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Alex Jones

I lead teams at the intersection of strategy and design. Autodidact. Polymath. Barbecue acolyte. I start fires (the good kind).

Music

Where Should I Start?

As my themeword for 2008 is Explore (other people’s choices are interesting too), I am kicking off a new series: Where Should I Start. The premise is a simple one, ask or answer a question that starts with “If I wanted to [read/listen to/watch/learn about] something where should I start?”

There are so many amazing things in this world to experience, yet it can be hard to figure out where to begin – luckily the LazyWeb can help out.

To start things off, I’ll give a couple of recommendations and ask for some in return:

If I wanted to read a book by Leo Tolstoy, where should I start?

War and PeaceWell, I assume War and Peace is as good a place as any. In fact, I recently picked up a copy as I have never read this epic depicting Napoleon’ invasion of Russia and some of the lives impacted by the war.

After going through a ton of reviews on Amazon, I believe I found a translation that will be both accessible and close to the original in terms of narrative flow and rhythm.

If I wanted to experience Miles Davis, where should I start?

Kind of Blue by Miles Davis Kind of Blue, recorded in 1959, is by far his best album, the highest selling jazz record of all time and one of the most beautiful jazz recordings ever made.

Kind of Blue tends to be near, if not at the top of many critics’ lists of best albums of all times and is definitely one of the most influential Jazz albums ever released.

Over to You!

  • If I wanted to listen to music by Django Reinhardt, where should I start?
  • If I wanted to introduce a non-geek to science fiction which books should I recommend to them? Yes, I know non-geeks reaf sci-fi, but I’m looking for interesting sci-fi.

If you have answers to these questions, or would like to add your own to the series, please leave them in the comments!

Live Earth

Okay, so I had absolutely no plans to watch any of the Live Earth concerts. My plan had been to work on the laptop and mining the DVR to catch up on the various programs I’ve recorded over the last six weeks, but then I saw this amazing performance by a giant group of drummers (they were called SOS something, but a cursory inspection of the site didn’t how them), mixing rock, Brazilian, Japanese, Scottish and African percussion styles So, now I have the concert footage running as I work, occasionally muting it to avoid some of the less-than-interesting performers (Genesis without Peter Gabriel is just Phil Collins and I could do without him in my life) and the hosts, who prattle on, which I guess is their job.

In between the concert is some interesting information, and I truly hope it encourages more people to step back and think. I know that I sure as hell need to do more to act on the issues that are important to me – overcoming inertia can be hard. The conservation and environmental messages and delivered very well, they use the medium of television to the fullest – I just saw Robert Patrick, (think T2) with a set of garden shears trimming bamboo in what can only be described as slightly menacing, which is perfect delivery and attention getting. As he is clipping it, the narrator talks about how much more beneficial a stand of bamboo is over a stand of trees in relation to eliminating carbon and generating oxygen (30% – not too shabby).

Now, if only they hadn’t polluted the airwaves with Madonna.

Pandora on My Box

PandoraBoy Screenshot
I’ve finally decided to give the Pandora music recommendation service a try and enjoying it thoroughly. The system is built upon the Music Genome Project, which assembled “literally hundreds of musical attributes or “genes” into a very large Music Genome… [capturing] the unique and magical musical identity of a song – everything from melody, harmony and rhythm, to instrumentation, orchestration, arrangement, lyrics, and of course the rich world of singing and vocal harmony.” All you have to do is type in a band name and it makes the connections to other interesting groups, streaming the music to you via an Internet radio station.

So why am I checking it out now? PandoraBoy. This handy little app eliminates the need to run a browser in order to use Pandora. So I can listen to the tunes without taking up a tab in Firefox. I am also able to control it with hot-keys and my Apple remote, so if I don’t like a song while I’m in my reading chair across the room, I can skip it, just like I do with iTunes. Add to that, the built-in Growl support and you have a ell rounded, focused app.

Thanks to The Unofficial Apple Weblog for introducing me to PandoraBoy and spurring me on to try it. Now, to add the ability for it to write out to SilverSpider Play List…

SSPL 1.2 Coming Soon

Just a quick note to let people know of the upcoming release of SilverSpider Play List 1.2. Changes include:

  • User-specified album covers: SSPL will check to see if the current album name/artist name combination is listed in the Various Artists file, and if it is, it will use the images that are specified. Images (small, medium, large are all defined) are specified as URLS from any Web site, so you can use Images from Amazon, or post your own.
  • Keep the play list file to a reasonable size (hat tip to Sean for helping with the solution)
  • New config setting: $PlayListLength to define how many songs should be stored in the play list file
  • Moved the list of Various Artists from config file to separate the file
  • No longer needs closing comma, nor does it require escaping of special characters
  • Updated the in-line comments
  • Changed the format of the various artists file, allowing user to specify the artist override name. While most albums in the list will use ‘Various Artists’, the user could have one album use ‘Various Artists – Country’, and another album could use ‘Jazz Masters (Series)’
  • Added basic international Amazon query support, so users can choose to query the international Amazon sites instead of just the US .com site. This is still in a testing mode, and will be a beta feature within 1.2. Future versions should bring it up to speed. At this point, only one site will be queried, so SSPL will not check international domains if it cannot find an album on Amazon.com. Sorry.
    • us (default)
    • uk
    • de
    • fr (testing)
    • jp(testing)

I hope to have this released within a week.

SilverSpider Play List 1.1 Released

Just a quick note to let everyone know that a new version of SilverSpider Play List is available.

Changes

The first big change is the ability to choose the size of the album cover, which was requested by two people on the same day! So, you can now use any of the following sizes:

  • Small (50 x 50)
  • Medium (130 x 130)
  • Large (300 x 300)

The second big change is the addition of six new formats, bringing the total to 12. These new six are variants on the same basic layout, the image is placed in it’s own div and is encased within a link. A second div contains the information (song name, album name and artist name), with the first listed item acting as a link.

I have also added examples of the output for every format within the documentation so you can see what it actually produces. A full version history is available within the documentation.

Upgrading

I had to make changes to the config file, so make sure you back yours up before you overwrite it. Also, with the introduction of the new sizes, you will need to create two new missing album cover graphics if you want to use the larger sizes.

Download SSPL 1.1 (64K zip)

As always, let me know if you have questions or suggestions. I will do my best to respond quickly, but I have friends and family in town for the next week, so please forgive me if it takes a bit more time.

Happy Birthday Mr. Cohen

Leonard Cohen
Image from The Leonard Cohen Files
Leonard Cohen, one of the best singer/songwriters celebrates his 70th birthday today. Come late October, he will release a new album, Dear Heather, adding it to an impressive discography. He is an inspiration to a wide array of musicians and artists, including Johnny Cash, Bob Dylan, Nick Cave, R.E.M., Tori Amos, Nirvana, Jeff Buckley, Trent Reznor and Nina Simone among many others, resulting in over 900 covers of his songs.

Happy birthday Mr. Cohen.

Interested in learning more about Leonard Cohen? Check these sites out: