Podcast 4 Transcript

A transcript for Episode 4: Codex Seraphinianus (2007-03-23).

Pronoiac passed the podcast to otter.ai.

Summary Keywords

people, elephant seal, filter, meetup, thread, totally, week, nice, tags, awesome, australia, cool, search, illicit, photos, fun, meta, sydney, download, showed

Transcript

mathowie 0:13 Welcome to episode four, the metal filter podcast. It's March 23 2007. And that was baby Balrogs salers. Psalm

Jessamyn 0:20 wasn't he the one that met that girl meet Meghan that they were going back and forth on meta talk for a while about that they met at that meet up and

mathowie 0:28 they both made music or something. Like something

Jessamyn 0:30 like that. Yeah, I read about his profile was like, oh, fiddle player. Awesome.

mathowie 0:37 Except, I mean, it's, it's gonna sound a little kid burnsy Especially around talking.

Jessamyn 0:44 Ken Burns ruined that music for everybody. I always used to listen to that music.

mathowie 0:48 I should do a little joke with it. Like, dearest Martha. Abraham. The prairie. Yeah, the prairie life has been hard. I'll be back in Washington soon. 1863. So, so how was your trip to to Australia?

Jessamyn 1:06 My trip to Australia was great. It was it was two weeks, down under four cities a road trip down the Great Ocean Road to Metafilter meetups in 24 hours in Melbourne, and in Sydney, both of which were really really fun. drag my sister to both of them was cool.

mathowie 1:22 How many people showed up to

Jessamyn 1:24 the one in the one in Melbourne was small. It was just three people. But but we had a whole evening out like we went out to Japanese food. We went out to ice cream. We went to this rooftop bar and sapphires kind of behind a building. And totally, it was totally fine. Yeah, no one's ever heard

mathowie 1:40 of von meetup going into more than one location. That's cool. Oh,

Jessamyn 1:44 well, in Seattle. We used to do that. But that's because all the places were like closed and stuff. This was like they had a plan. And so we did did little stuff. It was totally fun. And then the Sydney meetup was just, that was like 10 people or something at this big bar. And my sister and I had just flown in from Melbourne that morning, and went on this long walk in the sun with PK, which was fun. He picked us up at the airport. It was amazing. Nice. It was really nice. And then, you know, we hung out with them for a couple hours, which was which was really great. There's a bunch of Americans in Sydney. Oh, cool. Yeah, web goddess and quip and quips, coach, partner. I'm not remembering what our Metafilter username is. But

mathowie 2:27 oh, web Goddess is in Sydney. She kicked. She kicks ass in the Nike challenges for like metal filter members running? Really? Yeah, they do, like monthly who can run the most miles and she's like, off the charts. Like, I mean, she's just in like, probably good shape and running like 510 miles every couple days. But when you look at a month, it's like an order of magnitude more miles than anybody else.

Jessamyn 2:51 Wow. That's really cool. Yeah, she was she was super nice. And she was from Indiana. And so her and my sister were like, Indiana, because my sister went to college there. But ya know, it was fun. And then we were in Sydney for like a day and a half and then and then flew home. And I'm just about getting to the point where I can wake up before noon.

mathowie 3:07 Yeah, I remember going to Australia and coming back in probably two days later, or a day later. I felt fine for like a day or two and then buffed up for two weeks. It took several weeks.

Jessamyn 3:19 I know that's totally, totally it. But like, you know, I don't care. It's totally worth it. It's an amazing place to visit. Everyone should go.

mathowie 3:26 I'd find that the Austin one awesome. One was good. Oh, yeah. You were in South by Southwest. Yeah, that was that was fun. South by Southwest getting way too big. The the meetup was great. It's like, I don't know. 1215 people there were some, like Austin people or was it? Yeah, it was like half Austin people. And a lot of people have moved to Texas. You know, Houston, Dallas, people like Astro van or something. We're not Dallas. Nice. What is it? Brian J. Bush was there that was pretty cool. Yeah, I know Brian. Yeah, he somehow ended up down there. A few people from South by Southwest that wandered over. So it was good. I love that the meetups have kind of taken off and every time I visit a city there can be a meetup there like without why announcing it first like you'll just write well

Jessamyn 4:13 cortex is coming to Maine so I'm deciding whether I'm going to drive an hour and a half to go to New England meetup

mathowie 4:19 Maine is only an hour and a half that's awesome. Yeah, all

Jessamyn 4:23 the states are like I can get to every state New England I think in like two and a half hours. I'm not sure how long it takes me to get to Rhode Island. I just liked the Portland Portland meet up well in the cortex cortex Portland Portland meetup Yeah. Oh, I

mathowie 4:37 took like a I'm gonna play a little bit I'm gonna try and get a snippet that isn't too embarrassing for anyone. I got like a voice recorder from for my video iPod. And I just laid it out on the table. I just wanted to get like a feel a taste of what a meetups like and it's perfect. Oh, yeah. Because it's like crowded bar. There's one conversation you can hear clearly and there's like two or three others in the background. other metal filter people and then there's birds chirping because spring in Austin is perfect. There's clinking glasses and I guess I'll just like play a 32nd snippet at this point

Unknown Speaker 5:15 Yeah, absolutely. I've tried this was the first year I've had badges are bad for anything and it's really been like cognitively just kind of a mess for me because I'm so anti Southwest and I used to try to escape every year because I can't take it I lose centrally and it makes me insane.

mathowie 5:38 Together it was pretty cool. I just like laid out. Nobody even noticed it. I don't think nobody even asked about it. I'd record about 10 minutes of random meetup banter. That's cool. That's cool. There's no interviews. This week, we'll just

Jessamyn 5:56 review we have a special interview next week. Yeah, hopefully

mathowie 5:59 it will go off well, and we're always looking for new people.

Jessamyn 6:04 Yeah, I've got a whole list of people I would love to talk to. So I'm sure we'll have no shortage. Um, I'd really like to talk to Melissa Mae. And I don't remember what her what her husband's name is. But they just like moved to Portland from the Midwest. And I thought it would be fun to talk to them about you know, they do music and stuff like that. I'd like to talk to a quartermaster see what life after doing, doing a thesis on metal filter. So it'd be fun to talk to him about that.

mathowie 6:35 Let me see what was the popular Favorites page? Or which

Jessamyn 6:38 my favorite my favorite asked Metafilter of this week? Well, there was two right there was the heavy drama Jack and Jill relationship filter store thread, which was only interesting because it was one of those. I'm gonna write about this relationship and the third person and then asked you to tell me who's being unreasonable. And it was one of those one,

mathowie 6:58 what was it called Jack

Jessamyn 6:59 and Jill, you probably wouldn't have read it if you kind of skip relationship filter questions. It was basically people that have been dating since high school, they went to college together, they've been dating, he went away for a job and came back when he came back, his girlfriend was in grad school. And then he wanted to get a job in another country while she finished grad school. She thought that was unreasonable and showed a lack of commitment. But the whole thing is like phrased like, there's this guy. And there's this girl and it doesn't say who it is. And then people have to kind of pick based on like, not enough information. And so the thread was just kind of interesting, because people sided on, like, depending on whatever your experience is, like, the totally different side. wasn't one of those, like, is my wife being a bitch or not? Like, you know, people were like, I agree with Jack, I agree with Jill, this is what I think whatever. And it was actually kind of an interesting relationship filter, just because it seemed like kind of a Rorschach tests. You know, when people write these things that are like, could be either I don't really

mathowie 7:58 know. I really don't post.

Jessamyn 8:02 Well, yeah. And then I mean, the guy was an anonymous thread, and the guy later posted was like, No, this is me this this. This is what I'm dealing with. He was. Well, which a lot of people guessed, but it was hard. It was hard to tell. But my favorite posts are my favorite. Yeah, my favorite posts from this week. Was the squished food asked Metafilter thread.

mathowie 8:23 Oh, yeah. And how does that one go?

Jessamyn 8:27 Well, the question is, or the request is helped me squish my food. It's people who this username called Cat pie hurts. Who likes the densest, most compressed food possible? Sometimes I sit around and fantasize about compressing an entire salad into a tiny cube or a sandwich into an extremely dense and flat brick. If I could do this out be the happiest human in the universe. And then it's this thread. This like 40 people commenting either like oh, yeah, that's totally what I want and then trying to help them find different ways to make incredibly squished sandwiches.

mathowie 9:12 And we're all the suggestions just sandwiches.

Jessamyn 9:15 No, no, but it's like, you know, you can use a panini grill, you could use a sushi press. You could use an egg Cuber, you could use a hamburger press. You could use these little mini toasters. You could use one of these playdough things somebody one of the best answers was somebody who put Snickers bars in a ziplock and drives over them with their car.

mathowie 9:34 Someone does that. I don't know. I mean,

Jessamyn 9:36 it's another one of those TK Christ things right? They say they do it. But yeah, I put Snickers bars and triple bags ziplocks and roll over them with my car. I thought I was the only one I'm completely serious. So yeah, that was that was probably probably my favorite this week. Well you read that thing about the the elephants You'll get washed up on the beach. The guy who the guy who, Flynn's to the elephant seal,

mathowie 10:06 Oh, Jesus, I'm missing out. I've had my head buried in code and like server administration stuff, I'm seriously reading like 10 threads a day top blow. And

Jessamyn 10:17 this was technically from last week, but it was kind of a you know, normal thread called Nature sumo wrestlers about elephant seals. But then rumble has this great story about this elephant seal that washed up on the beach. And he had to call the SPCA guy to shoot the elephant seal. And then he was going to like bury the thing. But it was too big. And he's a what anthropologists they didn't like, it was like sick and dying, and the SPCA guy had to shoot it. And then, oh, he's an archaeologist. And so he called like the local, the local school. And they cut all the meat off the elephant seal and took the bones away and put it in a garbage bin so that the bugs would eat all the flesh off of it. Oh my God, it was the best. But then he had all this elephant seal blubber that he had to get rid of. And he buried it in his yard and all these dogs dug it up.

mathowie 11:14 Oh, God. That one.

Jessamyn 11:19 It's a funny, it's a funny story. I'm just excited that you know, you've been working on new server stuff.

mathowie 11:25 Oh, yeah. Hopefully I think by Wednesday or so next week, we'll start deploying that stuff is

Jessamyn 11:32 exciting.

mathowie 11:33 I mean, it's, it'd be a great test. If everything isn't awesome, that it's totally my fault.

Jessamyn 11:43 This is when we'll know. Yeah,

mathowie 11:45 like I've, you know, I'm always inching along with experiments like a little bit better code a little bit better hardware, a little bit better code, adding a gigabyte here. But this is like a humongous change of like, there's so much capacity now. That if things aren't like amazing, if they keep dying, or whatever, being slow, is totally my code. Which is good to know.

Jessamyn 12:09 And then there's the murder etiquette thread

was just went up today. Like I just discovered that an old boyfriend from high school has been arrested on a murder charge. Should I send a note to his family? That's on us. Metafilter. Just this morning? Yeah. Like it it just gotten posted when you called and stuff.

Well, people don't know how to deal with it. Right? I mean, you know, if you're somebody who's dealt with a murder in your life or your family, you know, that's a hard niche to sort of figure out from your like, day to day peer group. But it's easy to kind of find on metal filter like, well, this is how I dealt with it when you know, some close relatives committed a murder or what have you.

mathowie 12:49 It's like finding out a friend growing up is as no apology spammer. Like, that's what he does for a living. And I was like, it felt like I do a murder. Like, oh, God, he wasn't my house, but trivialize death completely.

Jessamyn 13:04 Right, right. Yeah. I mean, I don't know my feeling on etiquette is a card that says I'm thinking about you. And I'm sorry, this, you know, I'm sorry, this happened is always kind of appreciated. It's a terrible position for a parent to be in. Yeah, totally.

mathowie 13:16 Like a lot of the popular ones in the last week on metadata are all well, I guess, across the sites, were all kind of just really useful utility kind of things. This is like a BBC documentary on editing film. I really liked seeing the BBC stuff. There's a BBC documentary on gardening that's like four hours long, and it's like Alan Titchmarsh and he's a great garden designer guy. The BBC is uploaded. He's awesome. Like, here's our entire series as one video file. It's not high quality video. It's hard to watch four hours of a tiny stamp video, but it's cool to see him sharing it like an entire series.

Jessamyn 13:56 That's sort of cool. I need some gardening tips. It's starting to snow starting to melt here. My landlady is in the South Pacific and I have to do something

Yeah, I need to I need to start learning a little bit about gardening. Oh, and John emcees 300 most favorite songs Yeah, that's pretty cool. has been posted to meta filter and people are very very very very happy about it.

mathowie 14:20 That's an awesome like application of get your own fucking blog. And then he did and it's good. So like, the system works this shows works. System works people tell more people to get their own fucking

Jessamyn 14:37 Yeah, it's not just good. It's awesome. And it was like this little like, I'm gonna post my 300 favorites Fox like it was this kind of project limited project. And of course the tags are music's objective review critic countdown and Hanson

mathowie 14:54 gets featured. Yeah, that's perfect. That's like an outlet. That's super creative. Live in like, feeds, like his need to talk about music and like he's no longer. I mean, sometimes people get annoyed with like all the music but the music threads that would never die or,

Jessamyn 15:12 or that they devolve into. I don't know what your problem is. I liked the New York Dolls. Yeah, exactly.

mathowie 15:16 Or, you know, yeah, they were just a rip off of blah, blah, blah. And I guess one of the other useful things there's the that crazy was that illustrated book that people were kind of worried about copyright,

Jessamyn 15:28 the pitch? Oh, the codecs are funny on us. Yeah,

mathowie 15:31 that's like super famous document I've heard of for a long time.

Jessamyn 15:36 The whole thing up on Flickr? Yeah, it's low quality.

mathowie 15:38 I'm okay with that. Because just the low quality gives you a taste of what it is. I mean, it's, I've seen them in museums, you know, like, or at Garden. Sometimes they'll have like a display case with one of them opening the drawings are exquisite. So it's just not the same thing to see it on Flickr. It's not like they're not gonna sell anymore. probably sell rice or coffee. Oh, there's a good podcast. Think every month there's a show give me good podcast posts, and always loaded with a crapload of good lectures. This American Life debuted last night. Everyone loved the Chris Ware segment showed up on the site this week. Did you see that? What? This American Life is a TV show now you heard about that, right? No,

Jessamyn 16:24 I don't have TV. But I don't like to have like, be like one of those. I don't have TV people. But I don't have TV. I've been busy watching season four of the wire.

mathowie 16:32 I haven't even started the wire yet. Started at all. Yeah, it's in my Netflix queue. It's probably two movies away and season one and so good. It's so good. Yeah, I can't wait. I've been putting it off. But yeah,

Jessamyn 16:47 it's a good it's a good winter thing to watch, though, you know, because you just want to like, sit there and be like, all in a row.

mathowie 16:53 You're in Australia for the last two weeks or three weeks,

Jessamyn 16:55 and you've been beat up. And I don't know anything about

mathowie 16:59 this American life, like moving to show time. So it's a weird, you know, hardly anyone pays for Showtime. But like, how do you turn a radio show what's visual about it? Because they're mostly just storytelling and like how they're going to do it. Like I rayglass has been everywhere talking about it. On fresh air and their little segments and interviews galore with him everywhere I turned it was like, how are you going to do this and he had alluded to like, they're gonna do some weird stuff, where he just tells the story while sitting at a desk in a weird like out in the world, like sitting in a desk. So it looks weird. And they're trying they didn't want to, like make a documentary style of right, tell the story while we're showing you the story.

Jessamyn 17:43 It just stuff they do. They're wandering around talking to people. So it doesn't seem like it would be that huge transition. I mean, when I think about my favorite This American Life episodes, and there's not that many of them. I mean, I'm kind of hit or miss with This American Life. Yeah. So they're usually active. They go talk to somebody who's making balloon animals or whatever the thing is,

mathowie 18:02 yeah, but it's always more fun to imagine it in my head. Like what all that street noise look like and stuff. Right? So yeah, it would probably be kind of a so it debuted last night but they did it early teaser of like a whole segment.

Jessamyn 18:16 Today, put it online. Yeah,

mathowie 18:17 I guess they did this on Tuesday, and it was animated by Chris where the guy did. Oh, nice. No, no Chris Ryan and stuff. Yeah. So it was like this story of kids and those anime that's really cool. And it'd be awesome if it was just Chris were always animating the show, but I have no idea what I just download the show. I guess it was on last night. The debut. And luckily, it's available on the illicit internet. So watch.

Jessamyn 18:42 Three cheers for the illicit internet. Yeah, the biggest thing in Australia, man is that like, internet cost a ton of money? Everywhere. So the illicit internet is just like close to you. Yeah. Because Because you're a bit yeah, it's so I could find like these little free Wi Fi hotspots, but it was only like your first 100k was free. Like 100k isn't enough to load Gmail practically.

mathowie 19:09 Yeah, no, do they have to like pay for that transatlantic cable or something?

Jessamyn 19:14 I assume that upstream is just metered you know, I haven't really looked into it and if you get it at home, it's expensive and and a whole bunch of stuff. So I found I was spending a lot of time in Australia like using my shell account to like check meta filter via links and like read my email and tie in you know, was

mathowie 19:33 when I was there in 2001, there was on every corner of Sydney and even in the vacation towns were in there'd be a like internet terminal it was like unlimited use for like a buck an hour like there are all these gaming like internet cafes Well

Jessamyn 19:48 that's the thing you go to like the you know they're usually run by like Chinese guys or whatever like these these little internet cafes where Yeah, it's it's two bucks an hour now but still fairly cheap, but it was metered at two bucks an hour. Now Two bucks an hour, it's unmetered. But you're like using somebody else's computer, you know. But yeah, you can download stuff and put stuff on your I mean, I put like one Flickr picture every other day up just because

mathowie 20:12 Okay, so when I did it in 2001, I didn't even own a laptop. So yeah, I was always using some borrowed Korean keyboard thing. But I remember, it seems super cheap back then. Not being my own computer. I just dropped in a drop in every morning, evening. And like, it was $1. At most, you know, us to check stuff for half

Jessamyn 20:34 an hour. Yeah. And now it's two bucks. And, but if you want your own computer, you're at the library, really, like you're at the public library or the State Library. And that's, you know, that's your option. That was like the best internet I found in the whole country, mostly. But so it means that the illicit internet and the 2.0 Internet haven't sort of penetrated as much as they would otherwise. Because it's

mathowie 20:56 so weird, because because I was from Australia. I know, that Skype and all that stuff. I mean, that's one way to like kill, because all right, it's just to not let people download big objects. And then people can't download music and movies ever again.

Jessamyn 21:12 Right? I mean, while and maybe that's why cuz I exists, because, you know, it's like trickle charging, right? You can get like, a little bit downloaded every hour or whatever, and it takes you three days to download the whole thing.

mathowie 21:24 Yeah, but you still have to pay for it. If it's just by the absolute bid, right? Be like, I'm gonna see you buy the DVD. It's gonna cost me $10 to download this crappy version. Like, take two days of my life. Yeah, for 15 bucks and get the real thing. How's my mental talks been crazy? This week? So though, it's that super crazy. Just lots and lots and lots a little thing?

Jessamyn 21:49 Well, I mean, people have been taking stuff to meta talk, meta talk hasn't been like real fighty. At least at least, I don't think there's been a couple surly people. But by and large, it's just been, you know, more like meta talk being normal meta talk. It's been it's been busy, but it hasn't been like angry, or whatever. I mean, whatever. I live in New England. So I think it's because the weather's getting better. But it's only the weather getting better in New England, certainly not the rest of the world. I mean, it's been summer in Australia the whole the whole time, right? Yeah.

mathowie 22:18 Yeah. And I think there's a ton of little tech bugs, things I have to fix, which has been good.

Jessamyn 22:27 And I enjoyed seeing Monju both shot twos. That visualization of the meta filter context. Yeah, through the IBM's. Many Eyes thing. Fascinating. Oh,

mathowie 22:38 I thought was a great thread about the it's hard to find things and asked me to filter and archive. And I have I totally agree. Like, I can't I mean, the weblog going with a weblog model for showing your archives like clearly is not the best way to like lead someone down the path of figuring stuff out. But then you can only do so much with like a Custom Search engine before you run into processing problems. And and then Google offers no granularity. So it's, it's really tough. We have to, I mean, it's like, I wish we had a gazillion sub categories or tags within category. So we could walk,

Jessamyn 23:18 is there any reason we can't do a tags within categories, custom search, so limit by category and then hunt by tag?

mathowie 23:25 Yeah, that's what I was just thinking might be a way to do it. But that would have to be a custom search that's local, hard to do those. But right. It's just processor intensive. I just imagined, like a browse menu where like, I want to know about immigration problems with relationships. Do I just search for immigration and married and ins? Or do I go to the relationships category? Do I look for the tag immigration? Would that be more specific than just as like a raw search across pure text?

Jessamyn 23:58 Well, and this is the kind of thing that I say to people when they ask like if librarians are going out of business in 2007. Yeah. Because people still don't know how to figure out what's a really good search or to be able to kind of do an iterative search, where you look for stuff, look at your results, and then do a second search. That's better based on what you got in the first search. Yeah, it's hard, right? People don't know how to do that necessarily. Some people do. Don't.

mathowie 24:24 Yeah, one of these days we should probably sit down just rethink like completely blank slate. How would you make an archives or a search page for AskMe edit filter, search. I'd love to see something that was like drill down that was like, only questions and computers and technology only questions that are tagged with Apple within that computer technology. And now I want to freeform text area or something like some way we can let people drill down a bit before they do a search to confine their, their bits a bit more.

Jessamyn 24:55 Yeah, and there's ways of making Google do some of that work.

mathowie 24:59 Yeah. A few dozen pluses and all that crap. Yeah. But I

Jessamyn 25:03 mean, you can do some of it on the back end where the formatting of the way the category shows up. You can put that in quotes and use that as a search to do kind of a category limit. You know what I mean? Yeah, it's it's hacky. But like, you could use Google's processor instead of your own?

mathowie 25:19 Yeah. Well, I mean, we should think about, like, you know, no limits whatsoever. We could do anything. Right, right, right. How could we lead people like, what would you do? I mean, I guess we almost have to mimic, we have to make a virtual library. I mean, that's, hey, every good tech. Every good text site that's absolutely useful. Awesome. Utility is basically mimicking a real life person who's an expert at that. So like, we just had to figure out like the, the approach you take to helping someone find a question and then try and see if we can mimic that and interface. Did you see the 100 year old photo blog? No. Oh, it's pretty cool. I don't know where this person gets. They're not all 100 Someone has a stash of photos from like 1900 to 1950. Oh, nice. And they're just and then posting like a photo a day. And the the awesome ones like the 1909 New York City street photos. They're just amazing, man. That's cool. Yeah, it's called short B. S. horpy.com. And yeah, I immediately subscribed to the feed, which had no images in it. I unsubscribed and PB was

Jessamyn 26:30 cool enough. Oh, man. This is really nice. Photo, isn't it? Yeah. I mean, there's Lewis Lewis Hine.

mathowie 26:36 Sorry. Yeah. So I mean, yeah, these are not this person does not have copyright on these photos. Especially the ones in the 50s are still under copyright. But who cares? They're awesome.

Jessamyn 26:46 It looks like they're from American Memory from the Library of Congress site.

mathowie 26:49 Oh, yeah. Maybe that's where they're pulling down. So the feed has teeny photos. The moment the site went up, PB like made his own feed for it with the full size photos. So it's great. So I have a secret feed, which I

Jessamyn 27:02 do and it must be nice to have PB around just all the time. Now.

mathowie 27:05 I didn't I didn't task him with this. He just like came up with it and did it. No,

Jessamyn 27:10 I just mean in general, because he's totally into the same nerdy stuff. You're totally

mathowie 27:13 Yeah. And he can write you know, yeah, paid scrapers for fun. Right. Some of it's weird that these the ones in color are weird. Just because they look new compared to all the cool Sephia black and whites. But yeah, I wish the guy would only post black and whites.

Jessamyn 27:32 Wow, this is cool. No, I'm sort of looking at them. Yeah, there's

mathowie 27:34 like old rat collector as much of old weird stuff.

Jessamyn 27:38 That's really cool. No, I'm totally enjoying this. This is awesome. Yeah, that's Sharpie is actually the name of one of these people.

mathowie 27:45 Oh, cool. I didn't even notice that. That wraps up episode four of Metafilter podcast. Thanks for joining me and Jasmine this week. Next week. We'll be doing the same thing and try and throw in an interview though. Until then.

Unknown Speaker 30:00 The Shadow me shadow me. Oh lady me me