Jarrett House NorthNow with 80% less politics!

In our IM conversation, Greg also pointed out that you can use the URL format suggested by What Do I Know, but fetch it with http:// instead of itms://. Why would you want to do that? Because you get the XML package that the server delivers, and you can pull out individual PlaylistIDs, so you [...]

Just got off a long IM conversation with Greg, in which he pointed me to, in no particular order: stevenf’s proposal for a standard way, called mtaste, to represent your musical tastes on a blog (more thoughts on this in a second) Jeremy Zawodny’s complaint that Apple’s music store doesn’t already know what he might [...]

Some great discussion about how the iTunes store does its magic. From MacSlash, discussions of how iTunes does HTML, and some thoughts about how the information gets delivered from Apple’s servers. Bill Bumgarner identifies some nifty tricks you can do with search and music sharing. And Todd Dominey, at What Do I Know (an almost [...]

No, not that red pill. Shuman’s started a blog. He’s handcoding it and he only has four entries and no permalinks, but hey. Oh, and for the record, I disagree with him about The Two Towers. If it made more money, it was less about marketing inertia (though they certainly didn’t have to work as [...]

Going from my own list of tracks I’m trying to replace from CDs that were sold during college at the end of each semester for gas money (true!), I found some gaps in the Apple Music Store’s 2000 songs. I haven’t gone back to figure out who owns the rights, but I have pinged the [...]

Although Peter Murphy is not available on Apple’s iTunes Music Store, William Burroughs is. Dead City Radio and Spare Ass Annie. Track by track. If you’ve never heard Michael Franti and the Disposable Heroes of Hiphoprasy backing up Burroughs’ insane rants on the latter album, you at least owe it to yourself to spend the [...]

Last week I went to an MIT alum event at which Nicholas Negroponte, founding director of the MIT Media Lab, spoke. It was less… revelatory than I would have expected. In fact, Negroponte, who said he doesn’t do that sort of stand up talking very often, largely eschewed the techno-prognostication that made him famous except [...]

Details at MacInTouch (which is slammed): All five major labels, over 200,000 songs and growing, $0.99/song, AAC, burning allowed (but you have to change the playlist every 10 burns), browsable via iTunes (4), new iPods, new iPod dock with line out. I’m getting ready for a presentation. More thoughts later. Later: Details are now up [...]

Fortunately, I’m not in a mood where the Dog is too close, but I did finally start reading Churchill’s Black Dog. At first I was taken aback. It’s a collection, and only the first story is about Churchill. Also, the author (a psychoanalyst) spends the first 15 pages discussing various theories of Churchill’s temperament. Apparently [...]

I scored some great tickets for the Mariners from a co-worker last week (thanks, Kathy!), for today’s game. It turned out to be a gorgeous afternoon in Seattle: mid-sixties, no humidity, sunny with patchy clouds in an enormous blue sky. The Mariners were up four-three at the top of the eighth, we had just had [...]

One last post from Gibson at the end of his book tour in Dublin, pondering hyper-branding, the oddity of soba noodles near the Liffey, and… … winding up where I always eventually do if I’m jetlagged in Dublin: peering throughy the fence at the tiny, deeply strange Huguenot Cemetary on Merrion Row, c. 1693. Grave-markers [...]

…has two cut-off valves. One cuts off water pressure from the main line to the filters. The other cuts off water to the whole sink and faucet assembly—apparently, and to the filters as well, since the two valves are joined for some insane reason. Meaning that if the filter line is cut off, but the [...]

Philip Greenspun discusses things that could be done on the Internet to improve our ability during the next Presidential campaign to understand what the candidates are saying and doing, including distributed outlining and blogging. He suggests that blogging will not help us get a “comprehensive view of any one candidate.” But what if there were [...]

Craig spills the beans by pointing to a Washington Post article: Pep Band’s Last Stand. Apparently a rich alum has decided to finally settle the argument over whether the University should have a Pep Band or a bunch of blown-up loonies in uniforms—oops, I mean a marching band. Chalk up another blow against self determination [...]

Drove into work this morning in my wife’s car. She’s taking my in-laws down to Mt. St. Helens, which is about a two and a half hour drive, so we figured she should have the newer, bigger car. This makes the second time she’s driven my car, the first being yesterday, so I hope everything [...]