The music project I should be working on

You might know that last year, I thought I was going to try to start a competitor to pandora. I read 2 papers about collaborative filtering, and then went back to playing halo, sudoku’s and other forms of procrastination. I discussed it with Soog and obviously didn’t fulfil my end of the partnership.

There were two things that I thought were key, the first being we weren’t going to pay liscensing to the musicians. After all, we were providing great value by matching up artists with people that like them. This meant having mostly independent artists with possibly an enlightnened label. The second key was letitng the artist sell their music, with or without drm, for a price that they set. The largest complaint I hear from music pirates is that the price of cd’s is outrageously high and the label gets 99% of it. In our system, the price would be whatever the artist sets, and the artist would get some fixed percent, say 90, of it.

It’s easier not to feel bad about stealing from a giant company, but it’s harder to justify to oneself if one knows that of the 50 cents it would have cost 45 are being taken from the artist. I still haven’t seen anyone do this, but I don’t know the details of the deal with facebook selling music. On a related note, I love the Garden State Soundtrack, and am probably going to buy a bunch of cd’s of the artists on it.

In conclusion, I agree that the situation sucks right now where you have to pay a bunch of money to find out if you like a cd. I think the labels served their purpose in the old days by scouting talent. I agree that the laws are slanted right now in favor of the labels and that should be changed. Finally, I agree that it would be good if the labels went out of business, which is why I think this is a good business idea. Replace them as a much nicer and more agile and less expensive middle man. However, downloading music is stealing property, though it be artificial property.

5 Tips to Increase Your Likeability

As seen on reddit:

http://www.prometheusinstitute.net/opinion/jh92006.htm

It is very good general life advice about getting along with others. They are hard to implement, but worth a try, I think. I don’t really have anything to say about it, though. Go read it.

Just too tired

Statyed up late last night working on moola. I plan to update the blog this weekend, changing the layout so that the blogroll and such are on the right side. I might drop $15 so that I can edit the css, or maybe I’ll get someone to host a site for me like dan did and host a wordpress blog there. That seems slightly preferable in the long term. Went to the nat’s game tonight. It was tough to watch, and it’s frigid here: 57 degrees right now. That’s 14 degrees celcious and 287 kelvin. Will post more in coming days.

Fratrik

The unday

I woke up today feeling some effects from last night. Thirsty, I thought I’ll have two glasses of pinapple orange juice. It turns out that was a bad idea, as my empty stomach couldn’t handle that much acid. The rest of the day was spent lying around, bemoaning life, and watching movies and football. The last one I saw: Unleashed.

It’s time for bed, and

I’ve got 50 blogs unread.

Better feels my head

Tomorrow I’ll feel dead

3 days of blogs

Here is my response to 3 days of unread blogs:

I don’t care about apple.

I do care about nbc. It’s cool that they are streaming their shows. Too bad they aren’t abc, fox, or the impossible hbo. Right now my 3 shows are: House, Grey’s Anatomy, and Entourage.

I started reading blogs with techcrunch. He got me to Scoble, and he got me to a ton of people. I’ve gotten to the point, now, that I pretty much ignore techcrunch. It interested me at first because I was new and didn’t read personalites (rory, scoble, hugh).

Goodbye, techcrunch, I’m going to unsuscribe from you, we had a lot of good times. You introduced me to moola and many others.

Surreal Life

I hate having information not online. I want my browser history online, indexed so that when I want to find that random thing I read 3 weeks ago, I can find it as fast as I find things in iTunes. What made me think of this was A VC:

But something odd has happened to me lately. I don’t want to write in a desktop software application anymore and I don’t want to save my documents to a local drive.

I use two operating systems and 3 computers regularly. Having my life (gmail, google reader, meebo, this, rememberthemilk, google calendar) online means that I can access it from anywhere.

Back again

I got back tonight and feel newly motivated to do things in life.  I worked on my moola game strategy program over the weekend. It’s been on my list of things to do since this summer and I finally got around to programming the logic to solve it. I still can’t present it and the last program I wrote used up all of my memory, so we’ll see what happens.

I’m doing laundry and am going to catch up on blogs, so I’ll lset you know if I find anything interesting.

If you want to try out moola, let me send you an invite.

Morbid Thoughts

My grandfather passed away this morning. He had emphysema for years and had taken a turn for the worse in the past couple months, so we saw this coming. My mom has been down there since last weekend, and I’m heading down tomorrow.

The last time I went to a funeral of someone I knew was when I was five for my great grandmother. I am extremely lucky that my other three grandparents are still living, so this will be a first for me. For the moment, I am not feeling very emotional, but that’s likely to change once I get there. A 30 minute drive back from my home to my townhouse, I got very pensive:

What’s the meaning in life? Unsure that there is some external source to give meaning, I like the hypothosis that it is somehow based on relationships. To me there’s elegance in the recursive nature of something like that: life gives meaning to other lives. We’ve bootstrapped our way into something meaningful.

I tell people about my grandfather and they say that they are very sorry to hear it. What is the appropriate response? I suppose thank you. (I’m not very good at these things.) Appreciation for their concern is what I would like to show. I’ve been trying to mitigate it, saying that we saw it coming and so forth; much like I did at the beginning of the post.

The whole thing has got me thinking of the giant snowball that is life. It keeps rolling, and though some pass away, everyone else keeps hurtling forward whether they like it or not. I imagine a snowball because some people are insulated at the center and can forget that humanity involves a tremendous numbers of births and deaths, ups and downs, every day. Others are bombarded with the grim reality that, at least in the physical world, we are just complex systems robust in some ways and delicate in others. How different their lives must be than my own. To them it it might seem to be a long march, that everyone begins at one point and ends at another.

Rory, who I started reading because of google love, said this:

And – the thing I never could have expected – the death of my grandmother has changed my perspective in so many ways that I actually feel like a different person. So different that it feels strange to be writing right now. Like I don’t know who I am or what I’m supposed to say. I feel like I’ve forgotten what my favorite color is (assuming I previously had one).

I’m not as close to my grandfather as Rory was to his grandmother, but I wonder how much his death will affect me. (I left that present tense in, in honor of the two previous ones I “corrected.”) Will I be more motivated to do what’s important to me instead of wasting time? Odds are against it, sadly, because I’ve thought that many times in the past. I did manage to post today though, forgoing the relatively unimportant task of catching up on reading.

Maybe I’ll just appreciate people more. I called some people who I hadn’t talked to in a while today, but I just wanted to talk to them, without mentioning my grandfather. I spoke to others, and wanted them to know. It’s kind of like #3.

If you’ve read this far, I sincerely thank you. I am genuinely curious about what your thoughts are.

Crazy Facebook (better late than never)

So I finally catch up on blogs and find out that I’ve missed the boat with respect to facebook. I log on and love it, for the same reason I use google reader instead of going to my 40 blogs independently. 90% of the items in the feed relate somehow to the topic, and almost all of them are negative. How did this happen?

1. People were unpleasantly awoken.
2. There was a movement.

Facebook facilitates so much social interaction, focused primarily with ones good friends, that people forgot how public a forum it was. The way I see it, “normal” facebook users logged on occasionally and checked out their good friends pages regularly to see what was going on. Where I come from, there was something of a stigma attached to people who spent copious amounts of time examining random people’s pages. Add to that the phenomena of “facebook friends,” where it’s rude to decline a friend invitation of even someone you barely know.

Enter “News Feed.” Everyone starts seeing somewhat personal, timely, and topical information about people they barely know. They suddenly realize that their facebook friends can see the same things about them. Many of their friends have already said that they think it’s creepy and in fact, the new feature makes it easy to see that your friends are joining groups like, “If I were a creepy, stalking pedophile, I’d <3 the new facebook.” You of course, jump on the bandwagon.

Dan says,

it makes me feel bad every time I log on
I really don’t need to know that your relationship status just changed
or that you wrote on one of your friends’ wall
it’s like it forces me to be a stalker
sure there’s nothing you couldn’t have done before
you just would have had to run your own facebook crawler
which would make you a huge stalker

agreeing with my view that it comes down to the difference between normal users and stalkers. I have to say, I enjoy reading little tidbits, even when it’s a little sad, like one of my friends becoming single after a long relationship. Maybe I’m just a stalker at heart.