1) Pandora Radio is a smartphone app that streams music to your phone based on a vague "station" analogy. The app starts playing songs related to a band or theme you pick and you give each a thumbs up or down. It then play songs that seem to match what you like. The good thing about it is that it's free. The bad thing is that you don't have much control over what you're listening to, and the songs tend to be from alternate and lesser known albumns. I don't listen to music that much anymore, but if I want to listen to something I like it's a very convenient way to do it.
I doubt the artists are making much money from it directly, but it's sure to drive albumn sales.
2) I don't talk about the specifics of work, even work I'm quitting, on the Internet. So the rather meaningless hints I drop about my soon to be old job here are all I'm going to say in this space. And I'm notoriously bad at sending emails, so everyone just gets left wondering. I will say that those who have heard me rant about my job in person are likely to agree that it's mainly just a whiny pity party, and while the employment situation was truly awful, it's mainly my own fault for not quitting a year ago.
And that's the gooey center of my current angst. I was staying in a job I absolutely hated mainly for the money and security. That breeds self-loathing, and is something I'll need to come to grips with. What does it say about me? Am I really that shallow? And what do I do now that the money and security are gone? Surely I have been an idiot, but what sort of idiot?
It will all be fine. My life used to be crammed full of such crises.
3 Comments
Doo-Doo- Head - Mar 8th, '10
1) I forgot to watch the Oscars. At all. Oops. What a tragedy.
2) No, I won't be selling posts on this blog for $60 each. The effort by marketers to ruin everything good in the world by making it into an ad will have to find some other way.
3) I'm in a major funk over my career, or lack of. Don't expect lots of posts for a while.
There is a big part of me that thinks quitting a great paying job just because I hate it to my core is a bad idea. Maybe going crazy wasn't so bad. Maybe the sense of dread about getting out of bed on weekdays could be medicated. Maybe the urge to walk out every single day was just me being a doo-doo head. Maybe being disgusted and offended on a regular basis is just part of being employed these days.
On second thought, quitting seems like a pretty good idea.
6 Comments
Buy This Space - Mar 1st, '10
I got an email from a marketer saying they wanted me to make posts promoting their client. Basically they give me $60 to copyy and paste their marketing speel.
This means I've made the big time right? I can be a professional blogger?
6 Comments
Extended Tribe - Feb 26th, '10
1) R.I.P. William Trimble. You will be remembered fondly. A brief glimpse - A Saxophone Introspective (2009), part 1, part 2.
2) So it turns out Yelp has been messing with it's reviews to sell ads. In short, they would offer to "fix" negative reviews if you bought advertising. And before they'd call to sell you an ad there would always be new negative reviews posted.
This is obviously extortion. Perhaps there is some legal loophole that makes it legal, but nothing will keep it from being plain old extortion. Worse yet, since all of the reviews are just random anonymous idiots on the Internet, there is no objective difference between reviews doctored by Yelp and reviews posted by people with an agenda and background we know nothing about. In other words, is there any difference in a review "fixed" by a Yelp salesman, and some unknown person named LoveGoblin883? The fixing of negative reviews likely has no objective impact for consumers. I don't think this reduced the value, such as it is, I just think it's a stupid way to run a web service.
I think we really need some better way to bring true quality to this sort of service. Something like Yelp should be based on quality information. But where does that quality come from? Obviously not random, anonymous, infrequent comments. Those are just thin and biased opinion. Obviously not from subject matter experts, since that solution wouldn't scale well. Or would it........
The current innovation in the larger information revolution is social networking - A big site that empowers and leverages smaller communities. One of the things I like about both Chowhound and Ask MetaFilter is the community aspect. Yes, they may technically be strangers on the Internet, but they do actually meet up with some regularity. Even if I haven't met someone from MeFi, I've likely met someone that has. And I have hundreds of their posts to put their opinions in perspective. In addition, the "reviews" tend to be discussions rather than just knee jerk comments. This combination of real world face time and discussion history makes these groups more of a digital tribe and less of an anonymous digital mob. I can trust them.
Imagine being able to filter Yelp reviews in such a way that I only saw reviews made by MeFi members, my Facebook friends, and people I follow on Twitter. Suddenly the site is a trusted source.
It would be nice to see that sort of community approach applied to services like Yelp. Some middle ground between subject matter experts and a mob of random posters. Once you had that level of quality you could sell ads based on the quality of the product rather than extortion.
2 Comments
Rockstar Curling - Feb 24th, '10
Why curling is cool.
1) It's one of the last sports where you'll find real sportsmanship. You might have noticed at the Olympic curling that there is no official. No one looking at who touches the stones inappropriately, no one declaring a winner, no one with a whistle telling people when to start, no penalties, etc. Even when the round is over it's just the teams agreeing on who won. If a person touches or moves a stone when they shouldn't they are expected to announce the mistake even if no one else saw it. If a rule is broken the team making the mistake is responsible for noticing and dealing with it.
2) The most prized curling stones are made from a type of rock that only exists on one island in Scotland. That island was made into a nature preserve and no rock has been quarried there since 2002. The current stockpile of rock is expected to last until 2020.
3) Up until recently they still used actual brooms, even in international championships.
4) NBC produced a reality TV show, "Rockstar Curling", that would culminate in the winners becoming the 2010 Olympic curling team. The participants would try out for the show "American Idol" style and wouldn't necessarily be all that good at curling. Sadly, the show never actually got filmed.
1 Comments
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