God, I’m scared. Seriously, I’ve had two surgeries in my life. One went well, one went terrible (let’s just say the doctor refused to believe me when I said I could feel everything he was doing). So… with a 50/50 success rate, I’m a little unnerved. Hopefully, this will be my second good one. I guess it can’t be that bad, they’re gonna put me out. And I have heard really good things about this doctor.

Well, first let me get the picture out of the way (as promised ):

So, as you can see, the big square part is where the rupture is (if you click on the image (or click here if your browser doesn’t support java script)), you’ll notice the part that was highlighted in the smaller pic is noticeably darker then the other spots in my spine. That’s the ruptured disc.

Anyway, what they’re going to do over the hour that I’m out is cut away a bit of the bone in my spine (I’m told I won’t miss it… we’ll see ), and then get at the disc. If I had had a normal ruptured disc, it would have gone to the left or right, and likely been smaller. But NOOOO, I can’t do THAT. That’s to EASY. I had to have a BIG one RIGHT DOWN THE CENTER. So it’s a little harder then normal.

Recovery could be as much as two months, but it may be shorter.

Anyway, I’ll be going in on the 6th of December (normally the wait is a lot longer, but like I said, I don’t mess around when I mess myself up, so they’re trying to get me in ASAP), and getting out of the hospital on the 7th, so not too long there.

So… wish me luck, and thanks for reading!

Tags: Surgery, Narcipost, You-Came-Here-From-MySpace-Didn’t-You?, Testing-Lightbox, Oww-My-Back!, Nobody-Reads-Tags

In our last episode we covered the basics of what makes Web 2.0 so… 2.0ish. In this post we’re going to look at some of the User Generated Video that’s out there, and what your options are as far as hosts.

First and formost, lets look at some of the biggest hits out there. I’m sure you have all heard of the “Chocolate Rain” meme:

You might even have seen this on TV, but I assure you, it all started here on Web 2.0.

There’s been a lot of variations on this theme, my favorite of which stars someone we’re going to touch on later in this post: Chad Vader.

I must admit, I’m pretty partial to Chad.

Of course, there are a number of other viral videos out there, like “Leave Britney Alone!!!“:

Nearly three million views as of this writing on this video alone. Wow. Good job, Mr. Crocker.

Now, remember above where I mentioned one Chad Vader? Well, he actually has his own series: Chad Vader - Day Shift Manager. One of my personal favorite shows, I can’t wait to see more (there are only a few episodes out):

Eh? Pretty sweet, huh? VERY well done, I say. Another good series is a new one, known as ./shutdown:

GREAT SHOW! At least in my opinion. Very super high quality production values, you can get a VERY high quality watchable version on Stage6, a subdivision of the DivX crew. Only a few episodes, but they are GOLDEN.

And of course there are a number of other greats out there, enough to keep some going for a long, long  time. Ask a Ninja, Snowman Hunters, God, Inc (or anything by Francis Stokes for that matter), Mr. Deity, and another personal favorite: Goodnight Burbank

Absolutely amazing.

Now, if you want to get into generating user generated video, the first place I’d go is YouTube. It doesn’t get much more straight forward then that. After you’ve gotten your feet wet you can try some of the others like Veoh, Stage6, Metacafe, or even the venerable Internet Archive (circa 1996).

Stay tuned (via RSS perhaps?) for next time when we delve into the beautiful chaos that is a user generated knowledge base: The Wiki Family.

And now, I bid you adieu with a delightful triplet for the road:

“The Polite War”

“Code Monkey Dance”

“A Love Song from Skullcrusher Mountain”

Tags: Video, Viral, YouTube, Wiki, UGC

Well, I went to visit the good Doctor today as scheduled, and, according to my MRI I have a herniated disc, commonly called a slipped disc. Apparently, it’s so bad that I need surgery pretty soon, so I’m slated to meet the surgeon on Monday, and maybe he can get me in within the month, which would be great, as my health insurance cycles by the calender year, and if I do it quick, I can get it for close to free (because I’ve already paid for the super expensive MRI).

Anyway, I’ll know more on Monday, and I’ve got the Doctor emailing me a pic of my MRI scan, so I’ll post that up if/when I get it.

And don’t forget the next part of my Web 2.0 series: User Generated Video, coming soon!

Tags: Narcipost, Health, Spine, Promo

Ah… good ol’ Web 2.0. We’ve heard about it for a while (starting with the first O’Reilly Media Web 2.0 conference in 2004), but really, what is it?

Web 2.0 is not so much an advancement of technology (in fact, many of the fundamental technologies are fairly old - recognizable components of AJAX (Asynchronous Javascript And XML) are over a decade old), but more a collection of Memes. I suppose, to put it simply, you could view Web 1.0 as mostly a “Read Only” Web (you surf around to other peoples pages and view them, or other people come to yours and view it), where as Web 2.0 is more of a “Read/Write” Web. A participatory culture, if you will where a person will go to someones site and add content to it (be it in the form of comments, videos, news submissions, or nearly anything else). Think Geocities vs. Blogger. There are a number of sites that epitomize this “Read/Write” web, and over the next few posts we’re going to take a look at some examples across different media formats.

First, let’s look at so called “Social News” sites. There are many out there, but the two biggest that I’m gonna focus on are Slashdot.org and Digg.com. They are similar, but different in some very important ways. Slashdot has been around for a while and they seem to have (in this writers opinion) a more erudite crowd (Caveat Emptor: there are trolls on both site in fair quantity). Digg is a younger site, and seems to have slightly younger users (not a knock either way, though). Both sites provide a stream of user submitted news (Digg is a bit more broad in terms of content, with Slashdot more focused on tech topics), both sites allow users to comment on each news article. They both offer social networking features (such as friends lists, and RSS feeds of just about everything). The major difference between the two is that Digg is quite democratic in how it decides which stories get to the front page, where as Slashdot stories are promoted via a number of editors. You’ll tend to find (again, in this writers opinion) that Slashdot tends to have a better “Signal to Noise Ratio“, where as Digg will often catch stories that would just slip through the cracks. However, there IS quite a bit of overlap between the two. There used to be a site that kept track of the various submissions and duplicates, but I won’t link to it because it’s since become a link farm.

Stay tuned next time when we delve into user created Video - all the world’s a stage, and all of us are the star!

-Note: I’m currently laid up with Back problems (we’ll find out for sure what’s going on Wednesday when I go see the results of my MRI), so I should be able to put aside a little more time to get articles up. Thanks for reading!

Tags: Web2.0, Digg, Slashdot, Social News, Narcipost, History

Yup. They are SUPER Sweet. I was a ninja for Halloween. Well, at least, for the party I went to on Saturday. I didn’t have time to dress up on the day itself.

However, while I was not able to take pics, this is likely what I looked like. Assuming I was able to be seen at all (as I was an ninja after all):

But yeah, Ninjas are sweet. And they have swords.

Also, this is a good time to test out how well my ‘blog handles YouTube videos.

Tags: Ninjas, Halloween, YouTube