What is Stack Exchange?

I moved here to the city to take a new job, and every once in awhile, I get asked, "What is it the company does?" (Actually, I'm first asked what it is I do at the Stock Exchange; I'm afraid they're down the street. I'm at Stack Exchange. There's a different vowel in there.)

They know it has something to do with the Internet and a website. Whenever I try to explain what we do, I see that glazed-over look appear in the questioner's eyes, similar to what you'd see in a deer's face moments before it impacts with the windshield.

I should note here that I'm not the official representative for the company. I'm merely a systems administrator; interacting with people is not my "thing."

I would say that what follows is typical of the conversation I have with my relatives when they ask me about my job. That would be a lie. Really they get that glazed-deer look in their eyes after the second or third line. But if I were able to have a nearly complete yet relatively short conversation about my job, this is how I'd imagine it would go:

What does your company do?

Basically we're a question and answer site. We try to make the Internet a better place.

So...you're like Yahoo Answers?


$DEITY no. We're a site where you can ask questions and get answers from experts.

Oh.  So only certain people can answer your questions.

Actually, anyone can. If you know the answer, you can reply to the question.

But...I'm not an expert.


That's okay. You don't even need to register to answer a question, but if you create an account, you can get reputation for your answers and reputation builds credibility for your future answers. Continued participation helps make you an expert, or at least validates that you are familiar with the subject.

So I post an answer, and I get reputation for it?

Not exactly. You post an answer, and other users can vote your answer up if it's useful, or down if it's not clear or doesn't answer the question. This affects your reputation.

What can I do with this reputation?

Absolutely nothing!

Well, that sucks.

What I mean is you can't get money for your reputation or prizes. 

So why do people try to get reputation if you can't do anything with it?

Reputation is like a validation of your knowledge in a particular area; you can embed your Stack Exchange profile's reputation into your blog or web page, to show the world that you actively participate in the website. For programmers, StackOverflow is the leading source of answers to programming questions on the web, and reputation is a fun way to show their peers how much they use the site.

So programmers can show employers their StackOverflow reputation to show what they can do.

It's a useful metric for employers familiar with the site. And our Careers site, which is part of the StackExchange network, has tools built in that highlight your reputation so employers can see how you participated in StackOverflow. They just create a Careers profile and potential employers can find a programmer suited to their needs.

Okay,...this sounds like Stack Exchange is just for programmers. I'm not a programmer.

Stack Exchange started out with StackOverflow, which is for programmers and their questions. And StackOverflow is by far our most active site...if you look at our list of sites, as of today there are over 4 million questions and it's growing by over six thousand questions per day. But there's actually over 90 sites in the Stack Exchange network, each with a particular topic of focus.

Ninety sites? Why so many? I could go to Yahoo Answers and there's just one site where I just ask anything I want.

We have a lot of sub-sites because this helps divide the areas of interest, which means your question won't be buried among questions that aren't relevant to the subject. You wouldn't ask a question about home repair in a stadium of people, would you? There's a good chance someone there can help you, but the majority of the people wouldn't have a clue, and it would be very noisy compared to going to a do-it-yourselfer's convention and asking the people there.

While we are largely technical...the first three Stack Exchange sites focused on programming, systems administration (ServerFault) and home computer user questions (SuperUser), we're not just for technology questions. We have sites for video games, parenting, science-fiction and fantasy, and even cooking. There's a list of sites you can explore.

What if you don't have a site that looks like it is good for things I'm interested in?

If you think there is a community that would be interested in what you have in mind, you can go to Area 51 and propose a new site be created. Area 51 is where new sites are proposed to see if they have enough support to build a community.

How do you make them grow? Like...why do people keep participating with the site?

I'm afraid there's no single answer for that! Maybe this would best fit as a question with our cognitive sciences site.

Most people come to get answers to their questions. Some stay because they enjoy helping others and sharing knowledge. Others find a sense of community. Some like the challenge of gathering reputation and badges, and others make friends in our integrated chat system.

It helps that we're completely free; there's no paywall, and we try to reduce the friction in the user experience by keeping advertising to a minimum. What advertising we do carry is shown as unobtrusively as possible.

There are many users who enjoy the game aspect of the site. They enjoy building reputation. We also have badges you can unlock by performing various tasks, like editing people's questions and achieving certain goals on the site. There are many users who enjoy trying to collect all the badges.

Wait, you get a badge for editing people's questions? Like, you alter what other people write? So you're like Wikipedia?

Our goal is to make the Internet a better place, and we're doing that by giving users tools to find authoritative answers to their questions. Sometimes an answer...or question...needs altering so that it can help the most people. Or maybe the wording is vague. Questions might get downvoted or closed until they are edited to be suitable for the site. 

So yes, it is possible for other users to edit your contributions, and in that respect we are like a wiki site. Remember, the goal is for us to make the Internet a better place, and we want your questions to help other people too! It's nothing personal!

Usually by this point I imagine the other person is either satisfied with the explanation or they're making a sandwich and have no interest in talking anymore. Or maybe I'm making a sandwich. Or both. It's my imaginary conversation, so I can make a sandwich if I want.

Regardless of the stopping point, I usually suggest they look at the new animated "about" pages that give a brief overview of each site. Take a look at the Apple site's About page. Cool, huh? Just click on the "about" link in the upper right corner of any Stack Exchange site page.

That's kind of all there is to it. It's free to join, it's free to participate, and it's free to lurk around the sites and peruse the information. Jump in and see if you can answer some questions!

How to Move Datacenters

(Disclaimer: as always, this is my blog, not my employer's. I'm not their spokesperson. They'll have their own blog entry about the datacenter move, so some details here will be a little vague...after all, I've grown rather attached to being employed.)

I haven't moved many times in my life.

I half-moved when I went to college, which normally entailed hauling a lot of my crap from home to a small shared bedroom space and back again every two semesters. I remember the "big move" when my wife and I bought a house, an adventure that involved a lot of storage totes and a hole in the wall covered by a strategically placed doorknob-guard that happened to match the paint on the wall. And then there was what was possibly the most bittersweet move; hauling as many of my belongings as possible in our Toyota Corolla to New York City in 100 degree weather.

That's about as much fun as it sounds. And seeing as it ended with two of us entering the city and one leaving,...yeah, about as much fun as it sounds.

Thankfully the company moving data centers was not quite like that.

The company I work for was in need of moving data centers. Not for any scandalous reasons or a story of excess drama...it was simply a question of space and resources. Scaling predictions showed we would need more than the current company would be able to provide; we would need to move or hit a scaling wall.

Our company happens to run a fairly popular website with over one and a half million registered users and a large number of anonymous users utilizing our content.

So how do you manage a move of a website like that?

The first step is to become disaster resistant in case your primary data center is hit by a hurricane.

In case you forgot, New York City and New Jersey were recently hit by Hurricane Sandy, taking a number of tech sites offline as data centers around the island were systematically flooded and in several cases rarely-used generators suffered pump failures. This web company lucked out; we have a second data center on the other side of the country that dutifully replicated our data until it needed to step up to the plate.

As the storm intensified, the call was made to fail to our secondary site,...and we didn't fail back.

Months later we still had data served from the backup site, while our New York location was acting as a non-production backup.

This ended up taking a bit of pressure off the team; now that the data center we were moving was no longer the "production" site, there was more flexibility in when things could be moved around.

Second, plan, plan, then plan some more.

There were a number of meetings and pow-wows to discuss minutiae of the move. Type of racks to purchase, the power runs, expected loads placed on circuits, even the color coding to be used so it would be easier to identify what you accidentally unplugged while trying to reach something on a server.

Charts and checklists are made and cross-verified and I even throw the occasional curveball by saying something like, "Okay, but try not to mix brown and green cables or purple and blues too much unless you don't want me to touch it. I'm partially colorblind," which elicited some surprised curses as invisible handicaps don't normally get considered when you don't have those handicaps, which meant more revisions.

Got those checklists and charts all made and ready to go? Good. You'll have a Plan(tm) to follow until something goes kerplooey.

Um...where does that stuff go again?...

Third step: hire a good moving company that specializes in moving computer equipment. In our case, Morgen Industries in Secaucus, New Jersey. Yeah, I named them. Because they were that fucking awesome.

These guys gathered information about our servers...names, placement, etc...along with diagrams mapping where they would physically be placed in the new datacenter's racks. And they provided documentation that they were properly insured for moving our equipment, which is kind of important for moving what is essentially...you know, our entire business...through New York City traffic.

Migration measures were taken in the old data center; DNS names on remaining external services were changed along with the TTL values for the entire site, database clustering taken offline between geographical locations, and then cables were disconnected. Arrangements were made for access to both data centers' freight elevators and security was told to allow the new guys in, along with members of our own team flying in to lend a hand with the move.

The movers came in with boxes for the servers. They un-racked the systems and tucked them into their little foam-padded boxes along with scannable tags inventorying where the servers were at all times. They were fast. They were professional. After the cables were pulled, our team was mostly supervising.

Yeah...put it in that box there...good job, bro.

The moving team hauled everything ahead of schedule to the new location. In fact, that threw a kink into the schedule, as the new building needed to change the schedule in when the freight elevator could be used.

That's right. We were delayed because we needed someone with proper contractual rights to flip a switch on the elevator ahead of what was originally scheduled. Because the movers were too awesome to let something like schedules keep them from doing the job fast.

Step Four is the fun step. Getting things working again.

The moving team unboxed the servers and racked them according to specifications, and our team moved in to re-cable things.

The power cords got their own piles...

Management parts...now imagine boxes of patch cables. Many boxes of patch cables.

Systems were whipped out and cable management plans were pulled up so labeling could begin in earnest.

A labeler ordered just for the move, capable of making self-laminating labels. So. Many. Labels.

Cables were labeled and shuffled to the servers.

Realign the dilithium crystal and reroute power to the flux capacitor, then reboot...easy peasy.

As systems were plugged in, tests were run to test connectivity to the new switching equipment, and firewall rules had to be adjusted accordingly. There were some occasional...um...challenges?

Dammit, the SQL Server's eating Craver again...

In the end, though, the crack coding commandos managed to iron most of the wrinkles out.

Dude, it works. I can crash Reddit twice as fast from this data center!...Where's Craver?...Craver?

In the end, we were pretty happy with the results.

Color coded, management arms, labeled, blinkied, semi-sentient...

That is the 10,000 foot view of a datacenter move. It's not completely finished as of this writing; our data is still flowing from the backup site as testing is performed in the new site. Some DNS has not been migrated. Testing is still proceeding on the firewall rules for our site-to-site interconnects.

Some software upgrades are being implemented, then SQL Server has to be told that our New York site is back online so the data can begin re-syncing; each day, several gigs of data are accumulating in the backup site, waiting to pour back into our primary site. The physical move and cabling took the better part of a week to complete...that's a lot of time for data to pile up. We're also taking this opportunity to upgrade some of the servers to take advantage of less buggy clustering code, a decision made for reasons outside the scope of this blog posting.

New shiny data center. Servers are fully patched and updated. Some of the servers even have new parts, upgraded since they were offline for a period of time. Now we just fight the occasional Chaos Monkey glitch in a switch or a call about a rule in the firewall.

Step five is the big one; fail-back.

We're getting the infrastructure back up. Site to site VPN's. DNS. External services visible to the Internet again. Documenting connections. Testing new PDU's, and monitoring servers for reliability with their new cabling and possible bits shaken loose in transit.

Soon we'll have the meetings to coordinate the fail-back procedure, wherein everything in the remote site is shifted back to our new primary site with as little downtime as possible. This includes web servers, SQL servers, load balancers and internal services.

There you have it; the 10,000 foot view of a major website with lots of jiggly wiggly parts being moved to another data center. This is meant for people with a passing interest in how one company achieves such a move. I didn't get into the excruciating details of SQL cluster reconfigurations, the internal services being migrated, or the VM migrations.

In this particular instance, it really boiled down to a few steps.
1) Have a secondary site to run your business from.
2) Disconnect dependencies between your secondary and primary sites.
3) Physically move the servers.
4) Test the new connections at the new site.
5) Plan the migration of your backup site to the primary site.

A few notes to keep in mind:

1) We happened to have the resources for a second data center, which was in place for historical reasons. Not every business has this, and it's not a "right" or "wrong" thing. It's how things worked out for our particular business and it gave us a big advantage in making our transition.

2) The new data center is restrictive of what can and cannot be shown for security reasons. The pictures I posted above were taken with the understanding that we can show our own equipment and only our own equipment, so I was trying to be careful not to get other equipment housed at the new site in the pictures. If images are pulled, you know why.

3) There were rumors of a plan to keep our site online during the move using new racks on wheels, big UPS's and MiFi's. We'll pretend those were just rumors.

4) I work with a team of highly intelligent and capable people. While this blog posting was glib and probably made the move sound simple, the truth is there were numerous points where things could have gone south in a really bad way and the advanced planning performed by the team kept everything running relatively smooth. It was a week of late nights neck-deep in reconfiguring firewalls and switches and database burps for most of the team while I spent much of the migration handling office issues and helping our sales and remote groups connect to our internal systems as they were brought back online. It takes a lot of hard work to make something like this look easy...those guys deserve a lot of credit, from the guy that handled coordinating the movers and scheduling elevators to the admin that plugged in the last cable and the devops that altered the last firewall rule. These people were awesome...credit where credit is due.

5) This case was just how we ended up moving to a new datacenter. Depending on how a business grew its infrastructure, the behind the scenes methodology and drama could unfold in a very different manner. Our drama was limited to toe shoes and eventually fixing flat tires on a hand truck and the occasional aggressive negotiations when discussing certain logistics of the move. Your mileage may vary.

Publish a Podcast from Your Local Mac

I've always had a slight interest in presenting onstage. I have coworkers who do presentations. I worked in a school, they sometimes presented the change to "present" in front of an audience. I now work with a company with a consultant who does many classes and presentations of a technical nature. Yet for reasons that don't relate to the topic at hand, I haven't really worked on stage to give a presentation.

I'm a little strange in that when I have an interest in something, I usually try to do due diligence. Namely, research. I have some books on the shelf I've yet to read on presentations, for example.

Then the other day I was talking to a coworker known for doing technical talks and mentioned the honing of presentation skills. He suggested a podcast that had a series of episodes about giving professional presentations, and forwarded me the link with the "presentation" tag filtering results.

The podcasts were filtered; it wasn't a podcast about giving presentations, but rather a few episodes out of several where the topic happened to be about giving presentations.

Instead of subscribing to the podcasts' main feed, I downloaded the MP3's. Now I had the podcasts I wanted to listen to, but only as audio files.

The easy way to listen to them would be to import them to iTunes as music, then create a playlist just for those audio files and then telling iTunes to sync that playlist with my iPhone for later listening on the go.

While this would work, it meant that the "songs" end up getting shuffled in with other songs as any other audio track, and it would be played separately from the rest of my podcasts. I was also bugged by the fact that this interrupted my usual podcast workflow; listening to the podcast audio wouldn't mark it for "deletion" so it would be taken out of the listening rotation.

I lamented this to the same coworker when he gave some brilliant advice. Just serve it from your local machine with an XML file.

Well, it takes a little more work than that, but here's how I did it on OS X 10.8.2.

First, it seems that iTunes needs to grab the files from a web server. OS X happens to come with a web server, but the old way of turning on "web sharing" has been removed. To enable a simple Apache setup, open a terminal and create a conf file for your user:

sudo nano /etc/apache2/users/username.conf

...where "username" is obviously your username. In that file add the following block.

<Directory "/Users/username/Sites/">
Options Indexes Multiviews
AllowOverride AuthConfig Limit
Order allow,deny
Allow from all
</Directory>

...where again the "username" is your username. Then start the web server.

sudo apachectl start

At this point opening your web browser and entering "http://127.0.0.1" in the address bar should give you an "it works" message. If you go to http://127.0.0.1/~username" it should give you a little intro ditty to web page serving. Neat, huh?

This is a very limited web server; no database stuff, no bells and whistles, just a very bare-bones configuration. But I'm not looking to host a world-class website. I just wanted to turn those podcast audio files into an RSS feed for iTunes.

Next I created a subdirectory in ~/Sites called presentation_mp3 and copied the MP3 files to it. Now opening http://127.0.0.1/~bsilver/presentation_mp3 in my browser gave me a list of MP3 files.

Now the fun part, XML! I created a file called ~/Sites/podcast.xml. In it, I placed the following:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<rss xmlns:itunes="http://www.itunes.com/dtds/podcast-1.0.dtd" version="2.0">

  <channel>

    <title>Podcast Presentations</title>
    <description>Tips and Tricks for Delivering Killer Presentations</description>
    <link>http://127.0.0.1/~username/presentation_mp3</link>
    <language>en-us</language>
    <copyright>Copyright 2013</copyright>
    <lastBuildDate>Wed, 9 Jan 2013 11:30:00 -0501</lastBuildDate>
    <pubDate>Wed, 9 Jan 2013 11:30:00 -0500</pubDate>
    <docs>http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/tech/rss</docs>
    <webMaster>MyEmail@myemail.com</webMaster>

<item>
<title>Killer Presentations</title>
<link>http://127.0.0.1/~username</link>
<guid>http://127.0.0.1/~username/presentation_mp3/Killer_presentation.mp3</guid>
<description> How to give a killer presentation!</description>
<enclosure url="http://127.0.0.1/~username/presentation_mp3/Killer_presentation.mp3" length="24308496" type="audio/mpeg"/>
<category>Podcasts</category>
<pubDate>Wed, 9 Jan 2012 11:30:00 -0500</pubDate>
</item>

</channel>

</rss>

I based this off a template from this website, although for simplicity I didn't include the nice iTunes-compatible yet optional bits. I used the above as a template, adding a new <item> for each MP3 file, altering the "length" to correspond to the size of the file in the directory and the pubDate and description as necessary. You should be able to puzzle out from the above what things would need to be customized, at least to a point where it would work. The file was saved to ~/Sites/podcast.xml.

Once these were set, I opened iTunes and clicked File -> Subscribe to Podcast.

In the URL box I entered, "http://127.0.0.1/~username/podcast.xml", without the quotes.

Then I told iTunes to update the podcast and it downloaded them. Ta-da!

I should note that activating Apache means that others can connect to your machine's web server, so beware of taking it onto untrusted networks (if you're worried, use sudo apachectl stop to stop the server when going out.) Always keep your system up to date, kids! The open port 80 doesn't seem to show up under the sharing system preference, and it is accessible even with the firewall on. If you're worried, you may want to change the accessibility in the conf file.

In the off chance that someone else will read this and cringe at how horrible my XML file was, or get irritated that I didn't include particular options or any of a half-dozen other things I neglected to do properly, keep in mind that this was a quick-and-dirty way to get a series of audio files inserted into my podcast feed. If I were working on an actual podcast meant for public consumption I would have taken far more time prettifying everything and making each episode have more than a rudimentary description, not to mention hosting it on an actual podcast service.

That said, if there are improvements I should use feel free to leave suggestions. I was primarily looking for a quick and easy way to make iTunes act like a series of MP3's I downloaded were regular podcasts so I could listen to them in the same way I listen to other podcasts instead of squeezing them into music playlists, and ended up doing it by turning my laptop into a portable web server.

Any suggestions for improvements?

The Colbert Report

A discussion appeared on one of the internal communication systems the company uses wherein someone casually asked about the Colbert Report, and another employee, working in comedy when not doing the day job gig, said she knows some people who work for him.

"CAN YOU GET HIS AUTOGRAPH?!," I said.

This won me the fanboy award of the day. Maybe it was the all caps reply, or the fact that I said this within moments of the admission that someone I work with has been in close proximity to someone who breathed the same air as Stephen Colbert. It's impossible to tell what exactly fit the criteria.

The award? A ticket to see a taping of The Colbert Report.

The company I work for had given donations to several foundations and causes at the end of last year.

One of those foundations was WikiMedia, the charity behind Wikipedia. As it turned out, Jimmy Wales, founder of Wikipedia, was going to be a guest on The Colbert Report and the WikiMedia Foundation extended an invitation for one of our employees to attend the taping as a thank you for the donation. Who would get it this ticket? Apparently it was decided that the employee with the most enthusiasm for Colbert would get the ticket.

I was quite shocked, more than a little nervous, but I'm up for anything that involved the song "I've Got a Golden Ticket" playing in my head for the next 48 hours.

Arrangements were made, and I was told I'd be sitting in a guest area. I got an email from a representative at WikiMedia with contact information in case I had any trouble.

I just had to spend the weekend trying not to vibrate from anticipation. Which isn't easy. I vibrate a lot when I'm excited.

The weekend came and went. Then Monday arrived...time to go to work. Only this time I would watch the clock. While I could usually call it a day around five, I rarely actually got out at five. Normally this wasn't a problem...I willingly hang around and tie up a few loose ends. But today was different; I had a schedule to keep. I had to be to the studio by 6:00 so I could get in.

I checked and rechecked the route; I would take the R train to 57th street on the West Side, then hike the last few blocks to the studio. I checked with Google for a travel estimate, and double checked the route with HopStop on my phone. I then padded the estimate to take into account the fact that I'm a lumbering oaf with a poor sense of direction.

Then I headed out.

I managed to get to the 57th street station and accidentally exit on 55th street. I'm not sure I'll ever fully understand how the subways are marked; it's like going to the 51st street station and apparently exiting at 54th street, where I keep seeing this wonderful "Melt Shop" where I promise myself that next time I'm going to try one of their grilled cheese delights. Every time I find a subway station marked as a street, I never manage to exit at that street. It's just weird.

At any rate, seeing as I was headed to 54th street, fortune was obviously on my side in that I was now closer to my goal; somehow, given a 50/50 shot, I usually go the wrong way first and end up backtracking. I checked my Trello note to verify the studio address once again and trekked off. But before I could continue, my phone chimed.

The email was from Sara, the person coordinating my visit with WikiMedia. She said the crew was running a little behind, so I could arrive closer to 6:30 than 6:00. I sent a message back saying I wasn't all that far away, but I can just take my time now, so it's all good!

All I had with me was my jacket and headphones. I left my backpack at the office, as I didn't want to carry too much and risk having hassles storing it during the show or having security go through my belongings. Plus, despite the relatively cool temperatures, I knew that by the time I got there I knew the hike and the excitement would leave me a sweaty mess and the bag would just exacerbate the problem.

Plus there was a chance that it would make me a better target for a mugging. I don't know if it was my imagination, but that area of the island seem less lit than the areas I was used to. Or it could have been my imagination. I don't know.

I got to the address of the studio a little past 6:00 and did a quick walk-by. There was one entrance where people stood on either side of the door flanked by barriers, and most of the people were waiting with cellphone cameras drawn as if they were paparazzi. Next was a line going into a door with a paper taped to the front saying something about studio entrance and bags subject to search. I walked to the end of that building, where another line was formed under a sign that said, "Standby."

I turned and walked back to the middle line, and noticed a guy with a clipboard.

"Excuse me," I said. "Is this to see...the Colbert Report?"
"Sorry, but if you wanted to get in you'd have to be here before six. Tickets are all sold..."
"But I'm," and at this point I'm fumbling with my phone so I can pull up the email, "I'm looking for Sara. She said,"
He cut me off. "You must be a guest, then? Guest seats can get in up those steps," he said, pointing beyond the amateur paparazzi. "If your name's on the list you can sign in there."
Guest seating...on the list. Squee!

I walked up the stairs and another gentleman opened the door. I stepped through and found an attractive young woman sitting in the foyer. She looked up. "Are you Bart?"
"I am..."
"I'm Sara!" she said, shaking my hand. I'm feeling the sweat on my arms and back, despite the chilly January air that had soaked through my thin jacket during my several block walk from the subway station. At least my hands were dry. Thank $DEITY for small miracles.

We signed in at the desk, where we were issued little Colbert Report name tag stickers, then directed to a conference room area.

Face hidden since I didn't ask her for permission...

It was quite interesting, just looking around at all the books and works of patriotic art.

What could be more patriotic?

After about half an hour, I along with several other guests were escorted into the studio. Oh...WOW.

The seats were in a small section right in the front, near the area where Stephen does interviews with guests. I sat down and sent a message to my wife letting her know that I was now seated in studio, and that was when a stern looking man in a suit jacket firmly warned me that I would need to turn off my cellphone. I nodded an acknowledgement and tucked the phone away.

I wondered if I could sneak a quick picture of the set, but the security guy hovered not more than five feet away from me the whole time. Every time I glanced at him, he was watching the audience, as if waiting for someone to give him an excuse to go all beatdown on someone. Well, watching would be a nice way to put it. He was almost glaring. Straight-faced. Not a hint of humor in his expression, focused intently on the small studio audience.

A man in a seat next to me had his camera phone out over a "break," and I heard him get chastised and told to put the device away. I'm guessing there was a "no camera or recording device" rule somewhere that I must have missed.

Regardless, I was a guest of someone else's kindness, and I wasn't going to embarrass my company by getting kicked out or chastised by Colbert security. I wanted to, but didn't. Take pictures. Not get kicked out.

The set; oh the set! Quite shocking how much smaller it is in person to see. The desk where Stephen does his routine must be only 15 feet or so from the table where he interviews guests. When he does his runaround bit, you'd think there'd be a lot more room...you'd be wrong. All camera angle trickery. I think the entire set was smaller than the average high school stage, not more than 40 feet wide. There were two cameras taping him, along with one boom camera; those were all that I noticed, at least. There are also two television sets mounted on top of the set, so you can see what is being recorded, complete with the news story and picture-in-picture effects.

A comedian came out first to warm up the audience. He was actually funny; Paul Mecurio. I wouldn't mind seeing his full act at a comedy club. He even managed to find an unemployed pedicab driver a date in the audience...but I guess you had to be there to see the humor in that.

Then came THE STEPHEN. He actually started off by letting the audience ask questions before he "got into character," drawing a distinction between the Stephen Colbert of onscreen and the Stephen Colbert of the stage persona. They sounded a bit alike, but you can tell when he's breaking character. He avoided getting too personal, though; I think he was acting as a second warm-up to the audience, winding us up so he could feed off the energy for his own performance. And he was a funny guy, both as Stephen Colbert and Stephen Colbert.

One neat thing they do is overlay graphics on the fly. When he's pointing to an image hovering over his shoulder, it's already there. As in, we can see it on the TV above the set, and he can no doubt see it on a monitor; I was suprised it's not added in post production.

His comedy bits are already mostly pre-assembled. When he does his on-comera bit then the home audience sees a cut to a clip, he really does pause and we (the audience) see the clip play. The stage manager then does a quick countdown to let Stephen know when the camera will "go live" again, and Stephen steels himself and poses for the camera to cut back to him. During the time camera cut away; Stephen will grab a drink from under the desk and stash the mug away just as the clip ends and he's live again.

No NASCAR race is complete without crashes, and no studio taping is complete without flubs. Stephen had a couple errors during the recording. One of them I'll have to see what it looks like...at one point he has to sign agreements because he's being racist, and the lawyers keep coming in to warn him. When the woman steps up, Colbert flubbed a line with the word "hormonal" (or a variant of the word.) Instead of reshooting that scene, he just looped the word "hormonal."

It was good to see him flubbing a line. Watching the entertainment product, it all seems so fluid and perfect, but here you see the manufacturing of the product, humanizing the process. For someone with an old background in theater this was quite fascinating!

The show was taped from about 7:15 until 8:00. The crew will then stitch everything together and iron out the rough parts in time for the show to air around 11:30, which I thought was an amazingly tight schedule.

The taping ended and I was taken backstage where I walked three feet from Stephen Colbert! He was engaged in conversation with someone, so I couldn't bring myself to interrupt.

We slipped into the green room, which was in reality slightly larger than a walk-in closet, but had a monitor mounted on the wall and some comfortable seats. Jimmy Wales was in the room with a painter friend I had met earlier while waiting in the conference room. All the guests were standing around, and Jimmy stood and began introducing himself.

I extended my hand. "I'm Bart, with Stack Exchange," I said. "I wanted to thank you for the opportu-"
Before I finished, he was already talking to someone else. After a few moments, Sara turned to me and asked if I had my headphones.

"Yes, I have them right here," I said, holding them up.

She then asked if she could show me out. Which was understandable; I am not a well-known name, and these people were staff members or friends. I was Charlie Bucket. Only I doubt Stephen would ever offer me a spot at the Colbert news desk.

I wanted to ask if I could get a picture of Stephen Colbert, as I was so close to him...just a few more moments and he might have completed his conversation, giving a lull through which I could force myself to engage in some interaction with one of my heroes.

But no.

I was kind of ushered out through the exit and onto the sidewalk. Perhaps I should have been more forceful. I should have shown more...moxie. Is that the word? Had the guts to interrupt Stephen Colbert outside the green room, and ask if I could take his picture? That is probably the only chance I'd ever get.

I sighed, messaged my wife that the taping was over, and was at least happy that I had a couple of pictures from the conference room of the Colbert Report offices, which most of the audience would never see. I was offered drink from their kitchen. I almost used the bathroom near the kitchen, just to say I did that..."I flushed Stephen Colbert's toilet." I'd write that in my Christmas cards.

Then I walked back to the apartment.

As I headed up fifth ave, inwardly lamenting that my new sneakers weren't broken in well yet and were now squeezing the hell out of my feet, I saw two people huddled on the sidewalk under a blanket. Like most New Yorkers, I have grown pretty used to ignoring the homeless at this point. If you engage them, you risk being robbed, or taken advantage of, or perhaps followed and harassed. The city can have a certain dehumanizing effect that way.

This couple had a sign that I glanced at as I passed. Cardboard, with big markered letters, saying they were travelers that were hungry and had no money or family.

It's possible they're scammers, or just posing as homeless. But I had a good night, and felt really thankful for my employers generosity in letting me attend the taping. Maybe I also inhaled a few too many vapors from passing cars as I trekked across the island. I had traveled long enough that my feet were begging me to just get to the apartment so I could take the shoes off and let my feet breathe.

I stopped at a vendor in front of the Apple Store. "How much are the pretzels?"
"Two. Two dollars."
"Give me two then," I said.

The vendor bagged them up; I gave him a five, he gave me a buck and the bag. Then I walked back to the couple. They nodded a greeting when I stopped in front of them; I handed the brown bag to the young man, nodded, and turned away. Despite my earphones I could hear them say something about blessings and thanking me as I walked away.

I didn't really need that. Not that time. I had my thanks in the form of a good night from my employer, and all I wanted to do was try to improve someone else's night a little as well. Maybe it wasn't much, but that's gotta count for something, right?

Social Media Circlejerks

Social media is a funny thing. The name implies that it is supposed to be "social," a term that means, according to an online dictionary:

1. pertaining to, devoted to, or characterized by friendly companionship or relations: a social club.

2. seeking or enjoying the companionship of others; friendly; sociable; gregarious.

3. of, pertaining to, connected with, or suited to polite or fashionable society: a social event.

4. living or disposed to live in companionship with others or in a community, rather than in isolation: People are social beings.

It would seem the term "social" implies interaction with others; a connection to people. "Media" means:

( usually used with a plural verb  ) the means of communication, as radio and television, newspapers, and magazines, that reach or influence people widely: The media are covering the speech tonight.

Together this would imply social media is a way for people to communicate with people.

Indeed, the ever-educational Wikipedia sums up "Social Media" as:
...the means of interactions among people in which they create, share, exchange and comment contents among themselves in virtual communities and networks.

The problem seems to come when people get involved. By definition, this means social media is going to have problems. I'm still not entirely sure whether people cause the problems or are the problems.

I used one of the most popular social media sites all the time. Perhaps you've heard of it. "FaceBook."

It was interesting; you could "reconnect" with people from school. You could see both of the people who broke from their high school stereotypes and the people who had married and find time to post pictures of their kids.

People would sometimes post things that were relevant to their lives; observations about their day, and links to news stories they thought were interesting or funny.

In fact, much of my news feed became little more than an aggregator of witty pictures.

Yes. An actual capture of my FaceBook timeline.

So. Many. Pictures.

But the dragon really reared its head when events of note were making the rounds in the media. Mass shootings meant anyone with an opinion about gun control had to broadcast his or her wisdom. Presidential election inevitably led to virtual penis-measuring to show whose candidate was the bigger antichrist campaigning to destroy America; if you go back and look at postings about the elections, you rarely saw anything extolling the virtues of a candidate so much as the reason the other guy was Satan in disguise.

Okay. So people like to cling to ideas that were sometimes a little left of even keel. But sometimes, once in awhile, dear Auntie May would post something that was just too ludicrous to believe it wasn't a joke.

This, my friend...this is the true hazard of online social media.

I've had several occasions now where I would see something of such questionable reasoning that my brain would twitch. The gray matter completely lacking any form of muscle would actually momentarily seize up, causing my stream of thought to shiver out of alignment.

I would then make the mistake of commenting on what must be a cognitive error on the part of the original poster. Surely a link to actual facts, or pointing out their fallacious reasoning, will lead them to thank me for keeping them from continuing to look like a moron in front of the Internet audience.

I'd be wrong.

I've been told I'm a self-righteous know-it-all because I asked a question. I've been told, "I'm not going to debate religion with you!" when what I said had nothing to do with religion (which left me scratching my head for a few moments...) I've had people go off in insane, irrelevant justification for their statement that actually had nothing to do with their statement.

But usually I'd see <unfriended>

This is when I began to understand something fundamental to people's psyches on the Internet.

I have this annoying habit of trying to relate to people using my own Aspergian traits. I tended to focus on information; sifting through the wrong lines of thought in order to pull out the right. I value finding "right" and eliminating poor reasoning using facts.

Other people apparently don't do this.

 More to the point, they don't want to find reason. They're not interested in other perspectives; many people prefer to wallow in ignorance. Of course they don't see it this way, but it's the consequence of what they really use social media for; a circlejerk.

 If you aren't agreeing with the other person's idea, the tendency I've found is to simply shut you down. No discussion. No rationale. Just block you. Because you had the nerve not to share in their idea.

I'm not entirely sure why this is; I do know that the repercussions can be sad. These people whittle away anyone who challenges them to think or justify their ideas, leaving them with only a bubble of like-minded bobbleheads to validate their ideas. Fortunately in social media circles this usually results in you just becoming a bigger jerk who has a firm grasp on what you believe is true; in some positions, surrounding yourself with yes-men who don't question your ideas can have actual negative consequences.

Perhaps this is simply a side effect of the kind of people I've friended on FaceBook at some point. Maybe there are plenty of people who are simply quiet, and I've managed to notice, or focus on, the people who are particularly loud and repetitive in stating irrational crap. I'm not entirely sure.

In the end, perhaps this is just another part of human interaction that I have trouble understanding. people tend not to seek truth, but rather come to a conclusion and find others to validate that position. They "win" by silencing those who question the conclusion.

Me, I don't block people out. There are people that spout off and make me bristle; other times I just get depressed to see fallacies and outright misinformation being spread. But rather than take offense, I use it to remind me of what the general masses of people are often like.

Depressing.

Pointing out fallacies in reasoning will most likely accomplish little.

So I don't say much of anything.

Now most of my "unfriends" come from people who get offended just by me expressing my own ideas (note: this seems most effective when using phrases like "magic sky wizard") rather than pointing out to someone why using a bit of reasoning they are wrong or misinformed.

Heck, I don't even bother reading most posts now. I just spout off whatever mental diarrhea is sloshing in my head at the time and wait for the next nugget of wisdom is ready to benefit my legion of followers. I've come to accept that they're often wrong, but won't listen to anything that suggests they might be wrong in the slightest.

Hmm...is it still social media when you ignore what others have to say, while simultaneously expecting everyone to read what you think is important? Is there such a thing as narcissist media? Or is that what social media really is?

I suppose "social media" has a better ring to it than "validate meeeee-dia."