American Gods is a book best read with a Google window handy. (That’s not very couch friendly, however). Also, here’s a good American Gods ‘god’ reference (spoilers)

Noticed that I had 20 Mozilla windows open. Just added up my open tabs… 201. That’s scary. A tab counter plugin would be interesting…

• LJ implementing Whuffie
• Bloki eases Web page creation
• dylan.tweney.com – interesting links; dormant blog
• PHP PECL: tidy – Tidy is a binding for the Tidy HTML clean and repair utility which allows you to not only clean and otherwise manipluate HTML documents, but also traverse the document tree using the Zend Engine 2 OO semantics
• We are all nerds now
• Powerpoint Makes You Dumb
• SiteBar – The Bookmark Server for Personal and Team Use; fairly slick
• Passwird Deals – some not bad deals for the consumer season (add to FatWallet, Hot Deals, etc.)
• Take No Prisoners – disturbing Iraqi execution/Marine interview; not to rain on the Saddam parade or anything
• LegalTorrents – lots of music
• EA Canada Recruiting Billboard – the fastest way for me to decode was to launch a shell and String.fromCharCode() it. If you just want to know what it says

Return of the King is currently tracking 100% on both Metacritic and the Tomatometer.

What would be great is if Magnatune had a stream-to-shopping cart click-through somehow. Unfortunately, there’s no real standard. One can embed Winamp minibrowser URLs, but that’s just plain annoying. Neither Extended M3U, PLSv2, or icy/shoutcast have per-song URL support (and no players with a clickthrough interface anyway)… This would be such an obvious thing that people would want to do that you’d think there be a playlist standard to attach extra arbitrary metadata onto streams, but I guess not.

Well, I guess you can have some smarter streaming software that tracks which song to which IP (or some other identification method that’d work for proxies; but you’d have to assign a cookie or something first), so that one can visit a page and be able to buy from there. Not *quite* one-click, but pretty close.

This weekend, Creative Commons announced some great new stuff (7MB Flash), including the new Sampling licenses, and tracks to soon be released by Gilberto Gil. Also, 1M+ licensed works, book re-releasing and science licenses.

• The great hooky guitar/bass backing is by B Minor Relocation Program from the track Superego Exchange. Their full album, Assholes are Back in Seasonis available for download online; remixes by FlowerLounge (listening to a housey/jazzy mixtrack online right now) and Fourstones
• Colin Mutchler’s original guitar melody My Life, as well as Cora Beth’s violin duet version are both available in the Opsound Pool

God I hate how iTunes handles m3u’s. What kind of retarded behavior is to load streaming files into the main Library, and then of course to completely lose track of the original m3u order. Hello? What’s the point of a PLAYLIST if you’re going to ignore it? Also, if I select a bunch of MP3s to open, I want to be able to actually listen to the songs I selected (what a concept!) not see them completely mish-mashed (and not queued up) in my Library. So let me revise that: I hate how iTunes handles MP3s in general. (I can’t be the only one, can I? – and yes, most of my complaints would be fixed by having an ‘active/current playlist’ and a button/auto-pref to insert played songs into the Library)

• Better iTunes handling of M3U playlists – linked before, I know
• MP3 Dock 1.0 – looks cool, but $10, no iScrobbler support
• cdparanoia for OSX – someone actually wrote this. I’m impressed.
• MP3-Info CMM 1.3 – Finder contextual menu module; looks sorta like MP3ext (frickin’ awesome piece of software, installed on all my PCs
• WHAMB – free CD/MP3/OGG player
• xAudic – XMMS/WinAMP clone (no longer being updated?)
• MP3 Control 1.1 – small iTunes controller
• escapePod – iPod music extractor AppleScript
• Get iPod mp3 – allows copying of currently playing song from iPod
• Xpod – iPod copying utility; nice looking GUI
• MacMP3Gain – mp3gain GUI

Newish KCRW Morning Becomes Eclectic shows (see also Sounds Eclectic weekly list):

• Azure Ray (12/18/03)
• The Shins (11/10/03)
• My Morning Jacket (10/28/03)
• Death Cab For Cutie (10/23/03)
• Damien Rice (10/3/03)

• CVS Version Control for Web Site Projects
• Brent Ashley’s jsrs still actively maintained

got all my Audioscrobbler plug-ins re-installed; nothing aggregated on the list that’s “wrong”, although I think the Radiohead count is waaaay out of wack. Well, eventually my profile will better reflect what I’m actually listening to these days (music over time would be quite interesting)

(less time to program this output [3min] than writing the above paragraph thanks to rss feed + magpie)

• Weblogging With Your Palm