Moving to a new server – 2.75TB of usable storage (quad core, 8GB RAM) and less expensive than my current one (an old Athlon64 X2 w/ 2G RAM I’ve had for.. 26 months). I stuck w/ NetDepot, who I’ve been super happy with for hosting.
Linux nd11544 2.6.31-16-server #53-Ubuntu SMP Tue Dec 8 05:08:02 UTC 2009 x86_64
To access official Ubuntu documentation, please visit:
http://help.ubuntu.com/
System information as of Tue Dec 29 16:03:03 CST 2009
System load: 0.0 Memory usage: 0% Processes: 121
Usage of /home: 0.0% of 784.65GB Swap usage: 0% Users logged in: 1
Graph this data and manage this system at https://landscape.canonical.com/
While I got started with my first MP3s in the early/mid 90s, and started expanding my tastes during college, it wasn’t until my post-rave days in the early 2000’s that I became truly “music obsessive”. Part of that change probably had to do with exposure from new coworkers and friends after I graduated. And, while I have fond memories of Amoeba and KCRW, a lot of it probably also had to do with my finally crossing the physical/virtual threshold and fully embracing MP3s as my “collection.” Shortly after, I went “all in” on the cloud, storing all my music on my server.
While I hadn’t gone to many concerts growing up, in my new life I more than made up for it. I became a regular at the Derby, Spaceland, the Troubadour, the Henry Fonda, The El Rey, heck, even the Glass House (and anywhere else playing music). Multiple shows a week were not uncommon, sometimes with friends, but more often than not by myself – heading in early and catching all the opening acts just in case they were any good (not often, but those sometimes seemed to make it worthwhile). After Upcoming got rolling, my show-going time dropped significantly (something something irony about seeing all the events but being too busy), and after moving up to the Bay area (and travelling frequently), this trend has worsened (only slightly offset by an increase in festival going, and by finally succumbing to SXSW Music: The Best Thing Ever).
Still, my music consumption has continued unabated (out of control might be a more appropriate description). It’s continues to fascinate how much my musical tastes/experience has been shaped/facilitated by the new media landscape (where attention, not distribution is the limiting factor). And while it’s been enormously interesting/satisfying watching the future of music coming (Topspin, Spotify, etc.), what’s even more interesting is looking more closely at my own personal musical journey and what has enabled it.
All of this which is, I guess, to give preface and context for what I’ve put together. A couple weeks ago, I got it in my mind to try to make my own “decade” list – not something authoritative, just something to map my musical (and of course in turn, my actual) decade. Rather than a short list of albums, I’d pick out songs. This was at first rather discouraging, but with some encouragement, I redoubled my efforts and over the past few days I’ve plowed through my collection and culled almost 1200 tracks (and over 500 artists) from this decade. I then wrote some code to process those lists and dynamically generate a playlist that I’m calling “Songs from the 2000s.”
Each time the player is loaded, 40 songs, 4 from each decade are randomly picked (in year order, of course) from the aforementioned set of songs. An artist will only be called once. Rather than try (or rather, pretending) to be comprehensive, what I’m hoping give is a taste of my musical journey.
This past year hasn’t been quite the return to form I’d hoped to have for my blogging. Still, there’s nothing like a near-data loss experience (well, I had good backups, but a drive on my server had gotten royally screwed – I have some Evernote scratchings, but I’ll spare people the details of fighting apt-get/dpkg when your libc6 version breaks perl and then eventually, your entire system) to get one a bit nostalgic, and kicking the tires again. Being laid up in bed with a nasty cold all weekend and staring at a mile-long TODO list probably doesn’t hurt either.
In any case, after I get some stuff done before Christmas, I’ll probably be spending some of the last days of the decade thinking doing some reflection (also, while I first started migrating .plan updates to the web in ‘97, and the direct predecessor to my current blog in ‘99, my 10-year blogging on rf.net is actually coming up in a few months…
(Amazingly, it wasn’t until earlier this year when my old USC links (and email account!) finally got broken. 10 years ain’t a bad run.)
Last year, I bought a Kindle before heading out to Boston to work on the Obama campaign. Since I gave +1 week report, I thought I’d give a one year report as well.
Overall, I’ve remained relatively happy with the Kindle – I continue to carry it around with me pretty much anytime I’m traveling (bus, train, or plane) and the day to day experience, remains largely the same. This sums up both the pros and cons – it’s useful enough to be probably my most used device after my computers and cell phone because it just works – it takes only a few seconds to wake up before you’re up and reading, and only requires a few minutes of charging every few days (whenever I get around to it). On the flip side, there haven’t been (m)any major software updates. The listing screen remains as useless for managing a larger number of books, and the browser, which I use a fair amount for reading longer articles remains as weak as the day I got it.
As for the deletions, post-hoc edits, and other issues… it’s certainly remains problematic – hopefully the high profile of these occurrences force more people to think about its implications and consequences (as I did when I bought my Kindle, I’ll point out Mark Pilgrim’s essay – in light of what has happened, those that attacked the essay as polemic or hyperbolic might reconsider these dangers as quite real, and without the proper checks and balances, inevitable). That being said, in practice, my personal usage hasn’t been impacted much. I’ll probably feel differently when I decide to switch reading devices.
When I got my Kindle, I started keeping tracks of my purchases in a spreadsheet. Some details:
I’ve bought about two dozen books on the Kindle this past year. Lower than I would have thought, but I’ve been pretty busy this past year…
About 3/4 of these books are Mobi vs Topaz formatted. While there are tools for decoding your mobi books, there are none for Topaz books
Over 3/4 of the books are also non-fiction, for whatever reason
I didn’t keep track of the samples I’ve downloaded and while you can see your order history on Amazon’s site, they don’t display your sample downloads (I can’t imagine Amazon not actively crunching those numbers internally)
I marked down the price on Amazon when buying the Kindle books, my overall savings rate vs the Amazon price for the physical book was 39.07% or $157.84, (nowhere near the cost of the device).
On that last point though, even beyond factoring in the convenience factor, I guess that’s not quite a complete picture. I’ve also read about about the same amount of books from ManyBooks.net and other sources. And I’ve sent myself lots of documents (it seems that Amazon only started charging the delivery fee recently), and I’ve also read a few hundred articles via the browser (primarily using pushpopurl) – in fact, my default behavior for longer online articles is now to save them for reading online later. It’s not perfect – the Kindle browser really sucks, has not control over font size or line-height, and often has strange spacing issues, but even with those drawbacks, the reflective e-ink screen is so much easier on the eyes that it’s still worth it.
Nicholson Baker recently wrote a long article in the New Yorker which was pretty negative about Kindle (which I read on the Kindle, of course), and while many of his complaints are valid, I think he misses some of the point – while the E-Ink screen might not be as good as paper, for reading big chunks of text, it’s a huge improvement over a monitor. If you travel or are in the habit of reading multiple things at at once… well, you just can’t do that with physical books. He ends up recommending the iPod Touch for reading, but that doesn’t work very well outdoors or in sit-down transit (I’ll agree the iPhone is much more convenient in the subway). That he talks about the bright glow and the pleasant experience of night-time reading though seems to tell me that he doesn’t spend nearly as much time staring at screens as I do. Lastly, I’ve found that none of the other alternatives (even the iPhone) are as slick as the Kindle for personal documents. Emailing yourself a wide range of formats and getting it converted and delivered via 3G and having it pop up at the top of your reading list is just a very pleasant experience.
My major frustrations really revolve around form factor (well, being able to reasonably read A4/Letter sized two-column technical papers) and that I’m not able to better track my reading activity – not that I’d want a third party to have that information necessarily, but the types of self-instrumentation and tracking for reading patterns and the like is… exciting to me.
My next report will probably be in a year, or maybe a bit earlier if there’s a compelling alternative (the Plastic Logic reader form factor and feature set look great, however the performance might be a bit of an issue – having already gone through one horrible reader, I don’t think I’d be willing to compromise much on power management, wake-up and page turning performance).
I was clearing out some old files from my server and came across a bunch of old Prodigy videos (VOB no less!). Before “Big Beat” they were straight up rave. Pretty fun stuff.
Of course these are on YouTube, so thought I’d share.
(Everybody in the Place, Out of Space, and Wind It Up are from Experience (1992) and No Good is from Jilted (1994)).
Neither here nor there, but back somewhere between 94-96, Prodigy’s “Jericho” and “Fire” were some of my first MP3 tracks. I believe it took most of my of my computer’s CPU to play (I think it was a 386SX that had a Cyrix 486 upgrade by then?) to decode with Winplay (there was a DOS based player before Winplay, right? Or maybe I’m confusing some tracker players with that…). One of these days I’ll have to try to dig that old stuff out, since the dates are all a bit fuzzy.
Like last year, I tried to shoot some video of the sets I went to for SXSW Music. This time, I tried to get more substantive clips. I also upgraded from a Leica D-Lux 3, which had OK video quality but very poor sound quality to a Samsung NV24HD, which shot 720p H.264 video and higher bitrate audio. The sound (mics) still leave a bit to be desired, but overall I was pretty happy with the results, especially since the camera is very pocketable (camera battery life was my main bane).
I’ve finished posting most of my videos on Vimeo. Here are some of my favs:
I wanted to catch them after hearing them on the SXSW torrent and saw they were only playing once. They got started a bit late (good for me, since I first hit the British Embassy), and didn’t disappoint.
I tried to catch Yppah last year after discovering him on a Ninja Tune compilation, but it was just a DJ set. This year, he was w/ a live band which was more along the lines of what I was expecting.
Just a tiny clip of Amanda Palmer in church. The funny story behind this is that there are two church venues right next to each other and I was totally confused on why the schedule was all off…
Unfortunatley, by the time I got a better view, my battery had given up the ghost. He played a song at the end of Quincy Jones’ keynote, so I knew I had to see him play at the Elephant Room that night…
For whatever reason I never gave them a good listen, which thankfully is rectified because their set was great.
The only artist I saw twice this SXSW because I lurve Alcatraz Kid (his first album) so much. The venue was a bit out of the way, but I also had flan while I was out there, so that worked out.
Tell me when P.O.S. will be in town and I will be there.
The best set I saw this year. Great songs, amazing performance, front row. Damn skippy.
One of my few “I wanna catch that” artists, I missed him in the previous days, and with the venue opening super late, I was fearing the worst, but I got to see a great, if short set, so that worked out.
I had only caught one track from the torrent, but got it in my mind to check her out and was pretty pleasantly surprised.
This isn’t the greatest clip, but Nosaj Thing’s set roxored. Will definitely need to catch him next time he’s rocking a party in SF or LA.
I didn’t catch as many day shows as I had some work to do, but overall, I was again very happy w/ my SXSW Music experience.
This was also my 10th SXSW Interactive – which flew by way too quickly (and was surprisingly, even larger than last year). I want to say that maybe next year is a good time to take a break, but I can’t say that I didn’t have a lot of fun catching up with old friends again.
Since the beginning of the year, I’ve been spending most of my waking hours working on a new project with an old friend. It’s still a bit of a work in progress, but we’ll be at ETech this week and at events at SXSWi and SXSWm the week after, so what better time then now for a long rambly blog post introducing the Lensley Automatic.
hello.
A couple years ago, Jaime decided to build a photobooth (and with no prior experience, headed off to Home Depot…) and it’s been percolating along since. We’ve done events at the X-Games, the US Open, and with clients like Nike, Adidas, Diesel, Fuel.TV, Fuse.TV, MTV, etc. Towards the end of last year, after returning from a several month long interruption working on the Obama campaign (that worked out OK, btw , we decided that it was time to take it to the next level.
It’s been an incredibly busy past few months, but what we’ve ended up with I think is something pretty unique (with a lot of potential). We have a new and improved enclosure (although, admittedly, a new version is already cooking), and more interestingly (well, it certainly took a lot more of my time) our own custom software for the booth, visualizations, and network interaction, giving us the ability to completely customize the printed output, the booth user experience, and the digital followup. For a start, we’ll be tweeting and posting photos to flickr w/ autotagging by way of RFID (fingers crossed on that!) at ETech. Just the first of the cool things we have planned.
And, while learning Cocoa hasn’t been all roses, it has been a great deal of fun working on a project that touches on hardware, visualization, photography, events, and the social web (and soon, video and mobile) – it’s a big cross section of “things I’m interested in.” Plus, all the joys of starting a small business (that’s half facetious, but also half genuine). Sure the timing might not be ideal, but all in all, it’s been a great experience in terms of stretching out some different muscles after being a bit cooped up. And well, there’s no time like the present to do your own thing.
Oh, if you’ve seen me in person in the past couple months (not likely!) and I’ve been more scatterbrained than usual (or have been responding in a zombie-like fashion), now you know why. (Not helped by the fact that for whatever reason, I spent a good few weeks of development time on a 4pm-10am schedule.)
The book review of Daemon on Boing Boing reminded me that I’ve been meaning to put in my 2-cents in. A friend recommended Daemon to me last month – it’s a techno-thriller that has an interesting meta-story of being self-published and gaining popularity originally from word of mouth of bloggers and the like. It’s definitely a page turner, and I quite liked the premise and how it started, but towards the end, it unravels into extreme silliness (and stupidity), which was sort of annoying. (some spoilers) I wasn’t as bothered by the central, and ever-expanding, conceit of having an ultra-coordinated organization powered by a bunch of shell scripts (although it really strains credibility as the story goes on), but rather by how stupid and incompetently TPTB were depicted at a pure tactical level. The last incident at the bunker could have never happened for at least a half-dozen simple reasons. Instead of being exciting or thrilling or whatever it was meant to be, it just offended my sensibilities. Anyway…
The second novel that I finished recently was Neal Stephenson’s latest, Anathem. I’m not sure when I really committed to reading it – I spent a long while near the beginning going through a page or two at a time (basically thinking about that xkcd comment) which wasn’t helped by the format – reading it on the Kindle meant that it was pretty impossible to flip to the glossary or appendices (of course, in theory, ebooks should actually be better with annotations and definitions for things like this, but no one’s taken the time to do that properly yet). On the bright side, the Kindle is probably at least a pound or two lighter than the 960pg hardcover, so I guess that wasn’t the worst trade off.
Once it got up and running, however, the story actually starts to zip along. Not only are you rewarded for the initial slog, but that experience is actually tied in, both thematically and within the plot itself – which I found to be pretty clever. And, there’s an honest to god real ending to boot. So, kudos to Stephenson for that. I’m sure that I’ll be re-reading this at some point, and that it’ll be worth it.
The middle of last year was pretty much completely dominated by politics for me. Memeorandum replaced Techmeme as my starting page, and TPM and FiveThirtyEight were at the top of my reading list. Since then, my attention has started floating back. Here are some of my recent faves (blogs that have been intersecting well with some of my current interests):
aaronland – for whatever reason (having more spare time? I noticed myself reading more of Aaron’s excellent (and lengthy) essays this year. (geo, maps, photos)
tecznotes – another one of the blogs that I’ve been following for a while that I’ve been digging a lot more – probably also has to do w/ being able to get back into doing cool stuff. Mike’s everyoneiknowisdoingawesomeshit tag seems apt to mention here (visualization, maps)
Duke Listens! – there are a couple music technology blogs I’ve been following, but this one, by Sun researcher Paul Lamere I think has been the most consistently interesting (music, recommendations)
SmugBlog: Don MacAskill – I’ve spent more than my share of time the past couple years thinking about scaling, and it was nice to find a blog/community of people talking about some of the nuts and bolts (mysql, hardware, scaling)
Perspectives – James Hamilton (AWS) has also been publishing some great stuff along those lines, mostly around data center efficiency (data center, hardware, scaling)
I also now have a pretty reliable stream of AV stimulation through my Vimeo channels and groups. Not that there’s any shortage of interesting things – it always amazes me when people talk about being bored online – attention continues to be what’s in short supply for me, even now being able to set my own schedule.
I’ve been cranking away for the past few weeks on a new project, but hopefully I’ll have a chance this week to catch up w/ some posts, including some of the stuff I’ve been working on.
, we decided that it was time to take it to the next level.
