Watching Kristen get ready with her beautiful pregnant belly and her hair blowing in the wind of the hair dryer is so soothing, I don't want to get out of bed. Vampire Weekend's 2nd Album "Contra" has been bouncing in the background all morning and our cat Dora is nestled up against my side. I just want to take this moment in. Feeling Good.
Saturday, August 07, 2010
Tuesday, August 03, 2010
Thursday, July 29, 2010
Wednesday, July 28, 2010
Monday, July 26, 2010
Tuesday, July 13, 2010
If only more DJ's were this creative & entertaining... Beardyman - Live in the Underbelly
Clicked on this to decompress the other night... Just brilliantly entertaining and funny. Even if you don't get the all the musical references, you can't help grin when he gets people up and movin'. Jaime Lidell would be proud! http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qciVXUHTN10&feature=youtube_gdata Sent from my iPad
Friday, March 05, 2010
Sunday, February 28, 2010
Surprise, We're Pregnant!
For those who haven't heard yet, it's official, Kristen and I are expecting our first in October!
Woo-Hoo! We're very excited!
Friday, February 26, 2010
Savoir Adore - Bodies
Got turned on to this tune on the drive home tonight, love the rhythm tracks and the dueling male/female vocals of Deidre Muro and Paul Hammer. There must be something in the water in Brooklyn...
Enjoy!
Wednesday, February 17, 2010
Tripping Out Over Wayne Coyne’s Bathroom...
From Flavorwire: "Flaming Lips lead singer Wayne Coyne is no shrinking violet: he’s donned fake blood and a furry suit onstage, gone full-frontal in a music video, and slammed the Arcade Fire in Rolling Stone. Now images of Coyne’s self-described “drug damaged, artist[ic]” home — a veritable compound in Oklahoma City designed byFitzsimmons Architects — are making the internet rounds."
More Pictures: http://flavorwire.com/70597/tripping-out-over-wayne-coynes-bathroom
There is some really interesting design going on here but I don't know if I'd call it home.
Saturday, February 13, 2010
Yeah, that's an entire clove of Garlic on my roll!
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> I'm in my happy place right now, grabbing some good Italian food at > Emilio's!
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10 things Noel loves\hates
via youtube.com
Always entertaining, Noel Gallagher spouts off 10 likes and dislikes. Such a knucklehead.
Wednesday, February 10, 2010
Viva Voce - The Slow Fade
A few months ago I lost both the main and backup hard drives containing my iTunes Library. Roughly 1TB worth of data... gone. As you can imagine I was super excited... of course not, I was uber pissed, so angry I couldn't believe it, a hugh moment of "Are You Fuckin' Kidding Me?!?!? The main and the backup!!!" It was the best Ad for a Drobo ever and helped re-ignite a strong desire for Spotify, because, well, this has happened before over the years, and even though I had older versions of my library on other drives, I'm getting tired of managing hard drives, I just want access to a shit ton of music.
Now having those older drives with part of my music library is great, except for when you want to hear something that you purchased recently. Fortunately E-Music has very liberal Re-download Policy which came in very handy yesterday when I had Viva Voce's "The Slow Fade" in my head. The haunting chorus of "Gone Gone Gone" kept playing over and over in my ears as I tapped out the lulling rhythms on my steering wheel while driving to work, on my customers desk that afternoon and at the dinner table last night. Stuck on repeat was this simple lullaby of a break up and goodbye song. This morning I re-downloaded Vive Voce's Rose City and couldn't be happier to hear the this song in full and release my self of only remembering the one phrase of the chorus.
The march of the piano and the slide guitar set the mood of a county dirge while a wobbly distorted square wave from a keyboard fades in and out to accent the vocal melody. It's a simple and beautiful song, fitting for the end of a record, a relationship or mourning the loss of your music collection... "Gone, Gone, Gone."
Sunday, February 07, 2010
Google Superbowl Ad got Kristen all teary eyed.
It's amazing to think how much apart of our lives Google has become. Wild.
Wednesday, February 03, 2010
The Knife - Colouring of Pigeons - Tomorrow In A Year
Colouring Of Pigeons by The Knife In Collaboration With Mt. Sims And Planningtorock
Download now or listen on posterous
Colouring of Pigeons.mp3 (15647 KB) Download now or listen on posterous
New challenging and ambitious work from The Knife In Collaboration with Mt. Sims and Planningtorock, written specifically for the opera Tomorrow In A Year which is based off of Darwin's Origin of Species and other Darwin related materials such as Richard Dawkins' The Selfish Gene. It's as if they crept into my library and wrote an album about it. I couldn't be more excited.
Tuesday, January 26, 2010
Justice - Beginning of the end
Beginning Of The End by Justice
Download now or listen on posterous
Beginning of the end.mp3 (7445 KB) Download now or listen on posterous
Well it's not much, but it's something new, New Justice that is, fresh from the Ed Banger outbox and to be taken from an album do out later this year also to be titled ✞ (at least according to the ID3 tag). It's a very simple track, perhaps something that will serve as an intro (Hopefully!) Just as it begins to get interesting it cuts short, probably intended. Fingers are "crossed" that our other favorite Persian dance duo will pull out another winner and not a sophomore dud.
Friday, January 22, 2010
Scratch Input - Using Audio to control your computer.
via youtube.com
For the nerds... yes, but pretty cool. It's a short but dense clip, hang in there, somewhere around the 3:00 minute mark the potential use of the technology will start to sink in.
Wednesday, January 20, 2010
Wild Beasts - The Fun Powder Plot
The Fun Powder Plot by Wild Beasts
Download now or listen on posterous
01 The Fun Powder Plot.mp3 (9612 KB) Download now or listen on posterous
Wild Beasts remind of the 80's in the best way possible. Eccentric English guys who can play their instruments extremely well and clean. They use words not commonly found in modern pop music, such as "bereft", "bovver" and "donkey-jaw diction". Their songs are full of drama made of glassy guitars and syncopated rhythms and have a feel that is both "modern and of the renaissance" to quote their myspace page. Boasting Falsetto, Tenor and Baritone vocalists, I had to ask myself, "Is that Antony of Antony and the Johnsons sining with a more restrained Mew..." No it isn't but it sure sounds like it.
From all of the songs on the 2nd record, Two Dancers, I choose "The Fun Powder Plot" simply because it's the 1st song on the album and it gently lulls you into their overall dramatic and dynamic sound. Plus it has may favorite lyric of the whole record "This is a booty call; my boot, my boot, my boot, my boot up your arse hole."
Love it.
Enjoy!
Saturday, January 16, 2010
Wednesday, January 13, 2010
Eli "Paper" Boy Reed - Take My Love With You
Take My Love With You by Eli "Paperboy" Reed And The True Loves
Download now or listen on posterous
02 Take My Love With You.mp3 (5112 KB) Download now or listen on posterous
Sometimes you just need some good old fashioned soul music, full of heart and conviction and sung by white guy from Boston. Enter Eli "Paperboy" Reed and the True Loves with 'Take My Love With You'. This version from 2007 popped up on my iPod this morning and got my day started off on the right track, smiling and sining along.
Enjoy.
http://www.elipaperboyreed.com/Tuesday, January 05, 2010
Star Wars In Odd Places | Caveman Circus
This picture says it all... but there are many more at the link above. Who knew Chewie was such a big Ron Paul fan?
Saturday, January 02, 2010
Thursday, December 31, 2009
New Music: Caravan Palace - Jolie Coquine
What better way to ring in the new year than with a talented band of dancing gypsies? Caravan Palace hail from Paris, France and quite literally mix roaring 20's Swing with classic filter happy French House. It's an unlikely yet perfect mix. There have been a handful of songs over the past two decades that have used swing samples to similar effect (Mambo No 5 I'm looking at you!) but Caravan Palace do it live with Horns, Violin, Clarinet, Double Bass and Acoustic Guitars. Let your hair down, loosen up that collar, grab that champagne and have a Happy New Year!
More Info:
Wednesday, December 30, 2009
St. Vincent - Marrow
I was reading a Bob Lefsetz review of Jamie Cullum's "All at sea" and listening to the song via Youtube, bored out of my mind by the songs performance I start to wander over to the related videos and see that Jaime also does many a cover including "Sky Cries Mary" and "High and Dry" all of which sound lifeless to me. He's emoting alright but the performances all lack a rawness that would make a song stick with you for life. If those same arrangements were sung by Sting or even Norah Jones they would have a much better chance of sticking with me, these performance just leave me flat. St. Vincent is another one of those artists, like Jamie Cullum, who's name I had heard but for what ever reason had paid no attention to (and in the case of Jamie Cullum I'm glad I had.) Ms. Annie Clark finally caught my attention not with the Letterman clip but with a performance on Austin City Limits a few months ago. I was half passed out on the bed drifting away when I was lulled into curiosity by the angelic flutes and oboe's that suddenly jarred me to attention with a full on marching band stomp.
Growing tired of Bob's selections, I searched for a palette cleanser and found this phenomenal performance of St. Vincent's "Marrow" on Letterman.
http://austincitylimits.org/seyret-video?task=videodirectlink&id=176
Kristen and I were unwinding for the night and I stumbled upon PBS and Austin City Limits. I'll admit I wasn't immediately taken in by St. Vincent. Like a good music snob I was half interested and half bored because I was unfamiliar with the music and exhausted, so much so I started to drift off... then it hit me, those horns and the guitar solo, the dynamics of soft and quiet to loud and explosive, the sophistication of the arrangements... it had all pulled me in, I was now fully awake and enjoying every minute of it.
The next day Kristen had downloaded the album Actor and knew everything there was to know about her. I then headed to e-music for her 1st album Mary Me and began diving head first in to the world of Annie Clark.
Annie Clark's music as St. Vincent is almost exactly what you would expect from a multi-instrumentalist who grew up in Texas, attended Berklee School of Music, joined the Polyphonic Spree just a couple years after high school and played in Sufjan Steven's touring band. She writes Pop songs, full of life, colorful arrangements and orchestration that are rough around the edges. A juxtaposition of violent guitars and sugary sweet "Birds on your shoulder" orchestral swoons. Not every song is a gem, and many come off better live than on record, but the potential here is undeniable, and Annie know's this...
It's interesting how the internet is this revolutionary thing that allows us to connect and share so much information with one another yet it took a TV appearance on public television to get me to finally pay attention. Crazy world we're living in.
Enjoy.
Get More info:
Tuesday, December 29, 2009
Dusting off the ol' Drum & Bass shelf
While going through some files on an old hard drive this morning I found a hand full of tunes I had worked on back in my D&B days. None of them were ever released and they were played in clubs less than a hand full of times. The original session files have long been lost on a failed hard drive somewhere and I figure why let all those hours of hard work go to waste. Those that new me back in the early part of this decade might get a kick out of these tunes. Enjoy!
Joe Shockley & New Republic - Why you gotta do me like that?
The 1st tune goes back to 2002 and is one of the last I worked on with New Republic, mainly it was Wade and my self on this tune and truly it was me obsessively trying to come up with something as catchy as Zinc's "Ska" and "138 Trek" and was heavily influenced by the sound DJ's Marky and Patife were pushing at the time... all in one song. As a group New Republic had already released a 12" with Break Beat Science and were working on a Latin/Brazilian influenced Single/EP for another label before the group started to implode and eventually fell apart. Listening back to it now the song feels rushed in some parts and long in others, the drums don't punch through enough and you can barely hear the bass on my MacBook speakers, but overall it's a fun song. Good Times.
Joe Shockley - What You Want
"What You Want" written in 2003, is the 1st tune I worked on after leaving New Republic and you can tell I was a bit angry at the time. Prior to working on this tune most of the songs I worked on were mostly liquid funk inspired and upbeat. This was a total 180 from that vibe and was a very literal response to the feedback I was getting from the crowd.
Joe Shockley - Other Life
"Other Life" also written in 2003, represents the most fun I ever had making a D&B tune. I just threw my self into it for a week and had a lot of fun programming drums, finding all the samples and coming up with an obnoxious bass line/lead synth. It was also the shortest and most concise D&B tune I had done at the time and I loved how it didn't have an atmospheric "drop" and then repeat section. "Other Life" is also the last D&B tune I did as I stepped away from Drum & Bass all together, got back behind the drum kit and eventually started playing with Marqui Adora.
Saturday, December 26, 2009
Levi's Mean Machine: 1970 Mercury Cougar
Friday, December 25, 2009
Wednesday, December 23, 2009
Sufjan Stevens - Star of Wonder
Star Of Wonder by Sufjan Stevens
Download now or listen on posterous
5-09 Star of Wonder.mp3 (10427 KB) Download now or listen on posterous
What Holiday Season is complete with out the sounds of Sufjan Steven's Songs for Christmas. Most attempts at holiday music, especially Christmas music, fall flat with me, but Sufjan captures the hope and joy that the winter solstice seams to bring while still leaving in a touch of sadness and reflection that also comes with the season. Then again all of my favorite songs from Sufjan do this for me. He has the ability to capture tender moments in life that make you want to both cry and sing out.
This is an appropriate theme for me this holiday season as I celebrate my 1st Christmas with my beautiful wife and her family while I also mourn the sudden loss of my Aunt and witness the heavy sadness that weighs down on my family.
This year my holidays will truly be filled with laughter, tears, reflection and renewal. Fortunately I have Sufjan Steven's "Star of Wonder" to get me through it.
Joe
Tuesday, December 22, 2009
Friday, December 11, 2009
John Stossel Talks Atlas Shrugged
ABC Fired Stossel?
Opinion Editorial by John Stossel - Dec 10, 200985 ratings from readers
While clearing up some of the misinformation surrounding his recent career change, this veteran reporter also aims to clear up the misinformation about capitalism in his new career - with a nod to Rand.
People keep forwarding me emails and blog posts saying ABC fired me. Internet forums claim I was fired because I aired a story about the downside of government-controlled health care. This is silly. It's not even logical. No one can broadcast anything on "20/20" without ABC's approval.
The truth is that my departure from ABC was by mutual consent.
I left to go to the Fox News Channel and Fox Business Network because I want more time to report on free markets and economic liberty, the kind of reporting I do in this column. With two 24-hour news channels, Fox has more room for that.
Today, finally, my new Fox Business show begins! It will air every Thursday at 8 p.m. (and will repeat Fridays at 10 p.m. — opposite "20/20" — heh, heh, heh).
My first show will be on the "climate crisis." Or it might be on Ayn Rand's novel "Atlas Shrugged." I've prepared both shows because I can't decide which I should do.
What do you think?
I'm partial to an "Atlas" show because I reread the novel recently and was stunned. It was as if Rand had seen the future. Writing half a century ago, she predicted today's explosion of big government in shockingly accurate detail.
The "Preservation of Livelihood Law." The "Equalization of Opportunity Law." The "Steel Unification Plan."
Don't these sound like laws passed by the current Congress?
All were creations of Rand's villain, Wesley Mouch, the evil bureaucrat who regulates business and eventually drives the productive people out of business. Who is today's Wesley Mouch? Barney Frank? Chris Dodd. Tim Geithner? I'll ask my TV audience to vote.
"Atlas" is still a big bestseller today. This year, it reached as high as NO. 15 on Amazon's bestseller list. Pretty amazing.
Clearly there's some magic in "Atlas Shrugged." The Library of Congress once asked readers which books made the biggest difference in their lives. "Atlas" came in second, after the Bible.
Yet elites and the MSM hate Ayn Rand. When "Atlas" first came out, The New York Times wrote that "the book is written out of hate."
Maybe that's why no "Atlas" movie has been made. Angelina Jolie once wanted to play heroine Dagny Taggart, but it never happened. Rand's books still sell millions of copies, yet college "women's studies" courses rarely mention her. One professor says her department head asked, "Why would you study that fascist?"
Why such antipathy?
Rand celebrates business and free markets. The elites don't like business. In every newsroom where I've worked, and at my college,Princeton, capitalism was derided as selfishness.
And lately, as a failure. On one website, someone wrote: "You'd think it was a joke, when the global economy was collapsing because of greed, that anyone might turn seriously to the purple prose of crypto-fascist (!) Ayn Rand and think it was the answer to anything."
Well, I, for one, think her prose answers much.
The embrace of freer markets has lifted more people out of the misery of poverty than any other system -- ever. The World Bank says that in just the last 30 years, half a billion people who once lived on less than $1.25 a day have moved out of poverty.
But now, Wesley Mouch — I mean, Congress and the bureaucrats — tell us they are going to "fix" capitalism, as if their previous "fixes" didn't hamstring the free market and create the problems they propose to solve.
Who are they kidding? Rand had it right. She learned it the hard way in Soviet Russia. What makes a country work is leaving people free — free to take risks, to invent things — and to keep the rewards of their work.
Critics say Ayn Rand promotes selfishness. I call it "enlightened self interest." When free people act in their own self-interest, society prospers.
So there's my first show, maybe.
On second thought, with Barack Obama heading to Copenhagen promising America will cut its greenhouse gasses by 83 percent (not 82, not 84 — exactly 83), I may do my first show on global warming.
I'll decide soon — when I begin my new career.
John Stossel hosts the TV show "Stossel" on the Fox Business Network. He is the author of Give Me a Break: How I Exposed Hucksters, Cheats, and Scam Artists and Became the Scourge of the Liberal Media (January 2005) as well as Myth, Lies, and Downright Stupidity: Get Out the Shovel — Why Everything You Know Is Wrong (May 2007), which is now available in paperback.
» 26 Letters to the Editor so far: View Letters
I'm not sure about the move to Fox, but I often enjoy hearing John Stossel's perspective. Hopefully he'll add a little more balance to their "Fair & Balanced" reporting. I too have mentioned to friends that Ayn Rand predicted the future when it comes to the current state of economic affairs in the world. But I was saying that before Obama was elected, when it was the Republicans handing out money like candy on halloween and pushing agendas that did make sense in a "Free" market. It's easy to put the blame on the Democrats, but lets not forget all those Republicans who played their part. They're all hoping for the same thing... that they'll be dead before it all falls apart.
Joe
Thursday, December 10, 2009
TURNTABLE TRICKNOLOGY - Dj Rafik tears up Traktor Scratch Pro, Kontrol X1 and Maschine.
Jealous? More at the little link above.
Sunday, December 06, 2009
A lovely home cooked meal...
Tuesday, December 01, 2009
Freshjive Calls Out Obama
via urb.com
So I guess it's taken just a little over a year for the backlash to set in. Let's see where this goes.
Monday, November 30, 2009
The bummer that is touring... Canada.
http://www.cbc.ca/radio3/podcasts/video/CBCR3Video_2009-11-20.m4v True, most if not all the faces in this video are unfamiliar to you, that said, the sentiment is well understood. Touring is hard. Especially when few people know who you are.
Some insight from a few Canadian Indies who aren't The Arcade Fire, MSTRKRFT or Metric.
Some insight from a few Canadian Indies who aren't The Arcade Fire, MSTRKRFT or Metric.
So If Obama Increases the troop count in Afghanistan (again), does he get to keep the Nobel Peace Prize?
Michael Moore doesn't think so...
"Dear President Obama,
Do you really want to be the new "war president"? If you go to West Point tomorrow night (Tuesday, 8pm) and announce that you are increasing, rather than withdrawing, the troops in Afghanistan, you are the new war president. Pure and simple."
Michael White will continue to count the dead regardless...
"Every day, White, 51, updates a Web site he launched in 2003,icasualties.org, to keep count of the dead: American troops, coalition troops, contractors and Iraqi civilians. He eventually began documenting deaths in Afghanistan as well."
The Huffington Post reminds us that NATO is also willing to send more troops to Afghanistan...
"NATO countries are also preparing to send more soldiers, with British Prime Minister Gordon Brown saying 10 NATO nations are ready to offer about 5,000 more troops. Britain, which has 9,000 troops in Afghanistan, the second-largest contingent after the United States, has not named the countries it claims will provide the extra troops."
And I can't help hearing the line "Meet the new boss, same as the old boss" in my head.
Wednesday, November 25, 2009
Friday, November 13, 2009
Facebook status update provides alibi - CNN.com
http://www.cnn.com/2009/CRIME/11/12/facebook.alibi/index.html Gotta love it. A 19 year old kid turns him self in, knowing he's innocent, after he discovers the police are looking for him in regards to a mugging. When he volunteers to do the line up the victim says he's the guy and the police send him to jail for two weeks. The kids father points out a facebook status that indicates where his son was at the time of the mugging; at home, on the phone with his pregnant girlfriend, and he's released. The 19 year old and his family plan to sue for damages. Obsseive facebook status updates FTW!
Wednesday, November 11, 2009
Why Retweet works the way it does By Evan Williams
November 10, 2009 ∞
Why Retweet works the way it does
- Posted at 6:29 PM
This week on Twitter, we're rolling a feature we've been working on for a while out to a lot more users. (If you don't have it yet, you will soon.) That feature is our native version of Retweet, which Biz posted about on the Twitter blog a couple months ago.I'm making this post because I know the design of this feature will be somewhat controversial. People understandably have expectations of how the retweet function should work. And I want to show some of the thinking that's gone into it. I've been a big proponent of this particular design internally at Twitter, because, while it won't serve every use case, I think it offers something new and powerful.
Background
As you know, retweeting is a very cool thing that emerged organically from Twitter users as a way of passing on interesting bits of information. Third party developers who make Twitter clients embraced it and added retweet functionality to their apps without us at Twitter doing anything at all with the feature. This isn't the first time this has happened, and this kind of emergent behavior is one of the best things about our ecosystem of users and developers.People have long asked when we're going to build a RT button on twitter.com. While it would have been pretty trivial to do the way some clients have, the reason it's taken a while is because we wanted to do something a little more fundamental that we thought would add a lot more value.
While retweets as they work today are great, they have some drawbacks. Notably:Attribution confusion. With regular tweets, you have a user picture, a username, and the tweet text. They all have a particular relation to each other. We call this, the "anatomy of a tweet."
With what I'll call organic RTs, you have the same elements, but they have a different relation to each other. Most notably, the text of the tweet is not written by the person whose picture you're seeing, nor the username that's at the beginning—except for when the retweeter annotates the tweet, so they have written part of it. (And sometimes that's at the beginning, sometimes the end.) Even once you get used to the common syntax (and there's not just one), there's extra mental parsing to associating the text with the right username and not the picture.I believe this is a bigger issue for the readability of tweets than is obvious. I also often receive @replies from people who clearly think I said the thing that I just retweeted.
Mangled and messy. The attribution is confusing in the best case. But it's worse because different clients treat RTs differently, and if someone retweets a retweet it gets messy fast. Because organically retweeted tweets can be edited, even if the original author is properly understood as the author, it's not necessarily for what they really said. Inaccurate attribution is possible in any medium. But in Twitter, because of the character limit, it's often necessary. People shorten and edit retweeted tweets to make them fit along with the extra metadata. Even when for legit purposes, that can be misleading and unfair to the author. Worse, RTs can actually be easily faked, which has become a form of spam, wherein well-known people are shown to be promoting something they never twittered about.
Redundancy. If five people you follow retweet the same thing, you get five copies, which can be useful but is a lot of noise. This comes up even more in search. Popular users can get retweeted enough to saturate a search query. Coincidentally, as I'm writing this I came across this:
Noisiness. Let's face it: Some people over-retweet. You may be interested in what they personally say, but you don't need to know about every link and charity cause they pull their RT-happy trigger finger on. The only choice you have today is deciding if the benefit of getting their occasional gems is worth the cost of their retweetarrhea.
Untrackable. Retweets potentially reveal very interesting data. After all, if something's worth repeating out to all your followers, that's a signal that it's more interesting than something that's not (over-retweeters aside). If something retweeted by a bunch of people, relative to how many are following the original author, that's valuable data that may help people discover interesting news more quickly. Third-party developers have recognized this and built sites to try and track this information. But it's fundamentally hard because the data isn't structured.
This last point is not obvious but is particularly important for fulfilling Twitter's goal of helping you discover the information that matters most to you as quickly as possible. Part of the beauty of Twitter is that you can follow your friends, organizations, public figures, or strangers you find interesting. But no matter how carefully you've groomed your following list, out of the millions of tweets written today, are you seeing the absolute most relevant ones to you? Or are you getting some good stuff, some stuff you don't care about, and likely missing a whole lot of other killer tweetage you don't even know is there?I would argue it's the latter. The perfect Twitter would show you only the stuff you care about—relevant, timely, local, funny, whatever you're most interested in—even if you don't follow the person who wrote it. And, of course, it would give you ultimate, fine-grained control in how to do so. We want to give you more ways to help the good stuff bubble to the top.
Foreground
Toward that end, we've designed Retweets in a way that helps people get more good stuff, while solving some of the other problems described above.In an announcement a few weeks ago to get developers building new RT functionality into their clients, we released some preliminary mockups showing how the new Retweet functionality might work on twitter.com. (I've read a couple times today that we're apparently keeping this feature only for twitter.com, which is exactly wrong. Most of the clients are working on incorporating it presently.)
The design is simple: There's a retweet link by each tweet and, with two clicks, it will be sent on to your followers. This takes care of the mangled and messy problem because no one gets an opportunity to edit the tweet (more on that below). The meta data (about who tweeted and who retweeted) is not in the tweet text itself, so they never have to be edited for length. Because they're built natively into the system, they're trackable. And because they're trackable, we can take care of the redundancy problem: You will only get the first copy of something retweeted multiple times by people you follow.
It will be very quick and easy to retweet, you'll never have to edit the text, and you also won't have to worry if your followers have already seen something, so this should encourage retweeting more and more useful stuff flowing farther.
The noisiness problem is taken care of by a new setting that will allow you to turn on and off retweets on a per-user basis. That is, if you only want to see someone's personally authored tweets, you can shut off just their retweets altogether but still follow them.
The attribution problem: In order to get rid of the attribution confusion, in your timeline we show the avatar and username of the original author of the tweet—with the person who retweeted it (whom you actually follow) in the metadata underneath. The decision is that this:
...is a better presentation than this:
No fault of @AleciaHuck's but the first is simply easier to read, and it gives proper credit to @badbanana. Even if you know @AleciaHuck, there's no benefit to having her picture in there.
The drawback is that it may be a little surprising (unpleasant even, for some) to discover avatars of people they don't follow in their timeline. I ask those people to keep in mind the following: You're already reading the content from these people via organic retweets. This is just giving you more context. My experience is that you get used to this pretty quickly, and it's a welcome way to mix things up. If you find someone constantly throwing people in there you don't like, as mentioned before, you can turn off Retweets from them (while still following their non-retweets). And if you really don't like it, and you only want to see what people you follow wrote themselves, you can turn off Retweets for everyone you follow (individually). Organic RTs do not offer nearly this flexibility.
The other thing some people will not like is that, unlike organic RTs, there's no way to annotate or leave your own comment when you retweet something with the new system. Some people annotate with every retweet, some don't do it at all. But it's definitely useful in certain scenarios. We left it out of this first version mostly for simplicity. It's especially tricky when you consider transports like SMS where adding a lot of structure or additional content is hard. But we have some ideas there, and it's possible we'll build that in at a later date. (This point should not be missed.)
What about those cases where you really want to add a comment when RTing something? Keep in mind, there's nothing stopping you from simply quoting another tweet if that's what you want to do. Also, old-school retweets are still allowed, as well. We had to prioritize some use cases over others in this release. But just as Twitter didn't have this functionality at all before, people can still work around and do whatever they want. This just gives another option.
The larger point, though, is that this feature should make Twitter a more powerful system for helping people find out what's happening now that they care about.To give you a better sense of what we're trying to accomplish, check out this guest post on Techcrunch from back in May by David Sacks, CEO of Geni and Yammer and former COO of PayPal: The Awesome Potential of Retweet. In it, he lays out much of what I do above—describing the drawbacks of how RTs work today and proposing a native solution that's pretty much identical to what we've come up with. (Believe it or not, we had this design before he wrote that—not that we would have minded stealing the idea from him.)
I'm excited to see what our users and developers do with it and teach us about Retweet, so we can improve it more.
via evhead.com
I'm curious to see how this plays out.
Monday, November 09, 2009
Music you should Hear and See: Exile & DJ Day - D Train Routine
via youtube.com
Filmed in Amsterdam @ Rooms of Red Bull.
I love where DJing and Live PA's are going.
Bummer: !!! Drummer Passes Away.
Gerhardt "Jerry" Fuchs, the 34 year-old drummer for indie bands Maserati and !!!, passed away early Sunday morning, due to a tragic elevator accident. The drummer was attending a Williamsburg, NY benefit, when he and another elevator passenger's elevator car halted and he attempted to jump to the next floor. Fuchs' most recent work with Georgia-based psychedelic instrumental ensemble Maserati included a split LP, with Zombi released in early 2009, and rarities collection Passages out later this year. He'll be greatly missed.
via filter-mag.com
That's a shame. I'm glad I had a chance to see them on before he was gone!
Saturday, November 07, 2009
Spotify: not getting the best advice...
"My advice to Spotify is to hire a banker and start shopping the company to a BDC (big dumb company)." ®
Joe Shockley
Entertaining read this morning. What I don't get is all the backlash. Spotify has a brilliant model. They've learned so much from others who have failed at making this model work. They know the bottom line is access. We want it all and we want it now. Mobile devices have created the oppurtinuty to make streaming and more importantly caching work anywhere and that's a service worth paying for. If the BDC is Apple I might be down with this idea, anyone else will most likely screw this up.
Recently I had not only my entire media hard drive die, which housed roughly 1TB of Music, Movies and Pictures, but the media back up drive failed as well. Fortunately I have a 3rd back up that was just a few months old so my total data loss is very little, but I'm getting tired of managing this issue. These things tend to happen every couple of years and it's getting old.
I use Evernote and Dropbox religously and I want to manage my media the same way. I want to walk up to any device, install the app, enter my credentials and boom all my stuff is there. My library, My playlists, My ratings... The whole thing. I don't want to think about it, I just want access to it, where ever I am.
I want my Spotify and I want it now!
Joe Shockley
Sent from my iPhone
Tuesday, October 27, 2009
My take on The Time Traveler's Wife
The Book = A romantic adventure, inspiring and reflective. A great love story that has passion, depth and a tremendous sense of longing.
You Know, things that you feel when you're painfully in love.
The Movie = A rushed and uninspired piece of crap.
So Kristn and I went to see "The Time Traveler's Wife" at the $3.00 movie theater in Tamarac this past Sunday. We were adivised not to see it but I enjoyed the book so much that I just couldn't help my self. I wanted to see the charectors come to life on the screen.
From the very 1st scene the movie is all wrong. I don't understand why it is that when screenwriters, directors and producers set out to make an adaptation of a book they more often than not suck the life out of it and deliver a mangled cliff notes version of the story. At what point do you start cutting for time at the expense of actually delivering a finished product that's worth watching.
Don't get me wrong, you can't bring every word off the page and on to the screen, but if your goal is to make a love story with a fantastic premise such as a girl who 1st meets her future husband at age 6 while he's 39 because he's traveling through time unwillingly, then don't you think you might want to give the story a little breathing room so that the audience might have some time to get attached to the charectors and to possibly give a shit as to what might happen to them? Just Sayin'.
It's truly a shame. There was an opertunity there to turn this film Into a Titanic sized love story. There was so much depth left out that could've made this such a great film, Instead what was made was this steaming pile of turd that requires such a leap of faith to make it work that you really just can't buy into it. You just don't give a shit about anyone in this film, it truly plays out like an extended postcard of a sunny beach that's says "Wish you were here!" when it should say "I wish you were here becuase life sucks so much with out you that even the sun just dosen't shine as bright as It once did when you stood next to me."
I think you get me. I'm dissapointed. I wasn't expecting much, but I was expecting better. You had Brad Pitt as one of the Producers, Bruce Joel Rubin, the same screen writer who wrote the screen play for "Ghost", and Rachel McAdams... Hello! The Notebook! WTF! Then again it was directed by Robert Schwentke who directed "Flightplan"... yeah I didn't see it either so maybe that's part of the problem.
Bottom line, don't see this movie, remove it from your netflix cue, head over to Amazon, your Kindle or your nearest B&N or Borders and buy the book and enjoy.
Joe
Monday, October 26, 2009
Michael Lavine Photography · Books · Grunge ·
If this book ended up on my coffee table come December 25th, 2009 I would not be disappointed.
9 Weirdest-Looking Animals You Didn't Know Existed (PHOTOS)
From newly-discovered deep sea crustaceans to rodent-resembling primates, nature has brought us some outright weird-looking creatures. Check out these animals that just seem out-of-this world and vote for the one you think is the weirdest of them all!
Read more at: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/10/15/9-weirdest-looking-animal_n_317907.html?slidenumber=0#slide_image
Sunday, October 25, 2009
Wednesday, October 21, 2009
Monday, October 19, 2009
Sunday, October 18, 2009
The Rosebuds - Push It (Salt N' Peppa Cover)
While preparing playlists for my wedding reception brunch thing tomorrow morning I stumbled upon this gem. I debated wether or not to add it to the mix but then on her drive home from dinner tonight Kristen heard the original and was inspired, thus it's made the cut. It should go well with the cover of "Bust A Move" that Kristen's brother does. No Joke.
The scoop on this cover is that The Rosebuds did it just for fun and used it to promote a few tour dates. And It's just another reason why Kristen and I love them so much. Most bands have a sense of humor, but few show it. I love a band that can write dark moody songs and cut loose and smile from time to time. Just as long as it's not all the time. JoeSaturday, October 17, 2009
The Rosebuds - Push it (Salt N' Peppa Cover)
While preparing playlists for my wedding reception brunch thing tomorrow morning I stumbled upon this gem. I debated wether or not to add it to the mix but then on her drive home from dinner tonight Kristen heard the original and was inspired, thus it's made the cut. It should go well with the cover of "Bust A Move" that Kristen's brother does. No Joke.
The scoop on this cover is that The Rosebuds did it just for fun and used it to promote a few tour dates. And It's just another reason why Kristen and love them so much. Most bands have a sense of humor, but few show it. I love a band that can write dark moody songs and cut loose and smile from time to time. Just as long as it's not all the time. JoeMonday, October 12, 2009
Compute This: World’s Oldest Working Computer On Display
via gajitz.com
Once used to help develop nuclear reactors, The WITCH comes out of being in storage for 30 years to be on display once again.
Saturday, October 10, 2009
Up super early on a Saturday, but well worth it.
Upgraded RAM in production MacBook, Listen to The xx, created a new Disk Image of previous production MacBook, listen to some Thom Yorke. Help a customer Migrate select data from a Sunflower iMac to a shiney new 20" Aluminum Iintel iMac. Listened to house keepers of said customer franticly clean and making all efforts to avoid gorgeous, yet gigantic Golden Retriever. I have lots more to do today and It's not even noon yet.
Friday, October 09, 2009
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