Spotify Your Music

September 6th, 2009 Comments

spotify_logo

For many of you Europeans out there, you may be familiar with the service Spotify. It’s a no-nonsense online music streaming service. What sets this service apart from services like Last.fm and Pandora, is first, the catalog, and second, and most importantly, it’s a true on-demand music service.

Spotify is available in the UK, Finland, Sweden, Norway, Spain and France. It currently comes in three flavors: Free, Day Pass, and Premium. The paid services play music without ad interruptions (although I have yet to hear or see one; I assume they play in-between tracks). Their catalog is quite impressive, which seems on par with iTunes in size and scope. For you Lindy DJs out there, the entire Complete Jazz Series is available for streaming.

Unfortunately, if you’re in the States, you can’t technically sign up for the service, but there is a workaround for that until it’s official:

1. Visit http://www.azproxies.com/proxy-lists/ and find a proxy site at any of the aforementioned countries (I personally chose a French one, since I have a thing for French pop).

2. Once you’ve found an appropriate web-based proxy, enter in the site field: https://www.spotify.com/en/get-started/. It will ask you some basic sign-up questions; note that you need to pick a zipcode from the country of your proxy (Google search for one).

3. Download the application for your OS, install, run and you’re all set!

Why I Write

August 27th, 2009 Comments

If you’ve spent any time with me, you may know I’m not a grand storyteller. I can’t elaborate the subtle intricacies of how x happened at y. I’m usually to the point. There’s no build up or climax, as it’s usually just a statement of facts (arguing with me in person isn’t any fun, either).

Writing fills the gaps. It allows me to verbalize the things I can’t say in the moment. It gives me an outlet for all those funny details I missed when explaining how I learned that making a clam-shaped figure with my hands was not the appropriate way to ask for a to-go box.

Writing is beautiful. There’s an endless supply of adjectives, adverbs, and nouns at my disposal. I can reference facts and figures. There are paragraphs, lists, chapters, outlines, etc. It can empower me to do any number of things, such as:

  • Tell a personal story
  • Relay important news
  • Teach a new concept
  • Evoke an emotion
  • Argue a point cohesively
  • Code a program(!)

Writing gives me freedom. There are some words better left unsaid. Maybe those words are best left written. I can share those words with whomever I want to, be it myself, friends, or the world.

Writing gives me time to think. Time to remember the things I may have forgotten. Time to write the words I meant to, instead of saying the ones I didn’t mean to. It gives me a freedom I might not have in a split second in time: with it I can travel anywhere in time and space. Conversely, I can travel nowhen or nowhere at all.

Most importantly, writing is…

…timeless.

Launch-ifyed.

August 13th, 2009 Comments

Oddly enough, It didn’t occur to me to post a link to my new website-slash-journal, //REMarkify, here.

logo

The logo that isn't technically on the website.

In case you’re wondering where I got the name from:

  • “//” – The single line JavaScript comment tag.
  • “REM” – The BASIC comment tag.
  • “arkify” – Because it’s catchy and… after spending hours trying to find domain names that weren’t taken, this was as good as it gets.
  • Add the above together and bingo.

Have We Really Been Doing This Four Years?

July 27th, 2009 Comments

us

Times flies by so fast when you’re having fun.

The time is April 2005. I’m still working on my thesis. More importantly, I’m five months into “perfecting” my Lindy Hop. Jesse had been repairing the damage done from the previous four months. Sometime in May, he starts teaching a line dance called The Big Apple, and me having a voracious appetite for all things jazz and dance related I’m the first in line to learn it. A couple of weeks later, I’m (pathetically) attempting to dance the damn thing at our local swing dance venue, with Jesse and his wife, Candy.

July rolls around and I guess I had gotten the attention of another dancer, (other than the one’s going, “What the heck was that?”) and being only one of three others up on the dance floor, I guess it wasn’t hard. Emily was cute and had quite the personality, we went on our first date. At Trader Joe’s (romantic!). But before I knew it, I was helping her move (unfortunately) to Long Beach.

Four months of a long distance relationship and a job offer at Google, we move up together to the Bay Area make ourselves a (very) tiny home in Mountain View, CA. We’ve lived up here for almost four years now and we’ve been so lucky to have them together. Now with Emily launching her successful wedding photography business, she’s also inspired me to do great things. Forget about waiting until tomorrow. While we’ve had our ups and downs, I wouldn’t trade it for anything.

Although I’m taking offers.

Just kidding!

Thanks for everything, babe… and Happy Anniversary.

Domain Squatting Sparks Creativity

July 18th, 2009 Comments

Ever wondered why that website you visit has a weird name that ends in ‘r’ or ‘oo’ (Tumblr, Squidoo, come to mind)? Are they being intrinsically creative and edgy with their name choices? Well, yes and no.

You see, when the world wide web picked up in traction around the early 90s, less than 12% of the US had access to the web with that a small fraction of today’s websites were in existence. A few people saw the growth potential in the web and started buying domains left and right by picking: words out of the dictionary, prominent company names, famous names, etc. Since relatively no one was paying attention it was easy to claim them.

Fast forward several years and now there are over a billion people on the net. Domain names are at a premium, and now those cheap purchases in the 90s have turned into a million dollar industry. For example, business.com sold for some 7.5 million USD.

Somewhere around the beginning of the so-called “web2.0″ revolution, instead of capitulating to domain squatters, most web properties went with a more creative approach: create words (or alter them) to a point that no one has heard of it before. Hence, we now have Flickr, digg, and Twitter.

Necessity, is indeed, the mother of invention.

You Know You’ve Been Doing Too Much P90-X When…

July 3rd, 2009 Comments

Those of you who know me know that I’ve been doing the P90-X fitness program for the last four months or so. Like many Lindy Hoppers, Nick Williams introduced me to the pain and agony of this program, but honestly, it’s done wonders for me. There are some things, though, that you come to accept once you’ve been doing it for that long.

  • You can explain where the P90-X acronym comes from.
  • You can recite Tony Horton quotes on the spot. Not only that, but you’ve got his voice down, too. Here are some gems:
    • “Making Gumby look like the Tin Man.”
    “Don’t smash your face!”
    “German potato soup (in a sappy german accent).”
    “Do your best and… forget the rest!”
  • You wonder where you can get a copy of “Downward Dog Magazine”.
  • You know that there’s exactly a one minute interval where Tony manages to remain quiet throughout the entire set of videos.
  • You know the assistants (on and off video) and have given them nicknames:
    • Pam, The Blam.
    Phil, the Smart-ass.
    Dreya “thanks for your painful contributions to P90-X” Webber.
    Karen, the Pot-stirrer.
    Sophia, the Chiclet teeth girl.
    The Horton Triplets: Tony, Bobby and Joe.
  • You’ve made a made a drinking game for whenever…
    • … Tony hits on Dreya.
    … Katie moans in agony.
    … someone does huggers and shakers.
    … someone makes an “X” symbol with their arms.
    … Tony says he’s “done chattin’.”
  • You know that banana-boat is more than a tanning oil brand; it’s something much more painful.
  • You get withdrawals when you miss a workout.
  • You find yourself excited when finding other P90-X users and talk for hours about it, forgetting the dance altogether. You’ve become a walking salesman for it.
  • You’ve bookmarked beachbody.com, even though you’ve never visited the site.
  • You equate the “modified” moves as the loser moves.

*sigh*, I’ve thought too long about this.

What Yahoo Forgot

June 24th, 2009 Comments

My relationship with Yahoo has been a rocky one. I want it to succeed. I really do. But time and time again the company has managed to shoot itself in the foot. And given the bloated bureaucracy, I’m amazed Yahoo can even see it’s feet.

It’s simple really, Yahoo forgot what’s important: the user. While I worked there, I was constantly disappointed with the rhetoric at All Hands meetings: advertisers were seemingly top of the chain, followed by publishers, the lastly, the user. The guise was to bring them all together on an equal playing field. But they really aren’t, as the user gets the short end of the stick. Paid Inclusion (paying to bump a page’s relevance) is proof of that.

Oh sure, every month they release some fancy new “web 2.0″ interface tweak that maybe a handful of users care about, but it does not change the underlying issue of search. In ignoring the user, they also forgot they have two very powerful game changers that are wasting away to irrelevance: Flickr and, most importantly, del.icio.us. Before twitter, and most social bookmarking services, there was del.icio.us, and if it was correctly applied, could be reliable human powered search. In my own experiences, I search delicious before Google if I’m browsing general topics, since I know the most reputable sites will be represented (by frequency of bookmarks).

So I’ll end with my simple proposal: Drop Paid Inclusion. Integrate delicious results to Yahoo Search.

Say what you will about Google, there’s one thing they put first above anything else, and it’s their users (and their data, but that’s another story).

Pageonce Blows Me Away

June 23rd, 2009 Comments

Pageonce

The business of being an online aggregator of information is a competitive one; sites such as FriendFeed, Facebook, and Mint are all vying for your attention making it hard to choose one. Usually one site will have one service, but not another. Maybe it’ll have a good mobile app but few partner services. Or, maybe it’s just something no one ever uses.

Pageonce blows all of them away. I was just shocked at the sheer amount of online accounts that I was able to include in their service, all in one, so let me just list what I added:

  • Financial Institutions (BofA, [my student loan holder], Fidelity Investments, [my credit union])
  • Utilities (AT&T, AT&T Wireless, Liberty Mutual, PG&E Skype)
  • Shopping (Amazon, ebay, Netflix)
  • Travel (Virgin America, United, Avis, Alaska Air, Marriott, Amtrak)
  • Email (Google, Google Apps, Yahoo, Hotmail)
  • Social (Twitter, Facebook, Plaxo, Last.fm, digg, del.icio.us, evite, Flickr, LinkedIn, Meetup, Yelp, Youtube)

As the service grows, I imagine it will include just about everything under the sun. Personally, they hit about 90% of the services I use, and 100% of the ones I use frequently (I was pleasantly surprised to find my credit union and student loan holder).

For the most part it’s purely informational; you can’t do much to interact with said feeds, but that’s the major appeal of this as well. If you wanted to interact, you would do so on desired site (which is more secure, anyway).

The real clincher for me was having all this account information not just in one website on my desktop, but on my iPhone. Pageonce launched version 3.0 of their premium application (there’s a free one as well) which brings all of this information to the palm of your hand. There is a Blackberry app available as well.

Granted it’s a little on the slow side; it is after all, pinging all of your online accounts at once. And, as this may be a deal breaker for many, but trusting all of your online account information to one site can be a leap of faith. As it is, the site is well secured, well encrypted, and is covered by all the large online security companies. They do mention in their privacy agreement that they won’t use your data for marketing purposes and that you own it entirely, something Facebook has struggled agreeing to.

Definitely a service to keep an eye out for.

We’ve Been Soft

April 13th, 2009 Comments

And it’s about time it stopped. We (and by we, I’m especially pointing the finger at you, guys) have lost our purpose.

Something I’ve noticed in the past few years is how things we do every day have given way to this non-critical, safe, conflict-avoidance mentality. We have become masters of non-offensive, bland, politically correct language.

But, I’ll argue, conflict is a good thing. It presents a wide color of opinions and beliefs, not necessarily precluding that one is more right than another. There’d be no resolution or diplomacy without it.

Facebook is a great example of this; while there is an option to ‘like’ a post, a converse does not exist. I’ve seen this in countless examples elsewhere in our society. Are people so afraid of criticism that they can’t accept that someone might not agree with them?

We don’t discipline our children anymore, for fear of someone yelling child abuse. How are they supposed to know what’s right, when nothing’s wrong? My mother raised me tough, and while I don’t always see eye-to-eye with her, I’m saltier for it today, and know that I can take on the world.

This does not mean an end to equality between the sexes. If anything, it’s time for men to start pulling their weight and act like the men we’re supposed to be. If my grandfather were alive today, he’d tell us to grow a pair.

We are living in rough economic times. The day of the push-over is coming to a close. DiCaprio is out, Hamm is in. Our first duty was to get off our butts and elect the right people into power. Mission accomplished. Now it’s time to pull up our sleeves and get some work done, because no one is going to do it for us anymore.

Chivalry is back.

Bank of America [insert expletive]!

April 6th, 2009 Comments

<rant>

I knew this day would come. Alas, my 7.9% Fixed APR was too good to be true. In it’s place will sit a brand spanking new 12.9% Variable APR, most likely due to my recent stint of unemployment. While I have the right to reject this change (in less than two weeks), it pretty much means I can’t ever use the card again. There will be thousands of customers who won’t even realize this is happening, since the notice comes in a non-envelope that’s dressed up like advertising, likely to go into the junk pile. At least I don’t have much of a balance on it, but for others, it could hurt quite a bit.

You took my precious MBNA away and now this.

</rant>

Anyone have any good, and I use the term loosely, credit card recommendations?

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