Mr. Heaton,

Today, your company dumped a good customer without warning or just cause.  Out of the blue today, you made the decision to unplug all of Scott Johnson’s Frogpants network of podcasts, blogs and social media.  It is difficult to estimate how many potential customers you have given error to today, but in iTunes alone, you have refused service to possibly 100,000+ people.  Those people need to know who is suddenly preventing them from accessing what they’re looking for.

I’m sure I don’t have to tell you – since it’s your job to know such things – but you have just dumped:

• An entire network of podcasts and blogs, comprising a dozen very successful podcasters who have disparate audiences of thousands and in some cases tens of thousands of listeners.
• A massive web of highly effective social media mavens, most of whom have thousands of followers in Twitter.
• Media that has an unusually high international reach, with well above-average numbers of listeners outside of the United States.
• One of the top 100 podcasts in the world, according to listeners in iTunes, The Instance.

A cursory glance at your own Twitter feed makes it clear that you don’t understand or value the power and utility of social media.  Today’s bit of bad business by you was clearly the result of cold, hard calculation: you made an agreement with Scott Johnson that appears to be less profitable than breaking the agreement.  So much for almost every claim on your website “guaranteeing” “unlimited” “reliable” hosting that is “better” and “professional”.  The statement on your site, “we specialize in customer service” can now be considered laughable.

Of course, everyone involved with the Frogpants network will be henceforth opposed to patronizing your apparently fly-by-night operation.  The Internet meme you might become aware of is this: Get out of the blue.

I encourage any and all customers of Bluehost.com to get out of the blue, before Bluehost.com suddenly leaves all of your content un-hosted.  Get out of the blue as soon as it is feasible for you to stop paying a company that cannot be trusted with your blogs, forums, videos, podcasts and pictures.  I am not suggesting that any customer stop payment if you owe Bluehost.com money.  Don’t be like them, and break an established agreement.  Just take the first, honest opportunity to get out of the blue and take your content to another host.

Mr. Heaton, I sincerely hope that this letter finds you well, and that you take the opportunity to comment below if you have anything to say here.  Internet 2.0 is not a bum’s rush. Rather, it is an open and ever-expanding platform upon which those who speak have every opportunity to guide discourse, and those who remain silent increase the value of nothing.

Those who attempt to do any silencing will find such an attempt to be utterly impotent.

Thank you.

Of course, some films released in the first half of each year are so incredibly good that they capture an audience and keep it captured for long enough to compete with those that are freshly delivered in December.  This is particularly true for films that excel in categories like music, effects and animation.  Nonetheless, studios like Pixar have to base their decisions to release great films in June on a lot of market study.  They’re giving up awards and a ton of free advertising by doing so.

I think there is value in looking at the wasteland that is the first half of a year in film, and making a note of what was great during that time.  For example, at the time of this writing, Kick-Ass has an incredible 8.1 weighted average rating over at IMDB.  While that rating will certainly fall a bit once it is released on DVD, I’ll bet there weren’t 50,000 people in the world who knew that Kick-Ass existed for more than a month before it was released, and this says to me that the film actually is quite good.  It’s reputation is built on results, rather than hype.

There was a lot of disappointment at the movies in the first half of 2010.  Alice In Wonderland was a rare Tim Burton dud, Clash Of The Titans positively stunk, and someone paid Uwe Boll to release a third Bloodrayne movie.  Someone should really put a stop to that guy.  I realize that I’m not among the first billion people to say that.  I often wonder if he watches great films and considers emulating them.  I know of one that everyone should see.

The best film of the first half of 2010 is How To Train Your Dragon.

What a masterpiece!  From the spot-on perfect voice performances by Jay Baruchel, Gerard Butler and Craig Ferguson, to the simple and elegant Dreamworks animation, to the pitch-perfect script, How To Train Your Dragon is a joy to behold.  I’ve allowed the film to envelop me three times now, and I doubt I’ll get tired of it any time soon.  I knew I was hooked in the first minute:

This is Berk. It’s twelve days north of Hopeless and a few degrees south of Freezing to Death. It’s located solidly on the Meridian of Misery. My village.

In a word? Sturdy, and it’s been here for seven generations, but every single building is new. We have fishing, hunting, and a charming view of the sunset. The only problems are the pests. You see, most places have mice or mosquitoes. We have…

Dragons have long been confined in animated films to the stuff of cliche.  If you’ve seen one, you’ve seen them all.  Not this time, though.  The dragons in How To Train Your Dragon don’t conform to any particular shape or size or manner that you’re used to, and it works.  By the same token very little in this film conforms as expected.  The screenplay doesn’t follow the book on which it is based at all.  The characters are called Vikings and look a bit Viking-esque, but don’t sound much like you’d expect Vikings to sound.  They sound more like characters from Torchwood.  The music in this film is way, way beyond your expectation.  Stratospherically good music.  Let me be perfectly clear.

The John Powell music from How To Train Your Dragon will win the Academy Award for best original score at the Oscars 8 months from now.  At a time when composers like Michael Giacchino and Alexandre Desplat have cemented themselves as the newer heavy hitters in the film scoring business, John Powell just did the equivalent of stepping up to the plate and crushing a first pitch into the center field bleachers.  He scored a lob kick over the keeper’s head from midfield.  He got the one-punch knockout in the first round.  I’ll stop with the sports metaphors.

I couldn’t wait to buy the score for this film.  I made that decision in the first five minutes of the movie.  It’s that good.

I hope, if you have not yet seen How To Train Your Dragon, and it is still playing in a theater nearby, that you go do so immediately.  If that is not possible, I hope that you pick it up on blu-ray when it eventually arrives (and at this point, Dreamworks is so utterly surprised at the reception and box office for the film that they have not yet announced a release date for the video).  Furthermore, I hope that when you do see it on blu-ray, you realize that it is even a better film than the version you’re seeing.  It was epic on the big screen.

It was a beautiful day, crisp and cool and sunny.  As we set out, it was just the two of us and a couple of dogs.

At 62-years-old, having only had me stay at his house once before that, Micheal didn’t really know me. We’d previously spent perhaps 20 hours together in the same place.  We chatted a bit, but largely followed the dogs.  I let Sooty off of his leash, and he ran back and forth from one spot of underbrush to another, sniffing so loudly that he sounded like a little steam engine:

So we were walking along, and I got a bit quiet, and he asked me how my previous few months had been. I said,

Well, you know, my father passed away a bit suddenly in August, and everything just seems… different… since then.

Michael was visibly moved.  He put his arm around my shoulders, and thought about what I’d said for a little while, and then said something that I recall perfectly:

I’m really sorry.  You know, time carries on, and you’ve been a man long enough to wonder what that means.  To be a man.  I think you’re finally finding out.  No man truly knows until he loses his own father.  And you’re going to be the dad now.

I nodded, and Michael then said,

We never really lose anyone, you know.

I know.  I’m reminded of that every day, since we named the baby Will.  Every time I say his name, I think of my father:

But I’ve not really thought about my own father in relation to Father’s Day.  Or – I’ve thought about him, but I didn’t realize I was doing so.  I’ve thought about this, my first Father’s Day as an actual father myself, as a milestone whereby I mark what it is I’m accomplishing for my child.  My own dad still has an impact in all of that, but it’s not easy to perceive.  He wasn’t one to celebrate individuals much.  I don’t remember a Father’s Day as ever being much more than a requirement to call him, send him a card and a gift, and maybe visit for the weekend if I could.  If I did visit, he would only have one goal – to go out to eat.  That is it.  A meal at some place where he could get oysters on the half shell and a bit of fresh ceviche.

I find myself 3000 miles from my beautiful wife and son on this, my first Father’s Day, thinking about what Wilton Travis Jordan would make of this place.  I’m in one of the most beautiful places in the world, but I don’t think he would have been as interested in it as I am.  I really want to stay here, and work here, and bring my little family here – for good.  I imagine he would have just told me to hurry up and meet those goals.

And he would have said that he’d like to see me some time.

So we went to the hospital and were taken into the nursery where there was only one baby in an incubator, and he had his name tag prominently displaying that his parents had decided to name him Levi.

The nurse in charge left us alone in the nursery for a few minutes, and suggested Samantha feed Will in there, since there was another woman in the breastfeeding room next door.  The other woman wasn’t breastfeeding, mind you, she was just relaxing on a sofa.  We left her to her privacy, and Samantha fed Will while I examined Levi in his little baby bubble.

According to his chart, Levi’s situation had improved quite a bit since the day before.  They had stopped supplementing him with oxygen, and his heart rate had improved consistently.  He wasn’t jaundiced any more. His bowel movements were regular. Samantha had no idea what I was doing, so she asked me from across the room to tell her what his name was, and I said,

“It looks like his parents are naming him after a genocidal maniac who took revenge on a prince for sleeping with his sister by tricking every man in the prince’s city to mutilate their own genitals before he killed all of them and then stole their women, children and livestock.”

I really had no idea why his parents were naming him Levi.  I described the Genesis account quite accurately, but the parents of this baby could have had no idea whatsoever, and heard the first name of Sarah Palin’s daughter’s baby-daddy and just generally liked it.  It might have been a family name, and they might have been oblivious to the origin of the name.  This is the reason we didn’t tell anyone in the world what we were going to name our child until he was born.  We didn’t want to hear what other people thought of the name, and people tend to stop telling you their opinion of the name you chose after your baby is born.

The nurse came in and let us know that the breastfeeding room next door had been vacated, so we moved to it.  Over the next half-hour, we slowly realized that when you’re sitting in there, as Levi’s mother had been, you can perfectly hear everything said in the nursery.

Anyhow, we had a cool snap the other day and I got a craving for real homemade Texas red chili, and I noticed that we’ve not yet saved my recipe. The reason for that is pretty much that I don’t work from a recipe when I make chili. I really should, but the upside of not measuring or timing when it comes to chili, is that there is an element of surprise when things come out well.

A. This is a beef chili. It doesn’t have beans. If you want to make a bean soup, pick some beans you like and have at it. This is chili, so I start with several pounds of lean ground beef. In this example, I browned just over 4 pounds (2 kg) of 90% lean beef in a cast iron skillet, drained it and dumped it into a large slow-cooker.

B. Good chili is a tomato soup of sorts. I don’t think it makes much of a difference to use canned tomatoes vs. fresh tomatoes, but know that if you enter into the faith that fresh tomatoes are best, you’re going to be cutting up a lot of tomatoes. In this example, I used about twice (by weight) as much tomato as meat. That’s three large cans of diced tomatoes. Get the diced tomatoes. The whole ones make no sense (since you would have to cut them up), and tomato sauce just doesn’t work out the same. If you use enough canned, diced tomatoes, you’ll get enough tomato water to constitute all the broth you need.

C. Several tablespoons of chili powder (I used 6-10 and wasn’t really counting), a tablespoon of cumin, a heaping teaspoon of basil, several cloves of garlic, and a couple of squares of unsweetened bakers chocolate constituted the flavor-makers.

D. Believe it or not, it is possible to put too much onion in this chili. For this batch – which turned out really well if I do say so myself – I added one large red onion as you can see here:

E. Salt. I’ve always felt like the phrase “salt to taste” is a cop out, so here I’ll actually be specific. I added exactly one teaspoon of salt to the pot early on. A lot of chili that you might encounter at a chili cook-off in Texas actually has five times as much salt. It is certainly possible to leave the added salt right out, if you want to. I see my chili as one of the three things in my life that I actually add salt to, with the other two being potatoes and corn.

F. You’ve got to simmer this thing with a lid on for a long time. I don’t think it really blends until the crock pot has been working on it for at least four hours. Assuming that you’re not loosing much steam, you can cook this chili in a crock pot indefinitely, and every couple of hours it tastes a bit different. It is very important to stir the chili every 20-30 minutes while it’s cooking.

Options. I’ve had good results with all of the following: adding one can of beer to the mix at the start, leaving out the chocolate, adding a half-cup or so of brown sugar, adding one or two chopped fresh jalapeños to bring up the spice factor (red chili powder is pretty tame), using smoked cumin, using leaner or fattier beef, and topping the served chili with fresh diced onion and/or fresh shredded cheddar cheese.

Enjoy!

Indeed, that is no oxymoron!  The web is simply teeming with really excellent freeware, if only you put a little time and effort into discovering it.  What follows are my favorite examples of top notch freeware, categorized:

May as well start with Image viewing and editing -

• IrfanView
• Paint.net

Sure it’s not a very good name for an application.  The name gives you a feeling that you’ll be editing photos in your browser or something, but Paint.net is a standalone application just like any other, and it has the power and ease to be a complete Photoshop replacement for anyone who can’t afford Photoshop.

Music –

• Winamp
• iTunes

The before and after applications for your pre- and post-iPod music life.  If you’re not yet attached to an iPod, Winamp is a simply killer app that manages to be incredibly good looking in addition to free.

Audio recording and editing -

• Audacity
• Wavepad
  

Browsers superior to Internet Explorer -

• Firefox
• Chrome

Don’t really need any explanation here.  It’s a question of slightly differing tastes.

Document authoring -

• OpenOffice
• Notepad++

There is really no need to ever pay for MS Office for personal use when OpenOffice does it all.  Of course, if you do any text editing whatsoever you know that Notepad++ is the only way to fly.

File management via FTP -

• Filezilla

I can’t name an FTP client app that is superior to Filezilla, and that includes those that cost a lot of money.

I could go on.  I might go on, actually.

It was a world of fun:

Much love and thanks and hugs and fistjabbery to Tom Merritt and Jason Howell, two of the best guys in the business.

If there is any large category of iTunes offerings that are the most underrepresented by the iTunes Essentials system, it’s comedy.  Currently, I can easily locate exactly two iTunes essentials general comedy lists among the thousands of pro lists.  Contrast that with the mountain of comedy available on iTunes, and there is a gap to fill.

But rather than just point you at the best comedy tracks you can buy, I’d like to save you some money.  I’ve been a connoisseur of stand-up comedy for 25 years now, and have collected and listened-to hundreds of comedy albums.  There’s a difficult issue with buying comedy in iTunes: Most albums are divided up into 15 tracks or more.  At the usual price of $0.99 per track in iTunes, buying a couple of hours of comedy could be prohibitively expensive.  In some per-track collections, you’d run up a tab of over $50/hour to listen to your favorite comedians tell jokes.

But there is an obvious alternative, and that is to buy comedy in iTunes by the whole album.  To take the number one Essentials example below, purchasing all of Feelin’ Kinda Patton by the track would cost you a total of $27.72.  If you only really wanted to own half of the tracks on that album, it would run you $13.86.  But here’s the deal: You can buy the whole album right now for $7.99.

If you love comedy, purchasing whole albums in iTunes is the way to go.  But there are not yet any whole-album-save-you-money iTunes Essentials lists in the store.  I can’t even see a way to create a user-list that points at whole albums, rather than single tracks.

So let’s get on with the best comedy albums in iTunes, for the money:

The Basics

1. Feelin’ Kinda Patton by Patton Oswalt – At $7.99 for 28 tracks (runtime of 1.1 hour), Oswalt’s original brain freeze can’t be beat.
2. Retaliation by Dane Cook – Some people hate Dane for reasons I don’t grasp, but 29 tracks that deliver an incredible 1.7 hour runtime album – that went double platinum, by the way – for $13.99 is pretty good.
3. Monty Python Sings by Eric Idle and Monty Python – Six of their best songs are under a minute each, and all 25 tracks here are classic for $10.99.
4. Himself by Bill Cosby – Yes it’s only 7 tracks, only 46 minutes, but this is one of the greatest comedy albums ever, for only $6.63.
5. Holidays On Ice by David Sedaris – Who said comedy comes in stand-up clubs only?  Sedaris’ funniest book runs 4.3 hours long, for $16.95.
6. It’s Not Funny by David Cross – In my opinion, his best album.  For $7.99.
7. Strategic Grill Locations by Mitch Hedburg – The first stream of near-consciousness album from the late genius.  His next album is perhaps funnier, but any comedy lover wants more than 10 of these 21 tracks, so $9.99 is a good deal.

Next Steps

1. Shiny Happy Jihad by Joe Rogan – 1.1 hours of “I’m dying laughing” stuff from the man for $9.99.
2. Cheese And Crackers by Chris Rock – It’s a 19-track greatest hits package from one of the most successful standups of all time, for $9.99.
3. Incredibad by The Lonely Island – Saturday Night Live’s Digital Shorts-maker Andy Samburg’s greatest hits (so far) runs only 42 minutes, but is 19 tracks for only $7.99
4. A Night At The Met by Robin Williams – The only Williams comedy in the iTunes store, recorded at the peak of his work, is 16 tracks and 53 minutes for $9.99.
5. The Carnegie Hall Performance by Lewis Black – $9.99 gets you 1.4 hours of rants from the angriest sane man around.
6. Circle by Eddie Izzard – Because some tracks are up-priced, all 21 cost a total of $21.69 individually.  Get the whole album for $9.99.

Deep Cuts

1. Live At The DC Improv 4-5-08 by Eddie Gossling – A full set of the wildly underrated Gossling only puts you back $5.99.
2. It’s Bad For Ya by George Carlin – His last album, released posthumously, is $9.99 for 28 tracks that would cost you $27.72 individually.
3. You Can Win! by Maria Bamford – 21 tracks for $9.99. Every single one of them funny.
4. Greatest Comedy Hits by Eddie Murphy – If you’d buy 10 or more tracks of his individually, just get his 16 best  (plus a couple of others) for $9.99.
5. Comedy Central Presents: Stand Up – Each of these 21-minute tracks costs $1.99.  It’s cableTV-clean stuff you can pick and choose from.
6. 222 Live & Uncut by Patton Oswalt – Not an album, but two hour-long tracks for $0.99 each.  For sheer value, the best in iTunes.

Note: Comedy albums by the following artists are not available for purchase in iTunes: Richard Pryor, Richard Jeni, Roseanne Barr, Jim Norton or Vaughn Meader’s First Family (the highest selling comedy album of all time).

P.S. I love Katt Williams, but this is the worst value in all of comedy.  Cut that thing down by 80% at least!