Reformat the Planet

Today was the last day to finish watching Reformat the Planet over at pitchfork.tv, so I just did that. The documentary, about the first “chiptunes” Blip festival in NY in 2006, featured some interview and performance by Neil Voss, who I have babbled on about here before because I liked his video game soundtrcks for the N64.

It strikes me that there are so many scenes and subcultures that I think are awesome and would love to be a part of, but never will be.

I will have be satisfied with downloading more mustic from the 8-bit people website. Yum.

Ubiquity

Note that my last post was pretty much inspired by thinking about cool things that could be done with Ubiquity. If you haven’t seen or heard about Ubiquity yet, check out the announcement at Mozilla Labs first (and watch the video), then just check google. Everyone is talking about it.

There is some debate about whether the video was edited to “speed up” the cool stuff that happens. I find it incredibly hard to believe there is essentially no load time with some of those commands, I don’t care how fast your machine is.

lazyweb: clustering for RSS feeds

I mentioned to my co-workers Lloyd and Sheldon today that I had this great idea for a new website. You know how flickr does clustering? Well, what if that concept were applied to RSS feeds? I want to see all the new posts from all of my RSS feeds, grouped into categories and sub-categories.

But wait, there’s more!

It would be super sweet to me if EVERYTHING I READ was all in one place… that would obviously not be the sole location for these things, it would just be the aggregation of those things. And that place should also use clustering. So I’m talking about email, twitter, and sites I’ve subscribed to. This reminds me of a sweet article I read about online email aggregators, and how some of them do more than just email. Maybe one of these already does what I’m looking for!

But maybe I’m thinking about this the wrong way… maybe instead of a website (what I’d been imagining) I should be looking for a thunderbird plugin. Can I view all my tweets I’m following from thunderbird yet? I don’t really have that many thunderbird plugins installed, just OpenPGP, I think. Hell, now that I’m thinking about it, I don’t even know how to see what “add-ons” I’ve got installed… it’s not obvious anyway. Thunderbird is still my preferred email client, but it does suck in many ways. I should look around for more Thunderbird add-ons, but I’m too lazy even for that.

I’ve got Mono!

At a friend’s suggestion, I have now listened to all the full-length albums released by Mono. It’s basically ambient instrument-only music that frequently has many layers of guitar and distortion. I guess this particular blend of melodic guitar noise is referred to in some circles as “Post Rock”. I’m tempted to make some blogging jokes here, about writing a post about post rock, or something equally asinine, but you see how I didn’t make that joke, but instead made a reference to it, and that was more tolerable?

Anyway, I like this. It has the same “wash over you” feeling that Sigur Ros has consistently, and I’m intrigued to find that they have another EP released in conjunction with Pelican, whose album “The Fire in Our Throats Will Beckon the Thaw” I also have and sometimes enjoy. (I have not really listened enough to know whether I really dig it or not.) Anyway, for today at least, Mono is the perfect music to relax to while coding-away productively.

no k2 in the WP theme directory…

I went to the theme directory tonight with the sole purpose and intention of voting on the one theme I’ve been more than happy installing (K2, duh) and it wasn’t there! I assume this is because they’re working hard on 1.0, trying to get that out before they add K2 to the throng of themes already up for grabs. (They’re on RC7 now, I think.) Anway, I hope it’s that, and not that there’s some feuding or some other BS reason K2 isn’t listed.

Anyway, then I ended up following some links, and poking around in the K2 google code pages, and remembered that I’d started a thread asking for a particular feature for K2 back in February. I hadn’t visited the issue page in all that time, but there had been some responses, including a developer who said if I made a patch for the feature I was requesting, he’d see that it went in.

So tonight I made a patch. This officially marks the first time I’ve actually contributed (code) to an open source project. I suppose I’ve helped plenty of people on support forums and things before, but if this code makes it in, I’ll be… a geek hero or something.

Bill Stains on youtube…

In response to the news that texting while driving is now illegal in MN, a co-worker sent out a link to this song on youtube today. That song really reminded me of another song by Bill Stains, one of the guys my dad used to drag us out to see when we were kids. (This was usually at the Coffeehouse Extempore, now known as the Cedar Cultural Center).

The song it reminded me of was one I remembered as “The Ballad of Ten Ton Molly”. And when I couldn’t find that particular song on youtube, I found a few other Bill Stains songs on there. (Mostly poor quality though, which is rather sad.)

Apparently the song is actually called Jake and 10 Ton Molly, and was originally by Mike Agranoff.

Oh, you can hear it on his myspace page! My memory of Bill Stains’ version is better, but it’s well worth a listen. It’s also worth finding some old Bill Stains albums. He’s got such a great voice.