TURTLE

Yeah, I dunno what that turtle's deal is either.

I have my RSS reader (My shared items google reader page) folders set up with names like 'elegance' and 'hax,' and my elegance folder has provided many of the pics which grace the blog.

I have a feed from Socwall which seems to post any picture its users find worthy of desktopping. As a result, sometimes they're neat, sometimes boring, and often interesting.

Some of the other websites I read the RSS posts for are the Make Magazine Blog(Makezine.com), TechCrunch (Techcrunch.com), The Economist's Science stuff (The Economist), and the Psyblog (spring.org.uk).I try to have a couple of updates from each of my fields every day. It keeps internet life interesting. And I scan the headlines of major news sources, though I almost never read any articles.

And, of course, i read my webcomics (Penny-Arcade, Sam And Fuzzy, Dr. McNinja, QC, ScaryGoRound, XCKD, and LICD being the favs.).

One must keep up on the modern sense of humor, after all.

I found using ManicTime (Manic Time Download Site), a program from the Lifehacker blog (relevant post), that making a blog post takes about a half hour. Relatively cheap way to make my internet time more productive, no?

Manic Time is sweet, it even breaks down your internet time by how much you spend on each tab and website. I haven't started fiddling with the tagging system, but maybe i will. I've always wanted to be consistent enough with a journal to keep track of my time, maybe having this passive system on my computer would do it.

And maybe it'll become boring in three days.

Also; Scientist looks to weaponize ball lightning (Wired).

Can Love Save the Empty?

Erin McCarley's Love Save The Empty (Songza) iTunes Equalizer- Piano.

Pic is from The Sartorialist again. He has such good pics, I'll have to work to avoid always posting them.

I wonder (too often for my sanity's sake) how the systems we've built are supposed to satisfy us. I mean, they're mostly to improve comfort (here in America) and self-perpetuate. When things like the RepRap (RepRap.com), a $200 plastic 3d printer, and the FabLab (Wikipedia), a garage-sized prototyping center, become widespread, I wonder what people will build.

I hope they start with open-source schematics for a house, power generator, condenser, and greenhouse, and make themselves independent of society. It would amuse me to see a generation suddenly refuse to participate.

We're starting to realize information (appleinsider.com) is impossible to guard. What happens when anything can be built at home, instead of bought? Long ways off, I know, but I like thinking about it.

Maybe instead of a Singluarity (wikipedia) we'll have a Plurality, where everyone starts singularity-ing by themselves. A fusion of intelligence, with no fusion of purpose like singularity theory seems to imply.

Weird.

Music Fiddlin.

I fiddled with the equalizer presets in iTunes for a while on Joanna Newsom's Colleen (Songza). I found the classical setting pulls all the diverse instruments out. It's neat how well it highlights the (awesome) accordion run around 2:18, considering the Accordion isn't really 'classical.'

Pic is from The Sartorialist, I really like the look on her face. Very confident.

I love fiddling with equalizer presets in iTunes. Sometimes it seems like another song is hidden within an old favorite. Try it, right-click and go to 'Get Info,' then into 'Options.' Try some weird ones. The unexpected ones are often the best.

Some good ones I did today;

Ingrid Michaelson's The Chain (Songza). Vocal booster.
The Subways' Kalifornia (Songza). Acoustic.
Jackson 5's I Want You Back (Songza). Lounge. (See what I mean?)
Sam & Dave's Hold On I'm Comin (Songza). Latin.
Fleet Foxes' Mykonos (Alternate Version) (Songza). Electronic. (Probably the weirdest preset/song combo of the lot. It just sounds so good.)
The Shins' Australia (Songza). Spoken Word.
The Bioshock Soundtrack's Cohen's Masterpiece. Treble Reducer took off the crunch that was on the version I had.

And now it's just a list of some of my favorite songs.

I'd like to note that I was very upset when Songza transitioned out of its old format (causing me to lose some excellent songs, like Iron Horse's Float On cover (songza) , which I had previously only found on Songza.[which I just found again, looking for it.][Just now! I lost it for like five months. I was so mad.]).

But the new partnership with imeem has made doing this list much easier. Not only is it a two-click process to buy a song off songza through itunes (money just flying out of my wallet. Poof!), but the versions of the songs I have on my comp are the exact same as the ones on songza.

Even that weird Mykonos alternate version was the same.

(compare it to the original Fleet Foxes Mykonos (songza). Yeah, it's a weird set of changes, but good. Better than the original, in my opinion.)(sidenote; I know you're not going to do that. I actually just want to have all those music links in one place. It's my blog, i do what I want!)

Also made the comparisons more fun; I got to play the equalized version while i was checking the songza links and see just how awesome I am! I used Foxytunes (foxytunes.com) to easily switch between the two versions. (Foxytunes may be my favorite firefox plugin, mostly because Flashblock (mozdev.org) is annoying when i'm trying to watch a lot of videos.)(but awesome all the rest of the time.)

Mine sound way better. Try it! It'll make you feel like a big-time producer. Pullin' in cash moneys for mad beatz.

word.

Things of Interest

Joanna Newsom's Colleen. (Songza) Celtic styled song, beautiful in its lyricism and instrumentation.

"Have you come, then, to rescue me?"
He laughed and said, "from what, 'Colleen'?"
You dried and dressed most willingly.
you corseted, and caught the dread disease
by which one comes to know such peace."

Siftables.(TED Talk) A demonstration of computerized building blocks with amazing capabilities and interactivity.

Barry Schwartz. (TED Talk) What wisdom means, and how it affects our lives.

Exorcizing Laplace's Demon. (Dresden Codak) Dres Cod can always make me laugh. I paid him 20 bucks to keep making comments. Wish i could give him a pension, so he could update more often.

A surprisingly noteworthy pair of updates from Seth Godin's blog. Authenticity (Seth Godin's Blog) and Irrationality (Seth Godin's Blog). It must be interesting to be known as a guru.

Praise for Intelligence Destroys work ethics(NYmag). Explains a lot. Also meshes well with some notes from Gladwell's Outliers(Gladwell's Blog, a summary of topics from the book.).