Feed

  • Twitter

    I logged in the first time soon after it started in 2007. I did my ten years and then mostly logged off by 2017. I’m not likely to start using it again regularly although I still use it occasionally as a people bookmarking service of sorts. I logged in last week to get an ‘archive’ of all of my data and publish it elsewhere1,2.  I tweeted 828 times and based on the IDs in the data, I’m guessing that I was the 950,535th person to ever tweet. The process felt achingly familiar3. I’ve had some discussions with others about it recently and it reminds me to think about how I use the web. Per the course… I like to flush it out, write it down, and publish it so I can send a link instead of hashing it out in an email or text thread.

    Twitter was built as a MicroBlogging service. Microblogging as a type of broadcast medium was the forerunner to social networking platforms. Social networking existed from the moment the first network computer connections were made. Twitter had a good name and was the best breed of something not unique amongst the landscape at the time. The fundamentals of Twitter already existed elsewhere. The Twitter idea originated from Odeo4,5, a podcasting company. It was just a means of having an SMS group chat.  Evan Williams created Blogger which was sold to Google and was the basis of the ideas behind both podcasting and blogging. Before Twitter, social media meant connecting with others online primarily through email and RSS, both of which could be read from the same client and in a browser. Some folks worked out unique ways to notify others via email for pingbacks and trackbacks6. I was a fan of Friendfeed because it supported pulling feeds from various sources. Facebook acquired it for $15 million and shut it down7.  Similarly, Pump.io, StatusNet, and identi.ca were using the open-source Activity Streams format which was a precursor to the ‘Fediverse’ or federated social network terms tossed around today. 

    Inter-Net-work….the web was inherently social long before the media part. In Silicon Valley’s race to capitalize, proprietary methodologies were created because open standards hinder income potential. Even the data archive I got from Twitter last week isn’t exactly portable. The WC3, who sets the standards has recommended Web Mentions, Activity Streams, and Activity Pub9 standards which is the protocol that makes Mastodon federated. I migrated most of my Twitter follows over to Mastadon while I was at it last week. Watching the other platforms pivot to gain new users is amusing. Substack has added ‘mentions’, ’cross-posts’, and ‘best seller’ badges10. Tumblr rolled out a $7 badge and the owner insisted they would be implementing the activitypub specification which I noted appropriately11. I’m sure folks will figure out a way to spam those protocols too as long as there is a way to profit from them. Twitter turned to bots after it gained popularity and the account APIs were introduced. The bot, spam, link farms, etc were online long before Twitter too.

    Elon Musk recently tweeted “Vox Populi, Vox Dei” likely in reference to his surveys on reinstating previously banned accounts. It translates to the “Voice of the People is the Voice of God”,  but the full context of the most cited reference to that term is:

    Nec audiendi qui solent dicere, Vox populi, vox Dei, quum tumultuositas vulgi semper insaniae proxima sit.  “ And those people should not be listened to who keep saying the voice of the people is the voice of God since the riotousness of the crowd is always very close to madness. 

    ~ Alcuin in his letters to Charlamagne Epistle 127 in 760AD12.

    The riotousness of the crowd is Twitter. And Twitter is just a bellwether for the internet as a whole as we adapt to new communications mediums. Those first couple of years were just techie types tweeting because those were most of the same folks with websites.  Then came the journalists, media, celebrities, publishers, and internet celebrities. Then everyone’s uncle had it installed on their phone.  When those other folks started rambling on about their other interests, I lost interest. And then they started to monetize it all with adverts, tracking users across the web, and rewriting shared URLs so they could track those too.  The most retweeted thing ever was a pyramid scheme offering a reward for retweets. The web was already decentralized and will likely always be outside some platforms’ walled gardens. I just hope that the efforts to improve the open standards aren’t sabotaged by private interests.

    I’m sure in the coming year we’ll end up hearing a lot more on free speech and social media. I have a very simple minded approach to it which I wrote about pretty extensively in my article on Section 23013. I think that you’re welcome to espouse your opinions, ideas, or theories however you’d like but not entirely without consequence if they are damanging to others. I think that the main product of social media platforms, aside from usability, is sorting and moderating that information so that it’s vaulable to it’s end users. A platform like Twitter is a private company and can make itself reponsible for moderation however it best see’s fit to it’s own business model. And likewise, I can excersize my own liberty to not pay it any attention.

    I’d use social media again if I had something to promote and I suppose I’m lucky not to have the need. Former Twitter CEO Evan Williams apologized saying he was “wrong to think that an open platform where people could speak freely would make the world a better place”.  I wouldn’t completely agree with him on that because I believe there have been some good things gained through social networking platforms.  I read an essay recently fed to me, not via social media but my handy dandy good ole’ fashion hosted RSS reader…  entitled A Tweet Before Dying that said “What then? We’ll all move over to some Twitter replacement like Mastodon, hundreds of millions of us, and ruin that too? Sigh.”13. Other than echoing my sentiments here, whatever happens with Twitter means very little to me because I choose to rely not on the platform itself but on the interoperable standards of the internet which were social from the get go. 

    2022/12/03 Update:

    Right on Cue… Matt Taibbi, the investigative journalist published a series of tweets he’s calling the Twitter Files15 yesterday afternoon looking into the content moderation efforts of Twitter during the last election. Main takeaway for me was the fact that, imagine this… people are sending emails around requesting removals and questioning various policies. Sometimes just having an audience has it’s own consequences.

    2025/11/15 Update:

    The thing is… all this new reporting on foreign spam accounts seems so obvious to me, I can’t even really understand how it’s news other than the fact that they added the ‘about this account’ features showing country of origin16. The new reporting did kinda touch on something I hinted at here and that America’s Polarization Has Become the World’s Side Hustle17. Perhaps I’ll log in again and leave this as my only ‘tweet’ since I previously deleted all of the others… na, ole Space Karen isn’t getting any eyeballs from me.

    1. @windhamdavid tweets – https://davidwindham.com/til/lists/tweets 
    2. @windhamdavid follows – https://davidwindham.com/til/lists/people#i-follow-on-twitter
    3. Windham, D. 2020. Dirty Algorithm – https://davidwindham.com/dirty-algorithm/
    4. Odeo – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Odeo
    5. Twitter History – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twitter#History 
    6. Pingback https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pingback
    7. FriendFeed – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FriendFeed 
    8. Silicon Valley – S3E10 – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silicon_Valley_(TV_series)
    9. W3C Social Web Protocols- https://www.w3.org/TR/social-web-protocols/ 
    10. Substack – https://on.substack.com/p/introducing-mentions-and-cross-posts
    11. Tumblr –https://windhamdavid.tumblr.com/
    12. Alcuin – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alcuin
    13. Windham, D. 2021. Section 230 – https://davidwindham.com/section-230/
    14. Ford, P. 2022. A Tweet Before Dying – https://www.wired.com/story/tweet-dying-revolutionary-internet/
    15. Taibbi, M. 2022. The Twitter Files – https://twitter.com/mtaibbi/status/1598822959866683394
    16. Elon Musk’s Worthless, Poisoned Hall of Mirrors – https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/2025/11/x-about-this-account/685042/
    17. America’s Polarization Has Become the World’s Side Hustle – https://www.404media.co/americas-polarization-has-become-the-worlds-side-hustle

  • David Byrne

    I went to see David Byrne in Asheville a couple weeks ago. We were in the first rows and the audience started following the performers dance moves. It was like being in some sorta intimate line dance with the band. It was stellar. Watching him perform is more akin to watching a preacher than a rock musician. I’ve had a long held fascination with David Byrne and I think it began in August of 1981 when MTV first went on the air and I saw this video.

    I would have been just under 10 years old the first time I saw the video, but I remember quite vividly the debut of MTV on our console television in the living room. MTV aired a bunch of the same videos1 over and over, but none of them grabbed my attention the way Once In A Lifetime by the Talking Heads2 did. In retrospect, I believe the innovative use of film editing was just the product of the art school background of the Talking Heads band members. At that age, I didn’t really understand the meaning of the lyrics and it was only the motion that intrigued me. Regardless, the song reappeared in a 1989 film entitled Down and Out In Beverly Hills3, which gave me a bit of insight into the meaning of it. The theme of the film kinda nailed the existential crisis of the song lyrics. About that same time (1989) I owned exactly two concert films on VHS: The Song Remains the Same by Led Zepplin and Stop Making Sense by the Talking Heads4. Both of which are two of my all time favorite concert films. I bought up about every Talking Heads and David Byrne CDs I could get my hands on. And I played them non-stop. I had a couple friends who also enjoyed them, but they were few and far between.

    Skip ahead fifteen years or so, when I met my wife in college. Two things really stood out about our first date from my other gal pals. The first is that she had a really good sense of humor, not just the giggle type, but the dark and cynical gut rolling humor I like. The second thing is that she really liked the David Byrne and Talking Heads. It wasn’t just the ‘oh yeah, they’re cool’ type of like. She knew all of the lyrics to most of the songs and understood them. The first birthday gift I ever bought her was a talking heads CD box set. We played that thing out on every trip we took. I’ve since read How Music Works6 and followed about every recording project, film, or book he’s been involved with. I’m also particularly fond of his internet radio station7 because of the way he curates the playlists. I can’t say there is anything he’s created that I don’t like. I am particularly fond of a couple though… the film True Stories, Look Into the Eyeball, and Uh-Oh. I also really like the soundtrack to The Last Emperor and it was nice seeing him play himself on the Simpsons Dude, Where’s My Ranch? and in This Must Be the Place.

    Neither of us have ever seen David Byrne in concert. I bought the tickets as soon as they went on sale and put us in the second row. As with what has been noted the style of that original video in that he studied archive footage of “preachers, evangelists, people in trances, African tribes, Japanese religious sects” to see how he could incorporate them into his performance… the live performance we watched wasn’t too far off. The way he engaged the audience wasn’t that of a rock star, but of an evangelist. Because the set design was so simple and the accompanying band members engaged in a rehearsed synchronized dance routine, the first ten rows of the auditorium were completely engaged in the performance. Him and his crew were working hard breaking a sweat, and had obviously spent countless hours rehearsing the material and choreography. Like I said… it was top notch. We already knew the lyrics to the new album so we listened to the Imelda Marcos inspired musical Here Lies Love5 written by Byrne on the way up, while Ginny researched the Marcos’ real life. On the way back we listened to Brian Eno. I’d give the American Utopia concert a 10/10. And I give David a 10/10 on being an artist and a decent human being.

    Here’s the setlist for the show (Asheville, NC – May 8th, 2018):
    Here – Lazy- I Zimbra (Talking Heads) – Slippery People (Talking Heads) – I Should Watch TV (David Byrne & St. Vincent) – Dog’s Mind – Everybody’s Coming to My House – This Must Be the Place (Naive Melody) (Talking Heads) – Once In a Lifetime (Talking Heads) – Doing the Right Thing – Toe Jam (Brighton Port Authority) – Born Under Punches (The Heat Goes On)(Talking Heads) – I Dance Like This – Bullet – Every Day Is a Miracle – Like Humans Do – Blind (Talking Heads) – Burning Down the House (Talking Heads) – Encore: Dancing Together – The Great Curve (Talking Heads) – Hell You Talmbout (Janelle Monáe)

    25/12/04 Update: We saw David again last night in Atlanta for the Who Is the Sky? tour8. The thing is I’ve seen a lot of concerts in my lifetime and it’s definitely different. David takes a bunch of highly trained dancers, musicians, and vocalists and puts em through their paces in a thematic visually stunning choreographed set. He gave em what they wanted on this tour, yet the set list of songs somehow still felt like a tightly planned concept album. It’s really about him as an artist. It’s kinda hard to explain, but it’s like he’s floating up above it to steal a line from his song. He’s not rooted in any physical place or timeline even though several of the songs have very physical references. The lyricism is timeless and abstract – he blended a setlist that spans almost fifty years. Here’s the setlist:

    • Heaven ( Fear of Music )
    • Everybody Laughs ( Who Is the Sky? )
    • And She Was ( Little Creatures )
    • Strange Overtones (Brian Eno – Everything That Happens Will Happen Today )
    • Houses in Motion ( Remain in Light )
    • T Shirt ( Who Is the Sky? )
    • (Nothing but) Flowers ( Naked )
    • This Must Be the Place (Naive Melody) ( Speaking in Tongues )
    • What Is the Reason for It? ( Who Is the Sky? )
    • Like Humans Do ( Look into the Eyeball )
    • Don’t Be Like That ( Who Is the Sky? )
    • Independence Day ( Rei Momo )
    • Slippery People ( Speaking in Tongues )
    • I Met the Buddha at a Downtown Party ( Who Is the Sky? )
    • My Apartment Is My Friend ( Who Is the Sky? )
    • Hard Times ( Paramore cover )
    • Psycho Killer ( Talking Heads: 77 )
    • Life During Wartime ( Fear of Music )
    • Once in a Lifetime ( Remain in Light )
    • Everybody’s Coming to My House ( American Utopia )
    • Burning Down the House ( Speaking in Tongues )

    Anyway, you can go find the tour show reviews out there so I’m not going to sum it up. The Fox in Atlanta is wild with its mosque design. All I’ll say is if you haven’t seen a performance – it’s good – definitely worth the effort. Seeing the show is just a reminder of possibilities.

    1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_first_music_videos_aired_on_MTV
    2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Once_in_a_Lifetime_(Talking_Heads_song)
    3. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Down_and_Out_in_Beverly_Hills
    4. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stop_Making_Sense
    5. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Here_Lies_Love
    6. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/How_Music_Works
    7. http://davidbyrne.com/radio
    8. Who Is the Sky? – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Who_Is_the_Sky%3F

  • Man from Plains

    All this talk of politics has affected my netflix lineup. Last night we watched the documentary “Man from Plains“2 about Jimmy Carter3 and his most recent book. I’ve got to say that Jonathan Demme4 is one of the better filmmakers of our time. Ever since Stop Making Sense5, a video concert of the Talking Heads was released I’ve been a fan. What I like about Demme is the unbiased and personal approach. I’ve always said of good photographers and painters whom work with portraiture that the best approach is to be as transparent as possible so as to not influence the subject in any manner. This film does just that as it documents Carter’s travels to promote his most recent and controversial book entitled Palestine Peace Not Apartheid6.

    The film gives an honest perspective on the man and his principles as Demme was obviously given good access the former president during the filming and what impressed me most was exactly how candid and emotional Carter was during the filming. He is obviously a very intelligent man in the way he handles conversation and which may also explain why he is a physicist by trade. What is controversial about the book is that Carter is trying to explain that perhaps the Palastinians have been wronged which is very bold and politically incorrect these days. But Carter does it with eloquence and good rhetoric in the face of staunch adversaries.

    After the film, I followed up with some research on Carter and his policies. What amazed me is how strong his opinions about peace and energy conservation. He actually reduced the dependence on foreign oil by half during tenure as president. He installed solar panels (which were later removed) on the white house! It’s amazing how we continue to repeat ourselves in history as I think my third grade teacher began the first history lesson i remember with that exact phrase. President Carter had some interesting approaches to energy policy that may hold in todays atmosphere.

    Don’t get me wrong…I’m not a political or economic expert, but I can tell you a good deal about the Laffer Curve7 and supply side, trickle down Reaganomics including the fact that Author Laffer and Wanninski, credited with coining the term did so over a meeting in 1974 with Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld present…so I’ll let you do your own research8. But I am a good with the study of human character and I can tell you that I am compelled to believe that Jimmy Carter is a good man with honest motives or at least the film did an excellent job of concealing anything otherwise.

    April 20, 1979, White House photo of Carter and rabbit from the Carter Library
    April 20, 1979, White House photo of Carter and rabbit from the Carter Library [1]

    I can whole heartedly recommend that you see the film for yourself. The photo above is of Carter fishing when a swimming rabbit “attacked” his boat.. lucky the secret service was there to capture it on film.

    23/12/06 – The rabbit incident came up in a conversation likely due to conflict in Gaza9. I replaced the missing photo and added the references. I didn’t replace any of the original links, correct any of the grammatical, or fix the spelling errors.

    25/01/09 – I referenced this essay in a recent conversation with friends since he passed away at age 100. He was the longest-lived president in U.S. history. I read quite a bit about him recently and I watched the service on C-Span 10 this morning. The Carter Center published a tribute site 11 that’s worth your time. I left a condolence message. The more I learn… the more I like.

    Jimmy Carter is an inspiration for a life well lived. I told my friends I’m gonna pick up some tools in his honor and to handle some carpentry work for myself and I might even go so far as start working on the solar thing. I’ve referenced the Crisis of Confidence speech12 a number of times recently and I suggest a revisit. I first picked up on it in the film 20th Century Women and rewatching it had profound affect. I sympathize with Jimmy Carter’s tough mind, soft heart mentality and I hope that his work to advance human rights and alleviate human suffering is an inspiration for generations to come14.

    1. Jimmy Carter rabbit incident – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jimmy_Carter_rabbit_incident
    2. Man From Plains – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Man_from_Plains
    3. Jimmy Carter – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jimmy_Carter
    4. Jonathan Demme – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jonathan_Demme
    5. Stop Making Sense – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stop_Making_Sense
    6. Palestine Peace Not Apartheid – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palestine:_Peace_Not_Apartheid
    7. Laffer Curve – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laffer_curve
    8. Reaganomics – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reaganomics
    9. Israel – Hamas War – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2023_Israel–Hamas_war
    10. President Jimmy Carter Funeral Service at National Cathedral – https://www.c-span.org/event/public-affairs-event/president-jimmy-carter-funeral-service-at-national-cathedral/429876
    11. Jimmy Carter Tribute – https://www.jimmycartertribute.org
    12. President Carter Address on Crisis of Confidence – https://www.c-span.org/program/american-history-tv/president-carter-address-on-crisis-of-confidence/154404
    13. 20th Century Women – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/20th_Century_Women
    14. Carter Center – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carter_Center

  • binary data portability

    data portability
    i’m doing this logo for a contest because i believe in the cause and there’s a free iphone to boot.. (i’m always on ginny’s and i just installed a decent plugin for mobile editing of this site).. seems that Red Hat recently sent a Cease and Desist claiming that the DataPortability logo was too similar to their Fedora Logo.
    … while i was working on it kris sends me this.
    kw
    binary data portability
    it’s what happens when your working with illustrator too long… and actually the binary code got me to thinking of some great ideas for the logo and i got a cool link to this encoder from paul schou

    i was researching design firms yesterday thinking about the logo and noticed that now..they’re selling rental space on 2008 web trend map from information architect
    web trends

  • audiovisual actionscript

    popforge
    Popforge is an Actionscript 3 code sandbox started by Andre Michelle and Joa Ebert…. it’s hosted at google code…. they did the roland909 and 8bitboy – the amiga sound emulator….
    roland909
    and they’ve also got this great cubic vr processor for flashplayer9… and it’s one of the very few free non javascript dependent vr scripts..nice work all around… and they’ve got something to do with hobnox which looks like some serious business.
    hobnox
    mi145
    [kml_flashembed movie=”https://davidwindham.com/org/first.swf” height=”550″ width=”800″ /]
    speaking of digital audio.. that’s a composition written and played by my bro you’re listening to.

    var s:Sound = new Sound();
var sc:SoundChannel;
var ba:ByteArray = new ByteArray();
var array:Array;
s.load(new URLRequest("jazz_sax.mp3"));
sc = s.play(0,1000);
this.addEventListener(Event.ENTER_FRAME, spectrum);
var a:Number = 0;
function spectrum(event:Event)
	{ a = 0;

	graphics.clear();

    SoundMixer.computeSpectrum(ba,true,0);

    for(var i=0; i < 556; i=i+3)

    {

    a = ba.readFloat();

    var num:Number = a*360;

    graphics.lineStyle(num/19,0x999999|(num << 5));

    graphics.drawCircle(stage.stageWidth/2.5,stage.stageHeight/2.5,i);

              }

              }

  • Ruby

    ruby windham
    …my niece Ruby in binary form.

  • dynamic flash using ssp director

    ssp array
    slide show pro
    hey thanks.. imagemagick and todd dominey..who actually did all of the really hard work on this one.. dominey knows what he’s doing.. smart move licensing director per domain..it’s worth it..i’ll gladly pay for it…. and i can customize and use it now pretty seamlessly..almost anywhere to manage video, audio, text, html, and imagery.. including the entire layout and dynamic text /html with css attached inside of flash based pages…. which i would embed in this page (click image above for files) but it seams that kimili flash embed won’t support (bc the swf is dependent on other imported .swfs) an absolute src path from a url that is dynamic.. as this one is generated….. i’ll have to work on this in the near future.. i’m just glad that i can now begin to build so many more dynamic sites using director to manage the media files, layout and text in swfs.
    slide show pro director
    ssp fla
    i’ll add more parameters to it.. as i use it for other projects.. and thks in particular for the original array goes to Shannon Jensen a talented photographer as well.

    //modified from ssp user forums. http://slideshowpro.net by https://davidwindham.com
var totalImgs:Number;
var currentImgNumber:Number;
var theArr:Array;
var menublisten:Object = new Object;
menublisten.galleryData = function(eventObject):Void {
    theArr = eventObject.data;
    var menu_mc:MovieClip = _root.createEmptyMovieClip("menu_mc",350);
    var nexty:Number = 0;
    for (i=0; i<thearr.length; i++)="" {="" var="" mb:movieclip="menu_mc.attachMovie("mb","mb_"+i,50+i," {_x:0,_y:nexty});="" mb.txt.text="theArr[i][0].title;" nexty="" +="mb._height;" mb.onrelease="function()" albumnum:number="Number(this._name.split("_")[1]);" ssp1.loadalbum(albumnum);="" sspt1.loadalbum(albumnum);="" }="" ssp1.addeventlistener("gallerydata",="" ssplistener);="" adata="new" object();="" adata.onalbumdata="function(eventObject):Void" t_txt.html="true;" t_txt.htmltext="eventObject.data.title;" t2_txt.html="true;" t2_txt.htmltext="eventObject.data.description;" totalimgs="eventObject.data.totalImages;" ssp1.addeventlistener("onalbumdata",="" adata);="" sspt1.addeventlistener("onalbumdata",="" idata="new" idata.onimagedata="function(eventObject):Void" t3_txt.html="true;" t3_txt.htmltext="eventObject.data.caption;" t4_txt.html="true;" t4_txt.htmltext="eventObject.data.title;" currentimgnumber="eventObject.data.number;" ssp1.addeventlistener("onimagedata",="" idata);="" sspt1.addeventlistener("onimagedata",="" function="" nextimage()="" if="" (currentimgnumber="" <="" totalimgs)="" ssp1.nextimage();="" sspt1.nextimage();="" else="" ssp1.loadimagenumber(0);="" sspt1.loadimagenumber(0);="" previmage()="">= 2) {
		ssp1.previousImage();
		sspt1.previousImage();
	} else {
		ssp1.loadImageNumber(totalImgs-1);
		sspt1.loadImageNumber(totalImgs-1);
	}
}
nextImage_bttn.onRelease = function() {
	nextImage();
}
nextImage_bttn2.onRelease = function() {
	nextImage();
}
prevImage_bttn.onRelease = function() {
	prevImage();
}
var stylie:TextField.StyleSheet = new TextField.StyleSheet();
stylie.onLoad = function(success:Boolean) {
	if (success) {
	//nada
	}
};

stylie.load("stylie.css");
t2_txt.styleSheet = stylie;
stop();
</thearr.length;>

  • Pill Free Since 73′

    It was a classic lineup on IFC this morning.. after watching the end of the scripts spelling bee movie early this morning (we’ll say we get up around 5:00)…where it was once again confirmed that Ginny spells better than I.. i was completely fascinated this morning by the movie called “Does Your Soul Have a Cold” by Mike Mills…. Mills (wiki) has some really nice work floating around out there… and what a small world it is.. turns out that he and Miranda July(we likey) are a thing(see this too).. and his past life was artwork for the beastie boys and ads for nike…. point is i have been mostly pill free excepting the the time i tried to quit smoking with zyban and the ritalin to try to make me actually attend classes my sophomore year of college. However, it seems that the rest of America, (children and adults).. is on some sort of pharmacological cornucopia trip. I can’t stand the ads and the money they spend promoting them or the quasi news articles attached to our local news about health. I would guess over the last five years i’ve taken a total of 20 Advil…  but overall i am in good physical health and have begun exercising again.. and not just the yoga but the heart pounding thirty minutes on the treadmill too..ping pong and tennis.. whoopee..and if you get a chance.. “Does Your Soul Have a Cold” and Mike Mills are worth the time.

    Update:11/20/21 – I was thinking about Mike Mills this morning after reading a review about his film C’mon C’mon1. I suppose the title of this original post was because I had just watched a film about trying to medicate ourselves to happiness. I’ve switched away from Advil to Bayer baby aspirin. I noticed that the link above to his website has changed so I edited it, added some videos and a references list alongside of this update. While researching the movie, I noticed that Mike had actually been doing the same sort of interviews with kids seven years ago for another project: SFMOMA Project Los Altos: A Mind Forever Voyaging Through Strange Seas of Thought Alone2. I’m a big fan of anything that has something to do with the theme of children teaching adults lessons. Judd Apatow said “Mike’s films make me proud to be a human being”3. And I’m looking forward to seeing the new film because I really like his work. Granted I used to title and write posts a bit more casually, I wanted to update this one as a reminder.

    1. ‘C’mon C’mon’ is a special film about the kids inheriting an earth ruined by adults – https://www.nbcnews.com/think/opinion/c-mon-c-mon-special-film-about-kids-inheriting-earth-ncna1284213
    2. SFMOMA Project Los Altos: A Mind Forever Voyaging Through Strange Seas of Thought Alone – https://vimeo.com/90563906
    3. Mike Mills Anti-Hollywood Family Films – https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/01/09/mike-mills-anti-hollywood-family-films

    See Also:

  • wp – for cms president

    and ck it.. Askimet has done a perfect job with spam…
    askimet
    I’ve been working with digital stuff (professionally.. barely eaking a living at it since 2005)…i would like to lay down some simple facts that i’ve learned about the so aforementioned content management system. Managing IT and digital assets online isn’t rocket science but it can be made out to be by the quasi technical savvy bunch who might lead you to believe that computer programming is made up of elite brilliant minds.. fact is.. little has changed since the earliest days of the internet..show me some text and some pictures and let me search your information or give you mine) it’s just that some of the edges have been smoothed and expanded. Only one in thousand guys/gals actually knows the computers, servers, and networks from the ground up. Most are just selling/installing/troubleshooting/customizing someone else’s app or solution and this includes email solutions, business class hosting, websites, accounting, ecommerce, online marketing, internet enabled applications, business to business applications, databases, etc…So as a business it is important to maintain relations with another company or build an internal department to do so.. which i have seen in various stages of development and sometimes disarray.
    anyway… i forgot what my point was.. but what i wanted to say is that wordpress is a great content management system if used and customized properly to exactly how you’re going to use it.
    wp-commerce
    wp-custom
    i finally updated this site (the one you’re looking at now :)) to the 2.3.3 version of wordpress. I must say that i strongly like wordpress (not necessarily php) and wpmu comparing it other apps like ..drupal, phpwebsite, joomla, typepad, director, vanilla, typo, bbpress, , oscommerce, magento, opensourcecms, wiki’s etc….it is simple and customization goes as far as you can take the php with about most every bit of extra code written for you including importing from other apps. I wouldn’t build any site without it. I can customize it enough to handle the content (including online stores and all types of media) for any site design or needs. Even the entirely flash based sites can stand the help of a little navigation and a wp-admin section as porting the wordpress mysql to actionscript is not so hard as i have recently learned. And with a bit of work you can merge some other apps into it fairly easily. I’ve had the bleeding edge running locally for a bit and it’s really nice to see a stripped down version and i can tell you that the baked in ajax and media features are getting better.
    I have had no problems customizing, upgrading, backing up or restoring databases, finding a php solution for any task, NO security issues whatsoever, and no problem i coundn’t find a workaround for when it comes to content management thus far… so get on with your drupal, joomla and typepad.

    thks …matt

    wordpress for dummies

  • dread zeppelin, jackie wilson, and big al downing.

    i remember picking it up in about 1990… i think scott woolum got it first.. one way or another.. Ginny wanted to show me a video of cats doing immigrant song because i was making fun of songs that shouldn’t be played in a dining establishment.. and next thing you know.. it’s dread zepplin hour here.

    and while working on this music today … i knew this guy who’s now passed.. Ed Zomerfeld (who had a long storied career in music and radio)..he had this facination with Jackie Wilson.. i never understood it until years later when i finally patched the reason that Leaving Las Vegas (nicholas cage.. alchoholic) used Jackie Wilson’s Lonely Teardrops throughout.. jackie wilson was a speed and alchohol addict.. “Wilson suffered a massive heart attack while playing a Dick Clark show at the Latin Casino in Cherry Hill, New Jersey on September 29, 1975, falling head-first to the stage while singing “Lonely Teardrops”. The blow to the head Wilson suffered left him comatose. For the next eight years and four months he was in a vegetative state until his death at age 49. Al Green, the soul singer, was one of the few artists who regularly visited a bed-ridden Jackie.”.. he died in 1984.. the same year that Micheal Jackson dedicated his Triller album Grammy to him

    …and one last cool thing to note about Jackie Wilson was the fact that he was a golden gloves division champion at the age of 16 in detroit… that fact goes to show that it’s 90% perspiration and 10% inspiration.. jackie wilson would have been successful at anything he did.
    and on another note… i’ve always liked the african american country cross over thing.. i mean ray charles’ country and western album..charlie pride, dobie grey, aren neville.. etc.. but i’ve really grown fond of Big Al Downing.. his sound is unmistakable and remarkable…pictured with Buck Owens here.
    big al downing
    … how about this pre-mtv duzzie..

  • php5, mysql5, python2.4, ruby 1.8.5, centos5.

    media temple
    all standard pre-installed..time to migrate the dv as it’s a fun saturday thing to do…. on feb 10th mt released the upgraded dedicated virtual mysql 5, php 5, centOS 5 (it’s about time even though i know hosting companies that are years behind this setup).. and migrating is cake with the tools available in swsoft… but i’ll have to undue the manual php upgrades and next time i’m just goin to wait for them to do it for me…more details.. or try the Media Temple blog….but don’t get me wrong..i’m not necessarily an apple, plesk, or media temple fanboy… but i can tell you that moving away from windows and moving to media temple has been some of the smarter moves of my computing career thus far.. as windows is a joke and unix is the sh**.. and the guys at media temple (for the most part) actually know what they’re doing.. if you’re feeling the love or i sent you to this page to set up a hosting account… use this link to Media Temple…as i get referral credits to boot.
    here’s a note from the holiday season on hosting..
    elfyourself
    – Number of unique visitors per day: 1,290,330
    – Estimated total number of “elfings”: 36 Million
    – Average length of visitor: 15 minutes
    – Megabits per second: 650mb
    – Terabytes transferred: 55+TB
    – Number of required CPU cores: 16
    – 79,000 MySpace hits and 2 million Google queries for elfyourself
    – People spent 300 million minutes on all 20 OfficeMax® campaign sites

  • Louis’s Las Vegas

    i’d love to bring some attention to Louis Osteen as if he doesn’t already receive enough of it… he’s a great chef and personality of whom i admire for his unique views and experience with southern culture and food. i worked for him a number of years ago in Charleston and I learned quite a bit from him (about food, people, and music) over our hot dogs lunches.. we’ve kept in touch…he’s the reason i read “the solace of food – the life of james beard” who (beard) so reminded me of Ignatious from A Confederacy of Dunces(a book which has been described as the most accurate depiction of new orleans and i’ll testify since we were just there and which was to be adapted to film originally with belushi and now with will ferrel and lily tomlin.. although.. there seems to be a curse on it..).. which both relate to hot dogs, food, and southern culture. Speaking of….. listen to this… Jimmy Reed (who worked at Armor Meat Packing making hot dogs) about breaking down seventy-two miles outside of new orleans and how he wrote ‘ain’t that loving you baby’

    If you’re in Las Vegas.. it’s Louis’s Las Vegas and if you’re along the coast of South Carolina ..in Pawley’s Island.. it’s Louis’s Fish Camp
    louis's las vegas
    …. thks Louis!

    here’s an excerpt from the slate article.. about the curse of the book..
    As Will Ferrell has said, “It’s the movie everyone in Hollywood wants to make but doesn’t want to finance.”
    Most curiously, there is the matter of what many, including Steven Soderbergh, believe to be a “curse” that surrounds the book. In addition to the tragic suicide of Toole, a series of misfortunes have affected efforts to make the film. In 1982, John Belushi became the first actor cast in the role of Ignatius (Richard Pryor was also attached to this version, in the role of the visionary vagrant Burma Jones). Belushi was an inspired choice, possessing both the artistic range and the physical largesse to nail the character. All the lights seemed to be turning green for Kramer, who was then only 23 years old. But a day or so before Belushi was supposed to meet with executives at Universal to finalize his involvement, he died of a drug overdose at the Chateau Marmont. Five months later, the woman who led the Louisiana State Film Commission was murdered by her husband, which brought the efforts to shoot the film in New Orleans—and the production itself—to a halt. Other deaths tangentially linked to the project include those of actors John Candy and Chris Farley, both of whom were considered for the lead role before they died. And, for those so predisposed, the recent devastation that Hurricane Katrina wrought on New Orleans provides further amplification.

  • montreux jazz festival

    and why i must go this year… it’s july 4th – 19th, they won’t release the schedule until mid april.. and what a way to show my patriotism by taking my american made dollars to Switzerland and spending them there…(especially since our banks and corporate boys have no problem spending abroad in much worse places)
    this is last years line up videos..notice Soloman Burke, Booker T and the MG’s, Sly Stone?, Robben Ford, Van Morrison…. i had some discussion about going back to new orleans for jazzfest but since i was just there.. i don’t think it’ll happen…
    now.. i just need a way to pick up the extra three grand we’ll need in a couple months.. I’ve been working on another set of music for a client and i’m back to my amature musicologist days and after our trip to new orleans, i’ve been digging into some new stuff again..
    I have always loved cuban, brazillian, and reggae.. and this is a particularly good sound from Paolo Nutini doing a classic reggae sound with a Scottish influence? (or maybe it’s my Welsh decendents that dictates my fondness for the sound)..
    [kml_flashembed movie=”https://davidwindham.com/blog/nutini.swf” height=”400″ width=”500″ /]
    and another side note..
    i have been thinking of this for some time.. we wan’t to buy a houseboat (40+ footer – american/kentucky made.. customized with computers, video, and communications equipment and cozy furnishings) and ship it to europe via oceanliner transport for canal-ing around europe.. dock it in france..pay the montly dues on it..it’s going to cost a lot of money to do… and if anyone runs across this who may have the means to do this.. we figure we’ll be able to rent it out for about 2-3 grand a week for most of the year (or produce a video travel log and web as well..hint hint conte nast peoples)..and what a great way to see europe without the burden of hopping around on trains to hotels which will end up sucking up most of the money.