Two Slashes

Perhaps I’ve been watching too many Screen Savers clips on YouTube or I’m too tired to properly add up the consequences of what this might lead to, but I’ve got an idea.  A big one.  But if I’m even going to attempt it, I’m going to need your help.

First, of course, I need to explain the idea.  I’ve looked (albeit not as thoroughly as I probably should), and I don’t think I’ve found any IPTV show or podcast that centers around computer users and their questions.  Sure, shows like my own TechCentric, Hak.5, and even The Screen Savers took the occasional call-ins and e-mails, but ultimately they were airing pre-produced content that they had thought up on their own time.

I’m not as creative or well-funded as either of those latter two enterprises, but at the same time that also gives me the benefit of being able to say whatever I want to say without having to worry about losing sponsors or any of that other business-bureaucratic mumbo-jumbo any corporation or sponsored organization would be subjected to.

If you’ve skipped the previous two paragraphs, here’s the idea in short:  I’d like to start (”experiment with starting” might be a better term) a viewer-oriented vidcast answering a viewer question (or two) per episode.

This is where you come in.  Obviously, I can’t experiment with this without having questions, and in order to have questions I need to let everyone in on what I’m doing (or attempting to do).

Before I go any further, I’m going to try and lay down the following ground rules:

1. I’m not discussing religion. If you don’t get what that means, I’ll boil it down to mean that I’m not comparing X to Y and telling anyone that Y is better than X for reasons theta, beta, and alpha.  In popular usage, this would usually be referring to things like which browser/operating system/Linux distro is the best to use, but considering these are more opinion than technical, I’m not going to even put my toes in the water.
2. Be appropriate. I’m not interested in what porn sites you visited to cause whatever problem you’re having, and I’m sure nobody watching (my prediction is that this doesn’t even reach 3 people) is yearning to hear about what fetishes you have.  Keep it discrete or take it to someone with a privacy policy.
3. I am not your employer’s IT department. If you’re going to ask me questions about your work PC, you probably should be asking the friendly face on the fourth floor, not a kid with a video camera and no free time at school.  Not only will my tips possibly not work for you due to any settings your department has set you up with, but they may not be happy to hear of you tinkering with their carefully-controlled setup.  Which brings me to my next point…
4. Don’t expect episodes (if I decide to continue this experiment) to magically appear every few hours or days. As a college student, I’m already swamped in work, and add to that the content development for TechCentric, my fledgling attempt at a social life, and all the little other odds and ends I have in my daily routine, and you’ll notice that the free time left after all of the above (in which I would need to film, edit, and upload episodes) is actually negative.
5. I am not responsible if my tips result in more harm than good. I’m going to say what works for me (and should, theoretically, work for you).  However, I cannot be responsible for human error or the inevitable stupidity.  (And actually, if you toss me an e-mail full of blame, I might use it to publicly humiliate you.  Alright, maybe I wouldn’t…but you don’t know if I would make an exception… )
6. I have no budget. If your question is about something that requires me to pay $3,000 for product T, you’ll disturb fragile college budget U and cause me to fail to make my insurance payments V.  If the cost is somewhere in the ballpark of $10, I might go out and acquire whatever it is you’re asking about, but that will most likely be only if I get a decent viewer base and people decide that donations would be cool.
7. I reserve the right to filter questions. This one’s more to cover my behind than anything else, but I would rather pick questions that I can answer knowledgeably, that I have the resources to answer (i.e. Mac OS questions might be a little more difficult for me seeing as I don’t have a Mac on  hand) and that I feel might benefit a multitude of people.  If your question’s so detailed that the answer’s only going to apply to you, I’m going to skip it.  If I don’t pick you, I’m sorry.

For now, I have to figure out a distribution medium (either post videos to YouTube/Vimeo/insert-video-sharing-service-here, or go the full and involved way and put up a site with RSS feeds).  The first video or two will probably be posted here, however.  If you’d like to express your opinion or suggest something I’m overlooking on the matter, e-mail me.  I’ll also need a name (sorry, but I won’t be using Two Slashes for it no matter how many votes I get) and some cool graphics (i.e. logo for whatever name I end up with, lower thirds, and the like - I’m looking for at least some professionalism here).

For anyone worried about what’s happening with TechCentric, this is officially unrelated to and detached from TechCentric and I’m not looking to detract at all from the TC base we have going.  In fact, I hold TechCentric at a higher priority than this simply because it’s been the TechCentric crew’s ongoing pet project for the past several years in all of its forms.

Of course, I think that leaves me with one last loose end.  For now, go ahead and e-mail questions to the G-Mail account listed on the Contact page, but there’s a special requirement:  subject lines must start with “[question]” (exactly as written, but without the quotes).  This is more so I can set up a filter to set them aside in their own special pile, but it also means that the person asking the question isn’t as brain-dead as some of the people I’ve talked to in my life.  (Yes, I’d prefer if you had a head.)

I think that just about sums it up.  Let’s break the bottle and see where this goes.

And a special thanks to Calais for suggesting that the ideal tag for this post was “insurance payment.”  I kept it simply out of humor.

Even with the Olympics having come to a close about a week ago, the only name people seem to have stuck in their heads at the moment is Michael Phelps, the Olympian swimmer who walked away with eight gold medals and set numerous world records in his run for those medals.

While Phelps was standing on a podium getting the reward for his efforts, a different kind of Olympic-style test of strength has been brewing here in the United States, a contest with plenty of records lining up to be broken of its own accord.  (And I really need to quit doing *#$&ty post introductions like this one.)

I don’t typically pay attention to politics; I don’t really care who’s President, Senator, Governor, or any one of the tens of other elected positions as long as there isn’t a significant impact to my life.  To me, one candidate is as good as another, especially if things work transparently and their actions (and misactions) don’t change the way I go about my daily business, and I have a reasonable expectation that whoever ends up elected is at least as well-qualified as I am for the office they’ve been elected into.

Take Bush for example; everyone (alright, myself included) has bashed him time and time again for the state of affairs in the Middle East.  I have no idea whether I would pretend nothing was happening or send in the troops, launch a few missiles, and have the entire Armed Forces deployed before lunch, and it’s my inability to make a knowledgeable and fair decision that makes him a better candidate for that office than I am.  If it weren’t for the fact that the media constantly bombards you with claims of his failure as a leader of this country (or the war stuff), he might never have even been seen.

This election year has things playing out a little differently than normal, however.  We have an African-American running for President (having nearly squeezed a nomination over the wife of a previous - and notorious - office-holder), and a female vice-presidential candidate, neither of which (to my knowledge) has ever won their respective seats in government.  (I don’t see any ladies on this list, do you?)

What this sounds like to me is not a vote merely for the sake of “exercising our right as Americans” but a popularity contest in the sense of which candidate you’d rather see being awarded a Guiness World Record and which “invisible barrier” will be broken for future elections, if they all haven’t already been shattered by the current candidates.

I would have taken the time here to analyze the scenarios of what would happen should a woman become President (either by vote or incapacitation), but the concepts of a “Presidentess” or the “First Gentleman” are too humorous for me to discuss seriously.

Don’t take me wrong when I mention that, once again, I don’t have enough information to say that either Obama or McCain is superior to the other, but someone has to have noticed that this is bigger than just a four-year vacation at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, it’s a chance for the prospective record-breakers to get more material for those bestselling autobiographies that are due to be released any day now (and will no doubt become required reading for at least one high school class due to their lessons in perseverance, dedication, or some other related but meaningless literary tripe).

Unless something motivates me to get off my sorry backside and register to vote (and then actually convince me to go to the polls on Election Day), I’m not going to have any more involvement in this election than retaining my right to the occasional rant.  That aside, it’s up to (the registered voters of) America to choose which recordmaker President/Vice-President they want to take office.

And by the way, someone can remove the parentheses from my keyboard now.  I won’t be needing them for a while.