Month: December 2005

My Favorite Records:CSN&Y- Deja Vu

This is the another installment in my series of favorite records.

I’m a little more into the &Y than the CSN, but there’s no doubt that Crosby Stills Nash & Young made two great records. Four Way Street is a masterpiece in its own right, but for my Top 50 list I’m going to pick the 1970 issue Deja Vu.

Carry On, Teach Your Children, Helpless and Woodstock are anthems for anyone who grew up in the early 70s. But the songs on the record that make it a classic are David Crosby’s Almost Cut My Hair (must have been because I had the flu for Christmas) and Neil’s Country Girl (country girl I think you’re pretty). Then there is the timeless and beautiful Our House which will always be one of my favorite songs. This record is a bookend with Neil’s Tonight’s the Night as the best of my expansive Neil Young record collection.

Most of you have heard this record and many of you own it. If you haven’t and don’t, you are in store for a treat.

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Incredible Photos, No. 2

Get ready, here comes another Flickr post.

flickr

I’ve preached before, both here and over lunch, about the many wonderful features of Flickr. How you can upload, organize and share your photos. How you can select who can see each photo (from anyone, to friends to just your family). How you can order posters, bound and professional looking books of your photos, prints (yes, prints) and even real stamps with your photos on them. All directly from the Flickr page.

What I haven’t talked enough about is all the beautiful photos you can admire by exploring the Flickr community.

Explore a little. Explore a little more (click Reload in the upper right of the second link to see more photos). It’s like a museum, right on your computer screen.

If you want to see a particular kind of photo, search by tag or description (use tag and fill in something- like “old shed” or “marbles“).

Feeling stressed? Stare quietly at this simple yet stunning photo by Andrew Morrell for a few seconds- see how calming it is (notice the colors, the focus, the beauty and peacefulness). Instant zen. And it doesn’t cost a thing.

Take a few minutes to marvel at Thomas Hawk‘s amazing photography. His work absolutely stuns me. And he does it because he loves to take pictures and share them with us. Just like thousands of other Flickr users.

There are thousands and thousands of photos to be discovered in the great hall of Flickr. The uploading is just the beginning. There is so much more to be seen.

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Opportunists on Parade

When something unfortunate happens, you can be sure of two things. A lot of people will try to help while some other people will try to take advantage of the situation to make money. It’s like a bad event works some cosmic mojo that magically separates the angels from the opportunists.

You see this sort of thing on the big scale (think 9-11 or Katrina) and on the small scale.

So we have a little problem with Wikipedia. Some people work to fix the problem and one guy apologizes for his role in causing (or at least demonstrating) the problem.

Meanwhile, other people sit around noodling about how they can take advantage of the situation to make a little easy money. The best they can come up with (so far, anyway) is to file a class action lawsuit.

Some good detective work has provided a little information about the people behind this latest caper. You would think that no lawyer would even consider filing this ridiculous lawsuit. Unfortunately, however, there seems to be a lawyer for every real or imagined wrong. These days if you look at someone funny, some lawyer will be standing by to sue you into the stone age (for a fee). I can imagine the forthcoming treatises on “Trying the Funny Look Case” and “Wrongful Buzz Kills.” We can’t count on the lawyers to solve this problem, so the solution has to come from elsewhere.

Maybe it’s time for a little more internet self-policing. If the voice of the people can change Sony’s corporate policy on DRM, maybe the same voice can stop opportunists from hijacking the system. If these people get the Sony treatment, maybe they’ll find another more productive way to make money. Everyone else in the virtual room needs to stand up and shout – “help us make things better or get out of our way!”

No one who cares about the web community should stand for anything else.

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ScobleFeeds A-Z: The E’s

This is part five of my A-Z review of Scoble‘s feeds. The rules and criteria are here.

I found a great one I didn’t know about in the E’s:

eHomeUpgrade (RSS Feed)

eHomeUpgrade is a collaborative blog that focuses on “the connected home and the digital lifestyle.” That is a perfect recipe for a blog I want to read every day.

Honorable Mention:

Ed Bott (RSS Feed) (ineligible because I already read it every day)

Engadget (RSS Feed) (ineligible, same reason)

Ernie the Attorney (RSS Feed) (would be HM based on funny name alone, but good stuff too)

Evil Genius Chronicles (RSS Feed)

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Bad Facts and Mobster Tactics

It’s easy to hate the RIAA. It’s a little harder to make the RIAA’s mobster tactics seem justified.

nostupidpeopleSome lady downloads 1000 songs so she can “determine what she like[s] enough to buy at retail.” Only she forgot to delete the ones she decided not to buy and, I suppose accidently, shared those songs via some file sharing service. Part of her defense was that she buys CDs sometimes- she owns 250 of them. My wife has 250 CDs and she can’t even name the Beatles. 1000 songs is about 83 CDs worth. This defense sounds like some of the excuses my kids give me for not doing their chores. In sum, this is not the test case I would choose if I were looking to make some new law vis a vis the RIAA.

I’d find a grandmother accused of stealing Snoop Dogg music or maybe a dead grandmother who didn’t even have a computer. In other words, if you need to change the law, start with facts that will make someone try hard to rule in your favor.

These are not that kind of facts.

Yahoo story here.
Memeorandum discussion here.

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Grain Silo


I took this picture of this old grain silo this afternoon in Manvel, Texas. It was built in 1905 along with four others. It is the only one still standing and will almost certainly fall over the next time a hurricane passes through the area.

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Jukebox, Annotated

You know the drill. Open up your jukebox of choice, point the shuffle feature to your entire library of songs and list, without exception, the first 10 or so songs that play. Each week, I add a little commentary about some of the artists, songs, albums, etc.

Fall – Chris Mills (Kiss It Goodbye) (1)
All I Need – 5 Chinese Brothers (Singer Songwriter…) (2)
Walkin’ and Talkin’ – Marshall Tucker Band (Searchin’ for a Rainbow) (3)
Hey Girl Don’t Bother Me – The Tams (The Best of) (4)
Let It Bleed – The Rolling Stones (Let It Bleed) (5)
Bring the Monster Inside – Willard Grant Conspiracy (Flying Low) 6)
Blue From Death – Nicolai Dunger (Soul Rush) (7)
Devil in Disguise – Emmylou Harris (Last Date) (8)
Spoonful – Cream (Fresh Cream) (9)
Sugar Babe – Jonathan Edwards (Honky-Tonk Stardust Cowboy (10)

(1) I love Chris Mills. He does rocking, rootsy music that really speaks to me. Fall is about as good as a song can be. Period. In fact, this may be, at the moment, the best alt. country song ever.

(2) Nice Woody Guthrie tribute off of one of my Top 50.

(3) Nice swing number from some guys I knew growing up back in SC. Tommy Caldwell was a mighty good golfer as well as a fine bass player. This record was probably their best- anchored by an awesome live version of Can’t You See.

(4) I saw the Tams a million times at and around Ocean Drive back in the day. I still cherish the images of drinking a cold beer at Zack’s while listening to beach music. Good stuff.

(5) Nothing needs to be said about this song, but I’ll say it anyway. One of the best songs off one of the best records ever.

(6) They’ve been around for a while, but I only discovered them a year or so ago. Sort of roots meets haunting lo-fi. Quiet, yet chock full of music.

(7) I bought this record because of the comparisons to Astral Weeks. Not that good, but good. I can hear some early Van in this song for sure.

(8) Emmylou doing Gram live. Wonderful stuff.

(9) Willie Dixon blues classic from very first Cream record. The best song on the record.

(10) This is one of those records I’ve had all my life. First on LP, now on CD. Great hippie/country sound with some excellent playing. This is one of a small rotation of records that played in both my children’s rooms at bedtime when they were babies. It is one of my building blocks of great music. I can’t recommend this record highly enough.

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Yahoo Buys del.icio.us

delicious

As the blogosphere and related community sites continue to consolidate under the large and wealthy banners of the Yahoos, Googles and Microsofts comes news that Yahoo has acquired social bookmarking service del.icio.us.

I use del.icio.us for a couple of things. I use it to bookmark pages I want to go back and read later, and I use it to list and summarize the feed for my (now discontinued) Comments on Other Blogs page. While the site has been somewhat of a work in progress, it has become a useful and integral part of my web experience.

I suspect that the acquisition by Yahoo will be a positive thing- as long as Yahoo allows the service to remain mostly separate- like Flickr, and does not try to tie del.icio.us to Yahoo’s My Web 2.0 service. Flickr has only gotten better since Yahoo bought it and I see no reason the same can’t happen here.

A good day for Yahoo. And probably a good day for Technorati too, as Google’s price for Technorati probably just went up. My advice to Google- buy and buy now because if Yahoo gets in front of you again, Yahoo plus Flickr plus del.icio.us plus Technorati will be a huge lead in this race for web dominance. Technorati is definitely the jewel left on the board.

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