Free Candy For Everyone

I buy a lot of music. I can never quite get enough, and walking into a music store can be a dangerous proposition - I’ll frequently leave with a giant stack of music and a lighter wallet. With all that music buying, I tend to listen to them all a time or two, and if they don’t grab me, they quickly become forgotten. This results in a very large music collection with a lot of music that I haven’t really listened to - not enough to really know, at least.

My brother recently pointed me at an application that can help me to find new music in my own library. It’s called MusicIP Mixer. The basic idea is that it has a profile for every song, built by doing some sort of crazy mathematical analysis. Unlike other music services out there that I’ve tried that require users or experts to hand create profiles of each song, this is based purely on an analysis of the music itself.

With this cool data, it makes mixes for you. And it’s so nifty. You can make a mix based on one song, an artist, a collection of songs - it tries to find other songs in your own library that are like the songs you selected (based on crazy mathy formulas, I’m sure), and there you go. You can create “moods”, which you define by selecting some songs. For example, I made an exercise mood with fast paced songs, and then told it to make me a mix based on it. And voila! Lots of upbeat, energetic music to workout to.

I made some mixes to workout to, and some mixes based on my favorite songs to find other songs like them. It pulled up lots of music that I don’t usually listen to, and I got to hear some new-to-me stuff. Very neat.

My second method of finding “new” music was way simpler. It was to just make a smart playlist in iTunes. The rules? Select songs that I hadn’t listened to in the last two months, with a rating greater than 1 star. It’s been a pretty great way to listen to the less fortunate songs that haven’t been getting my attention.

I haven’t “discovered” anything really unexpected, but have found some old songs that haven’t made it into rotation recently, and got to hear some songs that might just earn a place on my faves list someday.

I did it. I bought a Mac. I can hardly believe it! After a lot of thought and consideration, I decided I wanted my next laptop to be a MacBook Pro. And so it is. I’m typing away, admiring the beauty of the 15″ screen. Oooh, it’s so lovely and crisp!

I’ve never owned a Mac before. I’m a bit lost without my right mouse button. But it’s a truly beautiful piece of gadgetry. It’s so pretty and well designed. I’m still poking around, figuring out how to do things with this new operating system. But hey, it can’t be tougher than a PC, can it?

My brother recently got a Mac as well, and he’s pointed me at a few starting apps to get me going. I’m writing this post with a program called ecto, it let’s me blog from my desktop. It’s pretty nifty. Who knows what else I might find?

Anyone out there have any suggestions for a newbie Mac user?

I had a thought provoking conversation with a friend this weekend. He is going to be meeting with a very famous person from the movie industry this week, and I commented on how cool that is. He was very nonchalant, “He’s just a guy, like anyone else, doing his job.” I had a hard time accepting that response, “But, but, he’s that guy!” This is a guy who’s contributed to many great movies in a very major way. I would have a hard time keeping my cool. But my friend was totally chill about it.

It got me thinking. Why do we care so much about celebrity? Why do I? Because despite my best efforts, I do care. It’s not a rational thing. I know that celebrities are just people, no better or worse than the rest of us. Most of them have a lot more time to spend on their appearance, since it’s a huge part of their job. But other than being prettier than the average person, why do we really care?

With these thoughts a-churning in my mind, I had a brief run-in with a celebrity myself. It was just a brief moment where I walked by this actor who’d been in several episodes of one of my favorite tv shows, but I found myself slightly tongue-tied and unstable. Come on, now! This is silly. I knew he was just a guy, and there was no reason to be at all in awe. But there’s something about the mystery of the entertainment industry that gets me.

Sometimes, when I walk by the ILM offices at work and remember all the work they do, I get that same awed feeling. I talk to some of these people on a regular basis - I know they’re just smart folks that come to work everyday and get their jobs done. Yet because their job is creating the magic of the movies, I get a little bit of a wow feeling.

Hey, who knows, maybe some people out there feel the same way about us geeks that work in the game industry? Hahaha. Nah.

Wow, this is so cool. iConcertCal is a plugin for iTunes that automagically finds upcoming local concerts for musicians in your library. It displays them all in a calender, using the visualizer. That’s so awesome!

Here’s what I got for the month of February:

Of course, it shows all concerts from everyone in your library. So maybe I have a couple random songs here or there that will now show up on this calendar. But it’s still way better than most event calendars where you really have no interest in 90% of the things on it. This is way more awesome!