From the “Starred Items” in my Google Reader

It doesn’t matter who the author really is, just as long as you like the books.

Eloquent recommendations for your media consumption.

The issue of privacy has been much on my mind, especially after finishing Ken Auletta‘s fine new book about the monster from Mountain View.  Matthew Ingram gets you up to date on the Google convection in Italy and the fact that Google IS a media company.  And Danah Boyd reports from Harvard about evolving privacy norms in the context of teens using Facebook.  Let me put it this way: fifteen years ago, if you knew someone was opening, reading, and analyzing all your mail, would that have been OK with you?  But now you don’t mind?  The world is changing and so are you.

(SPOILER ALERT for links only)  Finally, Tamara from Caprica looks like a total bad-ass with her sub-machine gun because she IS a total bad-ass.  Annalee Newitz knows how good the show is.  Are you watching the best show on television?

WordPress instability issue appears resolved, for now.

I have third-party hosting for this site, so I wasn’t effected by the recent WordPress outage, although my hosting provider had their own shut down for a few hours recently.  The real problem had been that I couldn’t upload anything using Google Chrome for Mac.  It’s extremely annoying to have to open a whole new application just to post anything.

Fortunately, everything appears resolved at the moment.  I upgraded to WordPress 2.9.2 and the whole thing is just honky dory.  Even using Chrome.  Time to try some new extensions?

I’m listening to the new Elephant9 album – Walk the Nile

Just downloaded this sucker from iTunes, which is interesting because it came out today.  Why is that interesting?  Because, in the United States, music comes out on a Tuesday.  Amazon.co.uk had this release al ready for download and old-style delivery, but not Amazon.com.  I have had issues with European release dates not being honored by my iTunes account (surely iTunes knows I’m in the US), but today, no problem.  So, if you are ready for over-the-top keyboard madness from Storloekken et al, go have at it.  So far, sounds like another monstrous effort.

Snow day is a great time to catch a buzz!

Not that kind of buzz!  Although I may have to take the dog back to The 700 for a Bloody Mary or four, considering that the city will be encased in 16 inches of snow.

But, more to the point, is Google’s new toy for keeping tabs on you, obtaining an absurd amount of private information about you, putting Twitter out of business.  Status updates on Google Buzz will be just like tweets, butt they will integrate with your already extant Google Apps, including mail and maps.  The service will also aggregate (GASP!) with Twitter, Facebook, Flickr and Picasa (what’s that?).

The problem for me is an issue of branding.  My brand (Mpomy!!) is not strongly associated with all my Google junk – which lives under the moniker “Blogerantz” (what’s that?).  Aaaaaand, I can’t just start using my mpomy.com stuff, because that’s not strongly associated with my Google stuff.  I refuse to live in a walled garden.

Sooooo, it’s time to start to wrap up the Blogerantz thing.  It’s meaningless and will only confuse my Buzz i.d., which should, like everything else, be an Mpomy.  And since Google requires a 6+ character i.d., I present to you the new Google profile:

mr.mpomy

Exciting, I know.  This nonsense would not even be blog worthy if it was not for the cruel architecture imposed by Mountain View that does not (I repeat, DOES NOT) permit importing of contacts from one Google account to another.  I’m afraid that the same may be true for Calendar events.

So, with tomorrow’s snow day looming large, I have before me a significant data entry time killing project.  My only hope is that it doesn’t get in the way of my other projects that are already planned for the day.  Otherwise you email address may get entered as kbEUFb@gduwk.cm n  or worse.

Two quick items:

I just started following this discussion at Supervillian that stems from this wonderful series by Matt Zoller Seitz about Michael Mann.  @switzke of Supervillian is taking the Seitz series as a jumping off point for talking about zen pulp and the ‘lone man’ narrative in film.  The discussion is just getting started, so you may want to tune in for the next few essay’s and responses.  Lots of amazing content going to be discussed there.

The other item in my morning inbox was an affectionate note about McCartney’s superb album ‘Ram’ from 1971 aver at Never Get Out of The Boat.  There’s is also information about a muzak instrumental version that McCartney did himself (?!?) and a various artists’ cover version of the album.

#SOYCD, or hastily recorded music in a snowstorm

Got a nice amount of snow in Northern Liberties, so here’s that cover version you’ve been waiting for:

Stream: [audio:http://mpomy.com/music/shineon.mp3]

or link.

As usual, recorded a bit quietly to preserve quality, SO TURN IT UP!!