Craftwork is completed, Artwork is abandoned.
Category: Q & A
Questions, and Answers, from the man himself
Deano’s answer to: “What are some fancy ways to order a drink at a bar?”
I like ordering a "Stoli Blu-driver", since it's both immediately apparent to the bartender what it is I want, but for some odd reason, seems to give anyone else pause, or outright confuse them. Good conversation starter in a new bar.
More to the point though – make sure you understand the difference between ordering a fancy drink, and "ordering fancy", which may have a tendency to aggravate a busy, overworked, has-to-deal-with-enough-random-crap-already bartender. The only real way to be seen as classy in the eyes of the bartender is to pay with a large bill and leave the change.
Deano’s answer to: “Why did there appear to be a corporate conspiracy to destroy rock n’ roll in the 1990’s?”
Rock bands are expensive to operate as businesses, and generally full of dickish personalities with enormous creative control and ego issues.
The 90s gave rise to flagrantly auto-tuned pop idol groups, so-called "reality television", and a host of other forms of extremely low-cost, high-margin entertainment. Which, by the way, was always "studio led", reducing control issues over even fairly big stars.
It was also a period that included the impressive rise in power and sophistication of the (largely dial-up) Internet, which in turn provided many additional entertainment outlets, and the ability to "feel part of the group" in a much less geographically-specific way… You could be a proud proto-goth, without having to blend in with the skinheads or metal stoners at your high school. Did I mention video games? VIDEO GAMES. Frag. Men. Tation.
In short? The music business gave up on arena rock. It was too expensive, too much a pain in the ass, and required large affluent audiences to concentrate their entertainment dollars all in one place, precisely at a time when they were "spreading the love" across a greater number of different forms of play/indulgence. It also didn't help that due to the transition to CDs, burgeoning internet use, the mp3, and services like Napster (the original, not the current whatever-the-heck-it-is), the recording industry was undergoing multiple, drawn-out changes to their long-standing business model – one of which, at least, was entirely involuntary (so-called music piracy).
At the end of the day, all these guys cared about was money. And there wasn't a lot of money in promoting single rock bands in the 90s (though, for a time, music festivals like Lollapalooza experienced a huge resurgence – again, by providing an alternative to the existing model – greater attendance in exchange for lower dollar-per-band in the cash box).
Why did there appear to be a corporate conspiracy to destroy rock n' roll in the 1990's?
Deano’s answer to: “What are the advantages of polyfidelity over polyamory?”
What advantage do squares have over rectangles?
As AJ Slater states, polyfidelity is a subset of polyamory, rather than an alternative to it.
This highlights at least one the main advantages: by being a specific subset of a larger/sweeping/more generalized practice, it may be easier to reach agreements over definitions and boundaries within a relationship.
Polyamory in the generalized sense, by contrast, may have a different meaning for every member or even bystander to a relationship, which in turn may signify the need for increased frequency of checkins/communication to ensure that everyone's "on the same page", at least until some rebalancing and renegotiation has occurred to the point in which roles and responsibilities are universally understood, rather than assumed.
Deano’s answer to: “What does ‘US Commercial’ in my server stats mean?”
It means visitors coming from IP addresses associated with a ".com" domain.
As Silvino Ferreira Jr points out, this does not map directly to users in the US. Many ".com" domains exist around the world, including a great many hosting providers.
Conversely, there are several companies and services using country-specific domain TLD extensions located in the US, or other unaffiliated country. Bit.ly, for example, is a company based in the US, with a country code domain TLD from Libya (.ly).
The only cheap and easy way to determine the country-level breakdown of visitors to a site is to use their IP address, rather than their source domain. This is still potentially inaccurate, but it's much easier for geolocation data tracking companies to correct associations of blocks of assigned IPs back to specific countries, regions, and cities, than it is to do so for each individual domain name on the Internet.
A few links to GeoIP information providers:
- ip2location.com
- maxmind.com
- google.com/analytics (if you're not using this for your website stats, it will provide geolocation info, as well as many other useful demographic tools for studying your site visitors)
One more thing: depending on the reason you're targeting the geographic location of visitors, you may experience less than ideal outcomes, even with highly-accurate information: http://xkcd.com/713/
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