wanderingstar.net

Just this year Y100 disappeared into the radio netherworld. Today 94 WYSP made that same journey, never to return.

I don’t normally listen to commercial radio these days except in the morning, but when I got in my car to go home for lunch, 93.3 WMMR was on and Pierre Robert was talking with two other station employees about the demise of WYSP. I was stunned. As it turns out, WYSP will be changing to a talk format (which they practically were anyway).

I don’t know what the other radio markets are like, but more and more Philly seems like a cauldron bubbling over. I just find it incredible that in a market as big as Philly, there is only one alternative/modern rock station left. That’s not to say another rock station won’t myseriously pop up someday, but until I see that happen, I’m left to ask … is rock a dying breed?

Obviously the motivating factor for anything commercial is money, so if WYSP is gone that means someone thought they could make more money advertising on a talk station rather than a rock station — or another urban station in the case of Y100. But if that’s true, does that mean others like me have been abandoning commercial rock radio in droves in favor of their iPods? Are we finally seeing the end result of the FCC’s deregulation of media markets (and tacit decision to encourage media monopolies) leaving a sour taste in the mouths of listeners? Has the almighty dollar taken the rock out of the roll?

It’s no secret that many people are disenfranchised by popular music today. Now radio stations are dying because no one wants to listen to what they offer anymore. That means less exposure for artists, and less exposure means less new people will get into rock. Already there are plenty of young people who have no idea who the Beatles are.

I’m just glad Elvis isn’t alive to see this.

For the past week or so, I’ve been working on a new design for Two-Penny Words. Based on the kind of content that’s going on the site, I decided in the design stage to shy away from the generic blog concept and try to fashion more of a magazine style that encouraged reader participation. A large part of the concept is to have comments for a story appear on the front page with the story copy.

Therein lies a problem, however.

WordPress was designed to be a content management system for blogs, which typically have multiple ‘stories’ on the front page at a time. When you stop to think about it, it just doesn’t make sense to have functionality for comments on the front page because of this. Which story would comments apply to? How would you visually try to present comments for five stories on a page? Ten? Beyond having a short list of most recent comments, you don’t.

In my case, however, I’ve configured WP to display one story at most, so front page comments now make sense if I want to have them. I wanted to put them in my sidebar, but the call to the sidebar is outside of the WP Loop, so the variables pertaining to the post were out of scope. At this point, I tried with some success to re-invent the wheel by creating a second WP Loop and refashioning the comments-popup.php in the sidebar.php code, but I was having a strange problem where even though the $comments array was being assigned, the normal WP functions for dealing with comments were coming up empty for $comment after the foreach ($comments as $comment).

Google didn’t yield any insight into the problem, so after a bit of poking around in the /wp-includes directory I’m writing up what I found here in case anybody else is trying to do this, too.

Eventually I found my way to the comment-functions.php file, and right there near the top I found the problem as well as a solution for keeping my sidebar.php file nice and clean. In the comments_template() function, there is an if condition that tests for what kind of page the function is being called from, and it didn’t include a test for is_home(). Adding that solved the problem handily.

I also noticed the function declaration:
function comments_template( $file = '/comments.php' )
Apparently you can supply your own template file as a string to comments_template(), so I copied and pasted the contents of comments.php into comments-home.php and placed a call to comments_template(’/comments-home.php’) in my sidebar.php file, removing all the cruft I hacked in there (which probably would have worked now with the is_home() check in comment-functions.php).

Nice and neat. Plus, now I can easily customize comments-home.php for display on the front page separately from comments.php on the single.php pages.

Just don’t forget to reapply the is_home() customization to comment-functions.php when you upgrade your WP installation.

Looks like venerable search mascot Jeeves is getting the pink slip. AskJeeves has been going through some rough times lately, having been bought and sold a couple times, I think. At least once, anyway. In marketspeak, this latest development is what we call brand dilution.

Poor Jeeves. Henceforth, Ask Jeeves will now be referred to as Axe Jeeves, a la The Inquirer.

A couple years ago I was cleaning the mountain of stuff piled on my desk at home when I happened to come across my old drivers licenses. At the time, there were only three licenses to consider, but now there’s a fourth.

All I can say is Wow.

Who is that fresh-faced stranger from 1994? I’m not sure I really know anymore.

Some things of note: Notice the much thinner face in 1994. I may actually have been a decent looking guy in 1997 without those awful glasses. Of course, I had those same specs in 1994, too. Notice also the long hair in 1997 which was chopped off that October. Also, notice the pendant cord in 1994 and 1997, from an obsidian pendant I used to wear all the time that I picked up on a high school history club trip in Salem, MA in April 1994. I’m not sure if I was still wearing it in 2001 or not, though I do still have it. The new picture is hard to make out very well, but it’s the first picture I’m wearing a collared shirt for, apparently. I also seem to favor black and red.

Maybe it’s time to go back to a longer hair style. Perhaps something a bit less computer geek and more rock-star.

I’ve tried a few new things lately — including a lemon mousse/custard dessert — but I’ve found myself using one particular method quite frequently because a) it’s easy and b) the results have been very good. I’m talking about pouch cooking, which I learned by watching Good Eats episode The Pouch Principle.

The best thing about this episode is that Alton Brown came up with a formula for pouch cooking that makes it very easy to come up with many different gustatory creations by simply combining ingredients from the different categories in the formula. Using a little imagination, it’s easy to come up with additional ingredients. For meats I’ve used the standard mahi mahi, tuna steak, and chicken so far. For liquid I tried some good non-forumla ingredients including some leftover basil vinaigrette dressing on chicken, and tonight I tried some Trader Joe’s Soyaki sauce (which was also used to marinade the chicken overnight) with excellent results. I’ve also bought sun-dried tomato vinaigrette dressing for a future experiment.

Yes, I’ve been eating pretty well lately.