic of the rest of the species? This is the defining fucktard.

TJ again/ Sooooo, my videos just got yanked off another site (the forth site for those keeping score at home). How much does a server cost, and will it fit in my living room?

@Promnight: Best in Show?

@JNOV: We used to run a Mac G4 as a server over business DSL. Eventually switched to a server farm so somebody else could babysit the damn box.

If I were going to dive into that mess again, I’d probably run a Mac Pro over business cable. (Technically you could use a Mini, but it might fry the hard drive.) Or if you have a PC geek in the vicinity (Jr?), just run Linux on a Dell or something.

Since you’re looking at video, you would want a connection with unlimited traffic, for which the trade-off is limited speed. This gives you a no-surprises monthly cost. The last thing you want is some video going viral and bankrupting you…

@nojo: That’s EXACTLY what happened. I had a pay-as-you-go account with Nearly Free Speech Net, and a video went viral. Next thing I knew, the cost became prohibitive. It was a great deal for static sites, but I was using close to 3G a day in bandwidth, and it looked like the bandwidth wasn’t going to top off at some point. So I moved and piggy backed off someone else’s account and just uploaded my videos there. Predictably, they went *poof*, and I have been run off another site. I’m getting tired of it. I’m either going to shell out the $300 bucks or so to have a corporate account on a free speech site, or I’m going to just buy the damned hardware myself.

@JNOV: @JNOV: Okay, let me get this straight – this fucktard can post freely on YouTube and you get your videos yanked. Yep, yep…makes perfect sense to me .

@cassandra_said: My problem is I’m trying to do it kind of anonymously, and I’m also using music. My videos fall under the Fair Use exception of the DMCA, and I doubt anyone would ever even file the papers to sue. But folks like YouTube, DailyMotion and ExposureRoom are risk averse, and they will pull your content if someone sneezes Take Down Notice. YouTube used to have a dispute process where you got to plead your case before they cut your sound or pulled your video, but so many people complained about “Glenn Beck is a Dumbass Racist Douche” that YouTube didn’t even give me a chance to dispute the false DMCA claims. If I were just yapping into a camera and covering the songs myself, they would have a more difficult time getting my videos pulled, but it could still happen. Instead of doing slide shows to music, I might just start doing voice overs and covers, but really, I love the music I use.

TJ, I just gotta post this craigslist thingy, its so bad: http://jerseyshore.craigslist.org/for/1393105050.html

@JNOV:

You might want to look into using Amazon S3 as your video host; their rates start at $0.17/GB of outgoing transfer. Here’s a relevant article:

http://www.stevestreeting.com/2008/09/29/streaming-media-from-amazon-s3/

that explains how to set things up so a Flash player can work with S3. IANAL, so I don’t know whether putting your buckets in the European data centers would keep the DMCA whammies away.

Hit me up offline (I’m assuming somebody can get at my email) if you need more info.

@al2o3cr: Hmmmm…I believe the EU’s enforcement of copyright law is even more strict than ours. Are you on Twitter? Would you DM me at JNOVJezebel? Please and thank you!

DEVELOPING HARD: Season premiere of SNL on now. And… still not funny.

This is like one of those noises in your engine. It just ain’t getting better, is it?

@nojo: @al2o3cr:

Okay. This is my understanding of the whole blog process:

Out there in the world there are servers, and these servers are like my computer’s hard drive. You upload content, and it’s stored there.

Then there’s the conduit from the server to the end user — this conduit uses bandwidth, and bandwidth is kind of like a radio or television station’s ability to transmit media to someone’s radio or TV. Bandwidth is probably a unique “number” on the dial that you have to get through some agency like the FCC.

I want to control a server, and I want to control or own bandwidth, if that makes sense. I don’t want to have to rely on anyone else to transmit my content from the server to the end user. Is it possible for me to set up a system where I control the input and the output at all stages?

Never mind. Apparently I haven’t been taken down again, and there’s just some sort of hiccup with the server — my content is still there. I didn’t realize that the person who set me up actually owns the server and is giving me free bandwidth. Wow.

@chicago bureau: U2 was en fuego for “Breathe”. Best performance I’ve seen of it.

Funny story from OC:

http://blogs.ocweekly.com/navelgazing/illegals-illegals-illegals/in-praise-of-the-slater-slums/

A fine example of what happens when too much stoopid is absorbed by gullible individuals.

@JNOV: But to answer your question…

There will always be some entity that can be leaned on with a DMCA notice — your hosting service, your Internet provider, even Amazon. Our server farm can arbitrarily declare that we’ve violated their terms of service, as can your local cable provider or DSL service. You can own your server, but you’ll only rent your bandwidth — you’ll never have an unadulterated path to the end-user.

However…

YouTube and other video-hosting services are easy centralized targets for record companies. They’re also very aware of file-sharing networks. But if you’re hosting blog videos on S3 or in your livingroom (and maybe at a server farm), you’re not an easy mark for automated detection software. This doesn’t mean you’re safe — I can find where your video is being hosted in seconds — but you’re no longer easy pickins. And that may be enough to keep the record companies out of your hair.

@JNOV:

Re: the server situation – it is possible to set up a 100% personally owned server; options range from the very small (http://www.macminicolo.net – $35/mo + you buy the mini) to giant boxen at Rackspace.

Two problems:

– dedicated hosting like this gets crazy expensive; the “$5 all you can serve” stuff is possible because the providers jam dozens if not hundreds of those users on a single server.

– you’ve still got DMCA issues with the upstream provider that you’re using to connect to the network. You may be able to avoid this by setting up in a less-IP-friendly country, but note that many of those countries are also known for shitty bandwidth and dodgy legal systems.

I’m the same handle on Twitter/IM/Gmail/everything else I sign up for, so hit me up if you need anything.

redmanlaw: The musical performances almost always have the ability to outpace the material. (Clearly so with U2.) Unless the musical guest is a total clunker, the music might be the only reason to tune in anymore.

I mean: there was a public-access-style show (probably the 100th attempt to recapture Wayne’s World since the early 90s) featuring biker chicks whose only real talent is to use the word “freaking” at least three times in a sentence. The only real comedy in the sketch came where Chick No. 1 actually said “fucking” as opposed to “freaking.” Which kind of destroyed the whole humor value of saying “freaking” every other word, which was in negative territory to begin with.

If this is repeated next week, then it might be time to put SNL on a serious death watch. They’ve been playing with fire for the last few years — the fall of 2008 notwithstanding — but this might be a bridge too far.

@chicago bureau: I always hold out hope, but we’re running into Year 10 of the latest dry spell. Rule of thumb used to be that a stock sketch in the first half-hour was a danger sign, but rare is the week these days that they don’t go to the well too early.

And to be very fogey, I miss the days when the musical act would be someone on the brink of major attention. Like, oh, Tom Waits. If I want to hear U2, I’ll just wait for an ad from the next gadget company they jump to.

@chicago bureau: The second song, “Moment of Surrender” is the new concert closer since the Chicago show couple of weeks ago. It replaces “40”, which I’m sick of. Looking fwd to seeing the band in late October.

@nojo: @al2o3cr:

Thank you! Thank you!

Okay, here’s the deal — we were using a flash player, and we suspect that whoever owns the damned thing (I have no idea who it is), got wind of what I was doing and disabled our ability to use it somehow. My videos are still on the server, but now we need a new player. Until the new player folks get annoyed and so on and so on.

As it stands now, my server issues are solved. Bandwidth issues are solved. Now we just need a player that will work with Moveable Type, and I bet I’ll have to convert the videos into another format that will work with whatever player we end up using.

What a hassle. And yeah, the record companies are one thing, but the folks I piss off are a whole nuther other. Some of them are savvy enough to know how to freak out YouTube, and they straight up lie. When that doesn’t work, they threaten me in the comments. Good times.

I’m thinking that if internet providers have these arbitrary TOS, I bet you dollars to doughnuts that they are contracts of adhesion and can be challenged. If you control the gateway, and I have no choice but to kiss your ass to get by and there’s no other road for me to choose, the process is fundamentally unfair and flawed.

@JNOV: Well, there you go — if someone was hijacking my custom embedded Flash player (and burning my bandwidth with it), I’d be pissed too. Presuming you didn’t repost the player to your server, in which case they wouldn’t be able to fuck with it. Unless they built in some kind of phone-home validation trick.

(And if I had a custom embedded Flash player, I’d toss it to you.)

As far as arbitrary TOS, I don’t think hosting services or ISPs are “common carriers”, and good luck challenging them in any event. If they’re caught in the middle between you and the RIAA, it ain’t a tough call.

@nojo: Oh. Wow. Hijacking? That’s not good. Neither is burning up somebody else’s bandwidth. Gah.

“(And if I had a custom embedded Flash player, I’d toss it to you.)” :-*

They might not be considered common carriers yet, but eventually the internet will be ubiquitous, and I suspect it will supplant not only print journalism but TV. Hell, we hardly even watch TV anymore in our home. The TiVo (OK, Computer!) records our programs, and we watch them when we get bored with the other computers.

@chicago bureau: Mildly amusing, which is all I can expect of SNL these days.

Kristin Wiig keeps it from being a total loss. And Don Pardo, still barking at 91.

@nojo: Just found out that we hadn’t hijacked a video player; it was free, and they blocked me from using it. Ugh.

@JNOV: But was the player itself hosted elsewhere, or on your server? The geek in me is curious how they blocked it.

But have a look at this:

http://flowplayer.org/

Haven’t played with it myself, but looks like it may solve your problem.

@nojo: We’re working on getting Flow Player set up on Moveable Type, but for now, the flash player is on the server we’re using, and my videos are back up. So, yeah, I bet we were burning up their bandwidth somehow, but I don’t know how to say to this dude who’s been helping me, “Hey — have we been stealing someone else’s bandwidth?” I guess I could just ask him, but I don’t want to piss him off. If it weren’t for him, my videos would be homeless.

@JNOV: We’re actually in a roughly similar situation — the Jams use a hijacked Flash photo player. But the author of that player wants to spread it around, and insists that folks use the version hosted on his server.

Which makes me a tad nervous. I’ve recently discovered that Flickr offers its own embeddable photo player, and I’ll be looking into that when I get a chance.

@nojo: Oh, and somehow I was blocked from using their player, but dude was not. I’m just going to man up and ask him the bandwidth question.