::Darin's Drivel::

Blog move: For those that care...

darin — Tue, 27 Jun 2006 05:05:51 GMT

My blog has moved to Vox. The new Six Apart blog product features a more robust blog feature set like bolding strikethrough, italics, links to photos that can be arranged inline and other nifty bloggy type things. I have imported the Vox blog into the top most module on my profile however so, if you're interested in what I'm posting, check my profile's top module slot. Naturally, my Vox blog has an RSS feed for those aggregators out there. Thank you, drive thru...

Unofficially, the International cannabis-culture day, "420" has a lot more history than you might think...

darin — Thu, 20 Apr 2006 21:36:35 GMT

Cannabis-culture enthusiasts everywhere typically celebrate today's date [April 20th or "Four-twenty"] and especially celebrate by smoking pot at 4:20PM today for some unknown reason. All of this occurs allegedly because of some kids at a San Rafael High School, according to Snopes.com, High Times magazine, the Marijuana-logues and The Straight Dope, that would meet at 4:20PM to smoke cannabis or "pot" with their friends. Well, it turns out that there are lots of urban legends that have surfaced around the date that have been passed on by cannabis culture enthusiasts for years, many of which have been debunked, like the one about the police code for pot smoking in progress being the code number "420", and many others. * Here's a wikipedia.org link that outlines the mostly agreed upon origin of the date as a special day in cannabis culture and the urban legends surrounding the number: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/420_%28cannabis_culture%29#Origin_Theories Please note that editing of this page on wikipedia has been disabled due to vandalism or editing attempts by banned editors which I personally find amusing. * There's also a couple of infamous events that occurred on this date including the Columbine High School massacre, the downing of a Korean Air passenger plane by the Soviets and the beginning of the French Revolutionary War [wikipedia has it down as plural "Wars"]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/April_20#Events * Some famous and infamous births also occurred on this day; most notably in the negative column for most people being that of Adolph Hitler in 1889: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adolf_Hitler The neutrality of the Hitler page is in dispute currently. It's really too bad that he didn't get into art school, in my opinion. Who knows what would've happended had he gotten in. * A well-known prophet named Muhammad, the founder of Islam, was born on this day as well in 570: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muhammad * Here's the list of noteworthy 4/20 birthdays with their birth and death year, where appropriate: Adolf Hitler 1889-1945, Muhammad 570-632, Napoleon 1808-1873, Tito Puente 1925-2000, George Takei 1940, Ryan O'Neal 1941, Edie Sedgwick 1943-1971, Jessica Lange 1949, Crispin Glover 1964, Luther Vandross 1951-2005, Don Mattingly 1961 * And the link to the complete list on wikipedia.org: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/April_20#Births * And finally, here's the link to the number 420 itself, mostly mathematic information about the number four-hundred and twenty: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/420_%28number%29

New features released today...

darin — Thu, 13 Apr 2006 18:07:50 GMT

Today's release features a few new goodies including the all new Global search function that appears in the masthead on every page. With this functionality, it is possible to search all of the tribe.net data types, including public blog posts, listings, events, non-private tribe posts, individual members, tribes, recommendations and requests. You can also filter out items from the results by clicking the tabs across the top of the results. Initially, the relevance of the results probably won't make a lot of sense. As we fine tune it and dial the relevance parameters in to the system though, search users should see a marked improvement in the relevance of the results and their sort order. This is all magical juju that I don't completely understand myself but it basically comes down to how something is "weighted" and items with more weight are sorted higher in the relevance sort. Items with lower weights are sorted lower in the results, etc. We also added the new MTN layout options A and B available at http://www.tribebeta.net/ I highly recommend that people go check out what we've got on offer over at http://tribebeta.net/ . There are two unique, switchable layout formatting options that you choose from and most of the new modules are configurable. These new layouts reflect a return to a previously popular My Tribe.net layout with options to customize the sort order of items within a module, what types of items are displayed within those modules and how many items per module are visible. Please check it out when you get a chance. And last but not least, there's a new My Revver Module that you can add to your personal profile. In another window or tab, go find a video that you like on Revver.com [ http://revver.com/ ], copy the URL and paste it into the My Revver module and save and the video loads on your Profile page. Click the play icon to playback the video.

Weird foods: Shark cheese, fermented herring and other disgusting edible oddities...

darin — Tue, 11 Apr 2006 21:31:04 GMT

A friend of mine brought a couple of his friends over to the warehouse on Saturday and after giving them a tour of the Vulcan complex to see some of the art that is up on the walls, we decided to eat dinner at the Vulcan Cafe. While we were eating, somehow the conversation turned to disgusting things that people eat; really appetizing direction for the convo. Anyhoo, one of my friend's friends mentioned something about shark meat that is buried for six months and then dug up and eaten. For the rest of the meal, we were saying "shark cheese!" at opportune moments to the delight of ourselves and I'm sure everyone else seated in the restaurant. Well, it turns out that this is not the most disgusting thing that people eat. When I got back to work, my friend IM'd me the link to a website that has entries for all kinds of wonderfully disgusting things that people eat including Surstromming, which is a fermented herring dish, if you can call it that. The story about that particular edible item alone makes this site worth checking out; Just don't read it while you're eating. It might just spoil your appetite: Weird foods website: http://www.weird-food.com/ Look for 'shark' and 'herring' or 'Surstromming' in the fish category or, if you don't think you can stomach it, don't. Preparing "cured shark meat": http://www.isholf.is/gullis/jo/shark.htm

Intel Macs will run Windows XP natively in OS X 10.5 [Leopard]...

darin — Wed, 05 Apr 2006 18:24:37 GMT

...and Apple's stock is up by about $4.33 today on the news last time I checked. There's a beta version available now but the software will be included in the next version of the OS aptly named Leopard [a leopard that can change his spots?]. No word yet about Vista, Micro$oft's touted but delayed new OS and whether or not the OS will run in BootCamp, Apple's software that allows an Intel-based mac to run both OS X and Windows XP on the same machine. There's also no good data yet on how the Vista delay and the news about BootCamp and Windows XP on a Mac will affect the computer maker's slim but growing share of the PC market. Here's the article on CNET: http://news.com.com/Apple+Windows+on+a+Mac+is+here+-+page+2/2100-1012_3-6057856-2.html?tag=st.num

Hooping: The art of hula hooping is making a serious comeback...

darin — Tue, 28 Mar 2006 09:58:16 GMT

It seems I'm a little late to the party on this one but that the famous 50s "circle" invention from the Coen Bros. movie The Hudsucker Proxy, "You know, for kids!", is making a comeback in certain circles, pun intended. There's a significant twirling movement afoot in the Bay Area and other metropolitan cities and suburbs, that promotes health, happiness, well-being and a chance to rekindle that inner child at dance parties and band gigs such as The String Cheese Incident shows where throngs of hoopers gyrate and exercise to the beat with colorful, sometimes flourescent hula hoops spinning around extremities and other body parts. There's a .org website dedicated to hooping and there are even a few individuals out there offering hooping lessons to the public; Some of them making a decent living from teaching the art of hula hoop dancing, staying fit and healthy as part of the strange and wonderful art of hooping. One such person who was recently profiled on a Current TV pod I caught the other night goes by the name of Kristabel. According to her website, she's currently in Miami at the annual Winter Music Conference looking for hooping gigs. The Hula Hoop phenomenon has come back for another round... Here's a link to the official hooping website: http://hooping.org/ And here's a link to Kristabel's personal hoopgirl site: http://hoopgirl.com/

Squirtgun assasins...

darin — Mon, 27 Mar 2006 06:49:11 GMT

I was watching Current TV today and saw a little pod about Street Wars for people who have waaay to much time on their hands to play a game where you receive a dossier on the other players and strategize how and when you will attack and "kill" them. "Killing" them means catching them unawares and drenching them with s squirt gun before they ambush you, essentially; it's a little more complicated than that so check the website for complete rules. Too bad I am so predictable that I would get whacked in the first couple of rounds. It looks like fun but I'd have to be a trustafarian to actually play this game me thinks. Here's the link to their site: http://streetwars.net/

Kolor me krumpy...

darin — Wed, 22 Mar 2006 02:12:02 GMT

So, I've been hearing this hip hop term a lot lately know as "Krumping" or "Clown Dancing" but before today, I had no idea what the word's origins were or where the term originated. It was a shock to discover that Gray Davis figured into the story though. You gotta love wikipedia.org for givin' up the funk once again on the Krumpin' tip: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clowning

Pixoh Beta: An online photo editing application...

darin — Tue, 21 Mar 2006 07:59:40 GMT

I just stumbled across this beta site while catching up on my Red Ferret blog posts. It seems to work in Safari and allows you to resize, crop, rotate and adjust photos that you upload from your computer or from popular photo sites like Flickr.com via a bookmarklet utlity that they've created. Apparently, the few adjustments and edits that can be made to photos are just the tip of the iceberg for this site in the near future. I'm not sure how useful this is to hard core web designers out there but soccer moms and other neo-luddite types might find such an online application useful for basic photo editing. Here's the link: http://www.pixoh.com/

Ho to decipher your cell phone bill...

darin — Mon, 20 Mar 2006 21:59:27 GMT

For some of my friends, reading through all of the data and examining the fine print with a magnifiying glass in their cell phone bills is a pleasurable geekxperience that they look forward to. Many people though simply don't take the time to read over these cryptic documents [myself included] and hopefully you will appreciate the article posted by CNET breaking down the typical cell phone bill. Here's the link to the article: http://reviews.cnet.com/4520-11288_7-6464118-1.html?tag=nl.e404

Car stereos, ISO9660 CDs and MP3s...

darin — Thu, 16 Mar 2006 22:58:38 GMT

So, I just recently replaced the Alpine car stereo head unit that was stolen out of my car in my own driveway right before I left for Christmas vacation to see mom last year. I was just too busy to take care of it for a few months and then, when I finally did get around to trying to find an Alpine dealer that had a single CD head unit that would play MP3s, I found that the dealer I had previously gone to [Circuit City] doesn't carry Alpine anymore and Best Buy was all out of the stock of the new units that include an iPod connector cable and provides iPod control from the head unit's display. Since I work weekdays, I had to scope all of this out on a weekend day and by the time I got up and ready to go on Saturday, both Alpine 2006 units had been purchased by someone at the Best Buy down the freeway from me. I had run into the same fate the previous week with this Best Buy as well. I decided that after I got some food, I was gonna look at the Alpine website and sure enough, I found a few dealers that were local and started calling around. It was about 4:30PM when I called Pacific Stereo in Hayward on Mission Blvd. and the guy who answered the phone was friendly and said the only difference between the two head units I was looking at was that one had more pre-outputs and, I came to find out just today, the unit I got had 34 watts per channel [times four channels] less power than the one I was originally interested in. The amazing thing was, this guy said that he had the unit, and the iPod cable that connects to it in-stock and that he could install both the same day which, around 5PM on a Saturday by the time I got there, was amazing. So, I took the bait and went down there to get the head unit and cable installed. Well, it turns out that a couple of the new head units from Alpine also play MP3 CDs [it also plays WMA files too but I don't have any of that Microsoft crap] but the CDs have to be in ISO9660 format. This is a special International Standards Organization [ISO] CD that is cross-platform, or can be loaded on Mac, PC or any other computer that recognizes this CD format. There are some limitations to this file format however and I will do my best to outline some of them here in the context of an MP3 CD for your car's CD player or any other type of CD or DVD playback device. There are extensions to the format [like Joliet for instance] that support longer file names than the old upper-cased, 8-character, 3-character extension naming format from older PC OS days [often referred to as 8-dot-3-ized] but some characters are not supported and there is a file name character limit [only one item in my list of MP3s was too long for my ISO disc] and a total number of folders limit of 255. So, naturally, the next thing I did when I got home was to create an ISO9660 CD so that I could listen to the entire Kraftwerk album catalog from one MP3 CD as opposed to just one album of their stuff on a single disc. Notes about ISO9660 CDs: Your experience may differ depending on which head unit or playback device you use, the manufacturer's implementation of the ISO format and other factors that are difficult to understand until you actually try this disc format out on a car stereo or a home DVD player that reads ISO9660 discs. I've attempted to play ISO9660 MP3 CDs I created on my home DVD player that recognizes ISO 9660 discs and the track playback order is wacktacular. The reason for this is, the player reads the files back as they are arranged on the disc. This means for the most part, that the files play back alphabetically. There's also a limit to the depth of nested folders you can have [8] and how many folders there can be total on the disc [255 according to the Alpine docs]. At least the Alpine kept the songs in their respective folders. Playing ISO discs in my DVD player would jump to the next song alphabetically across all folders which is a real drag. When I slipped in my Kraftwerk discography ISO disc, I got all of the albums playing back in the correct folders, but the album track ordering was sorted and played back alphabetically. That's kind of a drag for an album like Electric Cafe where songs kind of slip into each other when the disc is played in order. If I wanted to fix this, I could but I would have to edit each song's title before burning the CD and add a number to the beginning of each file name to serialize the track order so that the names line up alphabetically the same as the original CD track order. Another cool thing about this particular Alpine head unit is the MP3 file ID3 tag support, or the tags that are associated with the file that describe the artist, song title, composer, album, track number from a set, as well as musical style and other info about the file. Most of this info is displayed and scrolled when longer than what can be viewed on one screen, on the Alpine's front panel display. So, now that I have a reason to get an iPod, I am trying to figure out which one to get. I have approx. 57GB of music on my external hard drive, much of the more recent stuff is in AIFF format so that I can dither down to lower quality if I choose, but I always have the original source at the highest possible sample rate to go back to in a pinch. I could fit my entire library on the iPod 60GB but maybe I should be a little more choosy and get a 30GB and only put the really good stuff on the iPod. The Alpine also has another unique iPod-only feature that allows me to sort through all of the music on the iPod. When the iPod is connected to the Alpine in the car, the iPod charges itself while being controlled by the head unit. I've also heard that there's a search forward or backward by percentage of music on the iPod feature that will come in handy with my large music collection. Now,I've just got to to get me an iPod! I hear rumors that a new one might be in the works in April so maybe I'll wait a bit before I splurge.

The Ron Carter Quartet experience...

darin — Thu, 09 Mar 2006 23:32:40 GMT

When I arrived back at my home in Oakland last night after work, my roommate was saying something about wanting to go to a Jazz club in the city but unfortunately, she doesn't have a car and the transportation options for her were limited to BART and busses, etc. I was feeling kind of sleepy but thought that a night out on the town might be a good thing so I suggested Yoshi's, the Sushi/Jazz club at Jack London Square. When I went to look at the joint's website [ http://www.yoshis.com - duh, I had to perform a google search to find it but I shoulda guessed ], I discovered that the Ron Carter Quartet was starting a five-day set of shows beginning Wednesday night and ending on Sunday the 12th of March. The first night was the same night that the roomie and I wanted to go to Yoshi's so we decided that we were gonna go try to catch an impromptu jazz show. I had no idea who Ron Carter, or any of the members of his quartet were, but we decided to go for it on a whim and see what happened. After a somewhat pricey-for-what-was-delivered sushi dinner, boy were the two of us in for a wonderful, jazz master class surprise. The tickets for Wednesday's 10PM Yoshi's show were $6 dollars cheaper than the 8PM show at $20 a head and when I looked online, I thought the show was sold out because they use ticketweb for ticket purchases and their site said "no tickets available". Of course, I didn't know that you can't buy tickets the night of the show from ticketweb for Yoshi's shows but you can get them at the ticket office at Yoshi's. I found this out when I noticed that their web page says, "call Yoshi's at 510-238-9200 for additional availability" so I called Yoshi's and the nice person on the phone said they had almost 200 tickets available for the show so, we jaunted down the freeway to Jack London Square, parked in the lot and sat down for some Japanese fish cuisine and a spot of train watching. When we finished our food and paid for the mezo mezo food for the price [$60 for two people], we headed in with our tickets to look for our reserved seats [you have to tell the server that you have tickets for the show and they'll reserve a table for you inside the show]. When we arrived at the venue door which is just down the long hall from the dinner area, there was a flood of people coming in from the outside at the same time so we squeaked into the queue and tried to find our seats. The booth layout illustration on the reserved seat ticket flyer we got was easy enough to read and when we got to our booth, some guy was sitting in it. It turns out that the booths seat up to five people so I was embarrassed when I said, "I think this is our table" to our booth occupant. I was soon educated about the seating arrangement, having only been to Yoshi's once before for a show that wasn't terribly crowded so we got situation and put our initial drink and after dinner snack orders in. The place was completely filled with patrons by the time the show started. Before Ron Carter and his three cohorts came to the stage to blow our feeble minds, I noticed that there was a really nice, large diaphragm condenser microphone facing towards a clean-looking Gallien Kruger amplifier that was hooked up to the upright bass that later on, I would learn was Ron Carter's instrument. At most live shows, you don't see recording studio condenser mics used because they are fragile and can easily be wrecked by an inadvertant bump or whack from an unaware stage participant but this was no ordinary live show. These four men were incredibly talented musicians. From the first note that came out of the speakers towards us, we knew that we had stumbled onto something special and boy is that an understatement. Ron Carter played upright bass right in the middle of the stage and his fingers were really long and probably calloused from the years of flicking and sliding his fingers across the large strings on his upright bass. The quartet instrumentalists accompanying Ron consisted of the drummer Payton Crossley, who played a tiny little jazz kit whose kick drum was so small, it looked like it might belong to a young child's drum set. The percussionist, Rolando Morales-Matos, had an astounding array of gadgets, trinkets and toys that were arrayed around the right side of the stage from our vantage point; it turns out that there were even more of the percussive pieces hiding over there that he used that we couldn't see, including a bird whistle, two different varieties of rain sticks and some kind of stomped cowbell doohickie; there were other unidentified noise-making items used during the show too but I have no idea what they're called or what they look like. Finally, the piano and its player were at stage left as they were the last time I was at Yoshi's and Stephen Scott, a stout man with delicate hands sat with his back to us and we watched as his magical fingers massaged the grand piano keys like few I have ever witnessed in person. During quieter passages, I distinctly heard him singing the notes he was playing, even though he wasn't miked up. You could tell he was feeling it along with the rest of the foursome. It's difficult to describe what the music sounded like because it was many things all at once: experimental jazz, afro cuban-rhythms, a moist tropical rain forest or a music studio master lesson with traditional jazz drums combined with other-worldly noise makers, off beat chord changes, feels and sections where it seemed almost cacophonous; that everyone was playing their own disparate pieces of music and then in a moment, a crash cymbal and a snare would bring them all back together as if they had been playing a piece that was written to confuse and obfuscate, and then bring you to the central theme in an instant. Unbelievable. We could hear people in the back saying "Wow!" and "Yeah!" There is just no way to describe what I heard last night at Yoshi's; I'm just not that talented of a writer. I gave it a shot in the last paragraph but to really appreciate what we witnessed last night; the undeniably spectacular, whimsical and musically fantastic explorations of jazz bass, piano, percussion and drums, through many styles, vibes and feels at once incongruous and yet still connected to a common theme, you must go to Yoshi's and catch the Ron Carter Quartet before they are gone on Sunday. If you like jazz or have wondered what some good contemporary jazz might sound like and you have an open mind about music. Go see this show now. The Ron Carter Quartet plays Weds. through Sunday at Yoshi's with two shows each evening at 8 and 10PM Tickets are $20 for the Thursday 8PM show and $14 for the 10PM show Friday's ticket prices are higher at $24 for the 8PM and $18 for the 10PM show Both Saturday shows are $24 Sunday's Matinee shows are discounted with kids [$5 for one kid and $15 for one kid with an Adult] or $20 for adults only Sunday's 8PM show is $24 Yoshi's @ Jack London Square Here's a blurb from the Yoshi's web page about Ron Carter: ""One of jazz's most venerable bassists" Jazz Times "The always innovative Carter pushes forward with a sound as fresh as ever." USA Today With more than 2,500 albums to his credit, Ron Carter may be the world's most recorded jazz bassist; he is easily among the most respected and original. In his 45 year career, he has performed with a range of artists, from Miles Davis and Eric Dolphy to Lena Horne and James Brown. In addition to performing, composing, and arranging, Carter lectures and teaches. He recently retired (as Distinguished Professor) from heading the Jazz Program at The City College of New York (CUNY) and is on the board of directors of the Harlem Jazz Music Center."

I'll bee-lieve in evolution when you can show me how bees can fly...

darin — Wed, 08 Mar 2006 20:20:07 GMT

Okay, here ya go: http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,181212,00.html It's s sad day when I have to post a Fox News story about scientists disproving a stupid argument against evolution but there it is...

Seattle-based WetPaint beta will make Wiki page editing and creation a snap...

darin — Mon, 06 Mar 2006 23:24:26 GMT

TechCrunch posted about a new web 2.0 wiki creation and editing site called Wet Paint. Right now, you can try out the UI and see a tour of the features included but only email addresses are being collected for a future beta sign up where accounts can be created: http://www.wetpaint.com/

Manscaping? Gothamist posted a short review of a high school article that referred to the practice...

darin — Fri, 03 Mar 2006 00:02:13 GMT

Manscaping? Can you guess what it means? Here's a link to a Gothamist article [a New York City blog similar to the "-ist" blogs such as our own SFist in San Francisco] about some high school paper with no web presence called "The Argus" that published an article about the practice of shaving one's man hair, specifically in the nether regions. Apparently, it's a growing trend with the male population to shave lightning bolts and other shapes in the southern region of one's own body for the youth at the school. Personally, I just thought the Gothamist photo was funny. Have a gander at the associated photo for an example of northern body manscaping; some of you may need eyeball floss after seeing it though: http://feeds.feedburner.com/gothamist05?m=2875 NY Post article: http://www.nypost.com/news/regionalnews/62650.htm Here's the Wikipedia.org entry for the neologism 'manscaping': http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manscaping

Can't touch this: MC Hammer is now bloggin' and podcastin'...

darin — Thu, 02 Mar 2006 02:02:58 GMT

It's Hammertime and you can't touch this so turn this mutha out: http://mchammer.blogspot.com/ It's been slow lately. Sorry!

Ether - Charging for over-the-phone services like advice, consulting, etc. made easy...

darin — Wed, 01 Mar 2006 20:52:56 GMT

A new service called Ether will launch soon, if it hasn't already, that basically makes it easy to be a consultant or independent contractor giving advice over the phone for a fee that others pay you via credit card or check. My boss pointed out that Tech Dirt has the story of the "new" Ether.com which used to be Keen.com. Ether is employing the same business model and pretending like Ether is a "new" service. I guess many of Keen.com's members were using the service for phone sex and other sex related services. I looked over Ether's Terms of Use text and it doesn't specifically prohibit sexually explicit usage for site members. Only time will tell if the majority of Ether's accounts are used for similar endeavors this time around. The link to the site is here: http://www.ether.com/

Passwords are so last week...

darin — Fri, 24 Feb 2006 00:57:57 GMT

So, apparently, there's a big push to make passwords and personal data security more, uh, secure [who knew?]. This is especially true at large insitutions like banks and brokerages, etc. There were also some interesting conversations going on about how to do just that at the recent RSA conference. Here's an article that was featured in Wired News recently that talks about some of the ways passwords and alternative security measures might evolve into more secure protocols in the not-so-distant future: http://www.wired.com/news/technology/0,70234-0.html?tw=wn_index_13

Eventually, everyone will be offended by the internet...

darin — Fri, 17 Feb 2006 01:24:32 GMT

Jennifer Granick, executive director of the Stanford Center for Internet and Society, posted an interesting article for Wired News that relates the upset over the Muhammed caricatures in the Danish papers that has been in the news lately with cultural relativism and discusses the societal clashes that will continue to occur as the internet evolves and expands around the world: http://www.wired.com/news/technology/internet/0,70209-0.html?tw=wn_index_14

Annalee Newitz's Son of Dot.com post...

darin — Wed, 15 Feb 2006 21:08:41 GMT

For those of you who don't spend your days reading the latest boingboing.net posts, or surfing your bloglines RSS feeds for interesting news stories, funny websites, flash games or porn, Annalee Newitz recently posted an article for her column in that old school form of communication known as "The Bay Guardian weekly" printed on actual paper, as well as on her blog at Alternet.org, about this whole new web 2.0 trend and the buzzwords associated with it. For the reluctant but technically connected luddite, this is a crash course in all the hooplah and associated buzzwords you'll need for the next drunken blogger site launch party. Words like "folksonomy", "tagging" and many other "web 2.0" jargon gems are discussed or simply mentioned in the article. To bad she didn't get to AJAX, one of my personal favs. I try to read her techsploitation column in the Guardian every week but occasionally, I miss an issue and I can always turn to the Alternet.org bloglines feed for my weekly dose of female geekery that is Annalee Newitz. A self-described surly media nerd. I prefer to say Nywerd, like the guy in American Splendor but that's just me. The Son of dot.com blog item: http://www.alternet.org/columnists/story/32071/ Alternet where you can subscribe to Annalee's blog: http://www.alternet.org/

Blurb: turn your blog into a book...

darin — Sat, 11 Feb 2006 01:44:10 GMT

This is the kind of idea that once you hear it, you say to yourself, why didn't I think of that? Now, all those writers in training that I mentioned blogging to over the last year or two might just start to listen to me! Actually, I kinda doubt that they will even after hearing about Blurb. They're writers and this is just for publishing your blog which is often about someone's sad, depressing life that no one wants to read about anyway. Here's the link the private beta site of blurb that should be available in March sometime: http://www.blurb.com/

Pandora: New features added to version 2.1 include favorites, sharing, RSS feeds...

darin — Tue, 07 Feb 2006 00:18:10 GMT

Pandora's blog was updated recently with a post that describes some new features that were added to the 2.1 version of service including favorites, sharing, RSS feeds [the blog post says the RSS feed feature is just beta] and more. Check it out here: http://blog.pandora.com/pandora/archives/2006/02/pandora_21.html

Tunecore: get your music on the iTunes Music Store...

darin — Sat, 04 Feb 2006 03:20:29 GMT

I just read about a nifty new service that promises to get your music on the iTunes Music Store. I guess they charge a nominal maintenance fee for the service [$8 a year? can this be right?] and you get all of the money that is generated from sales of your music. They have options for getting your music up at iTunes U.S., Canada, Japan, U.K., and Australia. Rhapsody and other online music service sites are coming soon, according to their site. Here's the link: http://www.tunecore.com/

Finally, someone in a position of power speaks up about Global Warming...

darin — Wed, 01 Feb 2006 01:37:40 GMT

I guess Tony Blair is in a position of power, well, he's in a position to be this country's whipping boy for our international oil agenda but for crying out loud, he actually said that Global Warming is happening and pointed to specific studies that say it's advancing at an unsustainable rate! Can we get an amen from the congregation please? Dennis Miller even softened up in his most recent comedy show saying that he's not convinced about all the science reports he's read on the subject and he's a conservative! Mr. Bush you're next up at the plate to acknowledge that global warming is an issue:. Here's the Wired article link about Tony Blair's admission: http://www.wired.com/news/technology/0,70116-0.html?tw=wn_index_11

Car Harbor: Need to find a parking spot in a crowded city...?

darin — Fri, 27 Jan 2006 01:07:15 GMT

This was a nifty post I saw on Tech Crunch recently about Car Harbor which will launch in S.F. first. I think Craig Newmark is an advisor for these guys as well: http://carharbor.typepad.com/