2010 March

« Archives in March, 2010

(Hopefully) Harmonious Upbringing

March 31, 2010 / Anthony Smith posted in Harmonic Vicissitude / 1 Comment

Now that I am a father-to-be, my usual mental maelstrom is being tinted with the prospect of proper child raising. Thoughts on how to best raise my future offspring get snugged right in between gaming, work and other miscellaneous musings. I know that it is standard for all new fathers to be rather paranoid. After all, we don’t want the kids growing up hating their fathers for all of their lives. It seems to me that it is up to us new fathers to try to get it right the first time. I always like to get a jump on things, too.

So, how will we be able to mold our prodigy early to be as well-rounded as possible, as early as possible?

Simple. We provide a little prenatal musical accompaniment.

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Site News: Only Nerds Will Give a Damn Edition

March 30, 2010 / uhwhat posted in News / No Comments

Ok, I believe PuSH notification is up and running, but I’m too lazy to give a damn about testing it, but I will say, I think it’s a good idea. In this “always on” technology and communication age, the only way to turn good ideas into standards is adoption. So, in that effort, I’m throwing the weight of our meager little readership toward that adoption.

baD kARmA iNK – Doing good things for selfish reasons since about 30 seconds ago.

Edit: Ha! You think ME mad! Bwahahahahahah!

Good News, Everyone: bkI is back up…

March 28, 2010 / uhwhat posted in News / No Comments

: Image via Wikipedia

Bad news is that, while making the changes, I hosed the site and spent most of our down time trying to get us back up and running properly. Why I thought I could just start fucking with the live site was beyond me, I mean, it’s not like I haven’t done this before.

So, anyways, rather than just the one big update, I’ll do what I need on a dev site and roll out the features one at a time, which is just madness.

Oh, yes, madness runs in our family. Some people even called ME mad. And why? Because I dared to dream of creating a race of atomic monsters… atomic supermen with octagonal bodies that suck blood…

State of the Blog: Maintenance Down Time

March 18, 2010 / uhwhat posted in News / No Comments

: Image by julesjulesjules m via Flickr

Starting tomorrow evening, bkI will be down for maintenance for about a week for some needed design and integration changes that include:

Author Bio Pages
Guest Post Support
UI changes on both the front and back end to just generally make things easier to find
PuSH and Advertising Integration (don’t worry, we’re only going to advertise things we think are worth it)
Support for the fun we are going to have when our Texas Noir project launches.

Expected down time will be about a week.

This is a good time to give us any questions, comments, concerns, and, if you’ve been sitting on a story, pic, music, etc, it’s also a good time to submit something.

Thanks,

Pat

Head Content Wrangler/Web Monkey

What’s In Your Head?

March 17, 2010 / Anthony Smith posted in Harmonic Vicissitude / No Comments

With today being Saint Patrick’s Day, I felt it was about time to throw a little Irish flair into the musical mosaic today. Now, just because it is Saint Patrick’s Day, that doesn’t mean that we are going to go over all our favorite Irish drinking songs. It is a given that the majority of people are going to be out in the pubs tonight, drinking the customary green beer and most likely nursing a hangover bigger than that fabled pot of gold at the end of the rainbow in the morning. However, we already covered drinking songs for New Year’s Eve, which covered a number of Irish offerings, so we are not going to do that today. Also, since there is no government-sanctioned day off for after Saint Patty’s Day, I am not going to indulge. Need to keep the senses for work, you know. So, instead, I’m going to send out what’s kicking around inside my head and talk about Irish bands.

One band in particular. Now, we are not talking U2 or Thin Lizzy or even the Pogues. No, this time we are talking about a band that formed in Limerick in 1990 and went on to four Top 20 albums on the Billboard charts and 8 top 20 singles on the Billboard Modern Rock Tracks chart. This is a band that sold nearly 15 million albums in the United States alone and was one of the most successful rock acts of the 90′s.

Lads and lassies, I am talking about The Cranberries.

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Borderlines

March 16, 2010 / Benjamin Kenneally posted in Broadcast Domain / No Comments

Borders. The places between. At the edges of everywhere, you will find something interesting. Something akin to what is on either side, but somehow like neither thing.

In the physical world, borders are easy to find. They stand between countries, between cities, and between neighborhoods. Military bases, dive bars, wino hangouts, weird clubs…these are all the stuff of the borderlands.

On the internet, borders are harder to see. They tend to be places where cultures blend, since the physical realm is so meaningless here.

In the old days of the internet, the whole thing was a borderland. BBSs were the wild west of the digital world. You never knew what you mind find when you dialed in to one. Even now, borderlands can be found all over the net.

Warren Ellis’ Whitechapel strikes me as a borderland. Free flowing communication between people of all stripes. The only thing in common being a love for creativity. (Some of the posters there don’t even especially like Warren, which always amuses me.)

Amazing things happen on the borderlands. Cultures clash and mesh, idiotic ideas get bandied about (and sometimes brought to life), grand projects get undertaken, and friendships get made. These things happen elsewhere as well, but I always feel like they happen more often in the places between.

Tilted Forum Project is an old borderland. I hung out there often in the past, and still drop by from time to time now. The talk there is fabulous, and the community is great, but it’s gelled a bit as time goes by.

In some ways, Facebook is a borderland. As everyone uses it, there’s a ton going on there. You can bring together portions of your life that didn’t always co-mingle if you’re not careful.

In a similar way, the new My Outer Space might be a borderland. I only recently signed up, and it’s still getting together, so we’ll see what goes on there.

What borderlands do you hang out in? What magic spot where anything can happen do you point your address bar?

If you don’t have one, you should find one. Perhaps Wayne Coyne and the boys can help show you the way:

2009 Flaming Lips & Stardeath and White Dwarfs – Borderline from George Salisbury on Vimeo.

Where are the strong? Who are the trusted?

March 9, 2010 / Benjamin Kenneally posted in Broadcast Domain / No Comments

The internet’s web of trust is a curious thing.

People receive attacks from odd places all the time. We receive emails with suspicious links, malicious messages on Facebook. Even legitimate webpages we surf to may have been compromised through their javascript, and can do all kinds of bad things to your computer.

When we log in to a site, however, we feel secure, because of TLS.

TLS is part of the “s” (for secure) that appears whenever you see “HTTPS:” in your browser’s address bar. It encrypts your data using an awfully good encryption scheme so no one can see your username or password, or your credit card number, when you do things online.

There are two parts to the whole equation, however. The encryption side of TLS is quite good (There was a small compromise found not long ago, but they’re fixing it now, and the part that caused the flaw was deativated in the meantime). The authentication side, however…

When you send data using TLS, it’s not just important to encrypt the data, but to know who you are sending it to. If you encrypt your credit card number, username, and password, and ship it straight to a hacker (who supplied half of the keypair, probably) all the encryption in the world will do you no good.

To get around this flaw, we use PKI. That’s where we trust a third party to verify who you are sending data to by giving them a certificate. It’s like an ID. The PKI company you have all probably heard of is Verisign.

I’m not here to impugn Verisign’s business. They are a quite well known company, and do an okay job.

If you bought a car on the internet for $10,000.00, and a hacker used a certificate from Verisign to get your information, Verisign would be liable (in certain circumstances, of course). They would refund you up to $100!

Yes, a benjamin. That’s their indemnity in the entire situation, according to their contracts. And they are one of the many certificate authorities out there.I’ve never heard of the vast majority of them. But they say I’m perfectly safe, and should give my info to the nice man behind the counter!

Now, I’m a paranoid in training (I’m going to school for network security), and I’m not trying to freak you out. The internet is a great place, and the vast majority of things on it are enriching, informative, and run by folks on the up-and-up.

But next time you hand over your info, just stop and think for a moment. And make sure your browser is in “HTTPS” mode. It’s the least you can do.

Hopefully someday the internet will lead to some harmony amongst us all, and we won’t have to worry about this crap. I’m not holding my breath, though.

And This Too Shall Pass…

March 3, 2010 / Anthony Smith posted in Harmonic Vicissitude / No Comments

I have a confession to make.

I may be converting into a music video enthusiast.

Some of you may remember that my very first post for bkI was a thinly veiled rant on how music seems to be slowly subverted from an audio medium to a visual medium. In case you missed it, it’s sitting back there as Visual Autophony. And….I still believe in the spirit of that first original post. I feel that music should have the chance to be first experienced within the theatre of the mind, letting the strength of the song alone carry our imaginations. However, I am always willing to sit back and enjoy a good music video, once I have that opportunity to meet the music on my own terms.

I mean this sincerely when I say this. It is a moral imperative that you see the music videos of OK Go.

Not just one video. All of them.

Seriously.

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On History, Luck, and Opportunity

March 1, 2010 / uhwhat posted in Pat's Rants / 1 Comment

This week in 1836, 200 some odd people made up mostly of farmers, ranchers, smiths, and other ordinary people, stood and looked into the face of death and, with a defiant shout, fought for something bigger than themselves.

These 200 stood their ground for 3 days against the full might of an army who’s goal to crush a rebellion with such a show of force that no one would dare rise against them again. For 3 days they managed to keep a militaristic dictator occupied enough to keep his full force at hand, giving the rest of the rebellion a few more days to prepare. Those 200 changed the course of history.

Why?

Because they chose to.

History is nothing but people taking chances, opening doors, seizing opportunities. What made them history worthy was, in most cases, because they chose to keep themselves open to possibilities.

There was a link I tweeted recently that went to an article discussing a certain study wherein “lucky” and “unlucky” people were given a series of tests to determine what, if anything, made people lucky. When it came down to it, the lucky people were simply more open to opportunity, meaning you make your own luck.

Basically it works like this: unlucky people tended to keep their head down and perform the task at hand, while lucky people kept their eyes open for those opportunities.

In life, opportunity takes many forms. baD kARmA INk is an opportunity for us to get our names out there and to start building an audience. Problem is, it’s only an opportunity if we take advantage of it. The reason I am in the position I’m in at work is because I was open to the opportunities that presented themselves. When extra projects came up, I took them. When problems popped up, I worked on solving them. Effectively, I made the job my own and was rewarded with new work, new positions, and more money.

Problem is, luck requires work. When opportunity pops up, if you don’t take advantage of it, it just becomes another “what if” memory. When history comes knocking, are you going to answer the door?

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