Derek K. Miller - Penmachine words music comment - Vancouver, Canada

UPDATE: Yup, the AirPort Extreme Base Station worked like a charm. Back to normal now.

Evidence indicates that it is indeed our wireless router at fault for the slug-like behaviour of the Wi-Fi networking in our house. I think this will be a good excuse to purge the ungainly stack of networking gear...

...and replace it with a single wireless router that can do everything with fewer wires and, with luck, less general flakiness. Some of that stuff is only 10BaseT or 10Base2 speed, and has been blinking away in our den closet for a decade.

Labels: apple, geekery, techsupport, web

Our Internet connection has been painfully slow at home for the past few days. Or so I thought. It turns out that the hardwired connections (like the ancient iMac in the kitchen) are just fine, but the wireless network is behaving very oddly: uploads from our computers to the Net are speedy, downloads crawl. Unfortunately, most stuff (email, web, podcasts) requires downloading more than uploading.

I've tried restarting the AirPort Express that serves as our base station. It shows full bars for signal strength, so that's not a problem. I've tried disconnecting it and hooking up the old flaky Linksys base station—which was still flaky. I've changed the AirPort Express wireless channel, gone to 802.11g only (instead of mixed b/g), turned on Interference Robustness, increased the multicast rate, and so on.

Next I'm going to reset the firmware on the base station. If that doesn't work, I'll see if turning off network encryption, or changing the encryption type, makes a difference. In the meantime, we're mooching off a neighbour's NETGEAR router, which is (strangely) sometimes locked down and sometimes not.

Any other suggestions? This setup has been fine for months and months, so why it's suddenly gooping like molasses I have no idea. Networking remains voodoo, I tell ya.

Labels: apple, geekery, techsupport, web

A couple of interesting links from friends of mine today (nope, neither is an April Fool's joke):

First, Dave pointed me to tweetcloud.com, which aggregates Twitter posts into a tag cloud. Here's mine:

Funny, one of the words listed there is "cheng," which only appears because when I type Twitter posts on my iPod Touch, it tries to spell-correct "chemo" to "Cheng." That's annoying when it happens.

Second, Bill linked to an article in the New York Times noting that:

In the 17th century, China and India accounted for more than half the world’s economic output. After a modest interlude, the pendulum is swinging back to them at a speed the West has not grasped.

Some would argue that the overall pattern of human history since the invention of agriculture has been a long, slow march to the eventual ascendancy and dominance of China. It may be true.

Labels: china, controversy, friends, politics, web

It's been fascinating, if frustrating, to watch from the sidelines as the company I work for, Navarik, has done some amazing stuff over the past year. Most recently, they launched a new version of Navarik Inspection, our web-based application that helps petroleum companies keep a handle on the oil they're moving around the world.

That sounds like a pretty big deal for a small Vancouver company. It is. When people ask me what Navarik does, I use part of Navarik Inspection as an example. Here are the basics:

1. When an oil tanker pulls up to a terminal to load, the company shipping the oil wants to know, (a) how much oil gets pumped in, and (b) what the qualities of that oil are.
2. To confirm that, they hire a third-party cargo inspector who works near that terminal to check the various pumping measurements, and to take samples of the oil and analyze its properties, such as sulphur content, etc.—as well as to assess the state of the ship's tank, including (for instance) how much accumulated sludge is at the bottom.
3. Another inspector performs similar measurements and analyses several weeks later at the discharge port, where the oil is unloaded.
4. The information reported by the inspectors goes back not only to the shipper of the oil, but also potentially to a whole mess of other companies and people, often including the terminals, the ship's crew, the ship owner and operating company (which can be different), both the buyer and seller of the oil, various others involved in the transaction, and possibly government and regulatory agencies as well.
5. Each company receiving that information might do a bunch of stuff with it, such as passing it among various departments and through a bunch of computer systems for accounting, payment, analysis, and so on.
6. Especially with oil at record high prices, having that quantity and quality information be accurate is pretty important.
7. Until rather recently, a lot of the inspection reporting involved somewhat ad hoc systems of fax transmissions, emails, phone calls, courier shipments, and typing of the same information several times over into different computers at different places by different people—which risks delays and errors.

So, again, when people ask what Navarik does, I can go through the rigamarole above, and then explain how we've built a web-based software program that inspectors can sign into securely from any web browser on any computer (just like an online bank, or Gmail, or Amazon) and find out what shipments they've been hired to inspect. Then they can head down to the terminal, do their work, and come back and use that same computer (or a totally different one) to enter the reporting information, which goes directly over the Internet to the people who need to use it.

There's a lot more to it than that, obviously—mechanisms for other people to put together the lists of tests to be performed, procedures for nominating and contacting inspectors, information about ports and terminals around the world, thresholds for alerting people when inspection results are out of spec, and so on—but the overall result is that the whole cargo inspection process can go more smoothly. Information moves more efficiently and is more accurate, and people get paid quicker. And we have other web software solving similar problems for other companies too.

What I'm talking about here is a real web business—not one with a high profile and a shiny 3D glistening logo and a gazillion page views for a beta application with a questionable revenue model. Instead, Navarik is an under-the-radar company turning eight this year, with a few dozen very talented employees in a nondescript light industrial Vancouver building, adding a little bit of extra efficiency to the energy industry that keeps the modern world functioning.

For a business, that's a pretty good place to be. Navarik's founder, my friend Bill Dobie, will be speaking at the eLiberatica open-source conference in Romania this spring about it, and about how we use open technologies and standards that were built over the past decade for the Internet to make it happen.

I'm also hoping to be well enough again sometime later this year to help move it all along.

Labels: cancer, friends, money, navarik, web

• "You call this traveling? Twenty-one days, 15 countries, 45,000 miles—without setting foot outdoors."
  
  
• "The more affluent a country gets, the more things parents come to see as essential for raising children [so] as long as the world keeps creeping out of poverty, families will continue to shrink."
  
  
• jamNOW lets you jam online with other musicians, interact with fans, and listen to live streams from nightclubs all over the place. Haven't tried it, so I'm not sure how well it works.
  
  
• Looks like the iMac DV in our kitchen is finally officially obsolete. It's slow, but it still works pretty well.
  
  
• Are things really this bad for biology teachers in significant portions of the U.S.A.?
  
  
• "If all you do is work, your value judgements are unlikely to be sound."
  
  
• "I rejoice in this life that I have, and in the grandeur of a world that preceded me, and an earth that will abide without me."
  
  
• "Studies have shown that abstinence-only education does virtually nothing to prevent kids from having sex [and that] abstinence-only group[s] used birth control less frequently."
  
  
• "When I get a resume, the first thing I do is type the person's name into Google.  If nothing comes up, I trash the resume without reading it."
  
  
• "I don't want my ISP looking at how I use the Internet to target ads to me, period, any more than I want the phone company listening in on my conversations in order to sell me stuff."
  
  
• TripIt looks like one of the best online travel resources out there, though I haven't tried it.
  
  
• How to make your website or blog faster.
  
  
• The Universe is 13.73 billion years old, give or take only about 120 million years. Now that is a cool finding.

Labels: apple, astronomy, evolution, family, google, linksofinterest, music, school, science, sex, space, travel, web

Here's the last batch of my photos from the Northern Voice conference:

Labels: blog, conferences, geekery, meetup, northernvoice, podcast, web

Here are my latest photos from MooseCamp, which was the first day of Northern Voice. I've also posted some wacky night pictures from the way home.

At MooseCamp I had a chance to try out a Nikon D3 camera belonging to Matt Mullenweg. It's extremely impressive, probably the most solidly built camera I've ever held. But it is freaking huge—more massive than some medium-format cameras, I think. In contrast, John Biehler's new MacBook Air is shockingly light. Hold one and you'll understand what the fuss is about.

Labels: blog, conferences, geekery, macbook, meetup, nikon, northernvoice, photography, podcast, web

It wasn't really called TikiCamp, but the Northern Voice opening tiki dinner at the Waldorf Hotel in Vancouver was a ton of fun. Here are my pictures:

More from the main event tomorrow and Saturday.

Labels: blog, conferences, food, geekery, meetup, northernvoice, photography, podcast, web

Yacht Rock may be the greatest web TV miniseries ever created. At least in my opinion. And now, almost two years after the final episode, there is a new one, the official episode 11. (P.S. Language not safe for work.)

Smooth. Really smooth.

Labels: humour, music, video, web, youtube

Tim Bray, who was involved in it all and who lives here in Vancouver, wrote a good story about the beginnings of XML (eXtensible Markup Language), which is the foundation of a lot of how the Web works today. It's a reason that Navarik, the company I work for, has a business, for instance. His story talks about the people who helped make it happen, which is why it's a good story.

At the beginning of his piece, Tim wrote, "XML is ten years old today," because version 1.0 was officially released on February 10, 1998, a few days before my older daughter was born, and during the Nagano Winter Olympics. The specification had been kicking around in draft form for about a year and a half before then.

XML is a powerful way to make information readable and writeable both by computers and by people—and also, most critically, to make it portable between different kinds of devices over different kinds of information networks. In its simplest form, it is merely a well-structured way to format plain-text computer files. And it is an open standard, so no one has to license it or pay for it: you can just use it.

So now you can work with a web browser or a feedreader or another website to grab a web feed from a blog and read or republish it elsewhere. And big companies can wrestle their ancient mainframe computers into sending and accepting data from technologies that hadn't been invented when they were built, like web applications. When you read this website or make an airline reservation or buy a T-shirt online or check your webmail or update your bank balance, XML is involved.

It's one of the key standards that emerged from the dot-com bubble, and has helped the Internet become an essential utility around the world. Not bad for a ten year old.

Labels: geekery, opensource, telecommunications, vancouver, web

UPDATE: Lloyd Budd points out that these are not really open source.

OSWD is a bunch of open-source web designs, most of a bloggy style. There are more than 2000 of them so far, and you can contribute your own—at least if you have better web design skills than I do.

Thanks to Bre for the link. Here's a nice example, called RedTie.

(P.S. If you click on the image you'll see what it looks like now that I'm trying out Cabel Sasser's very slick FancyZoom web design JavaScript.)

Labels: design, free, geekery, opensource, web

As someone who's been a Vancouver blogger for more than seven years, and podcasting here for almost three, I often hear the question in the title of this post. But that's not what the questioners usually mean. What they want to ask is: Can you make a living from blogging and podcasting?

The short answer is yes, but don't go and quit your day job just yet. I didn't say that just anyone should try to pay for your food, lodging, and transportation needs (plus those for your spouse and kids) from blogs and podcasts, or that you could make a huge living from them. It's possible, but I don't do it, and haven't even tried. You should be aware that, just like anything else, making a living online would be a job, not some sort of free-money fantasy life.

My wife, who's also a blogger and podcaster, and I were talking about it this morning before she went to work (she's had the same stable, rewarding, good-paying professional day job for more than 15 years, and isn't planning on quitting that anytime soon). For us, our online activities are hobbies. They bring in a little money from ads and sponsorships, usually enough to cover their costs and maybe buy the occasional dinner.

Blogging for money

The people I know who work as bloggers, like Arieanna, work hard. She writes at least five different work blogs (plus others) all day, every day, sometimes until late at night. (If I had to scour the news for links about Mischa Barton all day, I'd probably go batty. And that's just one blog.)

If you look at blogs that are popular enough to pay people's salaries—like Arieanna's and the others at b5media, or the Weblogs Inc. network that includes Engadget and its siblings, or successful independent blogs like Daring Fireball—they tend to be very focused and updated many times a day.

They often attract lots of comments, which require moderation and feedback, and their posts tend to be well sourced or individually researched, and also well written and concise. In many cases, the words are carefully crafted to attract search engine traffic, and the blogger may spend quite a bit of time writing about things he or she isn't all that interested in, or at least (as in any job) may have days where the job is just a slog, rather than a joy. Money-generating blogs take a lot of effort, skill, and time to maintain. They're work.

In other words, don't expect to dash off a paragraph every couple of days about what your kids ate for breakfast and have the ad revenue pour in.

Now, if you can find a day job where you spend a significant part of your time blogging, that's another matter. If I weren't on medical leave right now, I'd be doing that over here (notice that the "Daily Blog" isn't very daily while I'm absent). But that blog—and private internal blogs and wikis the company runs behind a firewall—is just a slice of my day job, not the whole thing, so I don't think it counts either.

Podcasting for money

Podcasting, as an even newer medium than blogging, has an even less-established income stream. Search engine optimization and contextual advertising don't work as well for podcasts, audio or video. Like most bloggers (and like me), the vast majority of podcasters do what they do as a hobby. They (like me) might bring in a bit of cash from sponsors and podcast network advertising and so on. But podcast production is even more labour-intensive than blogging, and unless you put out shows quite frequently and build a significant audience on an appropriate topic (or topics, if you can manage several shows), it will be pretty hard to pay a mortgage.

Even Leo Laporte, whose This Week in Tech (TWiT) network attracts some of the biggest audiences in podcasting (numbering the hundreds of thousands each week), and who runs an extremely efficient podcasting operation largely by himself, still has a day job. Several, in fact. He remains a widely syndicated radio host, as he has been for decades, and also helms a cable TV show on which I've appeared (as a guest paid only in exposure and with a free take-out lunch) a few times.

Leo probably could make his podcasts a full-time gig, but presumably chooses instead to funnel what money he gets back into the network and to honoraria for his guest hosts. Others, like podcast pioneer Adam Curry, have used venture funding to create a buffer while they try to build businesses like PodShow into something large and viable.

Individual podcasters who work hard can also make a job of it. No one I know well does that, but among the tens of thousands of podcasts out there, a small number can keep their hosts fed, clothed, and housed. Again, those tend to be focused, well produced, frequent—and lucky. If you got into the game early, or happened to hit a certain niche at just the right time, or worked hard on a concept that struck a chord with the (still relatively small) podcasting audience, and then hustle like hell, you might be able to quit that day job, if that's what you want.

It used to be about the music, man...

In many ways, being a podcaster or blogger is like being a musician. Far more people play music, or blog, or podcast, for fun than make a living at it. I was a full-time musician for awhile in the early '90s, and it was tough work, with long hours, lots of low-budget travel (not a requirement online, fortunately), and crappy pay. I quit after I got married, because that life wasn't what I wanted long term.

The people I know who have made a career of music—and several of the guys in my band do just that, even though I haven't—aren't Rock Stars. They're working professionals. They do a lot of different things: they teach music, work as studio sidemen, tour with established acts, make instructional videos, play at casinos, entertain at weddings and corporate meetings, compose soundtracks, produce and engineer other acts, give seminars, and record jingles. They keep accounts, pay taxes, save money for retirement, buy health insurance, and run their careers as businesses.

I think anyone looking to work in blogging in podcasting is going to have to do something similar. Be professional, work hard. Use your online activities as leverage to do other things. Even in my blog's early days, it didn't make me any direct money at all, but it brought in plenty of work when I was a freelance technical writer and editor. Similarly, being an expert blogger or podcaster (or even better, both) can help you make money in other ways—such as helping other people and organizations make blogging and podcasting part of what they do.

It's not magic, it's work

If you're going to make money online, you'll need an entrepreneurial impulse, or you'll need to work with others who do. You need to know how these new media work, and how to promote and take advantage of them in all sorts of ways.

The Web and its technologies are still a frontier, and you'll probably have to bust your butt to succeed. You need to flexible and see opportunities you might not expect—selling cool T-shirts and mugs and stuff might make you more dough than any kind of sponsorship or advertising, for instance.

Or, if you're like me, you might prefer to let your blogs and podcasts be fun things that you do on the side, not something that you have to do every day, and which might burn you out after awhile.

The Internet is pretty damn cool, but it's not magic. Those who succeed on it are the same ones who succeed anywhere: they're smart, skilled, and have good ideas. They make realistic plans and knuckle down to put them in action. They hustle. And sometimes they fail and have to try again with a wiser view.

Labels: b5media, blog, johngruber, leolaporte, linkbait, money, podcast, web

I summarized my opinion of the proposed $45 billion takeover of Yahoo! by Microsoft in my comment on Robert Scoble's post:

I think if the merger happens, it will take ages to bring the two companies together, Yahoo!’s best people will bail out, and by the time the smoke clears, Google will have lapped Yahoosoft/Microhoo several times. Bad for both sides, and in the end for users, in my opinion.

Then again, I know nothing about running a business. These are just my instincts.

Here's what some other people had to say:

• Scott Rosenberg
• Andrew Leonard
• Kara Swisher
• Jeff Jarvis
• Dave Winer
• Angela Gunn
• John Gruber
• Marshall Kirkpatrick
• Kevin Kellher at GigaOM
• Erick Schonfeld at TechCrunch
• Merlin Mann
• Tim Bray
• Adam Engst at TidBITS
• Farhad Manjoo
• Time Weber at the BBC
• Dave Pell
• Scott Schnaars
• John Siracusa
• Fake Steve Jobs
• David Drummond, Senior VP at Google

Labels: geekery, google, microsoft, money, web, yahoo

A bunch of stuff I've been accumulating over the past few months:

• Types of coffee beverages
• U.S. regional pizza styles
• Build your own Apple Store
• Google Maps mashup of how Greater Vancouver would be flooded by a 4-metre sea level rise (move around to check out your own area nearly anywhere in the world)
• J Allard's thoughts on the first year of the Zune
• Very useful Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) reference for web developers
• How well does restoring from Apple's new Time Machine backup work?
• Intro to Fully Flared features slo-mo skateboarding, explosions
• When you post to your blog, where does the information go?
• Tips to give presentations more like Steve Jobs
• What other sites are on your shared web server?
• How Microsoft would reveal it hasn't done its homework in school (see?)
• New Apple instructional videos
• Long Radiohead video that features all the songs on In Rainbows

Labels: apple, backup, band, blog, environment, extremesports, food, google, linksofinterest, macosx, microsoft, music, publicspeaking, web

Todd Cochrane, one of the hardest-working guys in podcasting, and his team at RawVoice have just launched podcastFAQ.com, which looks to be a great one-stop resource to learn about podcasting: what it is, how to find shows, how to make shows, and so on.

As someone involved in three podcasts (Inside Home Recording, Lip Gloss and Laptops, and my Penmachine Podcast), I often get questions about podcasting from both prospective listeners and people interested in making their own shows, so I expect I'll be pointing quite a few people in podcastFAQ's direction.

Labels: audio, education, geekery, insidehomerecording, lipglossandlaptops, podcast, web

Our pal Kerry Anne (left) was one of the team of kick-ass bloggers who swept the CBC Test the Nation 21st century trivia game show tonight on national television. Of course, who do you call if you want trivia? Chefs? Flight crews? Celebrity impersonators? Cabbies? Backpackers? No! You call the bloggers!

It was an impressive showing, with a team average of 50 out of 60 questions correct (83%), a blogger (Rick Spence) with the highest individual score (57 of 60, or 95% correct), and the team's celebrity endorsee Samantha Bee (of The Daily Show) also scoring highest among the celebrity panel, with 49 out of 60. You can read more from Miss 604, Calgary Grit, and Mighty God King—and surely dozens of other blogs by now.

UPDATE: Unsweetened.ca has a big ol' list of blog reactions. And the CBC Test the Nation blog and Buzz Bishop have way more.

Nice job, KA and crew. And you didn't even have to wear jumpsuits, chef's whites, or Borat costumes.

Labels: blog, cbc, friends, lipglossandlaptops, television, web

I realized recently that I haven't mentioned next month's fourth annual Northern Voice blogging, podcasting, and general Internet fun-time conference here in Vancouver. It takes place just over a month from now, February 22 and 23 (a Friday and Saturday) at the UBC Forestry Sciences Centre.

If you're not normally the sort to attend geeky tech conferences (well, and if you are, for that matter), this is one you should go to, because it's friendly, cheap ($60 Cdn for two days, as opposed to thousands of dollars for some events), and fun. There are always plenty of both new bloggers and experienced types around, from all over the Pacific Northwest and elsewhere. It's well organized. Plus, the location is fantastic.

In 2005 and 2006, I both attended and spoke at Northern Voice, but in 2007 I had to miss it because of my first of many cancer surgeries. I'm planning to be there this year, but purely as an attendee who'll take lots of photos.

My wife, who went last year, is more involved this time, helping to organize the Thursday-night gala. You should sign up and come along too.

Labels: conferences, friends, geekery, northernvoice, vancouver, web

I've used NetNewsWire as my RSS reader on the Mac for years. It's the best program of its kind, in my opinion. And now it no longer costs money. I sat for lunch with developer Brent Simmons and his wife Sheila a few years ago, and he is not only a smart programmer, but a nice guy.

If you read a lot of websites and blogs and would like to get the latest without constantly hopping from site to site, RSS is the way to go, and NetNewsWire is the way to get it if you have a Mac. Go download it.

Labels: geekery, macosx, rss, software, web

This site runs on Blogger, as it has for more than seven years, but if I were starting over again today I'd probably use WordPress. That's what I recommend to my friends and relatives, so that other sites I work with, such as Simon's,