Jon Alper's probably insufficiently humble opinion

****** UPDATE: Easier to follow directions here: Account Info *******

So, I promised (threatened) to do a lot of dumb ^m^m… experimental things with running this blog.

One of the experiments is this. To comment here, you need to make an account. To do that, you simply try to log in and comment. When you get confronted with the log-in screen, you will see a link to Register. Click that, type in a a user name you want to use and whatever email address you are prepared to share with me. When done, an email will go to that address with a hideously hard to remember password and a reminder of your chosen user name. Come back, try to comment and when confronted with the log-in option, enter your chosen user name and the hideously hard to remember password and log in. When you log in, you’ll be able to create a profile and change your password. The suggestion to change the password will show up on the top of the profile page you land on.

Now, this is messy and it’s a pain in the @#$. The upside is, you only have to do it once and you will, thenceforth be able to comment. The downsides, that I can see now at least are:

• That creating an account could be scripted, it could be a way my site is used for spamming people. If that happens, tell me. The spam will be one unwanted email with log-in credentials. No way. barring security glitches with WordPress, to control the content sent by the account creation script and no way, again glitches with WordPress to send more than one.
• It’s a pain in the $%^.  Yeah, I know, another site you have to have an account on. I’m sorry. You don’t have to make an account. You don’t have to post comments. If you want to, this is how I am trying it for now.
• You have to trust me a little. You are trusting me with the following info: Some email address that somebody can read. Doesn’t have to be your ‘real’ one but it does need to be one you can read at least one message to. The IP address, browser, referring page and platform you’ve used to access this site are logged by the server. That IP address can be reverse lookuped (I know, that’s not a word) and it can be geo-located and all of that info can be correlated to the email address you used. This is true for essentially ANY web site you access and make an account on. In most cases, you have to trust some enormous corporation whose business depends on making some use of that info to make money. In my case, you have to trust me. Or not. Rest assured, unless I am forced to by court order or have to for some legal reason, I’m not going to mess with you.

Regards posting comments. Unless you spam, break some law I know about, threaten me or others, disclose personal information about yourself, me or others, or say something a reasonable person could deem offensive for the sake of being offensive, I’m gonna leave up comments. If you make a cogent case that blog entry was utter horsepuckey, your comment will stay up. I may rebut. I may just comment myself or post myself saying I disagree with you or I found your comment offensive or I may just leave it as is. Again, you’re just going to have to trust me that I want to do the right thing and will try.

(Yes I need a privacy policy. Yes that will come.)

http://wordpress.org/extend/themes/p2

This could make things interesting. One comment I got from my circle of friends was the Pub-like conversational aspect of Facebook is part (all?) of the charm. With P2, one could ‘as easy as WordPress’ (which is pretty flippin’ easy) host one’s own instance of a very similar experience. The challenges, of course, include access control and the barriers to ease of use with having to auth against all of your friends’ individual instances. Still, could be a baby step to my fantasy of  ‘protocolizing’ what we think of as social networks out of existence.

My friend Sherm posted his top 20 list under the auspices of the exercise described below to Facebook and tagged me to respond. (No, I won’t include his. That’s his decision to make)

Normally these viral “post your yadda yadda” things drive me bat#$%^ but, typical of Sherm, he posited an exercise interesting enough that I responded. It’s important that it’s not the “Desert Island” list because that one just doesn’t work for me. Though, obviously, there’d be huge overlap from this list to whatever too-damned-short-a-list I had to come up with to take to the proverbial desert island.

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– Begin Cross Post – (Numbers changed to bullets because it’s supposed to be an unordered list)

(Sorry folks, I don’t do the ‘tag your friends’ thing. Sherm and somebody else asked me to do this and the exercise struck me interesting. This took 8 minutes. Then I decided to remove some duplicates from the same artist. Another 10 minutes. I’d probably pick 80% of these if forced to redo the exercise again. Which would drop and which would add, I can’t predict. In redoing, I’d guess 80% would stay again and probably not the same 80%.)

The rules: Don’t take too long to think about it.  List 20 albums you’ve heard that will always stick with you.  20 albums that “changed your life.”  List the first 20 that come to mind in 20 minutes.  Tag 20 friends, including me, because I am interested in seeing what my friends choose.  To do this, go to the Notes heading on the left column of the Home page, paste the rules in a new note, list your 20 picks, and tag 20 friends.

In no particular order:

• The Dark – Artsy Annoyance/Boring Contrivance (Actually an untitled tape that has a storied history with other Dark on it as well)
• Peter Garbriel – 3
• Nine Inch Nails – Pretty Hate Machine
• Robert Palmer – Clues
• Kraftwerk – Computer World
• The Silencers – A Letter From St. Paul
• Pink Floyd – Dark Side of the Moon
• Led Zeppelin – IV
• The Beatles – Rubber Soul
• The Clash – Sandinista!
• Machines of Loving Grace – Concentration
• David Bowie – Ziggy Stardust
• The Crystal Method – Vegas
• Big Catholic Guilt – Possession
• John Lennon – Shaved Fish
• Eurythmics – Sweet Dreams (Are Made of This)
• Gary Numan – The Pleasure Principle
• O- Positive - Only Breathing/Cloud Factory (It’s one Disc so ;-P~
• Simon and Garfunkel – Bridge over Troubled Water
• Oingo Boingo – Good For Your Soul

Those of you who were ON some of these records and are reading this, don’t let it go to your heads…. and don’t doubt for a second doubt that, standing apart from my knowing you, the music rates.

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