How to Create a YouTube Time Link When Sharing a Video
It's easy to link directly to a specific time in a YouTube video. All you have to do is add a t parameter to the end of the URL that indicates the time position in seconds. Here's an example that links to Post Malone's Nirvana tribute benefit concert for the coronavirus pandemic 118 seconds in when the performance begins:
https://youtu.be/f7eaGcIyhPU?t=118
The t=118 parameter causes the video to begin playing one minutes and 58 seconds after the beginning. There's also a way to accomplish the same thing when embedding a video. Add a start parameter to the video's embedded URL in the iframe tag. The value of start should be the number of seconds to skip before playback.
For a shortcut to this command, pause a YouTube video, right-click the video and choose Copy Video URL at Current Time.
Here's the embedded HTML code for the Post Malone concert starting 118 seconds in:
<iframe width="640" height="360" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/f7eaGcIyhPU?start=118" frameborder="0" allow="accelerometer; autoplay; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture" allowfullscreen></iframe>
This HTML markup begins the Post Malone concert at the designated mark once a viewer chooses to play it.
For a shortcut, pause a video, click the Share button underneath it, choose embed, and click the Start At checkbox. When you click the Copy button to close the dialog you'll have HTML code you can use for playback at that time.
Screenwriter: Watch the Watchmen Twice
As a fan of the Alan Moore/Dave Gibbons graphic novel, I thought Watchmen was a terrific movie in spite of the excessive gore and the 17-hour run time. The comic's amusingly dystopian 1985 was captured perfectly -- President Nixon did not age well over the four terms he held office -- and I'm planning to see the movie again in IMAX, primarily for Jackie Earle Haley's Rorschach and the incredible opening credit sequence.
See if you can spot the tasteless metaphor in Watchmen screenwriter David Hayter's open letter begging people to see the film twice:
If you care about movies that have a brain, or balls, (and this film's got both, literally), or true adaptations -- And if you're thinking of seeing it again anyway, please go back this weekend, Friday or Saturday night. ...
All this time, you've been waiting for a director who was going to hit you in the face with this story. To just crack you in the jaw, and then bend you over the pool table with this story. ...
You'll be thinking about this film, down the road. It'll nag at you. How it was rough and beautiful. How it went where it wanted to go, and you just hung on. How it was thoughtful and hateful and bleak and hilarious. And for Jackie Earle Haley.
Trust me. You'll come back, eventually. Just like Sally.
Sally's a female super-hero who suffers an attempted sexual assault on a pool table.
The Size of Your Twitter Makes Me Feel Inadequate
Dave Winer is criticizing Twitter over the suggested users feature, which was added recently to help Twitter newbies get more out of the service. In the past when you joined Twitter, if you didn't know anybody else using the service you'd end up with nothing to do, an experience akin to being the only person in an AOL chatroom, giving yourself A/S/L checks and telling yourself you just got home from cheerleader practice and it's time to get out of these sweaty clothes.
So Twitter now tries to buddy up new members with some big-name users like Michael Arrington, Ryan Seacrest and MC Hammer. These recommended buds end up with hundreds of thousands of people following them on Twitter. This has angered some people with tens of thousands of followers by making them feel small, though they pretend that's not the reason. Winer writes:
I pour a lot of effort into Twitter, and while I wasn't in the top tier of users, I was solidly in the second tier. I wasn't doing the things you have to do to get the most followers, or I didn't have a powerful media presence like Leo or Shaq to get me up there. ... It's now approaching 20,000, which I am proud of, but it's not very much compared to the numbers of some people who did nothing other than be friends of [Twitter founder] Evan Williams to get hundreds of thousands of followers. ...
Think about it this way -- do you know who wrote Apache or PHP? Do any of them have the power to deliver so much flow to an installation of their software? Imho, that's exactly the relationship Twitter should have with its users. Or the phone company and users of phones -- they shouldn't jump into a conversation and say (for example) "We know someone really cool you would probably like to talk to. We're connecting you to them now."
Seven years ago, Winer was running UserLand, which had just come out with Radio UserLand, software for publishing blogs and reading RSS feeds. Radio UserLand was a pretty big phenomenon at the time that had an appeal not unlike Twitter today. Users formed relationships by subscribing to each other's blogs, getting updates in real-time through the RSS Cloud API and republishing interesting items they found on their buds' blogs. (Kids today call this retweeting.)
Radio UserLand's RSS reader came with a default list of subscriptions, and the bloggers on the list got thousands of readers.
I wasn't on that list. I poured a lot of effort into Radio, and while I wasn't in the top tier of bloggers I was solidly second-tier. Former MTV veejay Adam Curry was on the list, and in July 2003 he revealed why -- he secretly paid Winer $10,000:
Time to come clean on an investment I made a year and a half ago. At the time, UserLand software had released a Mac OSX version of Radio and I was totally digging the built in news aggregator. I came up with a cunning plan: I asked Userland if I could purchase a pre-installed feed on their aggregator, which supports RSS xml feeds. I paid $10,000 for a one year license. To date I've been delighted with my purchase and although I haven't checked recently, I'm pretty sure Userland still has me in the defaults. ...
The $10k didn't 'just' give me an automatic base within the userland community, it got pasted on web pages all over the world and I've built up an audience that consists of 50% aggergator users.
So when Winer was in the same position as Twitter, his software included a paid placement, something he never disclosed to his users.
I try not to reach back into the Winer wayback machine too often, because I'd prefer that people forget how I used to pumice out his corns as we sat on the beach and discussed which of his inventions I liked the bestest. But his secret deal with Curry is worth remembering as he crusades against Twitter:
[Twitter board member Bijan Sabet] says that Twitter is the little guy, but to me they look big -- huge -- when they have the power to move people up the ladder so quickly, and introduce doubt about their relationship with individual users. When being in favor with Ev means so much. That's screwing the whole thing up.
Credits: Rogers Cadenhead has 156 followers on Twitter. Dave Winer's self-portrait is republished under a Creative Commons license.
Currency Exchange is a Nickel and Dime Business
Neil Steinberg's column today in the Chicago Sun-Times has a surprising ending. He writes about an interesting Chicago character, Arnie Berezin, who has run a small currency exchange business for years:
Neva Evans has spent most of the last decade in a Jewel shopping bag tucked away in the cluttered back room at the Ashland-Diversey Currency Exchange.
Or at least her earthly remains have, ashes in a funerary jar with a mother-of-pearl finish.
"Good morning, Neva," the owner of the currency exchange, Arnie Berezin, would say as he begins each day at 5 a.m. -- which he does, seven days a week, cashing checks and issuing money orders in a tiny alcove decorated with business cards and rolls of coins. A $400 money order costs 85 cents.
"I'm a nickel-and-dime business," says Berezin, 62. "We don't get rich here."
If anyone knows Lisa Grace, Michelle Grace, Felicia Grace, Patricia Baker, Iris Heard or Dwayne Adams, Steinberg has something for you.
Hat Tip: 11111001111
Kickin' It Old School with Microsoft Word 97
I began a new book this week on Java programming for beginners. I haven't been doing much computer book writing for a couple years, so I no longer had an installed copy of Microsoft Word 97, the version of the software my publisher uses to draft manuscripts. Word 2007 can save files in 97 format, but it doesn't support the publisher's custom styles, so I decided to install Word 97 on Vista.
Huge mistake.
Word 97 appeared to install properly, but when I installed some other Microsoft software afterward, it removed files that Word 97 requires to run. Now the program reports a registry error every time it runs and Vista won't uninstall it or install a new copy.
After considering other options, I installed a trial version of VMware Workstation, $188 software that creates virtual computers in which you can run other operating systems. You run the simulated computer in its own window after deciding how much disk space and memory to allocate to it, and it acts like it's an entire computer. After setting up one of these virtual systems, you can clone it, suspend it and run it remotely over the Internet.
Using VMware, I created a new virtual Windows XP system where I can run Word 97 and the other software required to write my book. As far as I know, this Pinocchio virtual computer thinks it's a real PC.
Because Microsoft is run by sadists, I had to install Windows 98 before I could install a Windows XP upgrade. It was weird to step back in time and see the Microsoft channel bar, an early stab at web syndication that predated RSS. During installation, Windows 98 also touts its support for USENET newsgroups. Kids today don't know how good they got it. In my day, if we wanted to see celebrities naked, we had to know how to UUdecode.
If anyone has any experience with VMware, I'd like to hear how well it works. My biggest concern is whether anything I do inside the virtual computer can adversely impact the real Vista system it runs on. I want virtual computers that I can destroy with impunity by running buggy beta software and other dodgy programs that don't get along with each other. I end up doing that a lot in the course of writing a book.
'Mad Men': Smoke, Smoke, Smoke That Cigarette
I'm catching up on Mad Men by watching the first season on DVD. I find the show's atmosphere amazing, both in terms of the characters at the ad agency and the 1960 setting they inhabit. I can't recall a TV series where the sets have been so immaculately well-designed. The offices, bars, apartments and homes are so engrossing that at times I wish the characters would get out of the way so I could see them better.
Part of the appeal is nostalgia. When I was a young child in the early '70s my mother worked in Dallas as a secretary for the ad agency TracyLocke, and my recollection of visits there matches the look of Sterling Cooper. My memories are more pleasant than hers, since I didn't have to work there. One of the workers kept a bowl of SweeTarts fully stocked at his desk, and every visit I'd make sure to hit that bowl at least twice for everything I could carry.
Instead of burning through the episodes like a junkie, as I did recently with Weeds, I'm going to take my time with Mad Men. "Smoke Gets In Your Eyes," the pilot episode, begins with senior ad man Donald Draper struggling to come up with a new campaign for Lucky Strike cigarettes. The government has begun cracking down on tobacco companies that make bogus health claims in their advertising, just as the risks of lung cancer to smokers are becoming a major public concern.
Reader's Digest is mentioned during the episode because of an article scaring people about smoking. A detailed synopsis on TV.Com reveals that the show refers to a real article, "The Growing Horror of Lung Cancer," that appeared in March 1959.
I found the article in the Legacy Tobacco Documents Library, an archive of 10 million documents from tobacco companies about the sales and safety of their product. Reading the Reader's Digest article provides an interesting -- and horrifying -- perspective on the first days of the lung cancer epidemic:
Of 100 people who get lung cancer today, the physician told him, 45 will be inoperable by the time they consult a doctor, their cancer so widespread that surgery will be futile. Chests of the remaining 55 will be opened. This is drastic surgery and as many as 11 of the 55 patients may die of it. Inspection of the chest cavity will often give clear evidence of cancer spread, possibly even to the heart itself. In such cases the surgeon may leave the lung untouched and simply close the wound. These patients -- perhaps 12 -- will be dead in a few months.
By now the original 100 has dwindled to 32 patients who are operable. The surgeon removes all or part of the diseased lung and prays that no cancer seeds have been left behind. But in a distressingly large percentage of cases, clusters of these cells lurk in hidden recesses, to continue their growth. According to present statistics, only 5 of the 32 patients who survive the operation will be alive -- and presumably cured -- at the end of five years. Thus the score stands: 5 survivors out of 100 victims.
The article, which makes one smoker's pneumonectomy surgery sound nightmarishly medieval, is a pretty amazing read with five decades of hindsight. Heavy smokers were learning for the first time that they faced a high likelihood of lung cancer.
A few years ago, lung cancer was a medical problem of no consequence. A survey of world medical literature in 1912 showed a total of only 347 cases reported. Today annual deaths are measured by the tens of thousands. Tomorrow?
"It frightens me to think of what is going to happen in another decade when our present smoking habits catch up to us," says Dr. Ochsner.
Ochsner was Alton Ochsner, a famous surgeon whose clinic was one of the first to link cancer and cigarettes. As a young medical intern in the '20s he was once invited to witness a lung surgery operation on the grounds he might never see one again. He didn't for another 17 years, but then began getting numerous cases of World War I vets who had taken up smoking as young men.
Decades after the health risks of smoking became crystal clear, lung cancer continues to kill 1.1 million people a year, thanks in part to generations of ad execs like the protagonists of Mad Men.
Times Gives Aaron Swartz Props for RSS
In a discussion about journalism on venture capitalist Fred Wilson's blog, Dave Winer writes:
... professionals make plenty of these kinds of mistakes. For example last week the esteemed NY Times said RSS was software and that it was co-written by a 14-year old on a mail list. It is neither of those things.
They never called me to check it out.
The 14-year-old he references is Aaron Swartz, who got some nice press recently from the Times for an incredibly ballsy stunt he pulled to promote public access to government documents. Swartz used a scraping program to surreptitiously download 19 million pages of court documents -- totaling 780 gigabytes of data -- over the course of six weeks during a free trial of the government database Pacer. The data was sent to the non-profit Public.Resource.Org.
The Lede, a Times blog, described Swartz's role in RSS:
In the technology world, Mr. Swartz is kind of a big deal, as the saying goes. At the age of 14, he had a hand in writing RSS, the now-ubiquitous software used to syndicate everything from blog posts to news headlines directly to subscribers.
Winer believes credit for RSS is doled out under Highlander rules -- all challengers must be decapitated, for "in the end, there can be only one!" But The Times is correct to credit Swartz for his important role in RSS. When he was still in junior high school, Swartz became one of the lead authors of the RSS 1.0 specification, the version of the syndication format that employs RDF. He also has hosted the specification for the past eight years.
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