Anything is Possible, it’s a matter of Probability.

I am presently sitting quite comfortably on a foldable chair at a table with my PowerBook, a textbook, a cell phone, and a bowl of freshly picked cherries at my aunt and uncle’s house in the country-side of France. We’re about a 25 minute drive from Paris in the village of Vernouillet. On Monday I will move into a dormitory at Cité Universitaire on the southern end of Paris.

How did I get here? By plane of course, from the Tri-Cities Regional Airport, to Cincinnati, to Charles-DeGaulle International Airport. Why? That’s a bit more complex, allow me to elucidate.

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So, Verge is finally over.

Well, technically, it ended on April 4th, but I’m just now getting around to spinning out my thoughts on what happened.

For those not in the know, Verge has been a series of convergent media conferences put on by the Tennessee Journalist. We cover issues in web journalism, web-based media, getting jobs in new media, new technologies, and anything else potentially related to journalism and the internet. We’re fully buzzword compliant. Stephen Townsend did a great write-up on the event here along with some great pictures taken by my friend and roommate, Brandon Ball.

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When I think about blogging, and all the tools we have to make the task simply easier or possible at all, I can’t help but think of a layer cake. I’m going to dive into a bit of an analogy ride here (I am a big fan of analogies) partly to help explain the concept of a blog to my peers and friends who keep asking me to try and explain it to them. If this is simple stuff for you, just move along, this will get interesting in a later post.

To define a “blog” in the terms of a dictionary, we would start with something like “a Web site on which an individual or group of users produces and ongoing narrative”. In other words, a site that is regularly updated, can also suffice. The use of the word has become so broad that it requires some hands-on use and some refinement.

On with the cake. [Read more →]

So, to make a long story very short, my host of 5+ years decided to make some pretty big changes to their service, pricing, and level of access. Business wise it’ll be good for them, they can attract tons of SOHO’s to their service with lots of push-button services and “security”. All at the touch of a button.Well, the touch of a button thing is really a dirty lie, but besides that, their five 9’s reliability had plummeted to maybe two 5’s. Time to move on.I did a quick survey and found Dreamhost to have the right price, a good promo, and all the right features for the purposes of this project.

Additionally, have the flexibility to spread my wings a bit is nice, more on that next week. Even though there have been some very public typographical errors on their part in recent history, that level of transparency that they so dutifully maintain is what just convinced me to join on in.So let’s pretend for now that this is a new age, and we can all kick back our chairs, sip on some ice tea, and dream of spring and WWDC.

Hooray!

So we’re off to another great year here at the University of Tennessee and I’m one more semester close to graduation. I’ve decided to go ahead and go for the minor in Information Sciences. If we had a major I would have switched to that long ago, but since that isn’t available this will have to do.

On that note, IS 102, the introduction to the IS minor is interesting. I won’t lie, it’s far too basic for me. We’re starting on what computers are and not going too terribly far from that. Computer Science 102 and 160 both taught me more than this class can, but the context is certainly different which makes it not a complete waste of time. In either case it’s unavoidable at this point in time since the professor responsible for the minor left but a few months ago. We’ll make this interesting however. As versed as I am in Django, I have not had a chance to fiddle with Drupal. So I’ll be taking some class related time in the coming weeks to develop some Drupalie stuff. Good times. [Read more →]

I figure every site/blog/journal needs an inaugural post. So here it is.

This is a second run at making use of this domain, oddly enough, the slightly misguided vision for the first attempt ended up being realized after all.

So to those who ever saw the old edition, I apologize for letting it linger for as long as it did. In the interim, this space was largely utilized as a test bed for some RapidWeaver magic (a fun app worth checking out).

So now, after some time, travel, and reading, I’ve settled on marginally maintaining a presence on the web beyond Facebook and my long abandoned LiveJournal.

What will be on here? Hopefully some insights into online journalism and technical issues related to that (for as long as that lasts), software design, web design, broadcasting, and whatever else strikes me and isn’t ridiculous.

Cheers.