vanderwal.net has a great compendium of information related to the WSJ redesign.
Building A Collection Of DJ Albums: “Fifteen Essential 12-Inches And Albums.” I have only eleven out of the fifteen. Quite a crushing blow. There are a couple that I would put in there that they have ignored, like Paul’s Boutique by the Beastie Boys which set a whole new standard for back beats and the Z-Trip and Radar Future Primitive Mix that might be the greatest mix tape of all time. Perhaps I should make my own list.
Radio Bump (This is a test of the shortcut broadcast system. If this were in fact a real shortcut, it might actually go somewhere useful.)
Brent’s got a Macintosh News Aggregator up on his site now. Still a few sites that need to be added somehow it looks like to make it complete, but how long before something like this puts MacSurfer in a bad spot? I know when we started it way back when, that it was terribly time consuming surfing around to find all the updates that had occurred sine the last page update. It’s nice to see that all this newish Web technology does make it easier to follow the sites you want to follow.
USATODAY.com - Piracy pillages music industry Yet another big newspaper piece that does not really explore this issue fully. My views are quite evident to longtime readers. I buy music, and I want to be able to use it anywhere. There are lots of issues with the music companies, including the ridiculous pricing of cd’s today. At the same time, I admit there is an issue here with piracy. People who can damn well afford to pay for the music they listen to are making copies of cd’s for each other. I was at a friends house last week, he’s a consultant for a company that does ERP software implementations. He was giving a copy of the Moulin Rouge soundtrack that he had made for another friend of mine who works in the same business. These are people who make six figures plus, not starving college students, not people who are frustrated with the lack of digitally distributed music. This hammered home for me that this really is a serious issue that is not the simple set of issues normally presented by the “Internet” crowd. Sure, I might buy more music because of the exposure to it online, but others will simply take what they want regardless of morals and ethics. Having said that, the music industry cannot point at digital copying alone for its woes, and their statistics prove nothing.
I happened upon an outdoor hip hop show when I was going to get a coffee on Saturday. The band was Live on Arrival, an Atlanta hip hop group that has been around for several years. Somehow I had never run into them before. They were solid, a couple of MC’s, sometimes joined by others, and a band consisting of drums, bass, guitar, two keyboardists, and a dj. One word popped into my head while I was watching them: Legitimate. Really well designed and executed rhymes, and musically they are on a soulish tip. They sort of reminded me at times of the Goats, one of my favorite hip hop groups from Philly that also played with a live band. I snapped a bunch of pictures which you will find here. I’ll definitely be at their shows from here on out.
IPod: Music to Hackers' Ears This article paints a picture that says this device has the potential to be more than just another MP3 jukebox if Apple is willing to put the time in and nurture the community. Prediction: that won’t happen.
I’ve been digging a little into the Instant Outline stuff. Andy’s Hive gives you an interesting way to browse through the outlines without the overhead of Radio. This won’t really give you the full concept though. I can see without a doubt that this could be invaluable as a an internal collaboration interface the same way that we use IM clients to talk in the office now. Leave it in your outline and I’ll pick it up later.
First person shooter board game. I’ve been through a sort of board game revival over the last couple of years. The last two summers, we would gather around the pool in my apartment complex and play Risk and swim. Board games are a much more social experience than video games currently. Perhaps, though, that will change.
Giambi’s Bat Is Cold, and So Is His Reception I like how he chooses to embrace the attitude of Yankee fans, even when it goes against him. I respect that.
Yankees End D’Rays' Run. It looks, from the outside, like the pressure of playing in New York is having unexpected negative effects on Giambi’s performance. I’m certain that things will swing the other way, and that this is somewhat of an adjustment time period. Needless to say, it seems the honeymoon was over pretty quick.
Good people can do bad things, and bad people are quite capable of doing good things at times. Sometimes, when a bad person does something that wasn’t intended as a good thing, the results nonetheless are good results. Also, when a good person tries to do something good, they can cause bad results. As a result of this information set, I rarely will condemn a person’s actions across the board. I get frustrated sometimes, that the binary nature of people causes them to do this, to condemn someone across the board. It gets tiring, hearing essentially the same thing from someone over and over again. Just a meandering thought, but one that I seem to be thinking a lot recently.
It’s starting to look like Robin Ventura was the key off-season acquisition by the Yanks. They beat Baltimore again last night behind excellent pitching from Mussina. Too bad most of Manhattan still can’t watch the games due to the cable craziness with the Yes Network.
Stepwise: Restoring HFS and webDAV after Apple’s April 2002 Security Update
The newest version of Omnigraffle for Mac OS X ships with jjg’s visual vocabulary as a palette. How cool and very useful. Upon surfing a bit from a link I found at Webgraphics, I also found that Michael Angeles has a downloable palette that can be used for wireframing with Omnigraffle. Finally, there are even more palettes linked from Omni’s extras page. I have a feeling that I will never regret licensing all of Omni’s software a couple of months ago.
Animated Today 2002 opens the today screen on Pocket PC devices up to Flash development.
Rip ‘n’ Roll: A Date With 8 Jukeboxes This article does not live up to its title at all. I was expecting a comparison of the eight Jukeboxes. At best, all I got was a mention of eight jukeboxes. I can’t believe how shoddy I’ve found the mainstream media’s coverage of technology consumer electronics to be. The reports are, like this one, shallow and uninformative. I’m not talking about hardcore technical specifications or tests even, how about a comparison of the sound quality of these devices, or a listing of which has the best battery life? People are saying that Weblogs are not journalism, but all I keep thinking is that I get better information from Weblogs about many of the things I am interested in. Finally, there’s not a new piece of information in this article anywhere. No conclusions drawn, no recommendations made. Where’s the beef?
This post on Derek’s site, and the comments that go along with it are chock full of links that merit visitations. “who you calling boring, punk?”
Jordan’s Season Is Over Hey, I was pretty vocal about his return, saying that it wasn’t a good idea. I think that he tried to do something that he thought was right for him, for the team, and for the game itself. I’m really sorry that things didn’t really work out for him the way he was hoping. I guess there is always next year.
There are already a few interesting Flash MX components here. mmm yummy.
DaVinci is a Flash MX component for annotating images. This should give some of you Flash haters something to think about.