Cassidy is now a published artist! One of her drawings appears in a new children’s book called Just Me. It is a really neat parenting book written from a child’s perspective. I have read almost all of it and it is both touching and informative. It’s not written by a child- it’s written by a wife and mom from Houston. It is very well written and highly recommended, for both the words and the art!
Here are pictures of the cover of the book and Cassidy’s drawing that appears on page 62.
I have posted another A-Z installment on the Err Bear Music page. Remember that we have hundreds of full-length MP3’s for your listening pleasure there. If you use Windows Media Player as your default MP3 player, the MP3’s will stream when you click on the MP3 link.
We bought the house next door a month or so ago. After much unnecessary delay thanks to the City of Bellaire, it was demolished yesterday. That big ol’ Hyundai Excavator levelled the entire house in less than a half hour. Then it loaded the remains into big dumptrucks that hauled it away. It was really fun to watch.
After we move the fence and do a little landscaping, we’ll have a nice yard to run around in.
Three reasons you should tune into Rancho Radio right now:
1) We have done a major upgrade to the web page and the server. We now have a real time “Last 10 Songs” playlist on the web page. We also have a current, active playlist of 275 of the best alt. country and Americana songs you’ve ever heard (that’s 18 hours worth) . We are now broadcasting in MP3 Pro format, which results in increased fidelity.
2) We have a new playlist each week, chosen from our library of over 26,000 songs. We’ve spent all of our spending cash on records since around 1969, and you can enjoy all of that music with us.
3) Rancho Radio is totally free.
Take a listen, and if you agree that Rancho Radio is the best alt. country station on the net, tell your friends about it.
Update: Rancho Radio is now Newsome.fm. Still awesome, still free.
I can barely remember anything about my father. He died on November 14, 1968. I remember watching Combat with him in the very room we’re standing in above. I remember driving to Virginia with him once. That’s about it.
Most of what I know about him is second hand- things I’ve read or been told. He was a fighter pilot in World War II. Flew off of the Intrepid and received a DFC and 2 Air Medals. They are in a frame in our Media Room. I have a book on World War II with his picture in it. He was a pretty good golfer. He smoked too many cigarettes.
I don’t know if he had a good sense of humor, or what kind of music he liked. I don’t know if he liked to dance or what kind of beer he drank. My kids have some vague idea that I had a mother, who died shortly before the oldest was born. My dad is nothing more than a picture they’ve seen once or twice. I’d tell them more about him, if I knew more.
It’s not something I think about a lot. Maybe once or twice a year.
I am not a huge Southpark fan, but I know a cool thing when I see it. And creating your own Southpark character is pretty cool. Give it a try.
Cassidy and Rachel got out my guitars this evening and decided they were going to learn how to play them and form a band. Here’s a shot of their first jam session.
Hopefully, they’ll become famous and record all of my songs!
Thanks to the magic of the WayBack Machine at the Internet Archive, click here to see what Newsome.Org looked like on February 29, 2000. It’s interesting to see that the date code at the top still works and returns today’s date!
Somewhere around here I have an old copy of the first web site we put up back in 1996. It’s pretty frightening by today’s standards, but one of these days I’ll post a picture of it.
The other day I mentioned that I was going to write on Podcasting.
I knew what I thought the limitations were, but I wanted to take some time to consider the benefits. Today, Fred Wilson, a smart and interesting father and venture capitalist, whose Blog I read literally every day, wrote an excellent post about the great potential of Podcasting, and why he thinks it will become a bigger, more mainstream thing. He said it better that I could and he even addressed some of my issues. It’s a good read and actually made me slightly more optimistic about the possibility of mainstream acceptance.
But I still have some concerns. Here are the 5 reasons I believe Podcasting will not be embraced by the masses:
1) It’s simply too hard to create one. I built the computer I am typing on now from scratch, and I wrote almost all of the pages that comprise Newsome.Org. I used to write computer games (in Basic, way back in the late Eighties) and was briefly a game designer for a small software company. In sum, I am the neighborhood computer geek. And I haven’t the slightest idea how to create and distrbute a Podcast. Yes, I could spend a few hours and figure it out. But even if I did…
2) While it is much easier to download and listen to a Podcast (I use iPodder for that, and I expect there are plenty of similar programs), it is more effort than the average person is willing to devote to listening to music/talk, etc. when there are so many other alternatives. I have smart friends who still have trouble sending and receiving email. Podcast listening is simply not something that non-computer geeks are going to learn how to do. I and certainly a few others will certainly go to some effort to access a Podcast that we can’t get elsewhere (such as the excellent Podcasts produced by my friends at Compadre Records), but in general it’s easier to get the same sort of stuff somewhere else. So I figure even if I did create a Podcast, very few people would have the desire and ability (it takes both) to listen to it. And even if they did…
3) Podcasting raises the very same issues you have with sharing other music files: the priority challenged folks at the RIAA (a better site to get the story is this one) will eventually get around to putting most of the independent Podcasters (and perhaps even some of the listeners) out of business. If I can’t download a song from Napster (meaning the original one, not the current sad reincarnation), what makes me think I can download a bunch of songs strung together in a Podcast. So that leaves people like Compadre (who own the rights to the stuff they use), marginally appealing talk shows, and public domain stuff. And even if the big boys get into the business…
4) There will eventually be ads. As I discussed last week, ads are killing traditional radio and real time (as opposed to TIVO‘ed) television. Once people start trying to monetize Podcasts, ads will kill Podcasts too. As an aside, ads are also the biggest buzz kill on independent internet radio stations like Rancho Radio. In fact, if I can’t dream up a way to broadcast Rancho Radio without the ads, I’ll probably take it off the air, again. But even if I could handle the ads…
5) I am over 40 and no one over 40 uses an MP3 player and earbuds as their primary music source. I have serveral MP3 players, but except for the occasional long airplane trip, I never use them. If I walked down the hall at my day job listening to an MP3 player, people would think I had lost my mind (often they do anyway, but for other reasons). Like many people of my generation, I do a large part of my music listening in the car. I like to burn a bunch of MP3’s onto a CD-R and pop it in my CD player. It’s safer and anyone riding with me can hear the music and talk to me at the same time (if I had earbuds in, they could do neither). Yes, I occasionally burn a Podcast onto a CD-R and listen to it in the car, but that’s simply an extra step that the average person will not take.
In theory, Podcasting is a great idea. And I’ll continue to listen to them occasionally. But I will be surprised if Podcasting is ever embraced by the masses. I hope I’m wrong.
I have posted another A-Z installment on the Err Bear Music page. It’s a hard-edged, country rocker.
Remember that we have hundreds of full-length MP3’s for your listening pleasure at Err Bear Music.
Newsome.Org 