Author: Chris Aldrich

I'm a biomedical and electrical engineer with interests in information theory, complexity, evolution, genetics, signal processing, IndieWeb, theoretical mathematics, and big history. I'm also a talent manager-producer-publisher in the entertainment industry with expertise in representation, distribution, finance, production, content delivery, and new media.

🔖 Post filtering fixes at Homebrew Website Club | Colin Devroe

Bookmarked Post filtering fixes at Homebrew Website Club by Colin Devroe (cdevroe.com)
Last night Tucker Hottes, Den Temple and I held the first Homebrew Website Club at The Keys in Scranton, PA. I really appreciate that HWC will force me to set aside some time to work on my personal site since it is often neglected for more pressing projects.
Nota bene: Colin is dogfooding his IndieWeb friendly WordPress theme on Github! It’s a beautiful, simple, and very clean theme for a personal website/blog.

Colin, do you mind if we provide a link to your theme on https://indieweb.org/WordPress/Themes for others to potentially use and/or improve upon? (See also discussion at https://indieweb.org/WordPress/Development#Themes.)

Pulling the plug on @tumblr, and why is @feedly so hard to use?

Read Pulling the plug on @tumblr, and why is @feedly so hard to use? by David Mead (davidjohnmead.com)
I’ve now unfollowed everyone on Tumblr. It’s been turning into a dust bowl for me, people I followed haven’t been posting in years. Since the ads made the app annoying for me to u…

📺 The Late Show with Stephen Colbert: Sally Field S2, E96

Watched The Late Show with Stephen Colbert: Sally Field S2 E96 from CBS, 16 February 2017
These turbulent times remind Sally Field of the unrest from the 1960s. That, and the fact that polka dots are trendy again.
Nice coverage of the Trump press conference today.

Camerawork on the Furry Hat segment was shaky and made the moderate jokes there even shakier.

Sally Field has still got it after all these years and her analysis of Tennessee William’s Glass Menagerie was quite interesting.

📺 The Daily Show with Trevor Noah: February 16, 2017

Watched The Daily Show with Trevor Noah: February 16, 2017 from Comedy Central
President Trump holds a turbulent press conference, Jordan Klepper talks to New Jersey residents living on Dick Street, and Ezra Edelman discusses "O.J.: Made in America."
The opening five minutes was about as compact as you could make the craziness of today’s press conference. Holy Crap!

📺 The Daily Show with Trevor Noah: February 15, 2017

Watched The Daily Show with Trevor Noah: February 15, 2017 from Comedy Central
Trevor reflects on having a president with grandpa tendencies, Donald Trump weighs in on the Israel-Palestine conflict, and Mark Mazzetti discusses Russia's election hacking.
The Trump “Old Guy” opener was about as good as it gets for political satire lately.

The capper: http://maketrumptweetseightagain.com/

📺 The Daily Show with Trevor Noah: February 14, 2017

Watched The Daily Show with Trevor Noah: February 14, 2017 by Trevor Noah from Comedy Central
National Security Adviser Michael Flynn resigns and Republicans don't know how to handle questions about it, and Laverne Cox discusses the TV show "Doubt."
“That guy gets so much poutine.” -Trevor Noah on Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s good looks.

The Mike Flynn “cartoon” was an interesting method of storytelling.

There was a nice portion just before the interview in which Noah shows several examples of the ways in which the Trump administration tries to have things both ways, and then denies that they’re not telling the truth. Why must they waffle? Why can’t they just stand up and say “this is who we are.” We couldn’t do anything but respect them for that, but lying just ruins it all.

A map of Russia on the episode makes me wonder why I haven’t seen any pundits or comedians take the map and turn Russia’s highlight into Trump’s hair and then superimpose his face over South Asia. This image may help others with the idea:

📺 The Daily Show with Trevor Noah: February 13, 2017

Watched The Daily Show with Trevor Noah: February 13, 2017 from Comedy Central
President Trump meets with Japan's Shinzo Abe, Trevor profiles Trump's senior adviser Stephen Miller, and Elaine Welteroth and Phillip Picardi discuss Teen Vogue.
Interesting to see what’s happening at Teen Vogue. The Stephen Miller portion actually went pretty easy on his performance on the Sunday Morning shows this week. Not quite as funny as most episodes, but still interesting and relevant within the overall political environment.

The “Moment of Zen” at the end with Trump shaking hands with Abe was truly hilarious.

📺 "Suits" Admission of Guilt, S6 E14

Watched "Suits" Admission of Guilt, S6 E14 from USA Network, 15 February 2017
Directed by Michael Smith. With Gabriel Macht, Patrick J. Adams, Rick Hoffman, Meghan Markle. Harvey and Mike walk a fine line when they partner on a class action. Louis needs Rachel's help impressing a client during an annual presentation. And Donna and Benjamin refine their product.

📺 PBS NewsHour full episode Feb. 16, 2017

Watched PBS NewsHour full episode Feb. 16, 2017 from PBS NewsHour
Thursday on the NewsHour, President Trump takes on charges of Russian connections, the news media and a new immigration order in an animated and wide-ranging news conference. Also: What’s causing more white Americans to die in middle age, sanctuary cities take a stand against the president's immigration policies and an English professor's take on her own life as an immigrant.
https://youtu.be/8xp0dauQjks

Most media accounts took today’s pressy to serious task. The coverage here took as measured take on the event as could be humanly imagined–I can’t imagine how they maintained straight faces based on the portions of the press conference they showed here or other places.

🎧 Podcast Directories | Why Can’t We … ?

Listened to Podcast Directories from Why Can't We ... ?, August 19, 2016
Every year there are millions of podcasts published by tens of thousands of people in hundreds of languages, yet there are really just three podcast directories where people are able to go and look for new shows to enjoy. The vast majority of podcast players will read a directory listing from iTunes in order to provide the most comprehensive search, but none seem particularly good at recommending shows. Given how just about every other service we use online has some sort of algorithm in place to show us music, movies, TV shows, advertisements, and social accounts we might be interested in, why is podcast discovery still such a complicated endeavour?

There are obviously a lot of problems with the podcast ecosystem, and primary among them is podcast discovery and curation. I really wish there were more people working on this problem. Wouldn’t it be nice to have an indieweb solution?

It also makes me wonder what happened to audio platforms like Seesmic, Audioboo.fm, and Cinchcast which made uploading audio pretty simple, though I suppose that there wasn’t much of an audience for that type of audio, in part because the production value and actual content often wasn’t very good. Perhaps things like Soundcloud or streaming video/audio services like UStream have replaced them, but for any kind of bandwith, the cost of hosting goes up, but this also has the economic value of making the quality go up because it requires a bigger investment in production too.

📺 The Daily Show with Trevor Noah: February 9, 2017 – Laura Jane Grace

Watched The Daily Show, S2 E63 from Comedy Central, February 9, 2017
The Trump family is accused of using the White House for financial gain, Roy Wood Jr. prepares for Fashion Week and the Grammys, and Laura Jane Grace discusses "Tranny."