Adam's Blog

Welcome to version 11 of my weblog. It's March 2025. The last post on this blog was 9 years ago, in February 2016. For years, I wrote PHP software and taught myself using this blog. Each version was a new piece of software: tubeCode, Small Axe, Flip, Flip Lite, &c. Not just that - the URL changed too. It started with f​irsttube.com in the year 2000, which became blog.adamscheinberg.com and finally sethadam1.com. Version after version was an improved PHP engine, until version 10, where I finally surrendered. I decided it wasn't worth all the work and in August 2008, I imported the history into Wordpress. This site ran Wordpress for nearly 17 years. But the world has changed. First of all, I'm not a huge fan of Wordpress for my personal site anymore. It's still a great CMS, but I'm not a fan, personally, of the guy running things. Combine that with the fact that maintaining and securing Wordpress requires some effort and it started to weigh on me: it's not an actively used blog, could I update it without much effort? The AI toolchain is so incredibly helpful now that rewriting this "blog" only took a few hours. I...

It's been a long time since I've written, mostly because I've been involved in other things, Twitter and Facebook are suitable for expressing my thoughts, and, frankly, yet another web property to update is less appetizing than it used to be. But perhaps one day, I'll write here again. Until then: fear not, I'm still out floating around the intertubes.

TV heavyweight LOST premiered just over 10 years ago. To this day, it’s still recognized as one of the most powerful shows to grace TV networks, perhaps ever. Sadly, LOST is more recently known not for its intense storytelling and compelling mythology, but rather for its divisive final episodes. People who stuck with it from the beginning fall firmly into one of two camps: the finale-lovers or the finale-haters.

It's been a year since my last blog post. A year. A lot has happened in that year, my life is very different than it was as I wrote "My Thoughts on Phish as 2011 Closes." I'm a different person, and the things that make me happy have changed significantly. But here, as 2012 closes, I'm finding myself writing something I simply never expected to write. See, I didn't order the Phish MSG webcasts. As I've been slaving over the Phish.net forum, crumbling due to the site's size and several less-than-optimal code routines, I've been thinking something I've just not had the guts to say out loud: I just don't care that much about Phish anymore. I looked over the setlists for the last three nights, and I'm sorry to say, they just aren't that interesting to me anymore. They look totally tired, many of the songs being a total snoozefest for me these days. Friday night included this opening combo: Stealing Time, Moma, Funky Bitch. I would've slit my wrists if I went to NY and got that threesome. The set was rescued, song wise, by Stash, Nellie Kane, and what I'm told is a fantastic Wolfman's, the problem is, I just don't even care enough to check it out. I hope I get the interest to check out the Tweezer that everyone says is "one of the best of 3.0," but the fact is, I'm beginning to realize that I just don't like 3.0 Phish that much.

The following ramble goes on for far too long. It's been building inside me all week. I'm sorry to burden you to even read it. You don't have to. But I'd love to hear if any of you have the same inner conflict I do.

I'm still alive. And one day, I may post something again.

One of the most popular posts on my blog - and by far the most commented, is "The Decemberists’ “The Hazards of Love”: An Interpretation." Even though it was written and published in March of 2009, it continues to receive comments and pageviews. This week, I was listening to the album again and I spotted something I'd never realized before. I found a theme I'd previously missed. The story "The Hazards of Love" is a complete saga with well rounded characters with clear motivation. It exists in two acts. There are several layers of potential analysis, from character depth to allusion. "The Hazards of Love" itself is the title of four distinct un-thematically related songs on the disc. It bothered me only for a moment that Colin and company would reuse the song title so often for no clear purpose, but alas, this weekend, I finally found the connection. The four songs entitled "The Hazards of Love" all describe a different "hazard" of love! The first song, "The Hazards of Love 1 (The Prettiest Whistles Won’t Wrestle the Thistles Undone)" represents lust. It's Lust that drive William and Margaret together, that keeps her riding out past Offa's Wall to meet...

Top 10 Tech Failures of 2010

1. Something from Apple that everyone loves
2. Something else from Apple that everyone loves
3. Your favorite cellular telephone
4. Something Facebook did
5. Something Google launched
6. A crappy tablet nobody has ever heard of
7. Microsoft’s latest initiative
8. Desktop Linux
9. Michael Arrington
10. Ping

via Marco.org - Top 10 Tech Failures of 2010.

http://twitter.com/sethadam1/status/3792068929388546

I was assisting someone recently in building an API for their website and it occurred to me that while the current trend is generally using XML/REST/SOAP for APIs, there is quite a bit of benefit to using plain old Javascript and JSON. Most users won't venture into API territory, so if your goal is to make your API accessible - and this goes double if your primary purpose is embedding content in a third party site - it's hard to argue with Javascript. The Phish.net API, for example, is a simple HTTP request to an endpoint that returns JSON. If you provide a callback function name as an argument, and then pre-define that function, it will return the contents wrapped in a function call. In short, if you define a function called "example()" that accepts JSON an array/object as an argument, then by requesting the API with a callback of "example", the response will be returned like so: example(json response); The benefit, of course, is that it allows a user to embed your code easily. If you host your own callback functions, you can very easily walk a user through a data embed. For example, on Phish.net, we offer the...