I've been semi-away from the Sift for almost a month, holed up with my family in New Mexico after my Dad passed away. After a long 15-hour flight, I'm back in Australia- and back on VideoSift.

I'm probably about 10 pounds heavier. Huevos rancheros, Sonic onion rings and cherry lime-aids are responsible. A new health-kick will start soon- but not until I've exhausted the supply of good corn tortillas and salsa verde that I smuggled in my duffle bag. I can say with no prejudice- that we make the best huevos rancheros in all of Australia. (which is not saying too much)

Some of you may know that my Dad died about a week ago. I've been in New Mexico with my mom since then.

My dad was not a spiritual person. The only afterlife he recognised is the the genetic one. He lives on through his kids and their kids.

A couple of videos of songs my dad loved.

I like anti-humor.

I don't think this is on the level of The Aristocrats (very NSFW) but I like it:

A horse walks into a bar.
The bartender says "why the long face?"
The horse replies "I'm an alcoholic."

I also like jokes that involve turning the listener into the straight man. At work, when we're fiddling with some computer issue or problem - I love to say - "it looks a bit like a henweigh" Of course they reply - "what's a henweigh?" and I get to say "about 4 pounds". Childish? Yes - but it gives me a thrill. Very similar to the Dickfer joke in Spies like us.

I also like what is supposedly the shortest joke in the world:

"Pretentious? Moi?"

On long trips with the family we have joke contests. We have 2 minutes to think up an original joke and then it's judged- with the winner getting to judge the next round. According to my kids, this is the best joke I've ever made up:

What do you call a cowboy dinosaur who falls off his horse?
WhyImaSoreAssTex.

No, I won't be quitting my day job anytime soon.

... probably. From our million + visitors last month - here is the breakdown in operating systems.



@deathcow sent me this. I think it represents the experience of being an Apple user on VideoSift.

Anyone from this thread in particular?

I haven't. I bought a new laptop recently, and another gadget was not in my budget- but I probably will eventually.

... and so free enterprise was seen to be the winner. That's my take on most of the big problems of the last 20 years. That includes the rise of kooky Libertarian utopianists and the lack of government regulation of things like offshore drilling. You can call it a unipolar world, or hyper-capitalism but it's all talking about the same thing. There is no counterweight and no alternative to the plutocracy that's very quickly taking over the world.

It seems to me that it's going to get worse before a new ideology is born that challenges what we have now - and it's probably going to be bloody.

I'm hoping for new entities as nation-states that are born on the Internet and have no geographical boundaries. Something like Cory Doctorow's book, Eastern Standard Tribe.

Who wants to be a citizen of the Sift Nation? We'll have a better health care system than 4Chania.

I saw Dio in concert in Anchorage in about 1985 at the ripe of 15 with @deathcow and a couple others. The next day we wore our Dio shirts to school as badges of awesomeness. I'm pretty sure the opening band was Ratt. For some reason, lots of metal bands made their way to Alaska in the '80s. I think it was a stopover before Japan. The scene was pretty much like this:



I have good memories of listening to Dio on actual vinyl albums on dark winter nights.

A while back, I reviewed a number of VPN services that route your Internet connection through a local IP address and make you appear to be a "local".

For me, it's increasingly become a necessary part of my net experience. Not only do I use it to feed my filthy Glee habit and watch Doctor Who on the Beeb- but increasingly I have to use it to watch videos on VideoSift.

We all know that embedded Hulu clips and Comedy Central posts are *blocked for many countries- but many other video providers are throttling their bandwidth for international viewers. I have anecdotal evidence that this is happening with CBS and MSNBC for me here in Australia. The reasoning must be, well- we don't have any international advertising lined up for these clips- why should we pay for the bandwidth?

I'm still using a standard VPN Service, but I've moved on from the ones I reviewed. I'm now using "Hide My Ass". I like that it doesn't use Tunnelblick- which I've always found a little clunky- at least on the Mac. They've got a good list of servers, that lets me jump around to many different regions in the US- as well as other countries- Canada, UK, Sweden etc. I pay $10 per month.



Beyond watching videos, it's useful for me to be able to view the advertisements on VideoSift that are displayed to other countries.

Anyone who thinks the Internet is a wonderful borderless free-for-all is kidding themselves. Maybe at first- but these days it's a tightly controlled, geo-targeted world.

A very cool effect. Better view it in Chrome or Safari.

I'm thinking Flashless web video will open the floodgates to all kinds of novel ways to play with video.
via Daring Fireball

I saw the recent Kevin Smith directed, buddy cop comedy, Cop Out last night. Although it gave me a few chuckles in places- it was generally not that funny. Kevin Smith is a hell of a lot funnier just standing up in front of a crowd and riffing. Perhaps he should stick to that.

The movie was riddled with more cliches and stereotypes than bullet holes. Hey guess what - Bruce Willis plays a disgruntled cop with an angry ex-wife. Quite a stretch for him.

Tracy Morgan was funny in places - but plays such an over-the-top buffoon that it's unbelievable that his character would be able to hold down a job anywhere. Throw in the central casting tattooed mexican gangsters and you have a completely forgettable movie that tries to be a melding of Lethal Weapon and Bevery Hills Cop - but plays like a bad SNL skit.

So, things didn't go as smoothly as we would have liked. A few things coincided that led to a perfect storm of frustration here on the Sift. Here's the full story.

We were unhappy with our current hosting provider- we have 4 boxes with them that have recently been struggling with load- mostly database issues. The amount of ram in the DB server was half of what we were supposedly paying for – support was sluggish and we were getting pissed. Our good buddies at Neatorama just switched to a new bunch of servers that seemed like a heck of a deal. The move was on.

We needed to time the move to these new, much more powerful servers so that we weren't being double invoiced from two hosting companies. Our monthly server bill is a 4 figure amount that we just can't afford to double-pay.

So we paid for the first month on the new servers and they started building them- they had delays in getting the hardware- which was pushing right up on our invoice date of the 13th for the old servers- they finished building 2 days before the invoice date and Lucky had to pull an all-weekend job to transfer everything over to the new environment.

Still, everything would have been fine if it wasn't for our VideoSift domain hosted with Yahoo Small Business Hosting. When I first registered VideoSift on a lark back in 2006- they were offering $3 domains - and I thought - yes, this is for me. (unemployed at the time) They are a really, really bad service. Their interface appears to date back to the 1990s era web- and is very inflexible. I considered moving the domain onto a more modern registrar- but I was scared to touch it. I had read horror stories of domains being down for weeks on transfers from Yahoo- and had the experience of them just dropping our domain once for 72 hours on a whim. It pretty much works on Yahoo - and I didn't want to touch it.

In hindsight- this was the wrong attitude. The domain name server in the Yahoo control panel had our old server IP addresses in it. We needed to update this to the IP range for our new servers. We figured that this would propagate through in a few hours and people would seamlessly be directed to the new boxes. Unfortunately that was not the case. Yahoo hosting has a TTL "Time to Live" setting on DNS changes of 1 week - and there appears to be no way to modify this value. Even now, 5 days after the move- around 20% of our traffic is being directed to the old server - which has been shut down.

So, there you have it. Amateur hour on the Sift. I've learned my lesson and will move the VideoSift domain to a more reliable host. I'm sorry again for all the disruption. On the bright side- the new servers are great! We have a lot more free memory which we're planning to use to make the site even faster than it already is.

Seth Godin has a slightly whingy but good post on the demise of thoughtful content. These days most sites and even print magazines are using link-bait style salacious content to try and lure the click-and-go crowd that get their links from sites like Digg or PopURLS (The irony is that I found his article on PopURLS).

I agree with Seth that this this practice is increasing in the web world - but certainly isn't anything new to the print world. WOMAN GIVES BIRTH TO BATBOY is the offline equivalent to Digg link bait.

Although VideoSift is an aggregator - one of the things that I'm thankful for- is that we can be an end destination too - we don't aggregate links to other sites- so people are more likely to spend more time here and share their thoughts.

Fortune favours the brave.

I'm thankful to risk-takers for advancing us along toward the singularity.

You can dislike Apple as a company, but still be thankful for the advancements. I hated mobile phones before the advent of the iPhone. Now- although I'm happy with my iPhone - I'm sure I'd be happy with an Android GPhone or a Palm Pre. Apple was the trail-blazer that brought the concept to us- and now all smartphone owners get to reap the benefits.

I suppose that's where the lawsuit comes in. I think it's a bad move. Of course Android, Palm and even Microsoft are copying Apple's innovations- that's what happens when you have a runaway success. But Apple looks to be going down the same road of trying to protect its ideas that led to the famous "look and feel" Apple VS. Microsoft lawsuit that Apple ultimately lost.

Apple still has a big lead on in its competitors precisely because it's so much further down the the trail. When you compare the complete package, its followers can't yet match the UI and build finish of the original.

Apple should devote its energies to leading and heading further down the trail - not circling back and macheteing the mosquito covered safari tourists who can't get their maps unfolded.

I have a recurring dream of watching a massive jumbo jet go down at close range. I usually wake up in a cold sweat right before I'm engulfed by the cloud of burning aviation fuel. This scene from Knowing is the closest representation of my nightmare that I've seen. (warning: fairly graphic)

I'm reading this now and really enjoying it. Oryx and Crake is one of my favorite books- and if you like dystopian futures, and books about massive human die-offs, this one will appeal to you. It's not a sequel to Oryx and Crake but runs parellel to the timeline and many of the same events are covered.
She really does her homework on genetic engineering and imagines some amazing consequences. The Pigoons with human brain tissue, rakunks and other fauna and flora from the previous novel feature prominently.

Even though I'm only halfway through, I can already heartily recommend this book for people who like dark science fiction with some deep ideas. [hands in book report to Siftbot]

If there's one characteristic that has defined Microsoft over the years- it's their eagerness to spread Fear Uncertainty and Doubt about rising competitors. It's baked into their culture- presumably from the very top.

While it's usually not based in truth, it cows the pointy haired corporate bosses of the world.

More than any other reason, this is why I loathe the company and everything it stands for.

So the Struggling YouTube clone has gone bankrupt. I'm not one to hold a grudge but I've had bad feelings towards Veoh since they completely screwed up a community event of ours in 2006.

From my experience, they were all cool marketing with very little appreciation for real communities ... and we're still here.

There's been a lot of buzz lately about whether or not the demise of Flash is imminent, to be replaced with elements like Canvas and video for HTML 5 and h.264 video players. A few weeks ago, I wouldn't have thought so- but things seem to be changing quickly:

I'm now running YouTube's experimental HTML 5 video player- and like it just as well as the Flash one.

I stumbled across this pretty nifty demo of a pure HTML 5 drawing program.

And this canvas experiment with lots of moving graphics and sound had me saying "I can't believe it's not Flash!™".

... and I have to say it was kind of a downer. Beautifully shot and solid performances- but it suffers from a Hobbesian idea that most humans are generally evil in nature. At least that's what I took from it- and honestly, it kind of bummed me the hell out.

I hope the premise is wrong- and that if there was an epic, species threatening global catastrophe- people would band together to help each other instead of turning cannibal.

Dawkins says that altruism is genetically evolved behavior to protect our family, tribe, town- expand that outwards and you'd think it would apply to the entire human race if it was threatened.