Find your personal DJ

Time to get Down with your Bad Self!

If you are like me and sit at your desk all day long, you often look for distraction and entertainment. I was very excited when a friend pointed me in the direction of Pandora. Pandora is a music compendium that takes your noted favourite artists, genres, styles, songs, even rifts and chords and creates a customized continuous playlist. You can make multiple playlists, and they can even suggest preformed playlists for special occasions, like holiday music. As the songs play, you can rate them, stating if you want more like that, or less, or blocking the song or artist altogether.

What is fascinating is that the creators behind Pandora have developed a computer system that actually reads the notes and beats of the song to match it in their database with like minded music. Its not just saying "you like rap, so here is more rap"; it actually tries to find music which evokes a similar theme, emotion and style to what it knows you already like. And as you rate things, it continues to evolve and hone its knowledge of you. They call this the Music Genome Project. Fascinating stuff!

Unfortunately, due to intellectual property rights law, Canadians are blocked from using the site. But all my american friends, get out and check it out today!

What's your secret?

Thursday confessions. My favourite day. On my favourite forum chat site The Knot/Nest, today is Thursday confessions on the boards I hang out on. We all bare our souls and announce what has been eating at us that week. Its refreshing, invigorating and its cleansing. But its still not completely anonymous. I know I have held back in Thursday confessions, partly because these people know my real name and my real life, and partly because in my stupidity, I made my log-in name my first name and I worry about people I know in real life googling me and finding me. But for all of us to scared to confess whats bothering us or baring our deepest secret, there is a virtual community that is completely anonymous: Post Secret.

I kind of assumed everyone is now aware of one of my absolute favourite web phenomenons. But just in case you haven't:

PostSecret is an ongoing community art project where people mail in their secrets anonymously on one side of a homemade postcard.

Frank at Post Secret started this project about 4 years ago. He now has 3 books out and blog site full of people's secrets. It is updated every Sunday with the best for the week. The image at the top of this post is my favourite from this week. My confession: I only clean my house if I know someone is coming over, so I tend to invite people to visit every 3-4 weeks. Otherwise my house becomes certifiable.

What I really love about this though is the spinoff activities it has spurned. With the release of his 3rd book, Frank encouraged people to leave Post Secrets in copies of the books in libraries and bookstores before purchasing their own. Some people reported up to 3 secrets in their copy, and one person even found a response to a secret left by someone else! Visit the Post Secret forum community for more stories of found secrets. In an increasingly digitized world its hard to feel that connectedness to the world around us. Post Secret helps that - reading these stories every week, there is at least one that says to me, "hey, I know how that feels". A virtual confessional where everyone gets to be the priest and offer forgiveness. Redemption is only a click away.

If you haven't checked it out, do so. And I thought as a fun experiment, I will allow anonymous comments on my blog for the next few days. Leave your own "post" secret for us - let it out and be free!

LOLCats on your birthday

Hmm, my great experiment is already failing. In my defense we are renovating our entire 2 bed 2 bath apartment, and I have not had any time to even check my google reader. I am scared to think of all the blog posts I have to catch up on.

So this will be short, with a little content. Are you aware of LOLCats? It is a web phenomenon where people take crazy pictures of cats and give them captions, usually in some short form leet speak. Users can now upload their own as well.
Here is one my favourite pictures (though I have seen it with the caption "is it can be hug timez now pwease?")

So in honour of my friend Evan's 30th birthday next week, his wife (and my BFF) decided to hold a photo scavenger hunt with wishes from all his friends. He thinks LOLCats are ridiculous (being a vile dog person), so I decided to make him his own version, using our cats. I even played with the light levels to enhance the pic, which I was pretty proud of. What do you think?

The cats did manage to lick a little of the icing, but otherwise were well behaved around the cupcake. Perhaps it wast the 8 kajillion treats I gave them to settle them down. **sshhh** I didn't tell Regan when I let him eat the cupcake after I was done.
Oh and party hats and cats DO NOT MIX. Don't try this at home ;p.

Get yer politickin' on

***WARNING****
Political content below, reader discretion advised
If you can't poke fun at your own politics, don't follow the links. I do mean to amuse, not offend.

In honour of the upcoming US presidential election, I thought I would post an oldie, but a goodie.
JibJab shot to fame several years ago as the debate between Kerry and Bush Jr heated up. They created a stop motion cartoon with K/B "bobblehead" characters talking smack to each-other. My friends and I got a kick out of this and much email forwarding/youtube linking occurred. Now, normally I wouldn't start a blog off with politics. Talk about alienating your audience! But what I like about this, is I don't believe they were taking sides. They focussed on the positives and negatives of both candidates - it was not about swaying votes to the right OR to the left. It was meant to unite and entertain all voters, regardless of their party lines.

What I did not realize until recently was that JibJab continues to produce political satire and has even spawned greeting cards, and a DIY section of the site where you can upload your own head onto a video. Who doesn't want their 15 minutes of fame, or presidential smacktalk? Sign me up - its free!

Here is the video which launched the company:

This Land! | Funny Jokes at JibJab

And here I am bringing some old school sexy back! I need to work on my face edging, and figure out if I can include my hair, but you get the idea.


Check em out here for more hilarity and politickin'

A local plug

My good friend Sue has been working with the Nimble Company here in Vancouver for several years. Their pilot project is now on the web in its beta phase and needs people to participate!

Rap Space is a democratic social networking site for the hip hop generation. Artists can upload their music, people can rate, vote, talk about and download it. If any revenues are created through the sale of the music, it is shared 50/50 with the artist off the top. No hidden fees, no labels, no wait. Check it out, vote for your favourites and find your beat!
They also have a strong socialist ideology, and have plans to work with NGOs in developing countries to break down the "digital divide", provide travelling access, so the youth there can participate and contribute as well. After all, rarely does the next hip hop artist come from the hallowed halls of Ivy League. This is their write-up:

RapSpace.tv is the world’s first and only broadband hangout for the global hiphop community. Whether you have rhymes to record, beats to drop, lyrics to blog or just want to check out the latest hot indie rapper, RapSpace.tv is the digital voice for all things hiphop. Our goal is to connect the Web to the streets 24/7/365. Think of our site as an online recording studio where there’s always an audience and artists ready to dive in to the action.

Let's jump right in, shall we?

Welcome to my little corner of the intraweb. Fasten your seatbelts for what will hopefully be a bumpy ride.
My goal with this is to try and share with my in-computer friends all that excites and titillates me on the net. If I find a random blog post, website, game, video or tidbit, I will share it with you here. Since I spend about 90% of my life watching TV, a good dollop of gossip and reviews may find their way onto these pages as well. I hope over the next few weeks to work out a rotating schedule of sorts. This is mostly because I am a horrible procrastinator, and if I don't have a deadline, this blog will die a painful death before it is even started.

To start us off, I will link something my good friend Kia found the other day. I can only aspire to be this absofekking brilliant.

Without further ado, 15 Minute Lunch and a trip down memory lane, or how to get your ass kicked from 6-60. (click the pic if you know whats good for you):