New Website for The Night Trotters
While laid up feeling ill this weekend I decided to whip out a new logo and website design for my band, The Night Trotters. There is still a wee bit of tweaking to do, but it’s close to being complete. Check it out!
3 Million Teens Leave Facebook In 3 Years
Things are looking very bad for Facebook based on the numbers from this report. Teenagers do not seem to like Facebook. If only they’d give Google+ a whirl. Well, if only anyone would give Google+ a whirl. It’s a much better platform that does much more than Facebook, but no one seems to realize that, sadly.
Here’s what is going on with Facebook:
1) Teens (13-17) on Facebook have declined -25.3% over the last 3 years.
2) Over the same period of time, 55+ (perhaps those teens’ parents and grandparents?) have exploded with +80.4% growth in the last 3 years.
3) Of the major metropolitan areas, San Francisco saw the highest growth with +148.6%, a stark contrast with Houston which saw +23.8% growth.
3 Million Teens Leave Facebook In 3 Years: The 2014 Facebook Demographic Report.
Net Neutrality Is Dead
US Appeals Court Kills Net Neutrality
There goes the Internet.
Your broadband provider can now decide to throttle Netflix, Hulu, and YouTube streaming into your house and leave unthrottled their own crappy on-demand service for which they charge you to watch movies. Let’s hope the Supreme Court gets to rule on this, and that they have the people in mind rather than the corporations.
A visual example of what your Internet service could soon look like:
Disney plans to remake the Star Wars expanded universe
Op-ed: Disney takes a chainsaw to the Star Wars expanded universe | Ars Technica.
I’m pretty excited about this, actually. It sounds like they are taking the time to think things through and prepare an official storyline that will become the de-facto canon for the Star Wars universe. I did read the Thrawn triology (the stories that were officially licensed to occur after Return of the Jedi), and they were very good books. I hope they can keep at least some of that story line. However, some of the trash I ready after those books deserves to be forgotten.
Troll level: Expert
Man doing sign language at Mandela memorial was a fake.
“He was basically gesturing. He didn’t follow any of the grammatical rules and structure of the language. He just invented his signs as he went along,” said Delphin Hlungwane, an official South African sign language interpreter at DeafSA. “There was zero percent accuracy. He couldn’t even get the basics right. He couldn’t even say thank you.”
Adios, Feedly
Reading RSS feeds from multiple websites in a central, organized location that lets me quickly save items of interest without bothering me about posting to Facebook or telling what my friends are doing is a very important piece of my life. A good, clean RSS reader lets me quickly devour the day’s news, the latest trends, things my friends and family have written, and whatever else may be of interest to me.
I was an avid user of Google Reader until they shut it down earlier this year. Along with many other people, I sought an alternative home for my collection of important RSS feeds. I quickly found Feedly, and move everything over there. They seemed pretty hip, and while the interface and options took a little getting used to, it managed to satisfy my RSS needs (along with the mobile app) for a while.
Feedly started deploying a paid subscription model to get extra features, which seemed like a logical part of being a business, and I was OK with that. They didn’t take away anything I was used to in my free account. But they started making some boneheaded decisions, and the doubt started to percolate in the back of my mind.
After perusing Reddit this morning, the last straw was drawn when I discovered this thread and this blog post dicussing Feedly’s new approach to hijacking shared links, thus cutting out the original content publishers (something they apparently backpedaled on pretty quickly). Not being someone who tries to make money from his blog, this was mildly concerning, but not that upsetting to me.
What did it for me was the CEO of Feedly making some off-putting comments on that blog post and generally being a jerk about it rather than listening to concerns and doing PR the right way. I decided to take my feeds and head over to InoReader. It was an easy import/export process, and InoReader feels much more comfortable to me so far. Their Android app looks decent as well.
The funny thing is, I went to try and cancel my Feedly account, but I could not find a way to do so anywhere in the settings. I clicked on the “Support” link, and was taken to a page that advertised their services. There were no support options to be found anywhere.
If I figure out how to completely cancel my Feedly account, I will let you all know.
I will hopefully be happy in my new RSS house, but if not, there are still plenty of good looking alternatives out there.
Are you still an RSS user? What is your favorite reader?
Will’s Musical News and Events
It’s been a while since I wrote about my musical endeavors here, so I thought I’d post a quick update.
My main band for the last two years has been The Night Trotters, a traditional bluegrass outfit with some top-notch musicians kind enough to join me. We’ve been playing around Asheville a bit, and we just finished an EP entitled Thoroughbred Bluegrass Music. You can listen to the songs from the EP on our website, and you can buy the whole thing for a very cheap price from CDBaby. It’s also available on iTunes, Amazon, and Google Play.
Needless to say, I’ve been playing banjo with The Night Trotters, but I haven’t forgotten about the drums.
My old pal (Chris) Morgan Geer asked me to play some gigs on drums with Drunken Prayer on a few upcoming dates to help promote the release of his new CD, House of Morgan. Some of the tunes from that album are reworked versions of songs he and I recorded way back in the days of 1995 (or so) at WWC. These tunes have been taken and integrated into new ways of hearing them thanks to the marvel of modern electronics.
So, we will be playing some of those old tunes, in addition to some new ones, at these fine establishments:
- Nov 21 at The Double Crown (CD release show)
- December 13 at Static Age Records
- December 27 – to be announced soon.
Maybe I’ll see you there…
Hey Microsoft, I Heard You Need a New CEO
Dear Microsoft,
It’s been all over the news this week that Steve Ballmer has decided to step down as CEO. At first this seemed like a decision he had come to by himself, perhaps having felt as if his work here was done. Some started speculating that he was forced out by the board. Whatever the case, it has become clear that you will be seeking out a new CEO over the coming 12 months.
You need to choose me, and here is why:
1. I will work for half the money. It was reported that Ballmer made $1.3 million in 2012. I will step into his job for half the money.
2. I know what is wrong with your products, and I know how to fix them. I am someone who is intimately familiar with your apps and operating systems, and I am even more intimately familiar with fixing them. From disinfecting them, hardening them, cleaning them up, making them usable, and working around their aggravating inconsistencies, I know what is wrong with your shit. And I know how to fix it.
3. I know your competition. I got so fed up with you around the time Windows ME came out, I wrote you off completely, wiped all my machines, and became a Linux die-hard. I only used you when I had to. Eventually I ended up becoming a Mac user as I matured into adulthood and could actually (almost) afford the damn things. I know what it’s like to hate on Microsoft, I know why people do it, and I know what you can do to turn that around. I know what makes a Mac so much more appealing in the eyes of those customers you are so quickly losing.
My experience is based in reality. The reality of day-to-day usage and frustration with your products. When is the last time Ballmer sat down and tried to wipe a hard drive and reinstall Windows XP for someone? When is the last time anyone on your board, for that matter, had to disinfect a Windows 7 box riddled with malware and explain to their mother-in-law how her computer completely stopped functioning and why she now needs to change her online banking passwords?
Sure, there are thousands of consumers such as myself who are equally as familiar with your problems, and each have their own opinions on what you need to fix about yourself, but I bring to the table the experience of seeing you fail in many environments: colleges, non-profits, corporations, and federal government. I have worked across all of these sectors over the years, and I have witnessed each one seek out alternative solutions to the problems you consistently present.
Microsoft, you are out of touch, and that is why you are quickly becoming irrelevant. As you seek a new CEO, I hope that you strongly consider someone who is in touch, and I hope you even more strongly consider that person to be me.
Cable Companies: Monopolizing Progress Prohibitors
A good read about how the cable industry in the U.S. is getting away with highway robbery, monopolization, and stifling progress. This really needs to change.
“If you’ve got a commodity that everybody needs as an input into their businesses, like take railroads for example, and it costs a lot to initially build that network so it’s hard for someone else to enter, and you can cooperate with your colleagues who are also providing that service, and you can divide up markets, you’ve got a monopoly business,” Crawford explained. “We’ve seen this happen with wired Internet access in the United States.”
Most of us don’t even know how bad we have it. We lag behind most other modern nations in broadband permeation, cost, access, and options.
“If you move into an apartment in Seoul [South Korea], you have a choice of three different providers, they show up in a day because there’s so much competition, and they charge you $30 for TV and everything. Koreans when they come to the United States… actually laugh at us for how expensive and how slow [American Internet service] is.”
Don’t we deserve this?