And here’s an audio version with full instrumentation, recorded with Ric Hordinski who’s done production work with the likes of Peter Frampton, Phil Keaggy, and David Wilcox.

Invitation

This is the Invitation
To a new conversation
Of depth over speed
Of gift over need
A new Listening

The structure of how we gather
Speaks of what really matters
Telling a new
Story of Who
We are to each other

This is the Invitation
Community’s Restoration
By just showing up
We’re gifted enough
To birth a new world

And though we don’t know what it will look like
We’re feeling that world’s alive
Like it’s ready to bloom
Here in this room
The seeds in each life.

So community’s new frontier
Is finding all that we need right here
To weave a rich local life
Into  a tapestry lined
With the connections we share.

This is the invitation
To join a celebration
Of Neighbors and friends
Connecting again
Creating the new…

Neighbors and friends
Connecting again
Creating the new.

My neighbors and friends
I’m glad to come in
And be here
With you.

© 2009 Randy Weeks

It’s definitely possible that Twitter, or Facebook, or some new service will figure out a different way to format article links and titles embedded in updates in a predictable way that some new type of aggregator will be able to save for you.  But why would anybody do that when RSS is already ubiquitous.  Until these social networking feeds become strictly channelized, it’s tough to pull out every article from all your favorite news sources.  Even then, it still feels very kludgy to try and form the output of a Twitter feed into something as useful as RSS already is.

On a larger scale, I’m not convinced that the Twitter model will last in its current form anyway.  I’ve heard people whose opinions I respect say that Twitter will soon be the “new dial tone.”  It would be fun to think so, and I believe its style of communication will carve out a permanent place on the Internet, I just don’t think people will find it useful for everything.  Like so many technologies before Twitter – blogs, push, frames, chatrooms, and even RSS comes to mind – they’ve all found a their uses within the big picture, but they haven’t overtaken as some completely new and dominant paradigm like these writers would seem to imply.  They also say that the new attention-scattered generation is why Twitter will eventually take over, but it doesn’t appear that teens really care about these services more than their older counterparts.

Honestly, I’m not sure they know the scope of what they’re saying when they flippantly mention that RSS is becoming irrelevant.  Based on past experience, I wouldn’t look for the little orange RSS icons to go away any time soon.

(syndicated from blog.netcrafters.com)

Multiple IM Clients

Then there are the multiple IM clients that have been popular for a few years. The most popular of these are the Pidgin open source project, formerly known as Gaim, and Trillian, an application that comes in both free and paid versions. Pidgin has a vanilla interface but handles all the popular IM protocols in one IM client. They recently came out with a plug-in for Facebook chat, as well. By comparison, Trillian is a very slick and skinnable application that also handles many IM protocols in one spot. Both of them also offer an interface to IRC (Internet Relay Chat). I used the Pidgin client as my only multiple IM client for many years.

The Best of Both Worlds

Then I discovered Digsby. Digsby aims to do the best of both types of applications. You get the multiple IM goodness of Pidgin and Trillian, along with lightweight interfaces for Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and MySpace. You can have it notify you on varying and configurable levels any time there’s a new update in any of the feeds, as well as post your own updates. It will also notify of you new email for any email accounts that you specify.

Surely different people have different needs, and there may be those who still prefer to run each IM client and Social Network interface individually. But I’ve found that Digsby handles the perfect combination of what I do every day, and has made for a great everyday IM/Social Networking client.

(syndicated from blog.netcrafters.com)

• Microsoft is billing Bing as a “decision engine.”
• It uses attractive and lightweight graphics. For people who want an interesting design on their search engine interface, this may be a plus.
• They’re experimenting with Real Time Search. For now, this just means they’re including recently posted Twitter content from a few celebrities and tech industry personalities. But real-time search is a hot topic at the moment and they’re actually doing something with it.
• For developers and webmasters, Bing provides an API (Application Programming Interface) and some basic tools.

It’s also worth noting that Bing has taken one percent of the search market share from Google since their announcement. From April to June, Google’s market share fell from 79.1% to 78.5%. Yahoo remained consistent at 11%, and Microsoft went from 7.2% to 8.2%.

It seems hard to imagine anybody dethroning Google as the king of search, but with a Yahoo redesign/rebranding also due in the fall, it will be interesting to see how the search engine space race continues to develop!

In the meantime, here are a few links to some of the more lively news stories Bing has been creating:

Kayak to Bing: Stop Copying Us! (wired.com)

Google mocks Bing and the stuff behind it (The Register)

Google Does Not Mock Bing (Vijay Gill)

(syndicated from blog.netcrafters.com)

http://googlesystem.blogspot.com/2008/10/gmail-autoresponder.html

Basically, it allows you to take the “canned response” feature available in Google Labs, which is pretty useful itself, and set up a filter to have it automatically send an email response if an incoming message meets a certain criteria. This makes for a very flexible email responder. It means you could set up an email alias to have people send messages, and then use a particular canned response to automatically return an email reply only to them. Or you could set up a particular reply in response to certain key words in an incoming message. Anything you can use a filter for in Gmail can also be used to send back a canned response.

The only drawback I found was that you can’t set it to send from any specific email address even though you may have other accounts associated with your Gmail account. It will only send the automatic message as being from the main account associated with that mailbox. But if you can live with that, then it’s a great solution.

(syndicated from blog.netcrafters.com)

The search usually turns up the same basic list of ham radio, original music, and weather station pages, but something new and odd will turn up from time to time. The last time, I found my music listed on a Japanese site that may or may not be called “goo”.

Click here for … goo?

From what little I can read on the page, I apparently sound like Chick Corea and Return to Forever. While I am a huge fan of Chick Corea, I don’t consider myself in the same league. Who knows, maybe it says something like “he could never be as good as Chick Corea and Return to Forever.” Flattering none-the-less.

The new discovery this time out was finding my old general MIDI songs for sale on a CD in the Netherlands.

Click here.

You can find me in the huge listing of artists right in between Boyz 2 Men and Brahams (yuck and yuck, respectively) as having “27 nummers” on the CD. Thanks to Babel Fish, my suspicion was confirmed: nummers means numbers! (duh) You know, I don’t honestly recall ever having put 27 general MIDI files on the web. Maybe 10 or 12. What gives?

Since I’ve yet to find another person on the Internet with the same name, let alone somebody with the same name who also posted original MIDI files on the web, it has to be me. So curious. I guess I’ll try to buy the CD if I can even figure out how…

After a lot of online research, I thought maybe the Sangean ATS-909 would do, but I would still need to do the anti-chuffing modification. Then I ran across RadioLabs and their “Super 909“. This is an ATS-909 with many great modifications. New filters, a better speaker, a blue backlight, increased sensitivity, anti-chuffing, and removal of the tuning knob detent for smooth tuning. There were several favorable reviews of the Super 909 version of the radio on eHam.net, so I pulled the trigger.

I labored a bit over whether or not to pay $100 more for the mods, but ended up deciding it would be worth it. Well, I was right. With regard to both sensitivity and audio quality, it outperforms the 505 by leaps and bounds. I could only hear the strongest signals with the 505 and a longwire. With the Super 909 and the telescoping whip, I hear so much more. And with a longwire or active antenna, it rivals my ham HF gear. Granted, this isn’t the best comparison – I wish I could hear the difference between it and an un-modded ATS-909. Speaking of which, they will mod your existing ATS-909 with these modifications if you already have one.

As odd as it sounds, my only complaint was the way they offered free ground shipping on the Super 909. They had it set up as the only shipping option. I would gladly have paid more to get the radio here more quickly. Since it was traveling from California to Ohio, it took almost two weeks to arrive. Very aggravating.

But I’ve been enjoying listening to the HF ham bands without having to go into the shack for several weeks now, and I’m damn happy. I highly recommend this modded version of the radio. Good job, RadioLabs!

But by this time, Howard had found his way into the ManU doghouse and was only starting occasionally. Luckily, it turned out to be equally intriguing to follow some of the team’s other star players instead. Wayne Rooney and Cristiano Ronaldo, in particular. This last season, my interest expanded even more while keeping tabs on other American players in the EPL, such as Brad Friedel at Blackburn Rovers, and Clint Dempsey at Fulham. (See Yanks Abroad.) That led to following other individual players on other teams in the EPL, such as Didier Drogba and Joe Cole at Chelsea, and Dimitar Berbatov at Tottenham Hotspur. Finally, I started reading up on the history of the English Premiership League and how it works within FIFA (the world), UEFA (Europe), and the FA (England). Especially interesting is the relegation of the bottom three teams to a lower English league every season. So cutthroat.

As the EPL season was wrapping up in May with a fantastic title by Manchester United, attention started turning toward Major League Soccer (MLS) in the USA. Despite trying, and failing, to become interested in the MLS last year, I decided to buy the MLS Direct Kick package on cable this year. My main intention was to follow the Columbus Crew as my home team. And since David Beckham will be coming to the LA Galaxy in July, I figured I’d follow them too. Between the EPL and the MLS, I started packing two DVRs with games every week – the wife accused me of becoming a full-blown addict!

Although the Columbus Crew have crawled along near the bottom of the league during the first couple months, they’re currently on a three game winning streak, unbeaten in the last five, and are moving toward the middle of the pack in the Eastern division. I’m optimistic with the likes of Frankie Hejduk, Ned Grabavoy, and newly signed Guillermo Barros Schelotto from the famed Boca Juniors in Argentina. The LA Galaxy aren’t faring so well and remain in the basement in the west. But, the arrival of David Beckham will be a fun circus any way you slice it, so they’re still a team to look forward to.

Even though Tim Howard was loaned to Everton, and eventually signed with them permanently, I continue to rabidly follow Manchester United as though they’re my home team. As the EPL starts up again in August, it will be curious to see if the new interest in soccer can compete with an already long-term interest in the NFL, and the long and sordid plight of the Cincinnati Bengals…