thejeffparsonsproject.com
Thursday, August 14th, 2008
by Jeff
Wow what a day this turned out to be. 24 hours after we did what seemed like a typical interview with Senator Susan Collins on The Q Morning show, I never would have imagined it would be revisited. I guess that’s what you get when you decide to have a webcam in the studio and a United States Senator says something that is viewed as controversial.
I started running a live webcam using ustream.tv earlier this year. I think Interactivity is vitally important to broadcast media these days, and I was doing my part to provide that.
A nice feature that comes with ustream.tv is the ability to record from the webcam and embed it on a webpage, which is what I did when I posted the video here after the interview. The internet being what it is, things can become viral very quickly, and the next day we got a phone call saying that the video had spread to many political blogs and You Tube. The political blogs of course were mostly democratic, since Senator Collins is republican.
I couldn’t imagine what the fuss was about until I did a Google blog search and found the excitement was over a comment Senator Collins made about John Edwards. It never crossed my mind that people would think this was shocking, inappropriate, uncalled for, or whatever anyone might think about the comment.
I’m not going to lie. I loved this! Finally some attention on my meaningless little blog in the corner of the internet. So I spent the day reading all the posts all over the internet and even posting in the comment section on a few. It’s really been great reading.
The news eventually made it to the mainstream media with The Portland Press Herald calling me for an interview, WCSH requesting a copy of the video, and WGME running the story and linking directly to this blog. My traffic suddenly started to spike in the afternoon, and when I checked where it was coming from, it was wgme.com Very cool.
I’m am relieved though. I’ve been told that Senator Collins will be happy to return to our show in the future. That was my only real worry about all the hub bub. Hey at least it wasn’t like our interview with Barack Obama.
It’ll be an interesting show tomorrow. It’ll be the first time we include ourselves in our newscasts.
In case you’d like to read the reactions to the interview for yourself, I’ve compiled a handy list of all the places I’ve found one. If you have one yourself, let me know.
Making the news must be a family thing today. My dad even got a headline in the Sun Journal. Weird.
Thursday, August 14th, 2008
by Jeff
I never expected this to happen, but when I posted video of our interview with Senator Susan Collins on The Q Morning Show, the Collins haters seemed to muckle right onto my little video to bash her as much as they can. They’re all in an uproar because when talking about the John Edwards adultery scandal the senator said:
Would he go sneaking into a hotel in the middle of the night to see a child who’s not his? I don’t think so.
This is awesome! Well, kinda awesome. I got all excited when we received a call at the station saying the video was making the rounds on the blogosphere. I quickly checked my web stats and found no unusually high traffic, no trackbacks, no Google searches landing them on the Collins post. After a Google blog search, I found that they were linking back to our ustream site for the video. I guess I can hold off on loading thejeffparsonsproject.com up with Google Ad Sense.
As for what Senator Collins said in the video, I can’t believe Collins haters are worked up over that. Is a senator who actually speaks what everyone else is thinking really that bad? Kind of refreshing if you ask me.
Collins haters can bash her all they want, but the truth is she WILL be re-elected, so suck it up and deal. For the record, in case you care, I’m not Republican nor Democrat. .
And to the DB at Daily Kos, who says:
I’m not sure what’s worse: her speculative comments about John Edwards or the masturbatory nature of the on-air talent at the radio station
I’ll have to keep this short because my masturbatory nature doesn’t allow me to type well: STFU.
As I write this, the list of blogs covering this is growing and not ONE only Collins Watch links back to thejeffparsonsproject.com. Bastards. Thanks! At least abc.com mentioned The Q Morning Show. I’m waiting by the phone for them to call. I’ll be here all day.
Here’s a list of a few of the blogs I’ve found:
ABC News
Collins Watch - Others say they had it first, but sorry, I did.
mainepolitics.net – These clowns even went so far as to edit the video and post it to You Tube.
Election Central
politickerme.com
Thursday, February 14th, 2008
by Jeff
So ever since I started thejeffparsonsproject.com, I’ve kept the focus of this blog about everything I enjoy like TV, movies, geek type stuff. Not a ton of personal stuff here. Well that’s about to change as thejeffparsonsproject.com actually becomes a blog about Jeff Parsons. I’m moving a lot of that content that I would blog about previously over to my new site thisawesomeshow.com.
What’s This Awesome Show? It’s the name for a video podcast that a friend of mine and I are about to launch that will be all about those things I used to blog about here. We plan to release show on a bi-weekly basis we’re we inform viewers about things in the news, movies, television, sports and weird things we find on the net. We’ll also have entertaining video segments as we take our cameras out to do weird things in weird places. Why is it called This Awesome Show? When it came down to it, the question was asked, “What do we call this awesome show?” The title was born.
thisawesomeshow.com will also be a site where you can read up on all sorts of things we might be discussing in the show. The most recent posts are the new trailer for Indiana Jones, and a video of the 10th inning of the 1986 World Series re-created on R.B.I. Baseball for the old Nintendo Entertainment System. We’re posting new content daily, so check it out frequently. We’re hoping to have the first episode of This Awesome Show done within a month, and then new episodes every two weeks.
thejeffparsonsproject.com will still be here, but be more about my rambling and grumbling about what bothers me in life, or something cool my kid did, or an in depth discussion about who is the better host of The Price is Right. So go check out thisawesomeshow.com and leave a comment on stories if you like, so we know you’ve been there. Our goal is at least one regular viewer, and my wife doesn’t count.
Saturday, December 22nd, 2007
by Jeff
Strap yourselves in people, I’m gonna get all geek on you on this one.
The radio station I work for just launched a brand new website with a new designer and host. It’s another one of those turnkey corporate type deals, where everyone has the same template for their site, but the colors and logo are different for each. There’s a lot of things I like about the new site. Website technology moves fast, and our old site wasn’t keeping up.
However there’s one thing about this new hosting service that leaves me scratching my head. We are allocated a grand total of 1GB of server space. That’s right, one. I’ve got a USB thumb drive that holds more then that. The hosting service I use for thejeffparsonsproject.com allows me 300GB, and it’s cheap. For less then $100 a year I get 300GB of storage and 3000GB of bandwidth a month. So let’s do the math on that one. Big corporation with 170+ radio stations each get 1GB of storage space a piece. Guy writing his own little personal blog gets twice the space of 170+ radio stations combined. See how that math doesn’t make much sense.
We get told that this should be plenty of space. Well I’ve been creating podcasts for the morning show for over two years now. In fact I was involved in a conference call with the head of Top 40 programming a few years ago to teach everyone how to do this. Once again, we were ahead of the curve. Each 90 minute podcast is the entire show minus commercials and music. Works out to about a file size of 35-40MB in 64k mono at 44.1mhz. Very reasonable size for 90 minutes of audio in this day of high speed internet access, but you don’t need a calculator to figure out that I’ll burn through our entire storage space in less then a month with podcasts alone.
So to deal with this insane shortage of space, I’ve begun hosting the podcasts here on thejeffparsonsproject.com. I shouldn’t have to, but I’ve got an obligation to our podcast listeners. It’s really cool to get emails from people listening to our show on their iPod while they ride to work on the T in Boston. That’s a reach never before attainable in radio. Sure, I could have a small archive of only the last few shows, but what podcaster does that?
I don’t know the reasoning behind the lack of space. I’m guessing corporate got a cheap deal with limited bandwidth. Regardless, it doesn’t seem very well thought through. That’s ok though. I’ll just shake my head in disbelief and make it work. It’s what we do in 21st century corporate America.
Tuesday, November 20th, 2007
by Jeff
It’s been over a week since I posted anything, but with good reason I suppose. My son turned a year old this past week, and there was a big-to-do about that of course. Dinner with the in-laws on his actual birthday (the 15th), then his party with family and friends the following Saturday.
If that wasn’t enough to keep me occupied, the iPhone arrived on Wednesday of last week and I’ve hardly put it down since. It truly is everything I had hoped for, that is after some troubleshooting to get it to behave exactly the way I wanted it to. The "wow" factor on this is simply amazing. I’ll post a full review of the iPhone later this week. I know there are plenty out there, but one more opinion certainly won’t upset the apple cart.
Wednesday, October 31st, 2007
by Jeff
You probably noticed I changed the site today. I switched over to a wordpress site hosted on my own server, even after I said such good things about spaces on Windows Live. Come to find out Microsoft being Microsoft demands you get a silly Live ID in order to interact at all, so eff ‘em. I’m still working on the look here, and it may change several times, but I’ll give this a try instead of spaces. I might even post a bit more often now that I can know for sure someone might be reading this.
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