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The Strugglers
Playing modest, straightforward americana/folk music similar to Will Oldham and Smog, The Strugglers manage to carve out their own niche in a crowded genre. The biggest knock people have against them is their lack of outstanding-ness, but the fact that I have yet to hear a mediocre song is a pretty admirable feat. If Smog was a sine wave, The Strugglers are the average of that wave. That may not sound like a glowing endorsement, but trust me it is.
MP3 The Strugglers - The Rejection Letter
Technorati Tags: music mp3 strugglersGoogle Analytics
Based solely on the screenshot here and this Google Blog post, I am really looking forward to using Google Analytics on a couple of projects. It seems to have all the features of larger, more expensive (Google Analytics is free) services and has some extra Google-y hooks you can't get elsewhere such as AdWord integration. They say they are currently accepting new enrollments, but the site is currently "down for upgrades." So in the near future you can expect to be dazzled by the absolute efficiency of this site.
Technorati Tags: google google+analytics internetCat Power
Posting this mp3 will likely blow my bandwith for the rest of the month, but it will be worth it. In case you haven't found a leaked copy yet, here's a song from Cat Power's new record The Greatest. This is by far Chan Marshall's best work, and that is saying a ton. It is actually a pretty happy record, like she's excorcised her demons and made peace with the world. And there are horns! I am going to take a very small gamble here and say it will probably be one of my top five records for the year.
Free version of Pandora (It's still no Last.FM)
Back in the halcyon times of this past summer Pandora was getting a lot of buzz for their music discovery service in which dozens of professional musicians spent years analyzing music to determine what you will like even before you hear it. You give them an artist you like, they give you a stream of music they think is similar to what you like. It worked ok when I tried it, but not worth the money especially when there is Last.FM which gives you better music, a better interface, more features, and is most importantly free. Last.FM's discovery engine is based on what thousands of other users like me have listened to and liked, which seems to make it more accurate than a small group of pro musicians using some sort of scientific criteria to determine what I like. Music taste isn't exactly a science and can't be distilled into a set of rules.
Anywho, Pandora now has a free version, although their site is getting hammered right now. So go check it out and then give Last.FM a run. Find some new music and be happy.
Technorati Tags: music mp3 pandora last.fmElectric President
Morr Music's newest artist is the 23 year old Ben Cooper of Jacksonville FL, recording as Electric President. I've always imagined people on Morr living in underground bunkers deep in the Alps with nothing but their laptops, but Ben recorded most of his music in his tool shed and bedroom with an absolute lack of proper equipment. But somehow it all still works just as well as those fancy Europeans and their labs full of knobs and dials.
MP3 Electric President - Ten Thousand Lines
Technorati Tags: music mp3 morr+music electric+presidentHavergal
What has happened to the MP3 posts for the past week? Well since you ask, I've been stuck in a very delicious rut listening to nearly nothing but the Talking Heads. But I think that has run it's course and I'm back digging through the other gazillion gigabytes of music on my computer. Last night I re-found Havergal, who lays low. Real low. It's hard to find much out about Ryan Murphy. He's one of those oh-so-common singer/songwriter/architects from California by way of Texas and he makes really pretty glitchy post-rock. Very good music to listen to when you are very alone.
MP3 Havergal - I am a Frequency
Technorati Tags: music mp3 havergalMy first AJAX Desktop
After seeing Goowy, Protopage, Netvibes and most recently Microsoft jump into the AJAX virtual desktop game, I decided that maybe there was something more to it than I had previously thought when I dismissed it as being useless and gimmicky. I looked at a couple, and I'm really liking Netvibes as a personalized homepage. It's cleaner, faster, and fuller-featured than the others right now, although I hope they will add features like to-do lists, calendars, integration with more web services and things like that. Also as a designer, I'd like to be able to have fuller control over the visual stylings, but that's not a huge deal as it already looks pretty nice. Overall I think I am now on the AJAX Desktop bandwagon.
Technorati Tags: ajax desktop netvibes protopage goowy web2.oCustom ATM cards
Normally this is something I toss over in the sidebar, but it's too cool not to point out. Postbank, a Dutch bank, is allowing members to upload photos and get them printed on their ATM cards. I would go so far as to switch banks if I could do this.
Link from Cool Hunting
My only goal for the day
I absolutely need to get my RSS feeds under control today. Currently I use the excellent FeedDemon as my primary news reader, and everything is dumped into one giant folder because I didn't want to deal with cleaning up all the pre-configured folders that were installed with FeedDemon. Currently, I have something like 250 feeds in my "Favorite Feeds" folder. That's after I spent a fair part of the weekend weeding out ones I don't want to keep around anymore. Clearly I just have to bite the bullet and organize everything into categorical folders.
The reason this has become such an issue is that I have developed this neurotic habit of not being able to close FeedDemon if there are unread feeds. So when I get a break in my day and check on my feeds, it can quickly spiral into a two or three hour distraction. Not so good for productivity. I figure that by dividing everything up into smaller groups I can trick myself into limiting my browsing to one folder at a time then getting back to work.
Also, I think there might be a business plan (and I mean that in the Web 2.0 sense, not a real world sense) for someone who can figure out a way to better organinze large numbers of RSS feeds.
edit: I am not alone.
Technorati Tags: rss feeds FeedDemon productivity