Monthly Archives: March 2007


Bum Rush the Charts!

For far too long now the big record labels that comprise the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) have abused their customers and their suppliers, the musicians. They charge too much money for product, and provide a lot of crap in return. And not nearly enough of that money gets back to the poeple who created the content that makes the business possible. Now a group of podcasters are trying to organize an effort to show that the RIAA is obsolete and unnecessary. Mark Yoshimoto Nemkoff of Pacific Coast Hellway created Bum Rush the Charts. The idea is to pick one band that has made their music podsafe (available to podcasters to use on their shows free of charge), and get as many people as possible to buy one particular song on one day to try and drive the song to the top of the iTunes chart, ahead of all the stuff that the RIAA is putting out.

The band that was chosen is Black Lab and their song Mine Again. Chrisopher Penn of the Financial Aid Podcast has set up a special iTunes affiliate account and all the commissions from purchases through that link will go to the Student Loan Network iTunes account. Black Lab has also committed half of any money they make to the fund as well. So for $.99 you tell the RIAA that they can take a hike, get a great song and contribute to help some kids education. All of this is going to happen on Thursday March 22, 2007.  I’ll add the appropriate link here on Thursday morning so make sure you come back to this post then and buy the song.  thanks


AutoblogGreen Podcast 2

tesla roadsterThe very first AutoblogGreen podcast went live this morning.  My editor Sebastian Blanco and I will be doing these every couple of weeks and in the first one, we talk about some of the new green cars that debuted at last weeks Geneva Motor show and then run I interview I recorded with Martin Eberhard.  Martin is the CEO of Tesla Motors, maker of the new Tesla Roadster electric sports car.  You can find the podcast at this page.


Taking a test to find out about yourself 2

One of the more popular genres on the net is personality tests, and I stumbled across an interesting variation on digg this morning.  This particular test consists of about a dozen pages with a simple statement at the top such as “Art Is…”.  Below that are fifteen images such as the Mona Lisa, a tattoo, a fashion show and others.  You click on an image that most closely matches how you would finish the statement.  Then the test moves on to other statements and images.  At the end it gives you an analysis of your personality, which is presumably only as accurate as you are honest in your responses.

The problem with all of these various tests, whether they are online or in some magazine, ore is that you are relying on the programming of some anonymous developer or writer to tell you all about yourself.  The question is, why would you expect anyone else to know more about what you are like, than you do?  Why do people seem to need to have other people tell them who they are?  I admit that some of these tests can be quite entertaining if they are well done and this particular one was pretty good.  Maybe I’m asking the wrong question.

Does anybody really take a test like this to learn about themselves? or are they just curious to see if the test creator can actually accurately analyze someone’s personality just by asking a series of questions?  In my case it’s the intellectual curiosity.   I certainly hope no one would actually rely on some quiz to tell them something they should be able to determine just by taking a look at themselves.


Wendy’s Birthday

Last Sunday Stacey and Gerry threw a birthday party for Wendy, and most of the usual suspects were in attendance. There were parallel scrabble games running and Stacey provided prizes for the high scores. As usual the little provided some great photographic opportunities as did Wendy.


Not the Daily Show 4

The other day Jules and I saw about ten minutes of the Half Hour Comedy Hour (I’m not going to bother with a link, because it’s not worth linking to), and boy did it suck!  if you haven’t heard about the show, it’s supposed to be Fox News’ answer to the Daily Show.   There is a very important difference, the Fox show is the opposite of funny.  Where the Daily Show and Colbert Report take real people and real events and hold them up to the mirror, to show how absurd or ridiculous they are, the new show had to resort to a really lame SNL style sketch parodying political correctness.  I’m not going to dwell on the details, except to say that it was typical of the worst of SNL, it went on too long and offered nothing to even smile at.  I’m no fan of politcal correctness, but this sketch, was just plain mean spirited and dumb.   Stewart/Colbert in ’08!


Free music from SXSW

sxsw 2007For the third straight year, the organizers of the South by Southwest Festival are offering up a collection of free music by some of the hundreds of bands that are playing in Austin, TX next week. The first release for this up now, and contains 739 mp3 files of all kinds of music. The files are in one huge zip file and they can be downloaded by via bittorrent. If you haven’t already used bittorrent, head over to Azureus and grab their torrent program. Azureus runs on Windows, Linux, and Mac OSX. Once you install Azureus, download the torrent file from here and drop it onto the Azureus window, and start downloading. It’s a big 3.1 GB file (the zip file with all the mp3s, not the torrent file, that one is small) so it will take a few hours to download if you have a fast net connection. Fortunately the nature of bittorrent is such that the more people share the faster the downloads go. After it’s done please leave Azureus open, and keep sharing with everyone else. After all, we learned in kindergarten that it’s good to share. This is all perfectly legal and the songs are released under a creative commons license so you can pass it along. Go sample the new music, you won’t be sorry!