Author Archives: Mike O'Connor

Free corporation name searches

I’m working with Affilias to roll out a registry for corp.com domain names (“did you miss acme.com? you might be interested in acme.corp.com”). We’re shooting for early April to have things up and running.

Along those lines, I’m working on a little gizmo to help people look up name-possibilities for free. There are lots of darn good resources, but they’re really hard to find so I thought it would be useful to find as many as I can, and perhaps put some automation in front of them to make the searching easier.

This is a scratchpad for me as I locate the free-lookup sites.

Free trademark searches — US Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) — (note; follow the “Search trademarks” link in the middle of the page)

Free national business yellow-pages search — Searchbug

Free state entity name search locations (not complete, I’m still hunting them down on the incredibly variable state pages — you’d think there’d be some kinda convention they’d follow…)

Alabama
Alaska
Arizona
Arkansas
California
Connecticut
Delaware
District of Columbia (DC)
Florida
Georgia
Hawaii
Idaho
Illinois
Indianna
Iowa
Kansas
Kentucky
Louisiana
Maine
Maryland
Massachusetts
Michigan
Minnesota
Mississippi
Missouri
Montana
Nebraska
Nevada
New Hampshire
New Jersey
New Mexico
New York
Wisconsin

Cheap nordic walking poles

Marcie and I are big-time walkers. We do 2 walks a day, 2.5 miles each time — 5 miles a day, 150 miles/month, probably around 1700-1800 miles a year. We run through a lot of walking shoes.

The new addition to our routine is walking with poles — aka “Nordic Walking” — which seems pretty nifty. It helps us old geezers navigate icy sidewalks in the winter and gives us a little bit better workout. Here’s a pretty good writeup of the whole Nordic Walking thing if you’re interested.

But oh my, those poles they’re using are darned expensive — ranging from $60 to $200+ per pair. My “cheap is good” instincts were aroused and we decided to make our own. Heading over to the used cross-country ski-pole place, we bagged some nice bamboo poles for a big $6 a pair. Heading over to REI, Marcie got replacement tips for walking poles for $9 a pair. So we’re talking $15/pair for stuff.

The making is easy. You need to know how long to make the poles. I came across a formula (somewhere, can’t find the link) that says that the length of the pole should be about 70% of your height. I used a hack saw to cut off the poles (sometimes there are metal gizmo’s in the middle of those used poles — those would be tough on a wood saw). A little detergent applied to the “replacement” rubber tips to slip them on to the bamboo pole and we’re good to go.

Yeah yeah, I know — these poles don’t have shock absorbent neutrino power subsystems with articulated carbon fiber folding landing gear modules. But they work fine for us.

Tuning notes — MP3 files for your iPod or player

I came across some whiz-bang writeup about a guitar tuner program you could download to your iPod. Richard and I agreed that a simpler approach would be to record MP3 files of notes that you could put on your player — just play the file when you need to tune your instrument.

So here is a collection of files you are welcome to download and share. No ding dang rippin frippin copyright — all I ask is that you put a link to this page from your blog, tell your friends to do the same, etc. That way, maybe these files will work their way high enough in the Google ranking that people will actually find them.

Feel free to offer suggestions by commenting to this post — I’m not sure I’ve got the right notes when it comes to the orchestral tuning files (having never played in an orchestra). If they’re wrong, let me know and I’ll change them.

Here are the files;

Tuning — A — Bass Violin Sound
Tuning — A — Oboe Sound
Tuning — A — Violin Sound

Tuning — D — Guitar Sound
Tuning — D — Jazz Organ Sound
Tuning — D — Piano Sound

Tuning — E — Guitar Sound
Tuning — E — Jazz Organ Sound
Tuning — E — Piano Sound

Couches for town

Here’s the post about this winter’s Big Project — a couple of couches to replace the ones we have at the house in St Paul. Dang, we bought those couches pretty recently but the fabric was terrible — they’ve faded really badly in the sun and they pick up stains like nobody’s business.

Read on if you’re interested in the ongoing saga. Continue reading →

Podcasting 101 – Episode 1 – Going to record a remote? What do you take?

Poor old Safe Haven… This poor blog has been sorely neglected while I've been off fooling around with podcasting (at www.SexAndPodcasting.com).

But I'm starting a series of “how to” podcasts and they need some backup info and I've decided to post those notes here.

The first show is about all the things that you might want to put in your bag when you go out to record something as a “remote” (not in your comfy studio, but actually out there with da peepul). I decided to start with this one because I'm heading up to the Winnipeg Folk Festival tomorrow and needed to make this list anyway. Continue reading →

BlogTorrant – making BitTorrants easier for your blog

I've been puzzling about the problem that BlogTorrant solves for quite a while.

Namely — how can I make it easy to put BitTorrant versions of big files (like my Sex and Podcasting podcasts) up on my sites.

These sites of mine are built on Xoops, a very nifty, very flexible open-source content management system that can do all kinda cool stuff. But blogging isn't it's strong suit — not terrible, but it's a little clunky at things like track-backs, RSS, etc.

I solved the “how do I do enclosures?” problem by using FeedBurner to generate the RSS feeds that you're seeing — one of the nice things about that system is way it auto-magically does all the enclosure stuff for podcasting.

This BlogTorrant gizmo looks like it might be the add-on that will make it easy to do BitTorrants in the Xoops environment — I will do some tinkering and update this post with a cookbook if things work out.

Radio people are digging their own graves

I loved this New York Times piece called “Fade-out, how the new rock is passe on radio.”

Here's the punchline quote at the end;

Quote:

Some analysts fear that, when radio stations switch from alternative rock to programming aimed at older listeners, they may be making a sacrifice. “Radio has ceded the younger demographic to other media,” said Fred Jacobs, president of Jacobs Media, a radio consulting company in Southfield, Mich., specializing in rock. “I just don't know how we're going to get back people who didn't get into the radio habit in their teens,” he said, adding, “It really becomes problematic down the road.”

Another tidbit from the article. Turns out the big programmers (Cox, Clear Channel) dropped women from their ratings target in 2003! And here's another gem.

Quote:

“The format in the last couple of years has gone through an identity crisis,” said Kevin Weatherly, program director of KROQ, a closely watched alternative powerhouse in Los Angeles. “You have stations that are too cool, that move too quickly and are only playing the coolest music, which doesn't at the end of the day attract enough of the audience. Or you have the other extreme, dumb rock, red-state rock that the cool kids just flat out aren't into.”

Dumb rock. Red-state rock. I love that…

Here's a tip to the broadcasters. Figure out what podcasts the “cool kids” are listening to. Do something like that on your radio station. You'll be fine.

Update…

Hm, later the same day, Clear Channel (biggest oinker multi-radio-station owner in the land) posted declines in radio revenue. Here's a relevant quote;

Quote:

Radio broadcasting revenue fell 7 percent to $773.6 million, while live entertainment dropped 17 percent to $424.5 million

And here's a link to the story.

"Messing with my man" — a musical project, with apologies to Steve Reich

Xeni Jardin over at Boing Boing posted this great voicemail message from a very angry young woman who accidentally left the message on a wrong number. Here’s the link to her post. I’m goofing around with some new audio gear this afternoon and decided to do a little fooling around with it. I hope she hears it some day, and uses it to direct her anger — she’s been done wrong!

This is a take off on a great Steve Reich piece called “It’s gonna rain” – here’s a link to get you started on that one.

And here’s a link to my little MP3 — it’s about 3 minutes long, 2.5 mBytes.

Listen…

Recording Skype calls (for podcasting, but also interviews for work)

Ah. A completely satisfactory geek experience. Now that I've rassled most of the basic podcasting stuff into shape, I wanted to move on to doing interviews and conference calls and recording them — Ralph pointed out that Skype was the way to go.

Doug Kaye (the maestro of IT Conversations) put together this definitive post on how to record Skype calls. There are other ways, but this is definitely the industrial-strength approach.

I'm going to start doing “conversation” podcasts, but before that I'm going to use this to record an interview for a consulting project I'm working on — tomorrow. I have a little rant n'record that's going up on Sex and Podcasting about how you could use podcasting as an organizing tool for work (the show will go up in a day or two).

RSS as a replacement for databases

Safe Haven's not getting much attention these days because I'm still getting my sea legs with the podcasting stuff. Sex and Podcasting is gonna be getting a new post a day, at least for the next week.

But I ran into a cool thought while listening to The Gilmore Gang yesterday (what happened to them by the way — a great series of podcasts that seem to have trickled off to nothing back in February).

Here's the idea — why not use RSS on a manufacturing shop floor to let machines and work-centers tell each other (and us) what they're up to. Machines could “subscribe” to upstream machines, and “publish” for downstream machines and let each other know what's going on — feeds could talk about what came into (and left) the machine/work-center.

I spoze this could be expanded to anything that has stuff moving through stages — paperwork processes, hospitals, etc. All kinds of real-time applications come to mind.

One thing that would be neat is that we'd get away from the huge central database notion and so adding a workcenter, or rearranging them, would be easy. Simply a matter of changing who subscribed to what. Sortof an object-oriented model that us regular people could understand…

It could be really visual too — lots of cool UI possibilities there. Not to mention fitting in better with the notion of lean manufacturing, and visual management.

Now, back to podcasting.

Sex and Podcasting — my new podcasting gizmo

I’m late into the game — podcasting’s 5 months old, but I’m there now.

This blog has been neglected for the last couple weeks while I’ve been getting things pulled together, but I’m there now and this is an entry to record what I’ve learned. It’s going to be another really long one, so I’ll put topic headers and keywords (for Google) “above the fold” and leave the gory details for the “read more” section…

Sex and Podcasting — what it’s about, why I’m doing it, why I transmogrified Lorenzo’s “Sex and Broadcasting” book title into my site’s name, plus some of the interesting current developments in the podcast world like Adam Curry’s Podshow.com.

Licensing — I’m going to play RIAA licensed music. At least I think so… This section is where I’ll explore the differences between ASCAP/BMI performance rights licenses, Harry Fox Agency mechanical rights licenses and SoundExchange federal copyright licenses and how I’ve decided to proceed — the short version is; I’ve got a BMI license for the performance rights, and will work with Harry Fox on mechanical rights when they decide what to do.

Equipment — hardware/software plus construction. I got a couple cool new toys — some nice mics plus a really neat Marantz PMD660 digital recorder (which i wound up getting in preference to the Edirol R1).

To learn more… Continue reading →

Question for y'all — should I add conferencing to the site?

Steve and Ralph and I had a little chat in the “comments” section of the video-conferencing post that went up a few weeks back, which got me thinking this morning…

Since I imagine most of the folks who are reading this blog are Beer Gang members-in-good-standing, I was wondering if you'd be interested in having a conferencing area on the site so you could talk to each other directly. It's easy (a couple mouse-clicks) to put up, if you think it's a good idea.

Video conferencing on the cheap — finally

One of the dreams I’ve always had (from reading too much science fiction, no doubt) is to be able to do point to point video phone calls with folks. I was an early fan of ICQ — which back in the olden days was one of the very first video-calling applications.

I’ve always been disappointed with the results. The early cameras were crummy, bandwidth limitations resulted in choppy pictures with huge latency and the sound-portion of the call was always a nightmare.

It had been a few years since I’d messed around with the stuff, so when my buddy Bill Coleman asked, I took the opportunity to do a geek project and see how things work these days. This is a “notes to myself” post in case I have to retrace my steps some day.

The big breakthrough was to use Skype for the audio portion of the call. It’s pretty easy to get the video portion of the call up and running with MSN Messenger (and presumably AIM and Yahoo Messenger as well). But getting the audio to work has always been way too hard for me to suggest to “normal people” because of all the firewall and routing issues. Skype neatly solves that problem and we judged our Saturday Geek project “pretty cool” and a big success.

Good things

– It’s pretty cheap. For Bill and me, who both already have broadband Internet access and computers and like that, the only out of pocket cost is the $50 we spent on our spiffy little Logitech cameras. The instant-messaging client (MSN Messenger is what we used) and Skype are both free.

– Quality is good — especially the audio. Skype has got the kinks worked out of their stuff, so the audio portion of the call was smooth as silk. And the video works pretty darn good too. A little fiddling (mostly with the video “size” setting once the video portion was up) and we got the audio and video latency (geek talk for “delay”) pretty well lined up with each other so the lips moved when the sound arrived.

– It’s pretty easy, and thus a rewarding project and a lot more fun than all this stuff used to be.

– It will work for people at work. That’s a really big deal for Bill, because he wants to use this to keep in touch with his clients, who tend to be scattered all over the landscape. See the Cookbook for the tech details, but I think this rig will work with no firewall changes (except for the firewall on your PC) and thus won’t give security-people heartburn.

“Read more” to get to the Video Cookbook… Continue reading →