Comma, Please!

Is it just me? Every time I see this icon, all I see is a dude...

Tue, 12 May 2009 12:58:53 -0700

Is it just me? Every time I see this icon, all I see is a dude sitting on the toilet reading a newspaper. Maybe it’s the fact that his face is slightly obscured. Maybe if the bench looked like it was made out of wood it would be better. If you use this RSS icon on your blog, stop.

Embracing the Illegal

Wed, 06 May 2009 15:46:00 -0700

I set up a download for my friends this week. Two, actually. I created two links on a page on my own Web site. Clicking on each link downloads a folder of mp3 files of songs I’m listening to these days, which I think (and hope) my friends will enjoy. This is technically illegal, I think, but I don’t care anymore. I really like making mixes for my friends — and getting mixes from them, too. It’s one of the brightest parts of my life.

I’ve avoided setting up a direct download like this for years. Instead, I’ve used services like Pando to share large files because it was less efficient and so felt less wrong. I know that file-sharing is a touchy subject. I have strong feelings about it, and these feelings are often conflicting, but I’ve changed my mind about how I share music. Going forward, I’m going to try to share even more music with my friends, and I’m going to try and find an alternative way to “pay” for it when I do.

I buy tons of music. Some of the songs on the mixes I shared this week are non-DRM versions that I bought from iTunes just to include in these mixes. Some are from old CDs I purchased long ago. A few are from mixes other people have made for me. I bet a few are pirated or were shared with me by friends, but it’s hard to remember or identify them.

The Trio song on one of these CDs I made? I’ve purchased it four (4!) times: on LP (new), on cassette (used at record store), on CD (used at record store), and on iTunes (new). This is not an isolated case. I’ve done this repeatedly for other albums and songs. I purchased the French song that appears on one of these new mixes last year from iTunes and then had to purchase the upgraded version of it just so I could include it in these new mixes. Frankly, it was a pain putting these two mixes together for exactly this reason. Took me a long time. It would have been easier to just steal all of it. I’d be okay with paying someone a mix-only usage license, provided it was reasonable.

Every year, I make a mix of songs for my son’s birthday. I will continue to do this until he tells me to stop. Each year, I make about 20 copies of that CD to give to the kids who come to his birthday party. It’s a takeaway gift for them, and I make artwork for it and CD holders from recycled maps or what-have-you. The songs are a mix of kiddy songs and more adult-tolerable stuff. You have no idea how many parents (in addition to the kids) tell me that they love these CDs and listen to them in their cars all the time. I spend a lot of time trying to come up with the perfect mix for the kids’ age and also try to pick songs that the parents won’t burn out on over time. It’s been a huge success. One parent even asked me to make CD mixes to play (not burn and share) at their kid’s birthday party. Want to encourage an amateur DJ to spend six hours putting together French chansons and African ditties for free for your kids’ party? Just ask. Worked on me.

However — and I’ll be very honest about this — I am *not* going to buy 20 versions of that CD I made at full price. It’s just not reasonable.

So where does this leave me? The answers that are most appealing to me: 1) Give me a mix-only usage license, and 2) Allow me to pay artists directly for the music I purchase (or at least prove to me that a verifiable percentage of my purchase will go directly to the people who created the music). My friend Julie suggests another solution: Set subscription fees for all Internet-available content — newspapers, magazines, television, music, etc., and then trickle down the money to the artists.

Until these things happen (they probably won’t), I suppose I’ll need to pay in some other way. I guess I already pay in some way: The more people who download it, the more I’ll be charged by my hosting company. Perhaps I should create a new type of monetary penance whenever I share a mix. Any suggestions? What would make sense?

I weighed all of this in my mind before setting up this download for my friends. I kept coming to the conclusion that stifling my enthusiasm for sharing new music with my friends isn’t worth it. Being politically correct — or in this case, “economically correct” — has stopped me in the past from doing something I love and am pretty good at: introducing people to music they would never otherwise hear, and perhaps someday might even purchase or spread in their own way.

Chinese Wikipedia entry about… I have no idea.

Wed, 08 Apr 2009 17:01:48 -0700

Chinese Wikipedia entry about… I have no idea.

Boredom begone, with Skitch.

Tue, 07 Apr 2009 13:05:00 -0700

Boredom begone, with Skitch.

I have 36,700 messages, 9 unread.

Sat, 28 Feb 2009 07:57:21 -0800

I have 36,700 messages, 9 unread.

VeganYumYum » Crash Hot Potatoes

Tue, 03 Feb 2009 11:01:29 -0800

VeganYumYum » Crash Hot Potatoes:

Brilliantly simple and innovative. I want to make these right now.

Saw this interesting set of tweets that were nearly expressed at...

Mon, 26 Jan 2009 12:32:31 -0800

Saw this interesting set of tweets that were nearly expressed at the same time.

Track 14

Sat, 17 Jan 2009 22:05:00 -0800

Who’s sick of seeing seventeen versions of “Track 14” in their iTunes? Who the hell isn’t?

As much as I love iTunes, the metadata is a complete mess. I’m no perfectionist when it comes to this kind of thing. When it comes to my e-mail, for example, I don’t even sort it into folders. I keep it all in one big bucket, and I search for what I need. Try it. You’ll get amazingly good at searching and filtering. I did the same thing with my iTunes music collection when a problem moving my iTunes library resulted in all of my carefully created playlists going poof (the album lists of all 10 zillion CDs I had ripped). All of those album playlists were empty, and I wasn’t about to go put all of those songs back into those silly lists. I deleted all of those lists and just started searching and filtering.

I wasn’t always like this. I used to be one of those cross-every-T kind of people, the kind of very detailed person who would obsessively organize and reorganize the files on my computer. But the more I have embraced the digital world, the more I have realized that the assumptions you make when you sit down to organize “everything” will be wrong next year. Count on it.

Working at a start-up and helping build a social-networking Web application has only reinforced this. I see time and again that when you are organizing data, if you don’t keep it a little loosey-goosey but instead insist on enforcing strict partitions and rules, you’ll find out that you will eventually need to chart a completely different course of action, but the frame you built around everything will have to be torn down and rebuilt before the ship can change direction and still hold all of the information you previously had so carefully tended and gardened.

As a one-time copy editor, this kind of letting everything be messy (or “miscellaneous”) wasn’t an easy thing to do. But, music collections are kind of different. The people who created the product of digital music built in all these handy ways to classify, organize, and represent your musical collection. Metadata. What iTunes does, I hate to say it, is take a lot of this important information and dump it in the crapper. For a variety of reasons, not the least among them being a desire to stymie file-sharing, your iTunes library probably looks a lot like mine. It’s full of songs with no artwork, incorrect titles, no titles, no album information, etc.

I used to just let it go, but those Track 14s are the ones that I never could let go. I have countless playlists from mix CDs that my friend Scott burned for me, and all of them (every single last !@#$ one of them) are missing song titles and album titles. He’s a big music fan, but not someone who knows — or wants to know — the ins and outs of burning CDs so that all of that metadata is preserved. For him, it’s about the music, man, not about the technology.

Thankfully, someone appears to have made strides toward correcting this. Last night, I purchased TuneUp, an application that is designed to find and fix all of those Track 14s. It’s only for Leopard, and it appears to use some serious processing power, but it’s my best bet at fixing the mess without getting my hands dirty. Or wasting my time.

The app has bombed on me already, and it sometimes seems to do a whole lot and then just stop before finishing, but I’m willing to give it some time and see how it performs. I can tell it’s still buggy, but if it can eventually work for me, it will surely be worth the $20 lifetime licensing fee.

Try it out, if you like. They’ll let you fix 500 songs before purchasing.

I just noticed that iSquint has this in their Help. Kidders.

Sat, 10 Jan 2009 10:24:54 -0800

I just noticed that iSquint has this in their Help. Kidders.

Need to hire a company that really gets learning and education?...

Mon, 22 Dec 2008 15:33:24 -0800

Need to hire a company that really gets learning and education? Try Smart Asses. I mean, Smart Assess.

Letters to Santa

Wed, 10 Dec 2008 16:30:57 -0800

Letters to Santa:

I started a Flickr group to spotlight letters kids write to Santa. Not my usual style, but I think it’s a good idea, so get the word out if you can.

Let’s do this quarterly report freestyle, baby!

Wed, 10 Dec 2008 11:22:19 -0800

Let’s do this quarterly report freestyle, baby!

I hate to be crass, but that girl is clearly mooning someone.

Thu, 04 Dec 2008 15:36:00 -0800

I hate to be crass, but that girl is clearly mooning someone.

I think we may have a new competitor in the “worst...

Mon, 01 Dec 2008 10:56:00 -0800

I think we may have a new competitor in the “worst business name ever” contest. This one is right up there with Omega Consulting. (from the Omega site: “Our software developers and project managers comes from diverse background and all of them has a great legacy behind.”)

If the Nazis had been all about grammar, and I had been born in...

Fri, 21 Nov 2008 10:41:04 -0800

If the Nazis had been all about grammar, and I had been born in 1910, I totally would have joined.

All Mixed Up

Wed, 19 Nov 2008 23:43:00 -0800

Whither mix tapes? I used to spend an inordinate amount of time thinking up, recording, and designing art work for mix tapes (they were called J cards, in case you’re curious). I did it to woo women, to extend friendships, and to hopefully expand someone else’s musical landscape. The best part was when someone I had given a mix tape to cared enough to return the favor. Most of the time, they didn’t, but it hardly mattered. I was sharing my music with someone. Who among us doesn’t love to do that?

This kind of musical nerdity is the hallmark of the person gifted with both a sincere love of music and a relatively good ear, but with little of the intrinsic talent that real musicians possess. I believe they call us fans. Fans with a desire to, in some way, be their own musical artist and producer.

I loved tapes. Still do. I have a couple of big boxes of them, and I simply don’t know what to do with them. I suppose I will toss them eventually. I keep trying to get myself on a schedule to convert them to digital recordings. I don’t want to actually convert them, I simply want to re-get them, whether that means buying them as digital recordings or stealing them off of the Internet. I’ve already bought them at least once (I can’t tell you how many additional copies of albums I’ve bought over the years), so I don’t have any compunction against pirating a digital copy of a cassette tape I already have purchased. No regrets, no excuses. My plan of action is to pull out one cassette tape every week and make it my goal to find or purchase a digital replacement of it. I should have it all converted in a few years.

But what of those mix tapes my favorite friends have made for me? I can’t simply buy (or steal) those. I could try to convert them from cassette to digital, and I might at some point resort to that, but I will certainly, undeniably lose the flavor and mystique of the original, even if I scan in the homemade artwork and liner notes.

Once I moved on from cassette tapes to CD — I was not an early adopter; I resisted mightily — I learned how to make CD insert artwork and burn CDs, and I eventually entered another golden era of making mixes. But these days, I hate CDs. It’s becoming harder and harder to make CDs for friends and family. I make a CD every year for Henry’s birthday, but my rate of making CDs has plummeted this past year. My Photoshop artwork templates are barely used. My X-Acto knife sits safely in a cupboard. I have tossed all of those wretched jewel boxes. I even gave away all of my old CDs. Fuck ‘em.

I’m still stuck with the urge to create and share a mix. I’ve been collecting a playlist of songs for someone, but I don’t know what to do with that playlist. I can burn a CD, but why not simply set them up with a download of it? I could gift it to them via iTunes, but how might my personality shine through? I’m not just a digital DJ. I’m a seriously thoughtful amateur DJ, meticulously tailoring a set of songs to help promote a mood and present a point of view, as subtly and effectively as possible. How do I learn a new and innovative way to do that?

On top of all this anxiety, I have an added smidgeon of performance anxiety about mixes. Adding comedy clips and interstitials doesn’t seem to be enough anymore. I feel like I need to step up my game and make something even more unique. Do I need to start doing man-on-the-street interviews that fit my mix-tape them and include them? Must I be as good as a “This American Life” episode?

Well, I want to be.

What is the next way to accommodate this urge to evolve the way I create and share music? How, with all of these creative tools at my disposal, many of which I haven’t begun to learn, should I proceed?

I’ll probably just wing it. It’ll probably be good, too.

Whistling Dixie

Fri, 14 Nov 2008 00:28:00 -0800

When did I first hear Django Reinhardt?

It doesn’t really matter, but I was talking on the phone to Ashby Lawson this week. I used to work with him at Depalma’s, way back when I was in college. He lives in Sacramento now, although I never really see him or his wife Kellye, who also worked at that great restaurant way back when. While on the phone, he told me when he discovered Django, and I came to the conclusion that I must have just discovered him by myself at some point a few years back. Now that a few days have passed since that conversation, I’m thinking back and second-guessing myself. I think that it may have actually been Ashby who introduced me to Django, just as he introduced me to so much other great music.

In any case, it got me on a Django Reinhardt kick once again, which is dove-tailing nicely with my other current musical obsession: Dixieland (a.k.a., hot jazz). Actually, this isn’t my first Dixieland kick, but it’s coming on strong again, and it’s pretty much all I’ve been listening to lately.

It all started a few weeks ago when I got a hankering for music from Woody Allen movies. Lo and behold, there is not one but *two* compilations of music from his movies. That was good stuff, and those upbeat and boisterous sounds led me to watch Zelig again, which I haven’t seen since — there it is again — college. That soon led me to dig up a ridiculous amount of additional music. Namely, Golden Greats, a stellar 3 CD-compilation of hot jazz that I can’t recommend enough. I am especially stuck on Bix Beiderbecke lately.

This, in turn, led me to 10 more CDs that collect solo works of Dixieland artists. I won’t bore you with the details of all of those, mostly because I have hardly had a chance to make a serious dent in them. But, they sound pretty good at first blush. This is what I love most about music and being a nerdy music guy. As time goes by (sorry, couldn’t help it), I keep digging back earlier and earlier and uncovering new gems. Although it sounds too impossible to be true, it often feels like the further back I dig, the more I can uncover. At some point, you might find me sitting in a rocking chair next to a Victrola, with a big pile of 78s and a six-pack of beer.

Although, I’d like to keep this obsession digital, if possible.

Luxury Bath Bombs

Thu, 06 Nov 2008 10:48:12 -0800

Luxury Bath Bombs:

Incoming!

Ouch. Sounds painful to me.

Wed, 05 Nov 2008 12:08:40 -0800

Ouch. Sounds painful to me.

This may be the oddest spam I’ve ever received. It’s...

Wed, 08 Oct 2008 15:21:46 -0700

This may be the oddest spam I’ve ever received. It’s clearly marked as spam with the subject line “*****SPAM***** blow job sex”. Needless to say, I had to click through and see where it would actually take me. Investment spam or just plain-old-porn? Porn.