shawn rider dot com

A bunch of us went out to the Birchmere last Friday to see Jonathan Coulton with Paul and Storm. Sarah and I had seen him last Fall at the same venue, so we brought friends this time: Marjee, Trevor, Nowell, Carlo, Ian and Jane. A good time was had by all, I believe. The Birchmere is always a fun venue and the Jon, Paul & Storm combo is always entertaining.

I suppose I should probably feel more shame over my love of novelty music acts, but I would say two things to the naysayers of musical comedy stylings: 1) There is wisdom in humor. 2) Shut up. 

The video above was posted by Mr. Coulton, who came on stage to sing Nugget Man with Paul and Storm during the opening. He had a camera in his pocket and made much mirth. You can pretty much get the whole story from the video itself, although you miss out on the awesome JoCo model swivel. Too bad for you.

See these guys live if you get a chance! 

Reference: 

YouTube - Jonathan Coulton Sabotaging Nugget Man

I worked from home for the past two days. I noticed crews digging up the neighborhood electrical and whatnot boxes yesterday when I took the dog for a walk. Today they have moved into the open area behind my backyard, which I watch over as I work from my third-floor window.

All day long I’ve watched a fellow dig a larger and larger hold right behind my backyard.

All day long I’ve wondered: When is he going to hit a wire?

He just did.

1. I knew it! I knew my luck couldn’t hold, that there would be some outage.
2. Does the cable company even know who these people are? Who are these people?
3. Do the people know they have broken anything? Should I go say something?
4. A Supervisor came to ask about my cable TV and internet. His vest was labelled “SUPERVISOR”. I confirmed the cable is completely gone.
5. Does the Supervisor think I’m watching TV all day?
6. Man, why do I work on the Internet? It goes away so easy… I should do construction or sculpture or something more permanent.
7. I never have this much to write about when I want to make stupid little posts on the Internet. If it weren’t for the outage, I’d be a Twitter-fiend right about now.
8. Why did I never activate mobile posting for Twitter? (Oh yeah, because my cell phone sucks…)
9. Why didn’t the mobile activation for Jaiku work? At least then I could tell Nowell and Kristen about my woes.
10. They are using a rad little tool that bores its way from one big hole to another. It has a tempo of ~94bpm and a super regular rhythm with a lovely mechanical *tink* at the end. Groovin.
11. Why do I work on the Internet again? I should have one of these awesome boring tools and could bore through anything.
12. Now I can’t stop thinking of stupid jokes about the similarities between being a professional writer and a professional ‘borer’.
13. The Supervisor is in the hole. Even three floors up, I can recognize a coaxial crimper thingy.
14. Is it just me, or does that little spin at the end of crimping coax just make you look cool? Even Supervisor guy looks suave attaching those ends.
15. A globe just appeared over my network connection – we’re back!
16. And Supervisor is actually waving at my office window for confirmation of the fix – big thumbs up, man!
17. So I’m back. Catastrophe averted. Life path resumed.

I still don’t know who these people are, but at least they seem benevolent.

UB DMS Course Index

At the beginning of the Fall 2007 Semester, I received some plaintive emails from a grad student at UB (SUNY Buffalo) who wanted to look at my notes for the courses I taught (which he was preparing to teach). My course websites were well known within the Department of Media Study, and outside the department, too. I always tried to make the sites as complete and useful as possible, keeping in mind that they were meant to supplement the in-class environment (as opposed to being designed as online courses, these are merely course websites — big difference).

At the time, I had just suffered a hard drive crash and forced move to another machine and I could not find the files anywhere. My primary backup had been destroyed (reminder to everyone to practice good backup habits). I felt terrible that I couldn’t help out a fellow DMS student, and also that I had lost four years worth of planned, accumulated teaching materials.

However, in going through all of my various hard drives from old machines, I came across a complete archive of my course sites. What luck! I was able to do some minor modifications to make the internal navigation work, but otherwise they are the same as the last day that I was at UB. I invite you to browse the courses, relive fond memories of The Shawn Rider Show (Thank you very much, I’m here all week!), or use them to help yourself or your students. 

Please note: I am not trying to maintain these courses per se. They are presented here for archival purposes. So there may be broken external links or irrelevant information. As technology and techniques change, I’m sure many of the production techniques presented in these courses will become irrelevant. Nonetheless, I hope you’ll agree that there is still a value in this content, and the price is right! 

UB DMS Course Index

News Channel 8 is an ABC affiliate in the DC Metro area. They are pretty much either showing reruns of better shows, the traffic report, or really terrible local news coverage. The best thing about the morning show is that Dave Willingham, the traffic guy, seems totally drunk every day. And the weather guy (Ron Riley) kind of looks like John Boland, the SVP of Content at PBS.

So it’s no surprise that News Channel 8 really screwed up their recent story on a Greenbelt, MD trend: ZOMG! Some kids posted RAPZ on TEH INTARWEBS! And the raps are DIRTY!

Aside from the fact that it’s not news that teenagers like dirty rap, the broadcast version of this story is complete hysteria. One woman interviewed says, “Now that you show me this, I’m shaking. My girl is in 10th grade — this is so close to her.” Seriously? Of all the bad things that could happen to one’s daughter in this crazy world, close proximity to rap music is probably not the worst. The rhymes are dirty, homophobic, misogynistic, and occasionally racist, which fits with most of the landscape of contemporary pop culture. It’s just amplified in the hip-hop realm a bit, but it’s no different than the content of the tracks I was secretly listening to when I was in junior high school.

But the straw that broke this camel’s back is the blatant lack of research that went into the story, and this is exposed in the last paragraph of the Web version, the closing lines of the broadcast version. The Web version reads:

The school system says the fight club consists of one clip which keeps getting recycled. It says it reprimanded the students in the video, yet the system admits it is hard to rein in anything once it takes off on the internet. Right now, there’s no way of knowing whether the rants have turned into any physical acts of violence.

The broadcast version also reported that students have claimed to see new episodes of the “Fight Club” videos posted each week. A quick Google will turn up results on YouTube for “Fight Klub” — a series produced by MTV2 that features rap battles between up and coming rappers. Amazing! In fact, after 20 minutes of searching, I cannot find the Roosevelt High School Fight Club videos at all — but I have found dozens of other “Fight Club” videos.

The first tier of the videos one finds are clips from the movie “Fight Club.” These are multitudinous and varied, creepy in themselves. The next tier is ACTUAL fight club footage: People making amateur fighting clubs. If done in a dojo, this is not really even considered weird. And finally there are many, many videos of all sorts of folks battle rapping and calling it “fight club.”

None of these things are mentioned: the fact that this is in no way an isolated incident, that the students are mimicking a television show, and that there is precedent encouraging students to release aggression through verbal expression rather than physical violence (such as dance and poetry groups). This is a series of serious omissions and forces us to confront the unreliability of our local new sources.

Source: Fight Club Rants Run Rabid Online|NewsChannel 8

I Am A: Chaotic Good Human Wizard (5th Level)

Ability Scores:
Strength-10
Dexterity-11
Constitution-11
Intelligence-18
Wisdom-14
Charisma-15

Alignment:
Chaotic Good A chaotic good character acts as his conscience directs him with little regard for what others expect of him. He makes his own way, but he’s kind and benevolent. He believes in goodness and right but has little use for laws and regulations. He hates it when people try to intimidate others and tell them what to do. He follows his own moral compass, which, although good, may not agree with that of society. Chaotic good is the best alignment you can be because it combines a good heart with a free spirit. However, chaotic good can be a dangerous alignment because it disrupts the order of society and punishes those who do well for themselves.

Race:
Humans are the most adaptable of the common races. Short generations and a penchant for migration and conquest have made them physically diverse as well. Humans are often unorthodox in their dress, sporting unusual hairstyles, fanciful clothes, tattoos, and the like.

Class:
Wizards are arcane spellcasters who depend on intensive study to create their magic. To wizards, magic is not a talent but a difficult, rewarding art. When they are prepared for battle, wizards can use their spells to devastating effect. When caught by surprise, they are vulnerable. The wizard’s strength is her spells, everything else is secondary. She learns new spells as she experiments and grows in experience, and she can also learn them from other wizards. In addition, over time a wizard learns to manipulate her spells so they go farther, work better, or are improved in some other way. A wizard can call a familiar- a small, magical, animal companion that serves her. With a high Intelligence, wizards are capable of casting very high levels of spells.

Find out What Kind of Dungeons and Dragons Character Would You Be?, courtesy of Easydamus.

The Exercist, originally uploaded by shawnrider.

I’ve been digging around, trying to grab up all the various things that never made it into a cohesive site before. I have a lot of miscellaneous photoshop images that I occasionally want to be able to pull up and I can never find them. I found this batch hiding on an old hard drive. They mostly date from 2003.

I love these old p-chops. I can really see my skills and understanding of images growing. Anyway, check them out for yourself in my Photoshops set.

shawn waiting at white flint metro fall 2007, originally uploaded by shawnrider.

Uploaded a series of photos to Flickr today. Mainly I’m crossposting this so I can see how the other integrations pick it up, but I also became aware that there aren’t very many good photos of myself online. So this should make it easier to grab decent profile pix when signing up to new sites and whatnot. And if you have a burning desire to see what Shawn Rider looks like, then this should pretty much answer that question…

Sarah has been sitting next to me all night giggling at wildly inappropriate moments considering the movie I’ve been watching: a PBS documentary about some sad down being forced to relocate due to widespread lead contamination (“The Creek Runs Red” on Independent Lens). Talk about depressing…

So she finally IMs me a link to the gallery she’s looking at and it’s this Album Sleeveface Meme, which she’s pointed out to me a few times before. I’m not sure where it came from, but there are about twice as many images today as there were yesterday (at least on the sites Sarah has found) and the images have two crucial qualities: 1) They are hilarious. 2) They are easy to make. Just like slapping some IMPACT or ARIAL BLACK text onto a kitty-cat photo, these things practically make themselves. In fact, a run of photoshopped sleeveface images can’t be too far away…

Here are a couple links:

Random Sleeveface Gallery

Fun Tuna: Cool Sleevefaces Illusions