Grand Larseny

Along the same lines as Kutiman, the in Bb project is an amazing new venture in music. This time, however, it’s more of a roll-your-own type of deal. You are the creator of your own song which, unfortuantely or not, no one else will hear (most likely). You can get to the project at their website in Bb 2.0 - a collaborative music/spoken word project.

The project reminds me very much of a little Flash site that Amon Tobin did when he was doing on of his early albums. You could start, stop, mute, and unmute any track from one of his songs to create your own experience, so to speak. After playing with all the different knobs for twenty minutes I delighted. After playing with it for two hours, I was completely hooked. The in Bb project is a little different, but has the same effect.

This goes out to all the photographers in my family, the Siberian Wooden Houses project.

Irkutsk, Siberia is a city next to the deepest lake in the world, and it is home to some amazing (I assume) hand-made wooden houses. Vlad, of Vladstudio.com fame, drove around the city documenting the houses as they are falling into disrepair. If you care about any of the following, you will love the gallery he created:

• Photography
• Architecture
• Lighting
• Wood
• Siberia
• Siberian Wooden Houses galleries

I love four out of those six, so I’m absolutely enamoured.

A few rablming thoughts, prepared hastily:

I really love music. There’s something about the tone and emotion of a song that can really affect your reality. Music, to me, is more than just what you hear; you have to agree with what the artist is doing in order to enjoy it.

Put another way, when I’m in a really bad mood driving in rush hour, the last thing I want to listen to is classical music; it’s too calm. I don’t feel calm and can’t agree with what I’m listening to, so I subconsciously reject it. In a strange way, I find that listening to angry music calms me down, or at least I don’t hate the music and the situation. When I am upset and listen to harsh music, like hard rock or mathematica, I find myself able to concentrate more on the music and less on what’s pissing me off.

Typically I need my music to help me concentrate or work, so I’m looking for music that fits that part of my life. So far, I don’t know if there’s anything better than Explosions In The Sky, specifically the album “The Earth Is Not A Cold, Dead Place,” but the search continues. It’s a search that is its own reward.

Twitter is mainstream now, which is awesome. As more people use it, more ideas of how to use it float around. One idea that has come to prominence is tagging all your tweets by using a specific character for future reference. Just like you might tag a photo “Hawaii” or “Flower” or “Uncle T,” the idea is to tag your tweets so that you and others can find them later.

This is much better than just trying to do a search for the word “Hawaii” or “Flower,” because you can tailor your search results to find only the tweets you want to as you are creating the tweets. So, you think about what you might want to search for in the future, and you tag the tweet as such. It’s a pretty good system.

My problem is reading the tags. See, the hack that they use is to put the hash symbol right before the tag, making the “Hawaii” tag look like “#Hawaii.” This has become annoying. It’s not so bad when tags are at the end of tweets, where you can mostly ignore them, but there are many times where tags are not at the end of sentences. There are also cases where tweets use multiple tags for different reasons, making them harder to ignore.

Hash tags add more noise to an already quiet signal. When you only have 140 characters to use, adding 10-20 characters of noise is too much for me.

What I propose, however, is not to do away with hash tags. As I’ve said, they are very useful, and it’s not really possible to reproduce their functionality without doing something stupid, like completely overhauling Twitter’s back-end system. I believe that a simple UI trick can work.

I believe that tags should appear without the hash in front of them as a link to the search results for that tag. I’ve included a few mock ups of a couple scenarios in the scientifically proven best Twitter iPhone app, Tweetie.

Here’s a screenshot of the way hash tags are currently formatted, that is to say unformatted.

You can see in the tweet by Clint the hash tag for #short_url. Check it out as I would like it.

While this may still be too jarring for some, I believe it flows better in the reading process than having to interperet random hash characters. If time allowed, I would like to play with subduing the colors, or perhaps doing away with the button altogether and just changing the text color for the tag itself to indicate a link. In any case, I firmly believe that the hash character itself must dissappear if the tweet is to be readable.

Just for fun, here’s an example of a tweet with multiple tags at the end, to see how it might look.

Hopefully this may stir your creative energies, too. Goodnight.

Just ran across the transcript of John Gruber and Merlin Mann’s talk at the SXSW conference. After reading it for just a few minutes I couldn’t help but hear the voices of the Professor Brothers’s Steve and Frank in my head. I’ll let you figure out for youself which is which by reading.

John is Steve and Merlin is Frank ok there i said it.

This time is the coder’s favorite TheDailyWTF. It seems that Conflickr has infected the minds of those running it, and they’ve turned the entire site into a Twitter stream. Now THAT’S the new Web 3.0, baby.

Also, I have to say to the guys running TheDailyWTF congrats on the funding. I’ve always thought of milking the nearly dozens of readers of GrandLarseny for some serious dough like that. Any way you think I could sell out?

Gizmodo is infected with the Conflickr worm, which has led to hilarious results.

Ran across more furniture ideas. Because our home so far is 1) beautiful and 2) a realization of Monica’s vision for a home, we have a policy that all furniture with a hope of becoming a part of our house must first be approved by Monica. It keeps things looking good.

I’m pretty sure these are approved. They’re by the design firm Pal + Smith, who seem way to snooty to sell to the likes of me. They can’t stop me from looking and getting ideas, though.

File this away as so awesome it’s scary. A couple in Colorado thought they smelled gas in the water coming from the faucet, so they decided to do what everyone else does in that situation. They lit the water on fire.

No joke, friends, they lit the water on fire. You can read more about it, and even see a picture of their new fire faucet at CBS’s website.

Simple, brilliant website. While there are nice touches everywhere, I love the “FACT”s best.

Michael James Moran Woodworked Furniture.

I’ve already posted one video by Kutiman, please enjoy the rest of the series. They just get better and better.

THRU YOU | Kutiman mixes YouTube.

Today was big. Without a day as big as this, the simple apple I ate would not be nearly as sweet, but first you need to understand today. I like to think I’ve worked hard in my life. I wrestled in high school, pushing my body beyond what I thought were my limits. I’ve ran with the only goal being to pass out so I didn’t have to run any more. Does that make me a whiny emo dork? Yes, but the point remains that I know hard work, in brief flashes.

Today was different. Today was big. I worked really hard from ten in the morning to after seven at night, with only 20 minutes for lunch in between. This is the first time I’ve really exerted myself for nine hours straight, and I don’t think I’ll forget this experience.

There came a point late in the day when I hit the wall, so to speak. My body was done, and I realized that I had no energy left to burn. That’s when Monica saved my day, and acted as God’s agent, I truly believe, when she brought me apples and peanut butter.

Friend, I had the best food of my life, nourishing my spirits along with my body. I know it sounds hokey, but it’s actually pretty realistic in that the energy released by the snack did alter my mood through altering the chemicals in my brain.

The apples were sweet and moist, just enough to quench my thirst and concentrate all my senses on the pleasure of the moment. The peanut butter stuck in my mouth, giving me the feeling that I was eating more than just an apple, I was eating a whole meal. I’ve had the honor to eat in some of the world’s great places, but I have never had a better experience than this afternoon with apples and peanut butter.

This never would have happened any other day; it took the prolonged work to lead me to the point where I really appreciated God’s gift to me. And, brother, it was good.

Everyone knows that one day our robotic masters will rise from their primative shackles to a brutal and emotionless reign. To make the transition for future generations as smooth as possible, researchers have developed the robot cradle to take care of human infants while sleeping.

Apparently the cradle monitors noise coming from the mouth-hole of their ward for any unusual deviations. Once it has been determined that the human has awakened, it is promptly put to sleep with the classic lullaby “SLEEP, HUMAN CHILD, SLEEP.” We are all so lucky to live in such a forward thinking time.

A few days ago Apple unveiled a new model of the iPod Shuffle. Here’s a link to the Shuffle’s homepage along with a video guided tour of the new tech; just try to drool as little as possible.

Here’s the key points for people afraid of clicking links on the web* 

• No buttons on the Shuffle. None. Every button you need is now on the headphone cord
• Much smaller than the older, incredibly small, Shuffle
• VoiceOver to speak the current artist and playlist to you
• Did I mention there’s no buttons on the friggin thing

There has been a bunch of hemming and hawing from people over the missing buttons, as can be expected, but I believe this will be regarded as a brilliant move. Honestly, though, the move is very striking from a design standpoint. When you look at the thing it looks solid, like a single stick of gum or a piece of plastic packaging to be thrown away. Looking inside is no less spectacular; it really makes you feel like you’re living in the future.

The point of the Shuffle, the overriding vision, is to be small. You can have your music in your pocket with any iPod, but the Shuffle’s goal is to reduce volume (volume meaning size, that is). This means there are scenarios where using the Shuffle would not be optimal because there are much, much better options. Scenarios like:

• Playing music in the car
• Carrying around a large library of songs
• Playing songs on a good speaker system
• Playing songs on good headphones

The iPod Classic is great for the car, with a large library, and I use it pretty regularly with a huge speaker system and it responds well. The iPod Nano can be used with good speaker systems and great headphones. If you want to experience your music, these are great options.

I contend that the Shuffle is about consumer driven, perhaps throw-away, media. It is not about tuning your senses to engage as a listener with the artist, it is about appeasing your senses to get on with your day. That, to me, is why the new design of the Shuffle is so brilliant. Yes, you need to use Apple’s brand of headphones to use them, but why would you want something else?

When you’re on the go the best way to control your music is where you can always reach it, on the cord of the headphones. I fell in love with cord-based controls back in the mid 90’s in Hong Kong and again with the iPhone. When I’m moving I don’t want to control every little thing, just tell the music when to shut up and when to start again.

In the end, for me, the thing that kills the Shuffle is what kills the iPod Nano and iPod Touch; the iPhone. Apple has met my needs, and I think that this is one missed purchase they can be happy about.

* I am actually afraid of these people.  Unless you clicked a link to get here, you must go around all day typing misspelled felonies into web browsers. What came after my blog, www.embowzelment.com?