Sunday, June 29, 2014

My Duck Soup is Recovered

The My Duck Soup site was destroyed by a hacker attack at the ISP where it's located.  Everything had to be restored from my own backups as the ISP was very heavily-damaged by it.  My Duck Soup is now fully functional again.

The Ride the Dragon podcast was already removed but there was a new variable on restoring it.  My latest experiment was to send Cat a recording of the show from Thursday.  It turned out to be about 100 MB.  I wanted to test the mechanism and that worked easily.  Voodoo has been using the same general technique to sell recordings of his shows for some while.

There's nothing proprietary in what Voodoo is doing and he would happily tell you himself that Dropbox is used as an intermediate storage medium.  In other words, he uploads the recording to his Dropbox and people can download it from there.  This way no-one gets access to his computer and there is no increased exposure to security threats.  (Evernote can probably be used the same way but not likely as effectively.)

Voodoo's principle is that you can't buy the show unless you attended the performance and this satisfies the Zen aspect as those people when listening to the recording know already the previous fullness of it but someone who was not there never can.  I don't know if Voodoo looks at it that way but that view of it feels pretty good to me.  There's a problem that sending a bad recording means you will trash the memory of that previous fullness.

There's a different problem for people who would like to be at the show but can't because of a pesky work schedule.  That's going to be a problem for many in America when I'm usually only playing at two or three in the afternoon US time and usually only once a week.  So then I have to balance existential philosophy against being an asshole.  Deliberately making it unavailable to someone who cannot hear it any other way sucks.

Another kind of amusing problem is for someone who thinks I'm an asshole already and would never come to a show ... but likes the music.  Deliberately making it unavailable to them is like when kids line up on each side of the street to shout out, you're an asshole ... you're a bigger asshole ... well, your whole family is assholes ... well, your dog is an asshole (that last about the dog was a mistake as now you have to fight).

Using Dropbox makes the podcast pointless and the solution still has the problem that someone who just can't be at the show can't ever hear even a taste of what it was.  The alternative is to upload the entire show to the podcast ... but then it goes to everyone ... even to people who think I'm an asshole.


After all that, the solution that works the best is to upload the show to the podcast.  That's Zen shot all to hell but maybe there's some benefit in putting things in bottles.

No comments: