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Showing posts from July, 2007

Whatever happened to the Showbiz Pizza robots

I grew up in Lynchburg in the 80's, and one of the best things we had going for us was Showbiz Pizza. Pizza + videogames + animatronic figures = a great time for ten-year-old Sean Tubbs. Flash forward however many years, and the place is out of business, and then I read this on Boing Boing . Some guy bought one of the sets, somewhere, and then reprogrammed them to perform new styles of music. To me, this is absolutely hilarious.

What can widgets do for you?

In my RSS reader ( Bloglines , by the way), I have saved a lot of articles on widgets. Widgets are supposed to be the next wave of online advertising. To the uninitiated, widgets are little pieces of code that bloggers place in their sidebar to do something useful. Blogger allows its writers to add these pretty painlessly. All of the stuff to the right (if you're on the site, of course, as opposed to an RSS reader (bloglines, by the way, but I click-through a lot) is powered by a widget. The ones at the very top here aren't formatted properly at the moment, but they're put together by Feedburner (which Google owns now, by the way) as a way to boost traffic to individual entries. For me, they're convenient little tools which can at a moment's notice scroll through the latest offerings. But, will they boost traffic for the various offerings of the Charlottesville Podcasting Network? Will they add more subscribers? I'm writing to hopefully begin a conversation amon

Went to see the Simpsons movie

The wife and daughter were at church, and I decided to go ahead and catch one of the early morning shows of The Simpsons Movie at the Regal downtown. It was the first time in a very long time that I went to go see a movie by myself, and I thought it would be worth the trip. I've been a fan of the Simpsons since the first season. I never really watched it on the Tracy Ullman show. In recent years, it's no longer necessary for me to watch every new episode, and I almost never watch it in re-runs anymore. So, why pay money to go see the movie? For one, I thought it would be nice to see it in an actual theater for a change. The last movie I saw was Hot Fuzz earlier this year. I've not really wanted to see much of anything, as I've been busy with work-related things. But, I think I might have been the only person in the theater by himself, which made me feel very self-conscious. When I was single in the late 90's, I saw everything that way, and didn't really mind s

Places29 video on Channel 10

Charlottesville Tomorrow has placed its first video on Channel 10, one of the City's cable access channels. If you tune in at this moment, you'll see our video of John Giometti's presentation of the transportation study that's part of Places29 . They will be running this periodically over the next two weeks, and we'll be giving them more content as we film other events such as this.

Ten things I learned from the L.A. Galaxy/Beckham press conference

I was just watching the press conference at which David Beckham was introduced as a member of the L.A. Galaxy. It's about sixteen and a half minutes long, and was kind of entertaining. But, as I'm sure you're not really going to watch the whole thing, I thought I would provide ten things that I learned while watching. 1) Alexei Lalas seems well-groomed to play the role of booster for this team. 2) The sponsor of the L.A. Galaxy featured on the jersey is Herbalife. That's an odd choice for a main advertiser. 3) L.A. doesn't much care for their mayor. When Antonio Villaraigosa took the stage at the end, he was booed . The article goes on to say it may have been because the Mayor is a Chivas supporter. 4) Beckham almost called his sport "football" but corrected himself quickly. He said he'd get used to it. 5) Speaker after speaker makes reference to how this will build the sport of soccer in the future. I will likely watch a few matches. I also like how

Thoughts while doing maintenance

It's Saturday, and I'm feeling lazy, but I have at least eight projects to get to at some point over the weekend. But, my three computers are so laden with sound files that I don't really know where to begin in terms of organizing them. I've got audio from the last eight years waiting to be archived. It's amazing just how much stuff is on the Charlottesville Podcasting Network. I currently have audio files on three servers, and I'm trying my best to consolidate them to one place. This is a grueling process, but it's necessary so I can save a little bit of money on my server costs. Right now, I'm paying way too much. I've forgotten so many of the stories that I've posted the site. As you may recall, the original idea was to have the site be a place to go for original stories. Since getting out of the radio business, it's been harder to be efficient in terms of getting new things posted to the site. I've still got a large backlog of things