fire | Croncast - From Cool to Cul De Sac

Season 20 Ep 24: Cousin Kris, Painters Cap, Nothing Is Level

Mon, 16 Jun 2008 15:28:11 -0500

Croncast - 2008-06-16.mp3
Show: #499
Length: 22:52
Size: 15.7mb
Format: mp3

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Keep the Archive Alive goes on
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It is all about the Interwaves
The photo montage of the father's day trip are up
Look in the blog for the story
Soften up the crow's feet
Geez, that bag, what is she 33?
I don't know if Rock of Love is comparative to competitive improv dinner theater
The afternoon jamboree
Much like licking a toilet
"Cousin Kris!"
The first Casey's we stop at
Hey, I know you
No, I didn't know her name instantly
Hoping for it fire into my brain
Turns out to be cousin X
She's of the normal branch
But the odds of that
Not that great
Running into someone buying smokes
I just don't want to get there
I know, Betsy, you were driving 45 in a 75
Never thought we would make it
Creeping ever closer that sucking vortex where you grew up
It is an area of decay
Dilapidated nothingness
If you were a pizza deliver guy you would deliver to houses with siding
The rest are wrapped in Tyvek
It looks like depression
We tried the town route
Elliot is asking why it is abandoned
Yelling why doesn't it look like home
Two taglines
"For Rent"
"Rent to Own"
You wouldn't let me take the best photo
It was the award winning shot
It was beautiful
The transient neighbor
In a wife beater, smoking a cigarrete, talking on his phone in a NASCAR painters cap
And . . . And . . . his white wolf dog on the steps
Nothing is level there
I fell down 77 times
Growing oriental poppies
Couldn't believe it
Save me from this
And you walked away
Everyone walked away to leave me there
The scary compound
The old ass car wasn't as bad
Always had the perspective that there was someplace else I needed to be

Tags: white wolf chevrolet graveyard interwaves abandoned small town

Season 20 Ep 20: Photos, Old Shuffling Posse, Professional Tic

Fri, 06 Jun 2008 12:25:15 -0500

Croncast - 2008-06-06.mp3
Show: #495
Length: 30:25
Size: 20.9 mb
Format: mp3

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Oh, the 2008
Comments on the photos
I'm a what?
You're a good amateur photo taker, Bears
I never made it to the sweetest Goodwill in the world
When was that?
San Francisco, it just wasn't meant to be
Look at you all up on the Oprah stuff
I got my eye on those celebrities
I knew today was going to be a great day
Because the Lutherans were having a sale
Garage Sales are euphemisms for "Party on the Driveway"
You were benevolent enough to babysit
It is either a ghost or an alien in front of me
You should be so lucky
Space Ghost!
You can convince me of anything
I got to the sale kind of late
The guy from the furniture tent comes out an yells
That we can hop into a new line that is shorter
I was torn
They can have stuff in multiple questions
I think you will reach a point, your peak of sales skills
We should freeze dry you at that point
Then revive you in the future when the dollar is strong
It will be like a time machine
Betsy, you bring it
The dollar is still strong with the Lutherans
Double check the luggage later
I stand in line to wait for the dishes
I need my fine china fix in their housewares sections
I brought bags and I have adrenaline flowing in my limbs
Oh, look, Christopher Stewart
This is when I started to look like a nut
Started?
Slow shuffling old posse arrived
Those match my dishes
I love those
Are you going to buy those?
I am now just to spite you
You wasted my time with your story
They're rookies baby
You are con-garagies
They send the 12 year old anemic boy to help me carry stuff
She's now a professional tic
She went and bought speakers from Farm and Fleet
I love it, speakers from Farm and Fleet
I am sure you are related to people that duck taped their heads That is the truth
Duck taping down his pants
Especially when fired up the chainsaw
The tape suit
Class issues really stand in your way Mr. B
"Transvestite's getaway car ran over good Samaritan's foot"
Words make the world magnificent

Tags: Space Ghost Farm and Fleet speakers Lutheran sale Naperville

Season 20 Ep 8: Husband in the Bubble, Carbon Dioxide Vampires, Nock

Mon, 21 Apr 2008 09:14:07 -0500

Croncast - 2008-04-21.mp3
Show: #483
Length: 38:15
Size: 26.3 mb
Format: mp3

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Special note: Betsy and Jeanie are having a meetup in San Francisco May 21, 2008 at House of Shields 39 New Montgomery St., Time: 6:30 p.m., stop and have a drink or two!

One day to Earth Day
Elliot has been telling me about the poor suffering pandas for ten days
He was telling me the acid rain was burning the pandas
Which was causing them not to have babies
He asked me if I knew what trees were
He's so much like his mom
He says, "Trees are carbon dioxide vampires"
I told him that would be a great band name
He didn't get it
Two worlds collided
You bought this badminton set at Goodwill
At a garage sale
Well, it came from out of the house
Husband in a bubble
Whatever you had taught him was wrong
Proper badminton form
Let me show you
What? What you learned at La Moille badminton school?
I can't believe you tried to describe this
What the hell are you talking about?
Your boy cannot do overheard
Oh, baby
I won't even listen to you and your un-athletic skills
It's good he's not you, Kris
He just doesn't get it as I am trying to help him
You're a like a lion in the grass
Look at that birdie fly
He can't hit it back and forth
I wanted to work with him
And you wonder why he doesn't want to play with you
You are a weird nerd jock hybrid
You're a NOCK
He'll have flash backs
Badminton is where business gets done
Watching his badminton future crumbles before my eyes
Don't send the hate mail
I get it
I need to engage with him on another level
He's going through a growth spurt
He's 7 asking if the weather is changing
Sensitive to barometric pressure
Taking the kids to lunch
Ted's Montana Grill
Ted's Buffalo Hut
There is nothing more environmentally friendly than buffalo farming
What are you saying? Twice as much methane
Maggie is all about it
Elliot looks at Ted's Bison Hut
Looks left and says, I just want Subway
"I won't get a bag of chips with my burger"
Wanted to do something a bit special
He says, "Dad, I don't like fancy. I like Goodwill and Subway."
Half the time he is working on bits
What's 10 minus 8?
I think you owe me $2, Mom
I get to the foreclosure/divorce house
Ring the door bell
The laundry basket was longaberger
It was like you designed the house
There was a beautiful chandelier in his bathroom
He wanted $1,800 for it
Then he says, "I paid $23,000 for it."
They make excellent copies of this at Menards
Then, Mr B, there it was
I became the sucker
Do you like the table?
It happens
How much do you want for the table?
Well . . .
I paid $12,000 for it
This is a garage sale
The table turned to fire when he told $2,300
Can you grab me something out of that crystal wine in the box holder
It was so McMansion
It was like he was trying to get on Cribs and it didn't work out
Same outfit as yesterday
Because he is single now

Tags: Longaberger suffering pandas acid rain Ted's Montana Grill McMansion

who is letting me down more - via twitter

Sun, 02 Mar 2008 19:15:23 -0600

is it myself? not feeling very podcasterly of late, slacking. is it presnous popping for sony firewire?

Tags: firepod

Season 19 Ep 11: Walzer A., Buffalo Days, The Coffee Drinker

Fri, 01 Feb 2008 10:51:22 -0600

Croncast - 2008-02-01.mp3
Show: #457
Length: 26:13
Size: 18.1mb
Format: mp3

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The Resale Queen Podcast is now here!
Every Saturday by 9 a.m. CST

About the Wednesday show
We were recording and the phone was ringing off the hook
Call from Walzer A
So this is Wednesday's show
Yeah, it was your sister calling
Brother-in-law lost his job
And the three mother hens showed up at his house
I did not envy him at all
It is getting more and more crowded in this boat
Your mom told you that you need to take care of this
I couldn't think of a more depressing situation
I wouldn't have come home
I would have went out at 8 am and got a beer
Where? This isn't Milwaukee
I would have waited that shit out
You are telling me that I am a born leader
I was telling myself that I glad you all weren't here
This is how it goes down in my dysfunctional family
My entire life I have had to be the man
What?
You shoveled in the middle in a snow storm
You can't even tell you shoveled
Doing it repeatedly doesn't make sense
At 4:30 am our neighbor fired up his snow blower
Ridiculous
Some men wake up with motivation, Kris
What would you do if it were a chainsaw?
Then he started cutting down trees
Well, hell he was motivated
Oh, baby
I tossed pup pup in a snowbank
What for?
To send to the TV station
Are you serious?
Well, I did send it
The auto response email was "Thanks for sending to KABC 7 Los Angeles"
Your snowy dog will be on in LA
You dogs suck
Jorge would be restricted to humane society
Ass end up in a garbage can
That is what we should have called the Resale Queen show
Yesterday, I almost slipped and died
Good things that dumpsters are heavy
How come they don't shovel by them?
I am going to open Dumpster Land
A theme park for you and your people
The dangers that you face everyday
It can't be packing peanuts
There is no Calvin pissing on nothing
What stickers would the truck have?
Did the new trucks ever roll out to La Moille?
I though i shouldn't ask because it would be sad
There was a time that they did come out
No one can tie a knot in this town
Ending up in the county jail
Swanson's baby
Onions in the peas
They came to town for Buffalo Days
The quaint small town festivals in movies, lies
There's no tax base to support that
Basketball game in a gravel pit
I grew up across from a buffalo pasture
Did you ride buffalo instead of ponies?
Did they chain them to a claw foot tub to slow them down?
From kindergarten to graduation at 14
Let me run the tilt-a-whirl
I would be right there
Ending up with a corn cob in his bibs
Might be dangerous but in a small town that's fun
Being pulled on sled behind cars
Watching the console in a lawn chair
I have sat in the back of a Chevy and bounced across fields
We didn't do donuts in a Wal Mart parking lot
It was a small town
Ok, K-Mart
That would have been a 30 mile commute
I know you rode in the back of a pickup truck on the way to a K-Mart
Yes, I did
CB radios in those days, figuring out who the coffee drinker was
Your mom would have a handle

View Kris's resume or download it

Tags: buffalo snowy dog LaMoille Resale Queen sledding

What good are 3 hits from Google search results?

Wed, 05 Dec 2007 08:56:11 -0600

I can tell you. It all depends on what people are searching for.

Painfully obvious, right?

Well, not so much when someone searches at Google for intitle:"chocolate" ext:rss. The odds are astronomically high that even chocolate experts weren't even returned as results. See for yourself.

So what does this mean? It means that someone searched Google for a RSS feed (ext:rss) with the word chocolate in the title (intitle:"chocolate").

Yes, the search is more advanced than a keyword or phrase based search but that isn't my full point. The reason that it matters is that not only did this individual search for chocolate but also culture and abba. Not quite sure what it says about the person searching for those topics . . .

So for me, these three hits matter. They are three more than I would have normally received for those topics and a chance for me to get them to possibly subscribe to those feeds, subscribe to my podcast, click an ad (yes, I like money) or get my brand in front of them.

I am able to do this with keyword feeds that I create dynamically from posts that get the same SEO treatment that a normal webpage would get.

The other plus for this type of search is the fact that they return so few results and Croncast happens to be ranked #1 for most of them including searches like, say . . . "CNN" or "Micorsoft" or "iTunes".

I've had conversations with a friend, Rick Klau, about RSS feeds being indexed in Google search results. Most of those discussions focused on my saying that feeds should show up in search results and Rick saying that they shouldn't.

My stance is that some people, like myself, benefit from these results the same way that we benefit from a normal click through to our sites. I am able to do this by checking where the individual who clicked through is coming from and displaying a web page instead of the RSS with the exact same data that was in the feed.

But I don't stop there. I also make sure to let the user know how they got to the page and that they can now subscribe to that feed. It's a soft landing for what traditionally has been a hard look at XML or ugly feed displays in browsers. Which is where you will end up with 99.9 out of 100 feeds if you click through them when returned in a search.

What is Rick's position? If 99.9 are bad then they should be removed. For the time being I will agree that he is right. But that doesn't mean that this is the way it always has to be.

A couple of things could change this:

1) The uptake of RSS since IE7 and and FireFox now display their own XSLT to prettify the XML. Sort of like FeedBurner does.
2) Publishers add their own XSLT for their feeds
3) Publishers using blogs, most of which are dynamically generated, are written with code that can check for referers like Goolge, Live and Yahoo and redirect the user to a page that has the same content as the feed
4) My favorite. Google could create their own XSLT document that loads the feed into it.

Maybe that was more than a couple but I believe there are a lot of ways to welcome feeds into indexed search results beyond having to type in a search like intitle:"Google" ext:rss.

By the way, I'm not number one on this one Google is with it's YouTube property.

Next up, how to create RSS feeds with keywords in the title, how to get the .rss extension added to your feeds and landing pages for feeds.

Tags: RSS search page rank Google search RSS XSLT FeedBurner

Burning down the house

Mon, 26 Nov 2007 21:32:14 -0600

Betsy found this gem from last summer on the laptop tonight.

Some of you might remember when my mother-in-law set the grill ablaze last summer and my first instinct was to put it out with a sea salt grinder.

Advice: keep that fire extinguisher close or get a really big sea salt grinder.

Tags: salt sea grinder summer big

Betsy and her husband Kris Nov 23, 2007

Fri, 23 Nov 2007 10:02:48 -0600

Croncast - 2007-11-23.mp3
Show: #437
Length: 16:52
Size: 11.6mb
Format: mp3

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Short show . . . Betsy has places to be
Special intro by Elliot
Croncast live from the man pit
I forgot to mention Wal Mart
You can hear us there now
Shut up, Kris
Can't you hear us being piped into their stores?
People shopping and there we are with turkey fryers
We got FFA stories
The great turkey fry off jamboree we were invited to
Fryers, Keystone Light and firearms
Competitive fry off
Zis is my Wolfgang Puck oil
I don't think so Betsy
Celebrating by frying everything in sight
Grill on three legs and a cement block
Bugs? Forget it
Frying ice cubes
Guys around stuff on fire
I would do the firearms and clay pigeons
We are the hick/redneck ultimate starter kit
My thoughts make it tough to hang with the middle class
That is the relationship that has no boundaries
We just say the stuff they think but don't say
The turkey you made . . . oh, baby
Sacrifice of the bird
Who eats stuffing any other time of year?
What's wrong with Paganism anyway?
I'm not ripping on Pagans
What you are saying is that, "I fucked up the turkey and you were afraid."
29 cent a pound turkey, Pilgrims Pride
It had been beaten to death
It looked like it had just jumped in to the Latin Kings
It was black inside
I will never mess up another turkey again
You will have moist turkey for the rest of your days
The moment between you and your mom
"Like you do"
That is your mom's favorite quote
Living up to her standards
I tried cutting the leg when you asked
Sparks flew off the knife . . . not really
Sawing it into pieces
There was no layer other than the outer
The thrill of standing in line for deal
Sven Olacksen in the desert
What kind of job is jumping out of a plane?
The perfect job
You can have any job you want without kids
It frees you up
I had to meet you at 16
That's it
Elliot's special outro

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Tags: Wolfgang Puck Wal Mart turkey fryer Pilgrim's Pride beaten turkey

ready to play wii - via twitter

Sun, 04 Nov 2007 15:22:48 -0600

i haven't played the wii in months but "the man" fired up bowling. it is a father's duty to lose.

Tags: wii bowling old man

Back to Naperville

Wed, 17 Oct 2007 15:02:34 -0500

Heading back to Chicagoland. I'll see what kind of blog post I can fire up at the airport.

Tags: back post fire airport blog

iphone + old dock = bad - via twitter

Tue, 16 Oct 2007 10:20:15 -0500

just turned my iphone into a brick on an old dock. feels like it is on fire.

Tags: iphone brick hot iphone

Betsy and her husband Kris Oct 12, 2007

Fri, 12 Oct 2007 08:58:34 -0500

Croncast - 2007-10-12.mp3
Show: #421
Length: 30:19
Size: 20.8mb
Format: mp3

Betsy and her husband Kris Oct 12, 2007

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Tell a Friend Friday!
Tell'em all about it
This is a rocking show . . . starts slow, Betsy is sick, but fires up
Thanks Mexico Mike/Susan, seriously?
Proxy commenters need not hide
User your real information
I know who it is, Bears
Who?
You mom
She got a WebTV
Through a proxy
My perfect job would be the skipper on a boat
The skipper of a sailboat
So, I went and bought a Jamocha shake from Arby's
Now I want to throw up
Speaking of Goodwill . . . Mike and Liz just had a baby today!!!
Congratulations to the Marusin's and Poppy Ann
Wait until you get your Goodwill gift
No way Kris, I will them something nice . . . like a store display
Going to Ben Franklin to get some paint
Unless a blind person comes and runs their fingers over it no one will know
We are really talking about a $160 present
We should get them something new
Yeah, Kris, we will get them some diapers
You need not to nerd out on strollers, explain
Why don't they call it the platform stroller?
You can sit or stand . . .let's call it the platform stroller
Special place for them to hold on
They always want to stand in the cart
What kind of vitamin deficiency makes your skin fall off?
I mean like peel on your hands
One year of hands down the pants
Baby!
That is all about moisture, Kris
Maybe you need to get sick more often
Improv round two started last night for Betsy
Not just the core group, time to move on
Betsy and her ego
I love, love this class
Yeah, it is controlled psychosis
You are nuts
The crazier the people the better
Crazy people find each other
Giving off the crazy vibe
You find out later you have it in common
Kicking it at Bar Louie with my posse
I can't believe you are still going back
Of course I am
You don't want to profit from my sexual harassment?
This is your joint now . . . your cheers
They listen to the show now
My mom paid children to teach me to ride a bike
I don't know if I ever told you this before, Kris
Told me what?
I was born dead
What?
I was blue and not breathing
That explains a lot
What else you hiding from me?
Object work in improv
They reply to me . . . "It's not a radio show"
Well, let them come in and try this
That's right . . . dead air bitch
When is it a good time to bring up being born dead?
I don't know.
Who are you? Where is my wife that was born alive?
The doctor left with a blue baby
Came back with a pink baby
Don't go to Arby's and buy a Jomacha shake

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Tags: Jamocha shake Poppy Ann Marusin Goodwill improv psychosis Bar Louie