do it.
(web-based voicemessage thing (from odeo, the best place for podcasting), give it a try if you’re bored.
Monthly Archive for February, 2006
there’s a secret sale on threadless ending this saturday
it’s not published anywhere on threadless.com but if you enter tenbucks87 as the coupon code on any order of at least three tees, they’ll each cost only $10
a few other codes also exist, supposedly
tenbucks20, tenbucks45, tenbucks34, tenbucks85
enjoy.
announcing the brand new spanking talking-place for wikib
at talk.wikib.org
if you ask me it’s pretty damn cool and well worth checking out
enjoy …
every one who signs up real soon will get one free favour from me
speaking of which, wikib is still storming along, we still haven’t reach our goal of 100% notes completion but we’re always making progress. It’s a great way of keeping all your notes together (and with the help of everyone else working on wikib) much easier than typing them up on your own, also perhaps more comprehensive (if you see something missing in someone’s writeup, you/anyone can easily add it). Everything on wikib is fulltextsearchable and crossreferenced (through use of wikilinks , ask), not to mention impossible to lose and superneat.
incentive: the most valuable contributor(s) on wikib will be awarded
a couple of threadless tees (plus anything else anyone wants to offer)
this offer goes out to any contributor anywhere so long as they’re contributing good quality notes on relevant IB courses, this is not a quantitative evaluation but rather a combination of quality/value/quantity.
also please note, this is not a desperate cry for help but rather an expression of appreciation for the hard work that goes into making wikib possible
thanks everyone and good luck
keep it classy,
~j.out
a few more artists that i’ve been digging recently :
- Animal Collective (british version of broken social scene)
- broken social scene (canadian chillout)
- the new pornographers (canadian indie rock at its finest)
- arctic monkeys (in case you haven’t heard, is thestrokes meets franzferdinand)
- Feist (kind of folksy female vocal jazz)
some new albums worth mentioning:
- the life pursuit by belle&sebastian
- Sing-A-Longs And Lullabies For The Film Curious George (by jack johnson)
- parliament funkadelic
yea, pandora’s great for discovering
and also just for quickly putting something on that you know you’ll probably like but also probably won’t be able to see coming … it’s just that it can be very limited by having such little information to go by, i’m very impressed with how accurately it can describe an artist, but firstly it’s dependent on the knowledge of musical professionals behind the music genome project which is great and all but limits it’s ability to find new artists and also potentially introduces bias (i.e it’s not as if they really listen to (for themselves) everything that they analyze (i’m not suggesting that they make up data, but rather that the music they analyze might not be the music they listen to personally)) .. i don’t really know where i’m going with this but i like how musical similarity/etc is determined by what people are listening. it seems awkward having someone analyze music that they don’t necessarily enjoy listening to.
i really apreciate last.fm’s collaborative-ness , in that first of all it has all of my music listening history to look at in comparison to a whole lot of other people’s listening habits to analyze .. i really appreciate collaborative filtering
i kind of like the idea of ‘
what people who like what you like tend to like‘ , because it’s not just a matter of what the most popular music out there is [i.e determined by radio stations (payola) or music professionals’ analysis) but rather the music that is being discovered/listenedto by people who have similar tendancies to you
i also really like having records of all the songs i listen to , it’s a very cool application of stats :it is enormously difficult to find a cool application for statistical analytics)
i like to think that music can really define a lot about a person and it’s nice to meet people through music (a lot of people have met (myself included) people they really get along with
at concerts /etc)
does anyone else know the decemberists ?
i heard some of their stuff a few days ago (on last.fm), and i’m really digging them
give them a listen, i’ll pando you some of their stuff if you’d like (just ask) although i’d really urge you purchase some merch (perhaps including a cd) from the artist if you appreciate them.
i’m thinking that we’re going to use 30boxes for sharing calendar information in wikib (homework and whatnot) .. it’s nice and cleanly designed, very simple and perfectly functional
if you’re looking around at these sorts of things, i would look at rememberthemilk.com (more of a powerful todo list with duedates+reminders) and spongecell.com (for a more calendar style system plus great natural-language querying and easy input from phones and email)
in other news gmail is going to soon have gtalk integrated into it, lookin good.
we’re still looking for artwork for 96postal, have a word with me sometime if you want to have something to do with the launch.
alright well in case you’ve never noticed, wikib is hosted by pbwiki.com (pb:peanut butter), now they’re an awesome bunch who’ve made it as easy and simple as is concievably possible to run your own wiki. i would highly recommend them anyday and now that they’ve offered to double my storage i will finally get around to it.
you can use your own wiki to store (publicly or privately) any form of structured data. wikib uses it for storing all of our (IB) notes for all our courses in a neat supercrossreferenced and searchable manner, it’s superamazingfantastic and i don’t know what we’d do without it.
be sure to check out their tour if you think you might want your own wiki (for personal or social/collaborative/group use) or if you’re just curious
in the past i avoided signing up for riffs because i was idealistically against the whole centralisation of opinions thing , but well i tried it out (and i’m hating that they’ve tagged me as having signing up in february when i’ve known them for many months now)
well anyways, riffs is a real nifty webservice for exchanging views on all sorts of stuffs/people/things , it’s real nicely put together and a cool opinion community : well worth checking out
and about personaldna they do the one and only personality-analysis quiz that i would ever recommend others spend their time with. it’s really well done and focuses on fundamentals of a person’s character, it’ll even translate their analysis into myers-briggs style code. so yea if you’re looking for a good way to quantitate your character, be sure to check it out.
also worth mentioning is spongecell, a very cool ajax-powered calendaring system which really excels in its ability to interpret natural-language queries and whatnot , also very slick sms/email based i/o
also see techcrunch’s profile.
