Who am I? - part 2

Let's continue explaining my reception of the complicated radio/podcast perception. I find radio entertaining as long as it fits my time schedule. When I was younger, it was an option for me to listen to specific shows at the specific airing time. Nowadays however I got spoiled.

If there is an audio content on radio that I am interested in, then I will not adjust my time to it. If there is no possibility to listen to the show at my convenience, then I skip it. I try to use the podcasting + autoplaylists options on my mediamonkey media software and to actually manage and prioritize certain shows over the others.

Listening to podcast content is a sort of going back to roots of radio. Sure, large media and news production companies do produce podcasts and adjust to the growing demand of the market. But the real podcasting radio jewels are the private show produced by ordinary web users like you and me. The ability to produce a media content directly at the keyboard, the ability to be your own editor, censor, publisher and marketer surely attracts those individuals striving towards the free media. In most cases I feel those "small-time" shows as being more genuine and user oriented than the official radio-broadcasted commercial.

Just like people who blog and read blogs as a substitution for the written media. I personally prefer reading news online. By that I mean reading blog-comments about the official news. By reading, watching and listening to private net content I can feel the public opinion better then when reading the editors' approved content. 1000 bloggers give richer angle on any subject than a single newspaper. My usual newsreading starts with blog portals as technorati or knuff.

When it comes to reading, well, new new media have arrived to my written content world too. Audio books have spoiled me so much, that I find it more enjoyable listening to someone else's voice than reading the same content in a written form. I mean, children do enjoy listening to others reading to them, right? There has to be something in it. Needless to say, listening to a book instead of reading it gives me more degrees of freedom sort to say. Maybe I am more an aural type, who knows? Well, this allows me at least to have great book listening sessions while I am on my long jogging tours.

Don't get me wrong, I really like reading too. I do read local newspapers at daily basis, as long as I get them deliver every morning free of charge as a test reader. It's just that I find the new new media too convenient and user-friendly not to use their full potential.

Part of my media profile is also love to the digital photography, TV-radio commercials production, my mobile phone flashing and who knows what else... I will leave it to some other post. As I read in one of A-B-C's of the blogging, I must keep posts short and clear. The last two posts are everything but this...

To conclude the story, my media self would be best describe by words like free, portable, gadgets, tweaking, open. I can use these words as tags as well. Yup.

What is your media profile like? Anything I missed? Talk to you soon.

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Who I am? or Who am I? - is the question for ages

Well, how can I not remember that scene with Billy Crystal from the famous comedy Analyse This. I thought this short video may serve as an innuendo to a post about my media-self. This one is an assignment for the new new media university course. And, a handy way to introduce my media profile.

TV - not really for me, except for the tv screen itself. I do not tend to watch TV-program but I enjoy movies of my choice and an Internet video streaming material. I hooked up my tv-set to the Xbox game console, which has been "fixed" so it can play various media formats, plus more. A community driven Xbox application xbox media centre is THE actual media center of our home. This free program provides reproduction of just about every thinkable media format directly to our living room home cinema.

Xbox is connected to my home router and is a part of a home LAN. Router has it's own story too. Originally I bought it as a triple-media ADSL2+ modem. I am a curious and a gadget-driven man, so I found out the way to re-program my modem into a router. The best thing is that the router's capabilities have been locked by isp provider in order to limit the usage of the device.

Flashing modem into router and fixing xbox can start giving you my idea of media. Releasing the full potential of the devices through free network-available knowledge is my thing. As long as I know where and how to look.

Networking. I hooked my laptop to the home network too, so I stream music, videos and pictures from one device to another at my home. The good old television as I have known it for a few decades is forgotten where I live now.

My love to music in general has lasted quite long. I remember my late father taking me to a high-fidelity store speaker rooms, where he made me turn my back to the wall full of speakers and describe the difference in reproduction of various systems tested. Needless to say, I love music. It's a love with a capital L that transcends into a very personal perception of the music pieces. If neither you can compare both joy and pain of Anton Corbijn¨s "Control" movie about the band Joy Division and an obscurity of Eurovision Song Contest country-qualification concerts, than you know what I mean.

As I speak I listen to an instrumental piece Magic Spells by the new electronic band Crystal Cases. You will find this information in the right part of this page, where Last.fm displays the music I play on my pc, xbox or my zen. Social networking take another important part of my media-self. Being able to interact with others means a wider base, more alternatives, fresher ideas, and ultimately better choice. A logical concequence is a better music from my players. It helps me searching and finding music I enjoy, rather that what major music companies offer as mainstream music.

Music formats have evolved through my music voyage. I remember having a rather huge collection of long-play analog music albums. Yes, i was proud of my 350 records. In fact, they are still intact in my old room back at parents' place. Then I switched to digital cd format and collected even more albums. In late nineties minidisc format gave me portability and quality I prefered. Being addicted to my old Sony minidisc's fit and sharp sound I missed by far the first wave of mp3 players. I got my first mp3 player in 2004. That was a 15gb harddisk driven Philips hdd100. It still looks fantastic, a sort of an iPod antipod. Piano-black and shiny, though somewhat poor in functions for today's standard, but it still delivers superiour sound, when compared ty my present portable media player of choice: Creative Zen Vision:M.

Media organizing. The advantages of processor power in media organizing are thrilling. Having a several thousand large music collection, storing the songs in folders and managing them in that fashion is rather old and unpractical. Tagging is the winning word here. Mediamonkey is a free software that I use to manage my music. Once that this brilliant program unleashes it's whole powers, you actually learn to love your music collection. Automatic playlists generated by user-given criteria keep my music perception exciting after every synchronisation of the music library with my player.

One more thing worth mentioning is radio. The thing with radio is that I don't listen to it very much. I mean, I do love radio, I have even workhed a number years in front of a microphone on several radio stations, but I simply find radio quite obsolete nowadays. Podcast is the reason.

This post will be continued as soon as I get some sleep. It is 1:47 AM. Blogging carries me away too easy...

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Blood Money

"Nobel invented dynamite. I won't accept his blood money!"

Yeah, I really couldn't help myself not to blog on this one. I am obviously in the middle of Season 2 of the TV-show House M.D. and I usually watch whole seasons in one piece. That way I don't get to wait for a week or so for another episode and forget the most of the stuff that previously happened.

Speaking of doctor House, it is hard not to like his sarcasm. He treats his patients, co-workers, and bosses equally tough, and that is exactly what makes us, the audience, feel good about ourselves. The genius his character possesses, and his encyclopedic knowledge made me change my mind about the whole show.

House is a good person. It is not because of the blood money statement about the Noble price. It because of his weird angle on things where you cannot really morally argue with him. Siege the moment, that's what he is best at. And for that I take my hat off. If I only had one...

I could ask you whether you like House or not, but I suspect the answer would be obvious. Wouldn't it?

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See my books to read

Everything Is Miscellaneous: The Power of the New Digital Disorder by David Weinberger Read more about this book...

The Second Self: Computers and the Human Spirit, Twentieth Anniversary Edition by Sherry Turkle Read more about this book...

Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word (New Accents) by Walter J. Ong Read more about this book...

The Cult of the Amateur: How Today's Internet is Killing Our Culture by Andrew Keen Read more about this book...

The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference by Malcolm Gladwell Read more about this book...

Technological Visions: The Hopes and Fears that Shape New Technologies by Read more about this book...

So that is the booklist given by Mark. I started to read two of them only to get a recall notice. Well, I was playing nice once, but the second notice is to wait a couple of days till I'm done with Technological Visions, the last one on my pimped and improved booklist. I will get back here later on with my book impressions.
The presentation format in this post closest to what I would like it to look like. As I said it is a learning process. And so my blog pimping progresses. Now I need to find a way to put this list on a side column. Huh.

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The Power of Past

I am expected to get familiar with various web 2.0 applications during this course. This includes Facebook.

Up to recently I was really resistant to all the fame surrounding that web service. I mean, on a daily basis, Facebook's on TV news, TV text, Internet, newspapers, radio.. where does it end? Does it end at all? The point is that people do want to get get together and socialize. Even when they are not online they do use various applications within Facebook and message one another... or one to many... or whatever...

It all seemed like another madness to me. The hype will pass - is what I thought about Facebook. Then I received the first invitation to the service from a friend. Sure I rejected it, it was a few months ago when world media widely covered Facebook privacy intrusions issue. They claimed they fixed the issue and apologized to customers. "Too late to apologize" sang that guy from One Republic along with Timba "e-e-e-e" so I thought myself along with them: No way. No pasaran.

Then came the second invitation to FB. Then the third one and so on. So I thought myself, let's take a look. And I peeked in.

Just like Internet within the Internet, one page lead to another. One person's list of friends led to another list. I did start finding my friends. My old friends. Ever since I left my homeland, and ever further ever before - since many of them had left our homeland, I finally had the meeting place where I could easily socialize with all of them. Kind of defeated old "media me" had to admit it felt good to embrace Facebook as new "media me". So I turned to the Dark Side.

I do find people from my past I really never thought I'd meet again. This application sort of takes away excuses to NOT communicate. Having many friend around the globe whom I haven't seen in ages, I must be impressed. That's exactly the kind of web social tool I need.

Nick Cave was tonight in my dining room. A French music channel MCM recorded his concert back in 1997 while he was promoting his The Boatman's Call album. What a live performance! Then I walked to my PC and checked my Facebook page for the day. Guess what? A friend whom I haven't seen for 14 years messaged me from Australia. Ghost in machine? Just asking... err, maybe.

They say these days you cannot delete your account @ Facebook. What is there to worry about? says my new "media me". I am not a person who just quits - I'm here to stay. Facebook, here I come!

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Well yeah I'm pimpin' the blog, it's just that you don't see it... kind of... yet. :)

 

The statement above seems to be the most pathetic excuse I could have come up with. Being a research-freak as I am yet an absolute blogging beginner, I did a little research about this whole phenomena. Yep, I know, I could have just started writing - read: adding substance - instead of wasting my time on the blog package. But hey, that's life... I mean, how many times I have heard the sentence 'one thing led to another'.. And here I am, 48 hours have well passed and the blog does not look fundamentally different as I expected. Still.

Let me shortly state my case.

• As I started adding widgets and plug-ins to the blog, I was quite irritated because I could not add the nice-looking Amazon list of books widget. Then I went to the Amazon site and found out that the widget is for the WordPress-type blogs and not for the blogger-type blogs. Guess what, this one's a blogger-type one..
• Of course, than I googled 'WordPress' and found out about all the themes for their blogs! Do these themes look good or what... Than I tried to install the themes to my blogger-blog and did not succeed.
• ...but I learned that the WP-blogs appear to be more flexible and customizable than blogger-ones. I got that info from several tests-reviews-comparisons on the net. All the tests appear to be in favor of the WordPress.
• I also learned about the Windows Live-type blogs, and how they are inferior to the previous two types.
• though I must admit that the Windows Live Writer blogging software is fantastic. It is the WYSIWYG type, I see my blog's web layout directly as I type.
• At this point of my research I got really into switching to a WP-type blog from this one, blogger-type.
• So I opened an account at the www.wordpress.com. It was a bit strange at first to get two first hits on Google: the .com and the .org domains for the 'WordPress'. There is a reason for that .. keep reading.
• So I started the whole free blog package @ WP and was ready to get one of those fabulous themes for my blog and to show it off big-time. Needles to say, the free WordPress.com blogging service does not allow uploading personal themes other than those already listed, but...
• If I have a web server, then I can upload them to the specific themes folder and blah blah blah... read 'I got lost at this point', just wanted to make my blog look a bit more cool and I ended up writing my points here instead. :)
• So I figured that the .org domain is the site devoted for setting up a blogging service on personal or servers other than www.wordpress.com. I downloaded an executable WordPress blog package and saved it in a nice cool and hidden folder to deal with it later on...
• ...and in the meantime I do import my posts from blogger service to WordPress.
• mediaspotting.wordpress.com is the address of my other blog.

At this point I already had extended my blog-pimping deadline from 48 to 96 hours. Although this blog is new and absolutely unnoticeable in this earth's blogosphere, I still need to show respect to my readers (anyone out there?) and keep adding substance to these pages.

So here I am, now I explained why the blog's layout has not been substantially updated. I hope there's someone on these pages to read it...LOL

Anyone?

PS: I really need that visitor stat widget thing ASAP...

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Pimp my write

The next 48 hours I'm pimping my blog.

Was about time.

Watch this space. Hmm, guess I am talking to myself. Still, talking. :)

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