Archive for July, 2007
One year of eMusic
I signed up last year for an eMusic subscription. Actually, it was through a promotion I found in Paste Magazine…something like 50 free tracks as a test of the service. One year later and I have downloaded music from 76 artists, nearing 800 individual tracks. I don’t think I have ever consumed so much music, not even during my angst ridden teen years. The result?
- In addition to the rest of my music collection, I now have 3429 track representing 13.54 GB of music in iTunes
- I am much more aware of newer music trends across an array of genres
- Sometimes I find myself consuming to consume…mostly due to eMusic’s subscription model and my desire to get what I paid for
- I had the realization that I really dig DRM free music
- I wish that Last.FM worked with eMusic because the former is a much better tool for getting music recommendations than the latter
Here is the list of artists and albums I have become acquainted with over the past year (if we ever share a wifi connection, give these things a listen):
A Girl Named Eddy – A Girl Named Eddy
Andrew Bird – Listen – Armchair Apocrypha
Archer Prewitt – Archer Prewitt Live at Schubas 08/14/2004
Bad Religion – Suffer
Badly Drawn Boy – Hour of Bewilderbeast
Bebel Gilberto – Bebel Gilberto
Belle and Sebastian – The Life Pursuit
Big Ass Truck – Who Let You In Here?
Bob Marley and the Wailers – Capital Records Rehearsal 1973
Broken Social Scene – Broken Social Scene
Broken Social Scene – Live at Radio Aligre FM in Paris
Califone – Roots & Crowns
Camera Obscura – Let’s Get Out of This Country
Cat Power – The Greatest
Charles Mingus – Charles Mingus Presents Charles Mingus
Cold Play – Brothers and Sisters
Colin Hay – Man @ Work
Creedence Clearwater Revival – Chronicle Volume One
Damien Jurado – On My Way To Absence
Dogs Die In Hot Cars – Please Describe Yourself
Eels – Blinking Lights And Other Revelations
Field Music – Tones Of Town
Gomez – How We Operate
Half-Handed Cloud – Thy Is A Word And Feet Need Lamps
Iron And Wine / Calexico – In The Reins
Ivy – Guestroom
Joe Strummer and the Mescaleros – Global A Go-Go
John Coltrane – Lush Life (Remastered)
John Coltrane – Fearless Leader
Johnny Cash – The Complete Sun Singles, vol. 1
Josh Ritter – The Animal Years
Marian McPartland / Elvis Costello – Piano Jazz
Mates Of State – Team Boo
Mike Doughty – Haughty Melodic
Miles Davis Quintet – Relaxin’ With The Miles Davis Quintet (Remastered)
Moby – Hotel
Modern Skirts – Catalogue of Generous Men
Modest Mouse – The Fruit That Ate Itself
Moonbabies – Moonbabies At The Ballroom
My Morning Jacket – The Tennessee Fire
Nancy Sinatra – Boots
Neko Case – Fox Confessor Brings the Flood
Neko Case – Blacklisted
Neutral Milk Hotel – In The Aeroplane, Over The Sea
Ornette Coleman – The Music Of Ornette Coleman: Something Else!!!
Panda Bear – Person Pitch
Patty Griffin – 1000 Kisses
Robbie Fulks – Georgia Hard
Ryan Adams – Heartbreaker
Sergio Mendes – Timeless
Spoon – Gimme Fiction
Spoon – Telephono/Soft Effects
Spoon – Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga
Spoon – Sister Jack
Stephen Malkmus – Face The Truth
Sufjan Stevens – Illinoise
Sufjan Stevens – Greetings From Michigan: The Great Lakes State
Sufjan Stevens – Songs For Christmas
Sun Kil Moon – Tiny Cities
The Broken West – I Can’t Go On I’ll Go On
The Chameleons – Live at The Academy Vol. 2
The Clientele – Strange Geometry
The Decemberists – Picaresque
The Kinks – Come Dancing With The Kinks
The Mountain Goats – The sunset Tree
The New Pornographers – Twin Cinema
The Pixies – Surfer Rosa / Come On Pilgrim
The Raconteurs – Broken Boy Soldiers
The Rakes – Ten New Messages
The Twilight Singers – She Loves You
The White Stripes – White Blood Cells
The White Stripes – Get Behind Me Satan
The White Stripes – Elephant
Thelonious Monk – Riverside Profiles
Thievery Corporation – The Mirror Conspiracy
TV On The Radio – Desperate Youth, Blood Thirsty Babes
Ursula 1000 – Kinda’ Kinky
Dressed In Black: A Tribute To Johnny Cash
The Late Great Daniel Johnston: Discovered Covered (Disc 1 : The Covers)
Independent Music Awards Winners 2007
Monterey International Pop Festival
Tony Hawk’s American Wasteland Soundtrack
Voxtrot – Raised By Wolves EP
Voxtrot – Your Biggest Fan
Voxtrot – Mothers, Sisters, Daughters & Wives
Yo La Tengo – I Am Not Afraid Of You And I Will Beat Your Ass
Zuco 103 – Tales Of High Fever
PIKAPIKA
Check it out. The works of Takeshi Nagata and Kazue Monno who create animations out of long-exposure photographs.
Catching up on TEDTalks
I have been negligent of late in spreading the good words coming from TED. Here are the latest TEDTalks that have been made public.
Jonathan Harris shows some really amazing user interfaces with “We Feel Fine” and “Yahoo! Time Capsule.”
Economist Emily Oster discussing the impact of investing in ones own health and AID in Africa.
Will Wright gives a preview to his newest game, Spore.
Rives explores the apparent conspiracy around 4am.
And David Bolinsky beautifully illustrates the life of a cell.
Follow the links here or watch them on my VodPod @ appliedthinking.
The press to personal privacy
From my friends at TechCrunch:
Identity Protection System (IDPS)
Privacy is becoming a hot button issue, with the heat lamp currently shining on search engines. IDPS goes after another rapidly growing encroachment on personal privacy, video broadcasting. Current technology requires editing out people who don’t want to show up on film. IDPS does this editing on the fly by blocking out the bodies of people wearing a specially colored green sticker.
The sticker, or any other unique feature spotted by computer vision, could be placed on shirts and jewelry, opting the wearer out of being filmed.
And from We Make Money Not Art:
“With the IDPS project I wanted to sparkle debate about all the issues related to identity privacy,” explains [interaction designer Miquel Mora]. “Make people think about how our society has become a complete surveillance machine. Our identities have already been stored as data in many servers ready to be tracked. And our self image is our last resort. So we really need tools to protect our privacy. We need tools that can allow us to hide or reveal our visual image. We must have the control over it.”
I think this is some kind of brilliant, but wonder what kind of new social behaviors it will spawn. Will the green stickers be translated to mean that you are a person with deep philosophies on privacy or that you simply don’t want to be incriminated for an evening’s worth of debauchery?
Russia renews adoption agencies licenses
Good news: Last week our adoption agency informed us that Russia had re-accredited the agencies in country that they work with. And apparently others are on the way:
Russia renews adoption agencies licenses – USATODAY.com
Russia has reopened its doors to Americans who want to adopt children, re-accrediting seven adoption agencies based in the USA.Licenses granted in the past two weeks will enable the agencies to resume helping Americans adopt from among the 700,000 Russian children in orphanages, says Lee Allen, spokesman for the private National Council For Adoption.
Although we are currently awaiting for our dossier to be reviewed in Russia, we are hopeful that the process will start to move for us. More to come as things progress.
Simple messages: Live Earth
I’m not exactly sure what to make of the Live Earth event held over the weekend. The general purpose of the event seemed positive enough: “Live Earth will use the global reach of music to engage people on a mass scale to combat our climate crisis.” With 2 billion people targeted to attend from around the globe, even the slightest impact could be huge. However, I’m was a little disappointed when I read this comment from The Inspired Protagonist:
I struggled all day to come to terms of the meaning of the 50,000
people around me who mostly heard music interspersed with a very simple
message, change your light bulbs.
That’s it ? Couldn’t there have been more to it than that? Granted, 2 billion people changing their light bulbs could perhaps have a phenomenal effect. And maybe that was part of the point. A deeper message did not need to be overplayed because the call to action would have been lost in rhetoric. Change your light bulbs, make a difference. Simple enough.
