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Archive | July, 2011

Great Old Music: Fever Tree

By Kent on July 29, 2011 in Music

When I was a kid, there were these things called newspapers. Basically, someone took some wood pulp, pressed it into into thin sheets, wrote stuff on it, and sold it to you. Crazy I know, but it really happened.

Today at work, I walked by my secretary’s desk, and lo and behold, there was one of those newspapers. Just laying there. Beside some compact discs, paper checks and Burma-Shave signs. A cornucopia of dead technology.

Curious, I picked it up. Before I could reminisce about how it must have been to get day old news in flimsy print format, I noticed another relic of the past. I read that someone has uncovered a previously unreleased live record by Fever Tree, one of the best (of the 3 or 4) bands to come out of Houston, and it was going to be released next week. Immediately, I dropped the newspaper, wiped the ink off my hands and ran to my computer to read about this.

It was true!

Not only that, but it turns out Fever Tree’s keyboard player is the organist for St. Luke’s. That’s the local Methodist Church for rich people. I go to the local Methodist Church for non-rich people, but Cassidy has attended drama camp and worked as a vacation bible school counselor at St. Luke’s. So she may have met the guy who might have played on one of my favorite songs ever.

ftree

Fever Tree - What Time Did You Say it is in Salt Lake City.

I can’t really explain why I dig that song so much, but I have, from the first time I heard it.

That record is not on Spotify, but here’s one (from 1968) that is. There’s a good Day Tripper/We Can Work It Out cover on there. Ninety-Nine and One Half rocks, as does Where Did You Go. Good stuff.

Hopefully, I’ll get my hands on the new old record. If so, I’ll do a review.

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RIP Topify

By Kent on July 29, 2011 in Tech

I’ve praised Topify before, saying that it was one of the most useful little apps in my toolbox. I’ve used it for over two years, and it has saved me a ton of time, by allowing me to manage my Twitter follows and un-follows (for those dumbasses who think auto-DMing someone will somehow make them money) via email.

Last week, Twitter changed the format of its email notifications, which broke the Topify’s method of identifying and processing Twitter notification-related emails. I don’t care enough about Twitter to explore this in any detail, but my general impression has long been that Twitter has a very schizophrenic relationship with the developer community- they love them- until they don’t.

I was immediately worried that the end may be near for Topify, and today I received an email and read a blog post that confirmed my fears. Topify is shutting down on August 5, 2011.

There’s theoretically some way to work around this change, but Arik Fraimovich, Topify’s developer, made the understandable decision to throw in the towel:

I considered switching to using the Streaming API in the past, but the only option for Topify is to use the Site Streams version of it. But Site Streams are still in beta, and according to the documentation there is no estimated date for it to exit beta. Considering this last episode and other actions by Twitter in the past year, I have no desire to expriment with their beta offerings. Not only this can result in unstable service for you, they might just shut it down one day.

Unless you are making a butt-load of money in the meantime, why in the world would developers work on small value-additive apps, when they know from experience that Twitter can and probably will pull the rug out from under them at any time?

All I can say to that is, thanks Arik for a great little service. I used it every day for years, and it will be missed.

Now I’m going to have to visit Twitter to un-follow everyone who auto-DMs me

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Spotify Launches Artist Radio in the U.S.!

By Kent on July 27, 2011 in Music

When Spotify launched in the United States., the artist radio feature that is available in Europe was absent. Even without that feature, Spotify is a great service, and well worth the premium subscription price of $10 a month.

Still, people being people, many complained and begged Spotify to enable some sort of radio feature.

Much to my happy surprise, when I fired up Spotify tonight, the Artist Radio feature was there. No announcement, no bells and whistles. It was just there.

This makes an already excellent service even better. Hopefully over time, Spotify will add more ways to fine tune your radio.

Here’s the bottom line. If you like music, even a little bit, there is no rationale basis for not signing up for Spotify as fast as you can. It’s damn near perfect already, and it just gets better and better.

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A Girl, a Tooth & Some Pliers

By Kent on July 22, 2011 in Life

The other night, Delaney came downstairs and told me that her permanent tooth was coming in underneath a baby tooth, and causing the baby tooth to stick out. This made her retainer uncomfortable.

She asked me to pull the tooth. I asked her if she was sure. She said yes.

She’s a lot tougher than her daddy was at that age.

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Why Do a Bunch of Of Other People Have My Same Gmail Address?

By Kent on July 17, 2011 in Tech

Being the Google Apps loving, Google+ excluded, long-time domain owning cat that I am, I don’t use them much anymore, but I own several regular Gmail email addresses. I get occasional email at these addresses, mostly from websites where I didn’t want to give my real email address, so I have configured my Google Apps Gmail account to check them regularly. Emails to those accounts show up in a designated folder in my regular Gmail app.

gmail

A year or so ago, I started getting emails that weren’t intended for me, addressed to one of those old email addresses: knewsome at gmail. Over time, the amount of email increased. Now I get several a week. Most of the time I just delete them, or unsubscribe, if that is an option. Once I got what appeared to be an important email from a wife to her husband, so I emailed her from another email address and told her that I wasn’t her husband. I got another one from her the other day. She wanted him to call her at work, before 6:15.

At this point, I’ve unsubscribed, deleted and, in that one case, emailed, about as much as I can, to no avail. The emails keep coming.

I can’t get Tim Westergren to give me a straight answer on the Pandora hobbling 6-skips an hour limitation, but I got this today, welcoming some other Knewsome to Pandora:

Thanks so much for joining Pandora! We’re very happy to have you on board, and we look forward to providing you with endless hours of great music listening and discovery. The Music Genome Project has been a 10-year labor of love, and we hope you’ll enjoy the results.

Yesterday, Google wrote me, not to tell me I can finally use Google+, but to tell someone named Kenneth that his newest Gmail email address, signed up for via the Knewsome account, is ready:

Congratulations on creating your brand new Gmail address,
knewsome1968@gmail.com. Please keep this email for your records, as it contains an important verification code that you may need should you ever encounter problems or forget your password.

There’s more. Meredith, Holly and Margaret invited me to the AHHS Class of 2001 10 Year Reunion in Forth Worth, Texas. Hope it was fun. I graduated from High School before they were born.

I got an email about a Scholastic Book Order from a third grade teacher in Florida. Hope those girls got their books.

Someone named Kindal was about to waste his/her money on some software program. The salesman’s email was so over the top, I couldn’t even tell what he was selling.

Clearly, these are not all the same person, and at least some of them are not spammers or scammers. It looks like a whole bunch of people are using the knewsome at gmail address like some sort of shared phone line. I don’t use that address, so I don’t care all that much.

But it is troubling. And apparently not an isolated event. These folks are complaining to Google. As are these.

Has anyone else experienced this sort of thing with their Gmail accounts?

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Jukebox, Spotified

By Kent on July 16, 2011 in Music

Spotify Jukebox

A long time ago in a galaxy far away, music bloggers used to open up their music library, hit random, and list the first 10 or so songs that played. It was stone age music sharing, only without the ability to, you know, actually hear the music.

I did a bunch of those posts. Here’s one I did on October 22, 2005. It was like writing quarter notes on the cave walls of my blog.

It just got a whole lot better.

As anyone who reads my blog, talks to me for more than a minute or wanders into my office knows, I am deeply in love with Spotify. One of the many reasons why, is because Spotify finally gets music right- and legal- in the social arena. It’s like a better, faster, legal Napster.

So…

I went back to that old post, and made a Spotify playlist. Of the 10 songs that randomly played that day, 8 of them are available on Spotify. And remember, I have a huge and very, very diverse song library. If Spotify has – or can soon get – anywhere close to 80% of my song library, that will be pretty impressive.

Here’s that playlist, from 2005. If you have Spotify, the app will open the playlist.

The only songs I couldn’t find on Spotify are What You Want, by The Mertons, and Girl About a Song, by Jonathan Gregg.

I’m going to start making new Jukebox playlists, and sharing them via Spotify. So get ready for good music. Oh, and go sign up for Spotify.

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Modern Ruins: Splash Downer

By Kent on July 16, 2011 in Life

As long-time readers know, I am intrigued by modern ruins.

splash

Today, I came across an excellent video by Mike Eisenberg, chronicling the wasteland that used to be the Splash Down Dunes water park in Porter, Indiana.

Watered Down from mike eisenberg on Vimeo.

If you want to see a video of the park in happier times, here you go.

If you know of any good modern ruins video or photo collections, let me know in the comments.

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Spotify Wins the Race to My Desktop (and Heart)

By Kent on July 14, 2011 in Music, Tech

Everybody and their dog is talking about Spotify today, which is understandable since it, finally, finally launched in the United States this morning. I’ll keep this (sort of) short.

I have been holding a secret sweepstakes in my head about which much ballyhooed app would find its way to my desktop first. Google+, which is the talk of the internets, and still, amazingly, unavailable to Google Apps users, or Spotify, the Holy Grail of music apps. Spotify won.

I’ve been using Spotify for a few months, and can say unequivocally that it is the best music app I have ever used. By far. Now that it’s officially available and I don’t have to worry about some record-label madness derailing my joy, here’s what I know.

One, Spotify is going to completely change the music game, for the better. I simply cannot believe there is a true music fan that won’t find $5 or $10 a month a screaming bargain for what Spotify offers. Spotify has already replaced Windows Media Player and the bloated train wreck that is iTunes as my default music player.

Two, I have cancelled my Slacker Radio account, and may very well cancel my Pandora account. The 6-skip an hour limitation on Pandora (even the paid accounts) is simply a deal-stopper for me. The only thing that could ensure that I keep Pandora will be if it gets to my car quickly and cheaply. I want to dump Sirius XM (and the annoyance that is Mojo Nixon) much more than I want to dump Pandora, so the dashboard is open for Pandora to secure its place in my paid apps lineup.

Three, unlike 99% of the apps out there, Spotify does social right. The sharing features really add something to the experience. As soon as I add some alt. country, country rock, classic rock and blues loving friends to my Spotify circle, music discovery will be a significant, and fun, part of the experience.

Four, while there are tons and tons of songs in Spotify’s library, there are some holes around the edges. Particularly as it relates to less mainstream and older music. One of the first things I did was to try to add all the alt. country songs I thumbed up via Pandora to a Spotify playlist. I was a little surprised at how many weren’t available. I hope the library grows like I know the user base will.

Five, as amazing as this may sound, I have not added my huge local music library to Spotify. I have 26,000 or so (legal, non-shared) songs on my music server. The thing is, there are probably 15,000 or so of them that I never want to hear again. I’m afraid things would get too cluttered if I tossed my entire library into my Spotify window. Rather, I am going to use local files to fill in some of the gaps, and use Spotify’s library as my main one. This may change, but that’s the current plan.

I’m really stoked about Spotify. Now, if Google will stop screwing over Google Apps users, my desktop (and heart) will be full of joy.

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Dropbox vs Windows Live Mesh: I Can Answer That Question

By Kent on July 5, 2011 in Tech

Paul Thurrott, one of my favorite tech bloggers, asks why someone would use Dropbox over… wait for it… Windows Live Mesh.

Let me try to stop laughing long enough to answer that question.

OK, I think I’m OK now. Here goes.

One, Microsoft does a horrible job of marketing its apps. It may have the greatest set of apps on earth, but it can’t even figure out what to call them, much less how to effectively communicate to people what they do and why they are awesome. Seriously, I am a long time Microsoft user and TechNet subscriber, and I don’t even know what Live Mesh (what a stupid, stupid name) is. I think it’s the (God knows how many times) renamed FolderShare app that Microsoft bought back in 2005. I actually used FolderShare before it became a casualty to Microsoft’s (lack of a) marketing plan.

Two, Microsoft’s non-core apps tend to be very kludgy. Dropbox may only be a folder on my computer, but it’s a folder that I can access with a click of an icon, and easily drag items into. Sharing is as easy as a right click. As far as I know, there is no way to mount Sky Drive as a folder on my computer, in the absence of Gladinet or some third party work-around. Even when Microsoft adds features that compare favorably with other offerings, like the ability to sync multiple folders and more space, it generally trips over itself in some way- like the fact that you can’t access Sky Drive via Live Mesh. Or the fact that you need two separate apps in the first place. Between the ever-changing (and ridiculous) names and the (real or perceived) learning curve, many people will choose the ease of Dropbox.

Which is sort of too bad, because the battle for the cloud is wide open.

I agree with Ed Bott that the latest Dropbox security breach is a big deal. I’m a believer in the cloud, but every day I see more and more evidence that the cloud is still being formed, and no one has adequate security in place. I also agree that scale matters in the cloud. I would trust Amazon or Microsoft to keep my data safer than Dropbox. But I’m not willing to spend hours trying to figure out how to mesh (pun intended) Microsoft’s products into a workable solution. And if I feel that way as a tech blogger and geek, how do you think the typical internet user feels?

The fact is that you install Dropbox and you’re done. To replicate that with Microsoft either is or seems like (it really doesn’t matter which) the equivalent of a 1000 piece jigsaw puzzle. It might be beautiful, but few people have the time and patience to tackle it.

I have no doubt that for someone like Ed or Paul, who are very learned in tech in general and Microsoft in particular, the Windows mesh/mess of apps, when placed in the right order, is a fine, and maybe even preferable, solution.

Meanwhile, the rest of us go on living our lives, using Dropbox and hoping that Dropbox gets its security ducks in a row, so we don’t have to go try to figure out what Microsoft’s apps are called that day, and how they work.