… just right
a few more artists that i’ve been digging recently :
some new albums worth mentioning:
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.
very cool socially driven site all about people’s beliefs
real nicely done, well worth checking out.
the postal service is going to happen
we’ve got our head developer on task (rule#1 no one’s working over the break)
and i’m looking forward to a launch well before spring break,
it’s gonna be great but it’ll need great content in order for it to be anything, so let’s do this.
anyone with input of any sort, particularly the creatives, should reach me or comment
we’re looking for almost any sort of static visual 2d artwork that’s good lookin’
witty comics, colourful doodles or drawings, digital artwork, photography, these are not limits but merely ideas
we’re open to anything and capable of just about anything 2d , 6″x9″
give me a ring [613/8844669 (mob), 613/4826341 (vonage), j77percent (on gizmo or skype)
or an email to postalservice [at] 77percent.com, j [at] 77percent.com on msn, j77percent on aim, jeevs77 on y!m]
been meaning to post on them
they’re a great sound out of the UK, made number one before they got signed by Domino (debut platform of franzferdinand and others).
if you’d like a copy of their album email me and i’ll get it to you
the same applies for the new strokes album, first impressions of earth
another awesome listen
speaking of which, the lead from the strokes endorsed arctic monkeys and he’s known to be rather picky to say the least. both are great melodic rock albums.
i’d describe the arctic monkeys as a mix between franz ferdinand and the strokes actually, a great sound that i’d really recommend if you like either.
testing the broadcastmachine at 77percent
(the arctic monkeys are NOT up)
another thing, if anyone wants an invite to newsvine (a very cool social news website) let me know and i’ll hook you up.
because i’ve decided the run wikib.org as my ‘project’ for IB/ITGS i’m going to be unavoidably investing way more time than i have in the past (because it’s success determines a portion of a portion of my diploma), so keep your eyes open and i’m also hoping this might spur some further investment on the parts of others not to say that everyone’s help has already been phenomenally Good.
unfortunately this might put the postal service / 96prints (i had wanted to use that name from the start but i thought it might be kind of cheap, but, now that i think about it, since it’s a completely different sort of entity it’d be more of a respect thing than stealing a name (much like [apple / applerecords(thebeatleslabel)] altho i might end up using it as the motto rather than the actual name,since we need to be able to achieve i’m-feeling-lucky status so we’ll have to have a unique name)) onto the back burner for longer than i’d like.
if you’re curious about 96prints~,the postal service and aren’t in the know (it’s ok not everyone is as cool as everyone else, that would defeat the whole point) you can give me a ring of some sort (ims and email count). if you need a hint, you might be particularly interested in the project if you have any/all of the following a) entrepreneurial zest/ambition b) artistic ability of any level that you enjoy c) programm-ability experience or ambition with either php or rubyonrails or even flash and/or ideally, but far from likely, some time on your hands
in other news i had some illness going on and off since thursday, but i’d say that i’m better now.
so i’m in canada, in need of active hours (we love you IB) and i like microbrews : hence curling this evening, should be hilarious.
another thing, billmonk.com went live, it’s a social billing service designed for settling IOUs and the like amoungst friends, very clever and well thought out design.
a little discussion with the civil netizen folk, in case you’re interested (probably not)
it’s all about social direct p2p file transfer, starts off with me just comparing them with pando with the goal of discovering what really made them different (besides the stated ideals behind the project), and now i’ve got it, straight from horse’s mouth. special indeed
So what makes Civil Netizen special? Well, for one we have spent a lot of time working on solving a very fundamental problem on the Internet. That is, computers behind the NAT (network address translation) of home routers have trouble connecting to each other directly. Even the BitTorrent protocol requires users behind NATs to map certain ports on the router to get decent speed (by avoiding relying on computers with open IPs). Techniques such as UPnP are less than universally supported and, unfortunately, not turned on by default on common router models. We believe we have come up with a NAT traversal solution that requires no end-user configuration.
With this first beta release, we have begun the first large-scale public testing of our custom networking stack, which chooses between a few known strategies that have been circulating in the peer-to-peer technology circles. So far the results we have collected on NAT-to-NAT connections have been promising. We believe that solving the NAT problem will enable a new class of Internet applications that does not rely on expensive, centralized web-based services. When combined with BitTorrent-style multi-source download strategies, the overall download speed and success rate would be much improved over the current generation of implementations, especially for torrents (or parcels in Civil-speak) with very few seeds and peers. Given the “long tail” nature of the Internet, serving the low seed/peers use case is particularly important.
~christopher of civil engines
well it turns out, i’ve had something wrong with my comments posting php
it’s been fixed and i’m thinking that the bug has been there since we upgraded to wordpress2.0 the comments never made it to the database ; so if i missed yours, i’m sorry and please do try again.
the story (read:rumour/unverified)
sometime ago , the Norwegian diplomat Charung Gollar was asked to make a
presentation at the UN focusing on the main problems affecting the world
(2004).
his presentation consisted of 8 slides and was titled “The Power of
Atars”; he was applauded for its simplicity.
in spite of having no pretension at all, his work has been selected to
participate for the Nobel Prize of Political Marketing.
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