There isn’t an easier way to get into customized, streaming radio than to fire up Pandora. You literally only have to type in the name of a song or band, and it’s off and running. You tell it what you like and don’t, and it gets better at playing stuff more like what you like.
Their FAQ does a nice job of getting most users started, but here’s what I’ve been able to figure out by using it a lot:
You can create lots of stations, and you should. I’m into a ton of different genres, pretty much by mood, and so I have a few stations with my favorite two or three bands in that genre. This will help you discover more bands like those bands, and you can expand each station that way.
A couple of my more genre-hopping favorite artists (Ween, Pixies, etc.) have really bad stations to start with. From what I can tell, it’s dividing the whole Ween songbook up, and finding similar songs to each, and playing those. The Pixies station pretty much plays a lot of acoustic-guitar-driven early-90s sounding crap, with some very weird oddball choices thrown in. I’ve had much better luck adding my three or four favorite songs for each artist, and then encouraging Pandora when it starts down the right path.
The other thing the algorithm can’t figure out: attitude. Finding a hundred songs like “The Statue Got Me High” is fairly easy (punchy guitars, electric rock instrumentation, go). There’s no computer algorithm for “literary” or “clever”, so the closest you might get is Blind Melon. I try not to confuse it by getting too pushy with the button: if it’s way off, you’re probably better off tuning the original tracks or artists, not telling it “I hate this, I hate this, I hate this”. (It does have plenty of late-90s Default / Fuel / Nickelback in store for you, no matter what, so feel free to “no no no” that.)
The first few stations I created were truly attempts at capturing every existing interest, passion or investment I’d ever made into music. There is, however, no reason you couldn’t start a station for a band you were only interested in finding out more about. I own no Pretenders, but there’s no receipt check at Pandora, so I said they were one of my favorite artists, and the station it put together is pretty nice.
Don’t be afraid of the “why did you play this?” button: it explains a lot about the brilliant (and idiotic) algorithm behind everything.
Oh, and rename all your stations. There’s nothing worse than setting up a station for Beloved Artist, having it called Beloved Artist Radio, and being reminded constantly that they are playing music you do not love as much as you love Beloved Artist.
If Firefox has a killer feature for hardcore web users*, it’s middle-clicking to get a new tab. On one hand, it’s a performance booster: if I see a link in the middle of a page that I’d like to visit, I middle-click it, sending it to the background, and when I’m done with the page (even a few seconds later), the clicked link is already loaded. This takes load time from 1-5 seconds down to actually, literally, nothing, and with nothing fancy on the optimization or network end: just a small change in my workflow.
On the other hand, though, it’s about much more than optimization. Sending middle clicked links to the background is a new paradigm in browsing: if a page offers, say, three links you’d like to click, you used to have to either a.) click the first, remember that you wanted to click back, and do so for each link, or b.) load each link in a new browser window, which I suppose some of you probably do. Tabbed browsing offers a huge advantage: clicking links on things you might only be curious in, and sending them to the background, you can review them without interrupting what you’re doing, and queue up several paths of exploration simultaneously.
I only bring this up because I hear that Firefox is changing the way tabs are closed: instead of one “close this tab” X in the upper right, there will be one on each individual tab. I don’t want to rush to judgement (particularly if this is an option, and it can be turned off), but I can’t imagine anything more disruptive to my way of working with Firefox. Flock had this, and I couldn’t even stand it long enough to see if the other features were worth my time (although, probably, they weren’t). When my attention tells me “okay, I’m done with this page”, there’s nothing more satifying than sending it away with a click of the X and seeing what else I’ve got queued under that tab. With Flock, my attention told me “okay, time to close this page” and then I had to determine which of the nine X icons I needed to click to get what I wanted.
Putting an X on every tab means that it’s back to me to determine what’s open and how to close it. It’s a tiny bit more burdensome to open a tab now, since there’s a tiny brain tax I have to pay to finish it off. The tab I’m on is suddenly something I have to keep track of, instead of something I can ignore. (Tab position is occasionally important to me, if I accidentally have two tabs open, and I’m trying to Alt-Tab between them, and I realize I have to Ctrl-Tab, and I give up and start indicating my choices with clicks. Otherwise, I’m not paying a lot of attention to the tab set I have open.)
It’s not that I don’t understand the usability problems posed by the single X. It doesn’t really indicate what it’s going to do when it’s clicked, and it’s certainly easy (before you “get it”) to close the browser, killing 10 tabs when you only meant to close one. But presenting 10 X icons for 10 tabs does not simplify the choices a novice user has to make to get handy with tabs. It’s intimidating.
How will I handle it if it’s the default in the next Firefox, and I can’t turn it off? I might adapt by using fewer tabs, or moving my tabs around so I’m more frequently wanting to click in a consistent spot (hmm, I’ll be reading this tab for a while, better move it all the way left so it’s ready for closing when I’m done)… at the same time, there is probably a keyboard shortcut for “close the tab I am currently looking at”, and that might suit my needs, as well.
For the time being… ugh. I wish they wouldn’t change it.
* The most important innovation of Firefox is probably the plugin architecture: any number of things are well done in Firefox, but if they aren’t, someone’s probably written code that snaps in, automatically, and does it better. And note that I only consider tabbed browsing a killer feature for information / interaction junkies like myself: I truly think about 80% of IE users don’t need anything more than IE.
Here, let’s just see if this works. (Ideally, there will be a little triangle next to the link below, which will play the track in your browser, ta da.)
Which reminds me, four complete Guns N’ Roses demo tracks came out in the past few weeks, and I’ve been listening to them a lot. Overall, the sound is a little more future-oriented, but not necessarily experimental. I’ve read some people say that Axl sounds really strong on these tracks, and his voice is excellent here: maybe having thirteen years in the studio to perfect it makes a difference, I don’t know. The guitar work has been laid down by any number of different guys: I’ve read that Catcher in the Rye features Brian May (and it certainly sounds like it), and the very thrashy 128th note parts are probably by ex-guitarist Buckethead, but there is some other lead work that could be pretty much anyone else.
Better - Starting with a little manipulated keyboard loop and some distorted drums, Axl comes in with a falsetto, maybe something like Estranged. But then the real rock kicks in, and we’ve got a real driving rhythm, and some interesting chords popping underneath a pretty wide-open (and extremely catchy) melody. The chorus builds to a nice peak: all the parts really fit. The breakdowns in the middle are a little too techno-thrashy for me: I know exactly what he’s going for, but it might be overdone, or maybe even a little outdated. It’s very busy, anyway. We go back to the chorus for a second, and then it’s time for another guitar solo. This is my favorite track of the demos, maybe because it’s so varied within itself: lots of interesting parts, and none of them go on too long.
I.R.S. - Don’t take this the wrong way, but there’s another distorted drum machine loop in the intro of this one. I love that effect, in truth: it’s kind of a techno / hip-hop way to introduce some elements before coming in with the real impact of the song, but it’s an effect that was overdone five years ago. This song has a sort of a swagger, but it moves kind of slowly. There’s so many words in this song, too, and I’m not sure why. It’s about a relationship gone wrong, again, except this time Axl is calling for government help. The break here comes kind of late, and it’s got fairly brief Slash-esque soloing. Almost a typical rock song: this will fit into hard rock radio no problem (but might have problems standing out).
There Was a Time - Would you be mad if I pointed out a plinky piano loop and a distorted drum machine in the intro? No? Okay. How about if I mentioned that this was about love gone wrong? Not a problem? Great. The verses of this song might suggest “Yesterdays” or “Civil War”, and the string section in the background certainly add to the epic feel. The break is pretty extended, with three sections to the guitar solo, while it builds back slowly into the groove again. At the very end, we get some Buckethead technique, but the song is six minutes old by that point, and hasn’t done much more than chant “there was a time, didn’t want to know it all” off and on for three minutes. Could be tighter, but won’t have a problem breaking through.
Catcher in the Rye - the last of these tracks to leak out, and my least favorite by a long shot. The guitar work is clearly Brian May, and even some of the melodic touches are Queen-esque. Add in a Cheap Trick-sounding guitar line and some Elton John-like piano work, and you’ve got a song that wouldn’t be out of place on 70’s AM radio. Which is fine, I guess, but the chorus seems unfinished, and the lyrics are sort of “they all say I’m crazy”, except they don’t come together enough to convince anyone that Axl isn’t actually crazy. This is perhaps the least ambitious of the demo tracks, but there’s still enough that I could see it working as a single or with a crazy video. (The demo ends kind of abruptly at 5:38, after a fade, so there could be more later that might change my mind.)
As a group of four tracks, these work really well together. One interesting thing: none of these songs was performed live (at least to my knowledge: four others, “Chinese Democracy”, “Madagascar”, “The Blues”, and “Rhiad and the Bedouins” were played, and “Silkworms”, but that was mentioned as unlikely to make the record by band members), but the titles are among the ones that were mentioned in 1999 or 2000, so these might be very new or very old tracks. Their complexity might be one of the reasons that they were kept under wraps during the 2002 tour, but the fact that these tracks weren’t been previewed anywhere else might lead some to believe that they were selected by the band / management to maximize the impact of the leak. I guess we won’t know until summer, or fall, or winter, or maybe 2007…
I am monkeying around with WordPress and found that it didn’t really like doing javascript or object embedding in a post. So while I try to figure it out, watch some Transformers.
I try out a lot of applications, and there are a bunch that I use all the time to make my computer life easier. Some stand out more than others, but one that I’ve been using for about a year, almost without thinking about it, is FolderShare. You point FolderShare to a folder you’d like to keep synced up on multiple machines, and if FolderShare is installed on those machines, it just does it. It’s incredible.
(I should point out that a lot of solutions like this ask you to install an additional drive, or use some software to emulate a disk that you can write to, and the data’s actually sent to a central server. FolderShare just gets pointed at a folder you already have, and as far as I can tell, no extra copies are made on any other servers, just the peers you tell it to sync to. So that’s a level of complexity you don’t have to concern yourself with.)
I started out thinking that this would be a great way to use one installation of Firefox on my home PC, work PC, and laptop, but if you forget to shut down Firefox on one, you can’t use it on the others, because of the way it locks up files that are in use. (That’s one case in which it does not “just work”: if you’re trying to delete a file that’s in use on another machine, it can get confused, but mostly it elegantly avoids doing anything that might cause problems. That’s okay.)
I was able to get one copy of Miranda into a shared folder, but it’s got similar issues, so I scrapped that.
PWSafe, my favorite password storing app, works perfectly. I now have pretty much random passwords for most of my important logins, and the file where I keep them follows me around. (I think if you made changes to a safe, and didn’t close the app, and tried to run it somewhere else, you might get issues, but I try to shut that program down pretty quickly.)
It is technically a file sharing app, and that’s what it does best. I have an mp3 directory in my shared directory, and I stash my downloads there, whichever machine I’m on, so I can process them later on my main machine with iTunes. (They try to tell you that you could keep your whole MP3 collection in there, but I’m not sure how well that would work.)
I also have synced up a couple of my poker log directories, so hands I play on the laptop still get processed by PokerTracker. Pretty handy.
I suppose the killer thing to do with it would be backup of documents, photos or mp3s, where, even if you have no intent of ever using the files on another machine, at least there’s another hard drive in the world that this content is stored on, just in case. (Although, in my experience, most data loss is a result of human error, and FolderShare will happily distribute the damage you do to your filesystem across all the other versions of it.)
I don’t even think about it anymore. If I will want a file on my laptop, workstation, or home PC the next time I sit down with it, I just store it in my shared directory. It’s way more elegant than mailing stuff to yourself (no matter how great Gmail is), and it just works. (Have I mentioned it just works?)
I can’t tell you how disappointing it is to read in Wikipedia’s article about what Podsafe means that podcasters are still slavishly following Adam Curry’s lead.
Adam Curry’s effective status as the advocate, role model, and protector of all podcasters led numerous other podcasters to bend the rules in the same ways, using the same arguments.
Despite this, he regularly commented on DSC that, if it is really important for a show not to break any rules, a podcaster should not do the same thing. (To this end, Curry had also advocated the development and use of what is now known as podsafe music, and his production company PodShow created a new site called the Podsafe Music Network.)
Finally, after ages of debate on the subject with industry professionals and members of European parliament, as well as multiple complaints from Dutch music services about violations, Curry decided he’d hit a dead end and that any negotiation in progress with music licensors was futile. This was the reason he gave on 2005 November 7 for committing his show to henceforth being entirely podsafe.
The implications of this move, including the future exclusion of staple segments such as Hit Test, Backtracks, and the regular mashuptown.com tracks, reached further than his own show. Immediately, or soon afterward, all shows on PodShow began to use only podsafe music, if they didn’t already, and a large number of other podcasters followed suit, either in fear that they could no longer get away with what Adam couldn’t, or in simple support of Adam’s decision and of podsafe music.
Umm, are you serious? Adam Curry is the protector of all podcasters? (Wait, are we sure he didn’t write this himself? Nevermind.) It’s just miserable (if this is in fact the case) that two years into the culture, everything having been written up by NYT and adopted by Apple and appropriated by corporation, this is still the public face of podcasting. Yuck.
I was telling Thad yesterday that Project Rockstar, a game where you manage the music careers of bands you create and staff, has me thinking about working creatively, perhaps in music or podcasting, again. But podcasting for me was fun because I threw licensing caution to the wind, something that I knew was semi-sort-of-wrong, as much as I understood it, or wanted to. So research on podsafe music leads to an article which declares Adam Curry as my default legal and moral guide, and then to a company which recommends and licenses podsafe music: a company run by Adam Fucking Curry. There’s no getting away from this guy.
The thing about all this is that, in the year and a half since I played around with the medium, BMI and ASCAP have both put together dirt-cheap licenses ($300 minimum, with a very small percentage of revenue most podcasts will never generate) that podcasters can use to play anything from the almost-infinite playlists that those two groups represent. The best podcast ever, Coverville, has deals with both, and I imagine that the $300+2.5% or whatever isn’t keeping that guy up at night.
What if my podcast only played the thirty-second snippets from the iTunes Music Store? Would that be legal? Would that be interesting to listen to?
So, given that Christie had work (and at least $50 in un-backed-up iTunes music) on the hard drive, acknowledging (or even jumping to the conclusion) that the computer might be dead, dead-dead, unbootable from a CD or anything else-dead… was kind of sobering. I didn’t have another computer I could put her drive in, and expect it to boot. (I no longer open the machine Cratchit sold me: I’ve already nuked the BIOS and started one fire in there, and so all involved agree that it works fine the way it is.)
I thought it might be worth a shot to buy a USB hard drive enclosure, although I was pretty sure that Windows would identify it as a Windows drive that it didn’t have permissions on, and I’d have to maybe boot into one of those Linux CD systems that gleefully ignores NTFS permissions. If that happened, hey, I’d still have that hard drive enclosure, and I have a spare drive, so bonus toys for me. (Never call a hard drive enclosure a toy in front of Adam and Becky, by the way: they were markedly disappointed.)
But I digress. Best Buy was all out of their $45 enclosures, but Circuit City had plenty of $35 ones, so Best Buy just lost a customer for life. (Okay, 12 hours at least.)
The surgery was painless, and Windows did recognize the files on the drive. I tried to open C:\Documents and Settings\Christie, and boom… it said “Access is denied”. I googled around, and discovered that while Windows will respect the permissions that are already on there, it won’t prevent any admin from changing the permissions of any system. So I can’t see it, but I can change the rule that says I can’t. That makes no sense to me, but after 45 seconds Christie’s data was available to me.
I created a new profile for Christie, and copied all her data over. Yay.
My laptop looks a little loney on her desk, and attaching it to a USB hard drive, her desktop sound system, and an iPod nano doesn’t make it seem any happier. But it’s a solution that works for now.
The Tubbsitron KA, a computer I built with my own hands, and the machine I replaced just last year at this time, appears to be catatonic. I gave it to Christie about six months ago, set her up with some speakers, loaded iTunes, put a photo of the Minnesota State Fair up as the wallpaper… good to go. (In a house with four computers, it didn’t seem fair that she couldn’t have a little desk with one, for word processing or surfing or whatever.)
But, as she has reported, it went quiet on Wednesday, and didn’t want to wake up. I immediately thought of the $50 I just gave her to spend at the iTunes Music Store, and how they’re unsympathetic if you spend $50 and don’t back up your files before a hard drive crash eats them. (I haven’t backed up my files in about three months, but I do at least back up the ones I paid for… if that’s not too incriminating.)
When you turn it on, it beeps. That’s never good. The beep code persisted even when the hard drive was removed. (I was so happy that the hard drive was not the problem.) That beep code (long-short-short, or 1-2) indicates video problems (but all beep codes indicate video problems in one way or another: if the video was okay, it would write the error code to the screen). I swapped out the video card: no luck. I removed all the memory and reseated it. Same code.
Now, I’ve noticed that the video card that was in there (a 4x AGP beast that Christie in no way needs for the Battlefield 1942 she doesn’t play) was not getting enough power to run the fan, but the replacement (an older AGP burner that Christie in no way needs for the Max Payne she doesn’t play) did have its fan going. But neither card resolves the video issues. So: problem with the power supply, or problem with the AGP bus? Given infinite resources to get this machine back up and running, I suppose I would first swap out the power supply (just because it’s kind of making a funny sound, but I am getting very bad at telling where sounds are coming from these days), and then try to get another Gateway-branded six-year-old motherboard, so that the whole system could be transferred to the new motherboard, and I could spend the rest of my natural life chasing around those little screws and attaching case wires to jumpers I don’t understand.
Or, Christie could just borrow my laptop indefinitely.
I suppose if the Tubbsitron KA were the only computer in the house, I’d be a little more aggressive about repairing it, but I actually just got a USB hard drive enclosure from CompUSA and salvaged the data. (More on this later.) So, for the time being, that machine is pretty much dead, and Christie’s happily working on the laptop. Still, we’re down to only three computers in the house…
Okay, the game is to critique five random tracks from the iPod, with the specific instruction not to skip anything that’s uncool. Here we go:
Ludacris - “Hip Hop Quotables” - I gave this three stars at some point, just because the title suggests that he’s trying to be as funny as possible in a short space. I am not hearing a single line that made this track jump out at me, but Ludacris does make references to croquet and Hyundai, so that’s basically what you need to know about that.
India and Tito Puente - “What a Difference a Day Makes” - probably the only jazz album I know. I first heard this song in 1999 on the bus on the jazz and traffic information station. The first verse is in Spanish, and the whole thing is disorienting, stimulating, and over-the-top. I didn’t ask if it was okay to put on the CDs that played at our wedding reception: I just put it there. I still have my wedding-music playlist on my iPod, and I still play it occasionally.
They Might Be Giants - “(She Was A) Hotel Detective” - I still can’t imagine what John F. was going for when he wrote this song. I’ve been hating it now for 14 years. I was shocked to see the video as a teenager, since I definitely recognized having seen it years before, but remembered nothing about the song or the band. The sequel is definitely better: in my top twenty of TMBG all-time.
Jay-Z and Linkin Park - “Points of Authority / 99 Problems / One Step Closer” - I really like the fact that Jay lets Mike handle the first verse here, since it includes lines like “I don’t know what you take us (me) as, or understand the intelligence that Jay-Z has”, but my favorite is “if you grew up with holes in your zapatoes, you’d be celebrating the minute that you had some dough“. Two other things: the redo of this collaboration at the Grammys (swapping in “Yesterday”, featuring Sir Paul McCartney, for One Step Closer) was pretty hard to watch. Jay-Z yapping “yeah” and “that’s right” over actual Paul McCartney actually singing “Yesterday” made an uncomfortable moment into an unintentionally funny one, so I suppose I can thank him for that.
Mike Doughty - “Unsingable Name (live 2004)” - Is it just me, or did the overproduction of Haughty Melodic strip a lot of the charm from Mike Doughty? His stuff is naturally weird, and the new album seemed pretty square. He’s a very human and vulnerable writer, and too much production makes him sound extremely well-practiced, almost invincible. Either way, this is one of the better tracks on the album, and it’s great (better?) live.
You found the blog. Some people get here without coming through the front page - that's totally cool, I just wanted you to be aware that it's like a whole page full of sidebars and content you won't necessarily find here. So now you know.
