Music I've Been Digging

Since I've become jobless (hopefully ending soon), I've been listening to a ton more music. And spending a lot more money on music, which is counterintuitive, but whatever, I get bored.

So, here's some cool songs I've been listening to. This way you can be assured I'm a wannabe indie hipster minus any bone in my body being hip.

stellastarr* - Sweet Troubled Soul
It's the first single off stellastarr*'s (yes, that looks awfully weird) second album. It rocks. Their first album is one of my favorite albums of recent years and they rock live, so it's almost a given I'd like this song. But then it kicks so much more ass. All hard driving, while still showing the new wave-y influences. Awesome.

The New Pornographers - Sing Me Spanish Techno
One of the tracks of Carl Newman's newest pop masterpiece. It's just infectious. Between Carl Newman and Adam Schlesinger/Chris Collingwood, it's a wonderful time to be a fan of the pop music. Speaking of Fountains of Wayne ...

Fountains of Wayne - I'll Do the Driving
It's an older song that's gotten it's first release on the recent 2 CD set. It's pure FoW power pop with a huge hook, jangly guitars, and clever lyrics. I dig.

Hall & Oates - She's Gone
I'm so not even kidding. Saw a really good cover band at the Burren in Davis Sq. a couple of weeks back and they covered this, and I remembered how much I loved the Oates, so I grabbed the song from iTunes. Honestly, is it possible to not love this song? Really, is it possible?

The Decemberists - The Engine Driver
I don't think there's a song on the new Decemberists' album that's as good as 90% of the stuff off of "Castaways and Cutouts", but this is the closest, I think.

Ambulance, LTD - Stay Where You Are
It's a couple of years old now, but this song ages well. Soooo good.

Aaron Perrino - Every Year
I went and saw Aaron Perrino play a solo show a couple of months back and his solo version of his old band's "Every Year" was just plain awesome. His new band plays some shows at the start of September and I won't miss them.

I haven't heard any hip hop in the past few weeks that has blown my mind. I'm not a huge Kanye West fan, so I'm thinking the next time I hear a track that catches my ear it'll probably be off of the DJ DangerMouse/MF Doom/Adult Swim collaboration.

stellastarr* rocks my ass

Awesome NY band stellastarr* rocked my ass last night at the Middle East in Cambridge. I'm a little disappointed they didn't play my favorite track ("Somewhere Across Forever"), but I'll be damned if they don't put on the best live show of pretty much any band I've seen.

They rock and you should go see them and buy their CDs.

Me, I'm heading to bed slightly deaf but very happy. In the meantime, check out some cool pictures from flickr.

Oh, and here's my future wife for good measure:

(Photo from flickr)

Sometimes I remember why I like fat clients ...

As everything moves to the big bucket of bits that we call the internet, people get very accustomed to having access to their data wherever they have a browser. It's a wonderful thing.

Generally.

Then you get a time like now where all of a sudden you can't access your email for a while because someone at Google tripped over a power cord. That blows and makes you wonder if thin clients are really that much better.

Then it works again and you go back to living your little happy life until the next time someone spills coffee into a keyboard and you can't access your finances.

Job Spam

So, I've been doing the normal job hunting, updating my Monster resume, adding my resume into Yahoo! HotJobs, and checking some other job boards.

Within 24 hours of my resume hitting HotJobs, I got deluged with the usual spate of "financial advisor" and "make money at home" offers. Honestly, they're just thinly veiled spam. These are just spammed out offers -- there's no relevance to my resume or experience. These companies just have some agents that run and look for new resumes and then send out the spam.

It's not nearly as nefarious as normal spam, since they don't continually email you. But still, it's pretty annoying. I'm sure the same thing happens when you first post on Monster, but my resume has been on there for a while, so I don't remember.

Anyway, I'm pretty unimpressed with the whole HotJobs interface and experience. I just don't think it's nearly as effective as Monster right now. Then again, Monster has the wonderful habit of logging me out every day (even though I've checked to keep me logged in) and then forcing me to go through those stupid advertisment/signup forms that try to trick you into signing up for the Army.

Advertising and Podcasting

So, as I mentioned in my last post, I listened to the most recent Gillmor Gang podcast today. They had on Ron Bloom of Podshow, who are attempting to monetize podcasting. I'm not so sure it'll work as they expect it to. In fact, I think it might fail because it violates one of the things that has made podcasting great: I don't have to listen to advertising.

As I posted in the comments over on the Gillmor Gang blog:

I’m particularly surprised that no one brought up the fact that one of the reasons (I feel) that podcasting has worked so well is that there is *no* advertising (or it is at least minimal).

The AdSense model works because I can ignore the ads — I don’t have to give them my attention, or I can get more extreme and block them using Adblock or Greasemonkey. If the podcasts I listen to started to insert 30-60 second pitches, what separates it from the dying radio model? Even if it’s targeted, I’m still there to listen to the content. If the hosts start to overtly pitch products that are targeted to me, well, then I’m going to give them a lot less attention.

Scoble started to approach this when he talked about Adam Curry’s Sirius show and how it’s missing the wrap arounds that Curry would do on the Daily Source Code that at least gave you the impression that he actually listened and said “wow, this is good, other people would like this.”

Obviously it’s early, but I was just really surprised that this fundamental question wasn’t discussed. I’m not against compensating the producers, I just don’t know if this advertising model is going to work on the audience that listens to podcasts any better than the giant Flash ads that we’ve all learned to block.

Cool iPod / Podcast Feature

So I'm listening to the most recent Gillmor Gang podcast on my Shuffle as I'm running this morning. I get maybe 40 minutes into it and then get back to my home.

I hook the Shuffle back up and it sync'd up the location that I had paused the podcast at. I was able to start playing the show back from iTunes right where I left off. Maybe this is widely known, but I'd never stumbled upon this. Damn cool.

Random Job-related Stuff

Now that I don't work there anymore, I can point to this other blog I created/wrote for: http://www.gildblog.com. I think it came out ok, considering I know nothing about the "leadership development" field. But, considering I don't think anyone else in the company did either, maybe that's not surprising.

WebMailCompose is a fantastic Firefox extension. Now I can click on mailto: links and have them pop open a Gmail compose window. Quite handy when you're job hunting on craigslist.

Speaking of job hunting, I'm not really sure what I want to do. But I've found some interesting stuff out there, so maybe I'll get lucky. In the meantime, I'm probably going to try to get my blog to come up first when you search for me via google. Or at least close to first. So I'll throw a link into myself: Ryan Toohil.

Fun with Yahoo! Groups

Not trying to bury the lede, but last week pretty much my whole department got laid off. Exciting times. Honestly, I didn't really want to be there, so it wasn't terribly surprising nor disconcerting. The writing was on the wall when they completely cut the funding for the project I had been brought in to work on. I'll write more about this someday. The events over the past 1.5 years are ripe for many a posting.

Still, I liked the people I worked with, so that part sucked. I decided to follow the example of one of my co-workers from my previous job, who had set up a Yahoo! Group so ex-employees could easily keep in touch. It works really well, and Yahoo! had bought out eGroups (I think that is who it was) and built up a little more onto the interface. And the price is right -- free.

So I set it up and invited some co-workers. Or ex-co-workers I guess. Smooth as silk. Then I say to myself "Hmm, I'd love to be able to add this to My Yahoo! page or my aggregator of choice." I do a few searches and lo! Yahoo! Groups support RSS! Fantastic. The help page says to go to the Group homepage and there should be both an XML and Add to My Yahoo! badge.

Negative.

I search around, try to figure out what setting I need to tweak. Finally, I stumble upon it -- in the Yahoo! Groups help section it mentions that if your messages aren't set to public, you can't get the RSS feed and cannot add to My Yahoo!.

That makes no sense to me. Surely the RSS feed can live behind authentication, just like 90% of the other Yahoo! features, right? Why can't groups with private messages simply have RSS feeds that require authentication. For 95% of users, they're going to access the feed through their My Yahoo! page anyway, so they will already be authenticated, i.e. they won't ever realize that they need to be authenticated to consume the feed because they have to be authenticated to use their aggregator anyway. For everyone else, if they're smart enough to setup an aggregator, surely they can figure out how to access a private feed. I mean, I can do it for my Gmail, why not for my Yahoo! Groups?

Anyway, I'm going to throw this out here and hope that Jeremy Zawodny or Jeffrey McManus are doing Pubsub or Technorati or Feedster searches for their names. I guess email would be the normal way, but I don't want to add noise to (what I assume) are already overflowing mailboxes.

Konfabulator is Konfabulous

How's that for a lame title?

Anyway, big news yesterday in Yahoo! buying Konfabulator. Konfabulator is this nifty little dashboard tool where you can install little dynamic javascript widgets onto your desktop.

The recent rev of Mac OS X built Konfabulator-type functionality directly into the OS. Thankfully, the Konfabulator folk released a Windows version to supplement their existing Mac version. Then Yahoo! bought them and made it free.

As free products go, this is pretty amazingly cool. I've set mine up to emulate the dashboard feature of OS X, using the Konspose option of the Konfabulator. I hit F8 and get to see a nifty dashboard with a calendar, a rotating picture, some traffic, and some weather. I really want a traffic widget like the one Yahoo! built for the Mac dashboard. If I get bored (and it's not 100 degrees in my home office) I might try to build it myself.

It's pretty cool that companies like Yahoo! and Google are buying up these little apps like Konfabulator and Picasa and then just releasing them into the wild for free. I assume they'll have some sort of advertising model coming, but maybe the plan is just to try to achieve some brand lock-in, bringing folks over to their search engine, where they can rake in the advertising dollars. In any event, it works out pretty well for the user, getting all sorts of nifty tools for free.

I'm published

I'm a published author (well, co-author) and I didn't even realize it until today.

Win it for...: What a World Championship Means to Generations of Red Sox Fans

Page 128-129. I'm going to have to buy myself a copy.

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