Live Music in Dallas

I really, really, really, really, really want to go here sometime. Sometime soon. Sounds like a great place to hear some live music.

Anyone else want to go? Email me.

Share your iTunes on your home network

MyTunesRSS is a Java application that runs on any platform that supports both Java 1.5 and iTunes. It makes an RSS feed of your iTunes library, making each song into an individual podcast. The application is both the server and the RSS feed manager. You can now access your iTunes music (mp3 and unprotected AAC files) from any computer that has a web browser and that can access your network. You can also make the access password protected.

I haven't tried it yet, but plan to soon. I'll report back when I do.

Don’t get too comfortable here

There are lots of things I like about wordpress.com. I've only messed around "behind the scenes" for a few hours and I really, really like the user interface and how easy they make it for me to focus on the blogging and not the rest of the things involved with website management.

One problem, though. There is no way to modify the templates, add custom code, or things like that. I can understand their need to restrict that and how difficult it can be to provide the basic non-tech user a way to do it without damaging their blog. But I would like to be able to customize things here and there. So I'll most likely be moving this to it's own domain soon – as soon as I think of a good domain name – and installing WordPress there, where I have more control.

If you have any suggestions for domain names, email them to me (if you know my email address). If I use it, and I know you, I'll buy you lunch sometime.

Finding new music

I stumbled across a link to a site last week called Pandora. It's a streaming music site, but it sounds much better than other streaming music I've tried on the interwebs. You start off by giving it the name a favorite artist or song. It then hits the Music Genome Project to get info about what you've entered. If you enter an artist, it then plays a song from that artist and asks you about it. If you like it, it then goes back and finds other things that are similar. But, instead of just using reviews or descriptions by the artists, it actually analyzes the music and compares things like tonality, guitar effects, rythm, timbre, etc. to find similar music. And because of this, it finds artists that you may never have heard before.

Pros:

• It finds new artists for you
• Very high music quality for streaming music
• Great, easy to use interface
• You can rate each song it plays (like or dislike, like but don't play again for a month) to more fine tune its selection process
• You can set up 100 different stations.

Cons:

• You can't back up and replay a song that has already played (due to their licensing agreement)
• You can only skip a small number of songs per hour (due to their licensing agreement)
• If you want it ad-free, it's $36.00 a year, though I must say I haven't heard any ads yet and I've used it for sessions of several hours for the last several days.

I've shown it to a few people around my office, and they made comments like "Oh, like Launch" or something like that.  I've never used any of those other streaming music services, so I'm not sure how similar it is. I just know I like this one.

Last one to the party

After much peer pressure, I have decided to cave in and finally start a blog. I mean, based on some that I’ve seen out there, and some of the people I know who have one, I should be able to do this, too.

Mostly this is just to give me a place to post links to interesting things I’ve found around the web. Don’t expect many deep thoughts or insights. Anything of that nature will just be icing on the cake (if the cake were made of meatloaf and the icing were made of mashed potatoes).

So, uh, yeah – the end.