Charles Redell

Another in a series of my thoughts about Social Media, how it’s used or how it should be used.

“Who has the new #facebook feed? Or do you have “#FacebookFatigue” and don’t care? http://bit.ly/14D1hfP #sm”

Another in a series of my thoughts about Social Media, how it’s used or how it should be used.

“Wish #sm companies would get it that more sharing is better than less via @socialmedia2day “FB blocks twitter’s Vine” http://bit.ly/YQpqQm”

Another in a series of my thoughts about Social Media, how it’s used or how it should be used.

”.@Ryanintheus #Twitter. Once you get the hang of it, it’s easier to separate wheat from chaff. Good for #sm work and more fun for personal.”

Another in a series of my thoughts about Social Media, how it’s used or how it should be used.

“Trying to determine basic value of a twitter follower. EG how many of my followers use twitter & aren’t just dead accounts? #sm #socialmedia”

Another in a series of my thoughts about Social Media, how it’s used or how it should be used.

“via @Ryanintheus new YouTube channel design require action by nonprofits http://t.co/2JD9pEvz #sm Easy to tell I’m thinking #video lately?”

Another in a series of my thoughts about Social Media, how it’s used or how it should be used.

“ICYMI: Handy tips for making your video channel successful. http://t.co/qtYjJVPh #sm”

Seeing this article on gender equality in the New York Times, and the accompanying map, I was shocked at what crappy company we keep. And decided to compare it to the crappy company we keep as a nation with Capital Punishment in our law. 

Another in a series of my thoughts about Social Media, how it’s used or how it should be used.

“In an age of hashtags hard to believe “…shorthand labels don’t necessarily reflect how ppl talk about…issues “http://t.co/8JBXzCnf #sm”

Another in a series of my thoughts about Social Media, how it’s used or how it should be used.

“One more time then I think I’m done with these IFTTT tests. Thanks for your patience. #sm”

Another in a series of my thoughts about Social Media, how it’s used or how it should be used. Sorry. Doing it again. This tweet is just a test of a new IFTTT recipe. #sm

I originally posted this on Twitter. Follow me there.

Little fat hen you’re my new fave brunch spot. at Ballard by Charles Redell on EyeEm

Caught a glimpse of #sunset through the #trees while walking the dog. by Charles Redell on EyeEm

Over at Sound on the Sound, my friend Abbey is running a contest in which you can win the new cassette being released by Hobosexual. Yes, they are releasing a cassette tape. Anyway, to win you have to tell about your favorite tape…. I couldn’t come up with just one, but here’s my answer.

I immediately thought of a favorite tape when I saw this. Then as I read the above comments I came up with two more that could rank.

The first tape I thought of was a bootleg Phish show at The Bomb Factory in Dallas from sometime in the early 90s. I was (still am to be honest) big into Phish in college and had a ton of tapes like this. I knew their provenance so could tell you which generation removed from the actual taper my copy was, among other details. They were all on Maxell II-S tapes; anything else was too-low quality for us. The ones I didn’t get by trading with a friend (I tape a show for him/her, they tape one for me), I got from a now-defunct record/head shop  in Hempstead, NY on Long Island. They had books and books of show lists. You’d flip through, find the one you want, buy a blank tape from them and come back in a week or two to get it. They made a small profit on the blank tape, but that was it. Charging for a bootleg show was and is completely uncool.

 It was the ultimate in low-fi and it was great. Now I can download any show I want in pristine, soundboard quality and have it instantly. I don’t do that as much as I got tapes from that store.

The second tape I thought of was a mix tape my sister (who is 14 years older than me) made for me when I was about 10. Her name is Nina and she called it Neener-Beaners Rock n Roll vol. 1. It was full of the best damn songs I’d ever heard at that point. The Radiators, The Pretenders, Rolling Stones, Bob Marley, Clapton. Stuff that literally blew my young mind. Plus the fact that it came from my sister who was (still is) way too cool for school in my mind. That she thought of me and wanted to be an influence on me from 1,000 miles away was so awe inspiring to me… I listened to that tape way too much. I’ve still got it in a box somewhere (with a bunch of other mix tapes and shows I can’t give up) and will likely pull it out tonight just to get the songs from it so I can re-build the playlist. 

But the last tape I thought of was also probably the last tape I got and loved. It was a copy of Tribe Called Quest’s The Low End Theory on side A and People’s Insntictive Travels on the other. Two of the best hip-hop records ever produced.

I got it from a friend of mine in the winter of 1998 and even though I mostly listened to CDs by then, I still traveled around with my old Sony Sports Walkman (the big clunky yellow one with the hinged door that you had to flip open in order to open the tape door. That thing was so indestrctible that when I ran over it with my bike when it fell out of my pocket on Broadway on night, it didn’t miss a beat. Try THAT with your iPhone.)

 I had recently broken up with a serious girlfriend and was morbid. I was riding my bike and the bus everywhere and I was working the opening shift at a downtown Starbucks at 5:30 am and rehearsing the last play I’ll ever work on every night from 6-10 pm. All of this was taking place in Seattle in February. It meant spending a lot of time in the dark, cold, rain and this tape was my soundtrack. It was all I listened to for weeks and it got me through that very hard time. I still listen to both those albums a lot. Based on visceral memories alone, that tape is easily my favorite one.

Image by Flickr user mikael altemark. Used under Creative Commons.

Whew. What a day. My first full day in Alabama and I am whipped.

After getting up at 8:30 this morning and sitting around doing nothing, shooting the shit and getting a bit of work done while efforts at organization of the day’s tasks took place around me, I went out to help Mike and Tom Bosley do chores around the house. I started by trimming the Azelea bush at the front of the driveway before finding out that Tom already had done it (though not very well cause it did still look like it needed to be done). Then I went to trim the tree branches on either side of the driveway, so when people parked along the road they won’t be getting out right into branches. After collecting the detritus from those two projects and dumping it in the burn pit, I was sent to thin out the woods along the driveway for a bit. This meant walking around with a long pole saw and chopping away at “anything you don’t like,” that’s less than 3 inches in diameter, according to Mike. This was kind of odd cause, to me, it was all natural woods growth and who was I not to like it? But cut some out I did (using Dayna’s pruning theory of “tough love” as my guide).

Then came the two big group projects of the day: installing new transformers on the driveway lights and re-wiring the speakers so the wires weren’t running across the floor of the living room. The first involved me learning proper sledgehammer technique (“It’s not about pull, it’s about drop,” says Tom—and he’s right), and the second…well I was more in my element there so it was about watching Mike and Tom argue about the right way to do it and then coming up with the right way myself while sitting on the couch drinking beer and reading an article about parachutists who died skydiving at the South Pole.

Top all of that off with 100 degree heat that sapped even Mike and Tom and ice it with making a batch of bagels before and after dinner (by the end of which I was pretty drunk), and I had a full fucking day.

Mike: you gettin’ dragged away by the state bird? Me: what’s the state bird? Beat Mike: the gnat

Over at the NYTimes Caucus blog, there’s a post about the slightly conciliatory tone between Obama and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce that seems to have taken hold in recent weeks. Predictably this has brought out a rash of comments deriding the President for being in bed with big business and no friend of the American people. Never mind all the wins he’s had, it seems to be more fun for the far-left-wing contingent to deride Obama as little more than a Democrat in name only. I don’t get that.

Who are all you people harping on the idea that Obama capitulates to “the powers that be?” Are you the same people calling him a socialist but using different screen names to do so on comment threads? How is it possible that both the hard right and the hard left dislike him so much? And when did the idea of political compromise become “capitulation?”

Those of you who say Obama has always been in love with business, capitulates to the powers that be, and doesn’t care about everyday Americans, I assume you are liberals (as I am). So I have to wonder what it is about American politics that you think has suddenly changed? Did you really think that Obama was going to get into office and then slam through a bunch of very liberal policies without giving anything up to the other side? There was nothing about his campaign that implied that he would act that way.

Let’s imagine that he did somehow “force through” very liberal policies, just like W did for the right (a favorite trope of extreme left wing liberals). If Obama had done that in his first two years, do you think that the Ds would still control the Senate? Would Obama now have any chance of being re-elected two years from now? More to the point, do you really think, given the make up of the last Congress, that he could have done that?

Yes, yes, I know that on paper he had 60 votes in the Senate and a solid majority in the House. But do you remember who those Ds were? Do you remember that many of those Ds were from very conservative states and were very conservative Ds in the first place? If those people were not going to vote for a single-payer system or a climate change law, how was he supposed to get these policies passed?

As for the he loves business argument, I’ll first say that without business in America, there is no America. Yeah, we’re hurting and yeah, business got away with murder for the last 30 years (sorry, does that include your god Clinton? Good cause he was complicit in those policies). But we do need businesses to have some amount of freedom to act in their best interests or we’ll become even more marginal than we already are in the global market. Hence, the government did everything it could think of to support businesses after 2007’s crash. I know you like to whine about all the TARP money and Geithner et al…. but really, had we not done that, do you think 9.4% unemployment would look as bad as it does right now? We’d be crying to get back DOWN to 9.4%.

That said, Obama has not capitulated to business. His EPA is pushing CO2 regulations since Congress won’t do it. His Administration got the consumer protection agency created AND put a person who cares about people over business to head it. His administration passed the health care law and his administration is getting a dam good return on the vast majority of the bail-out money that was given to banks and car makers.

So before you whine that Obama isn’t liberal enough, think. Before you call him a Republican in name only, imagine what this country would be doing if McCain had been elected. Before you make “perfect” the enemy of “good” remember that revolution is a process, not an event. You have to compromise, or you get nothing. 

Now that Mubarak’s reign is coming to an end, it’s time to think rationally about what comes next. In Egypt, whoever takes power, the Muslim Brotherhood is going to be a part of it. A lot of people want us to be scared of this.

And then there is the latest fright word, the Muslim Brotherhood. You would never know it from Halevi, but the Brotherhood is non-violent, has always opposed Al Qaeda, and condemned 9/11 and other acts of international terrorism.

While the Brotherhood is far from perfect and certainly does pose a risk, it’s not a terrorist organization. Engaged correctly, they could lead a government chosen by the people of Egypt that is our ally as well as Israel’s. But if we let the demagoguery of the Right in both the US and Israel scare us into trying to isolate them, the whole world will miss an important opportunity.

The Associated Press ran a story about the passage of an extension of the Bush-era tax cuts on its wires this morning with the headline, “Bill preventing huge tax cuts heads to Obama Friday.”

What’s wrong with that?

The AP is a hugely influential news organization because it provides copy to news rooms all across the country. In this age of constantly shrinking news staffs, newspapers use the AP copy more than ever before. Language as obviously biased as this will quickly make its way into coverage of this story by almost every news outlet in the country. Think I’m exaggerating? Remember The Ground Zero Mosque?  

If you agree that the media needs to stay unbiased, think about writing to The AP at info@ap.org. Here’s what I sent them.

To Whom it May Concern:

As a journalist and subscriber to the online AP Style Book I was very disappointed to see today’s headline from The Associated Press on the passage of a bill to extend the Bush-era tax cuts by Congress. “Bill preventing huge tax hikes heads to Obama Friday” is a very biased way of reporting the news. In a time when many people simply scan headlines for their news, it’s irresponsible. We all know that this issue is a very divisive one pitting progressives against conservatives. By playing the story as being about the avoidance of tax hikes, AP is taking a very obvious stance on the issue. Instead a headline saying that “Congress sends tax bill to Obama Friday” would have been more accurate and more objective.
This gross example of bias is all the more disappointing coming so soon after the manufactured conflict over the “Ground Zero Mosque.” Thanks to the AP’s habit of referring to the Muslim cultural center being built two blocks away from Ground Zero as “The Ground Zero Mosque” in its headlines, almost the entire media establishment used that style. Unfortunately, that is obviously biased language created by conservative outlets in an effort to inflame public opinion. The AP is a hugely influential news organization. It is more so now than ever before as news rooms around the country continue to shrink, forcing them to rely on AP copy to fill their websites and newspapers. So why is the AP getting ever lazier and sloppier about it’s copy?
If one weren’t so sure that the AP is an unbiased news organization, one might start to think that there is a conservative conspiracy to control the media.
Histrionics aside, please take more time and care with your headlines. It’s a disservice to the nation when a news organization with as great a reach as The Associated Press gets lazy, succumbs to pressure to write for SEO and caves to the political winds of any one side of the debate.

I never really liked del.icio.us because the way one organized bookmarks never worked for me and the social aspect of sharing bookmarks just never interested me. But I never really liked it, but it feels like Del.icio.us has been around since the beginning of the Web. But now Del.icio.us is no longer operating