Hey, looks like they’ve got that B-roll!
(I’m back…)
WIKIPEDIA FOREVER!
Check out the fundraising banner at the top of Wikipedia at the moment:
Awesomely totalitarian, eh? I like it.
All hail our glorious[citation needed] wiki overlords!
camel/mouse
A camel is a horse designed by committee…
and this is a mouse designed by an open-source development team.
Awesome.
(via df)
music as autobiography
In Phil Gyford’s great blog post “The £10,000 Playlist” he muses on the value of having a personal iTunes library rather than purely relying on cloud-based services like Spotify:
There are differences, that help make my library worth spending on… my library has history, layers, a gradual accumulation over my life. It’s not just a playlist but a timeline that in itself is important.
Exactly. “Date added…” is metadata rich with autobiographical meaning, but because it’s handled by your media player rather than an ID3 tag (admittedly this is sensible) you can’t take it with you. For a good few years I could look through all my music by time of acquisition, from the beginning of the MP3 era (coinciding with my personal “discovery of proper music”, circa 13 years of age) to the present. But then I got a new computer and all that data was lost - but at least for the next couple of years, some new data accumulated. And then last year I switched from my PC and Windows Media Player to OSX and iTunes and it was all gone again. I like to believe I’ll magically be able to date every song I acquire from now on, but the chances are realistically pretty slim.
It’s a shame because music is so evocative of certain points in our life. I believe the crisis-ridden protagonist of High Fidelity at one point tries to distract himself from a break-up by re-ordering his record collection in “autobiographical order.”
I suppose he found the strength to do it all manually, so maybe I should stop moaning. I do remember the first song chronologically in my first Windows Media Player list was “Little Bastard” by the Ass Ponys:
…because it was the theme to The Ben Brown Show, really a proto-version of Ze Frank’s The Show that was way ahead of its time.
In conclusion, it would be nice if there was a standard library format to capture “Date Added…” data, allowing it to be imported and exported across operating systems and media players, so that people could reminisce more easily. Failing that, perhaps some brave hacker-type could find a way to seamlessly move music libraries from computer to computer, metadata intact. Go lazyweb go!
The Second Hand Marching Band - Dawn Raid (download MP3)
Or maybe not the whole Second Hand Marching Band, but Pete, Benni, and my friend Sophie.
Autumn’s here. We’ve had to figure out how to turn on the heating in the new house. This Sunday the nights abandon their incremental encroach upon the day, and instead launch a major offensive to seize everything north of 5pm. For consolation, then, we turn to pub roasts, fireworks displays, and acoustic indie from Scotland. Call it hyggecore.
new house, new job
All change, please…
pre-unpacking
First of all, I’ve moved the 47.5 miles from my home-town to sunny south London, with some friends and friends of friends and so on. That’s very exciting, and I’m looking forward to seeing friends a bit more, doing some culture, living well, and generally pretending to be a Grown Up.
Secondly, I’ve just started a super-good new job with the fine folks at The Reading Agency, where I’m the site editor for their teenagerish site Groupthing.
The big idea behind Groupthing is to provide young people with loads of creative inspiration, build a supportive community, and do all sorts of interesting things around writing, reading, language and creativity. (On the other side there’s a bunch of stuff we want to do for professional type people, educating them about technologies and trends and helping them run co-creation stuff with YPs.) There’s plenty to do. And if any of this sounds like it might intersect interestingly with what you do or know about, then definitely drop me an email! It’s certainly refreshing being in a completely new sector, where a Techcrunch is what happens when your hard drive fails. On the other hand, there’s all sorts of new lingo and institutional knowledge to learn, and the challenge of maintaining a pair of fresh eyes - while also adapting to the new terrain.
Anyway, they say moving and starting a new job are two of the more stressful experiences in our lives, but a week or so in and I’m still alive at least. I’ll try and find the time to blog, too…
Single Ladies by Pomplamoose (orig. Beyonce) [download MP3]
Of course it’s better enjoyed in charming video format:
Here’s an analysis that explains the inherent weirdness of the song - a weirdness even more noticable in this cover version. The short version is that a lot of the singing is in E major but a lot of the music is in E minor, known as “polytonality… a technique normally reserved for highly esoteric jazz.”
More important, though, is that the woman from Pamplamoose looks a bit familiar. Don’t you think? I have given it some thought…
…maybe she looks a bit like Michael Cera, circa ‘Bleeker’ in Juno? Or, he looks a bit like her? With no offence intended to either party, of course - in fact, Cera gets to bask in Ms P’moose’s reflected hotness.
![Orbital colonies skim through the magnetosphere of a dying blue giant star, NW10.
[ok actually a sunset over north london]](http://29.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_kqp9zsVSoP1qz4kpmo1_500.jpg)
Orbital colonies skim through the magnetosphere of a dying blue giant star, NW10.
[ok actually a sunset over north london]
I’m too stingy to get MobileMe, so instead, I’ve made this my iPhone wallpaper.
What’s that? This is the digital equivalent of having name tags sown into your underwear? Well… yes. But a) I have a tendency to misplace things, and b) fuck you.
