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justpeace already taken? wtf? even SL is a small world.

Listening to:	Burning Down the House, Talking Heads
Reading:	GEB
Weather:	brisk 59

This morning I decided to wash some windows in the house. I actually had a big plan to do this over last weekend, but discovered I was out of white vinegar, so that got put on hold. I know, scintillating, but just hang on, I'm getting to something good. So I surf over to IT Conversations to find something interesting to listen to during the window cleaning adventure (my home stereo not only has indoor and outdoor speakers, my computer is hooked into it, so I can move around and hear streams everywhere). Chose Dr. Moira Gunn, a very recent though short piece about the state of stem cell research, specifically the poor health of the Presidential lines, and their doomed future. Nice.

So short that I didn't even get one window done before it was over. Tragedy. So I head back to the computer to find something else to listen to. Some British dude about some social networking music thing, so-called musical myware, sounds potentially interesting. Turns out to be quite interesting, if difficult to understand, since the brit speak a bit quickly for my amuriken ears.

He created this thing called last.fm. You create a free account, download a widget that attaches to your music player (iTunes, Winamp, etc.), and tracks all your listening. Oh, not all. Only songs you actually listen to in their entirety. Then it creates shitloads of lovely statistics about your listening, and compares it to others, to create trees of "if ya like this, you're x% likely to like this" and whatnot. And this database did not start with a pile of tune data, it started from zero and is built entirely from users. And there's more, hang on. It also builds cool pages about the artists, links to various info about them via wikipedia and whatnot, pages about users, has a tagging system, and the big coolnes, has a custom streaming player you can download that plays connected streams of shit based on parameters you choose.

Cool, huh? OK, cool except for the fact that SOME DORK ALREADY HAD JUSTPEACE FOR A USER NAME. Can you imagine? How rude. So if you're looking for me, I'm justpeace0. Dagnabbit.

And this last bit, I was in SL yesterday after work, just wandering around looking at interesting creations, as I'm apt to do in there. I see a cool castle with a nice huge open arched lower floor, fly over to have a closer look, and a little grey dude with a pointed hat is flying around still building it. I say hi, looking cool, dude. We start to chat. He takes me to his nearby studio to see his art. All groovy, poster-style stuff, poking fun at religion and science and stuff, right up my alley. As we chat, I tell him I'm from WV, ask him where he's from. VA, right next door. Wow. My dad lives in Manassas. No shit, I live in Manassas. Small freakin virtual world.

permalink posted by cat 9:48 AM

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