Thursday, January 10, 2008

Don't Shake Life Off

Don't shake life off. There are moments in life when you see something, often in nature, that is inexplicably beautiful. Sometimes, though, your drive to work can give you peace, such as seeing the sunrise as I did today.
Actually, it's the 3rd consecutive day of the most beautiful sunrise I've ever seen and it has given me such a sense of the wonder of life. But we tend to shake this feeling off and convince ourselves that this beauty in life is fleeting, when.... when in fact that beauty is the essence of life and is constant and comforting if you let it be.
We think that all the awful things we see, or think we see, are permanent, as opposed to the fleeting beauty we allow ourselves. We have things mixed up in our minds, in our hearts..."

Thursday, January 3, 2008

Listening to a Tape

I did something I haven't done in years; I listened to a tape today, and that was really fun. I've forgotten how it's kind of nice to relinquish control of your listening experience... finding it cool to listen to a mixed tape someone put their love and time into for your listening enjoyment.

I remember making my own mix tapes and it was always something that you took your time to do and something you did for people who you really wanted to connect with. It took a lot of time and it wasn't a point click and burn kind of thing. It was taking the time to make sure that the tape was working right. Making sure you're on the right spot. Rewind, fast forward, getting just the right transition between songs...

Some of my closest friends in high school made me mixed tapes and there was something that we shared that I didn't share with other people because your choice of music is so defining. It seems a little different now, because everyone can check out everything at the click of a button, but even 10 years ago, you could share a tape and that was the only access to listen to someones eclectic tastes. It was like you found a tape and you found some person and her music you'd forgotten about and you really can't just get that at the click of a button.

It's less likely today that you or I might go to the record store and browse through the rack. I used to love to go to those used record places, view CDs and browse for an hour and poke at every mislabeled thing or ones without a label or one that were turned the wrong way and check out what that music was too cheap and hope it was something"good".

When I browsed those record stores it was always that sense of discovery that you were after. And that sense of discovery in the last few years has disappeared, when you can just search the internet. It's not a physical experience, it's a kind of a very disconnected experience, where if I put in the right search word I will get what I want and didn't have to work very hard for it. You and your friends aren't the ones putting their time into sharing music.

This ubiquitousness of music means that it is owned by everyone, which is good, but people like to have that sense of knowing something other people don't know or having that access that someone else doesn't have, which I think is now found by going to live concerts and saying, "Yeah, I've seen them live," and that live experience is becoming more profound for the very reason that you can't search and buy it on demand.

That live experience is what a lot of music people are talking about. And you can't replicate that on the Internet. You can't replicate that with a CD either. And so that's what bands are going to need to market and monetize, and to find their niches, with a their live show. And if you don't have a great live show, it might be hard to monetize your scene because once you post your music on the Internet, it's they're for everyone.

I believe then, that the experience of seeing the live show will define the music of the next generation, but probably ride right along side the experience of recorded music. They may well diverge in different way than we expected because of how drastically different listening expectations are now and will be in just a few years.

Wednesday, December 19, 2007

Remember The Milk, one...

Remember The Milk, one of the most beautiful to do list, if you have never tried out Remember The Milk try it out now, you just integrate it with the new g-mail and it gives the most useful task list that you can find in the interface is grade, there are multitude of options, you can categorize, you can even set it up to do project planning instead of just simple to do list. listen

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Tuesday, December 18, 2007

A Catcher for Christmas

This morning my son, who is 5, didn't want to go to school. He told me that it was because this girl, Maggie was bothering him. She didn't let boys play with her and made the rule, "No boys allowed." So, I asked my son what would make it OK for him to go to school today and he said, "If I had a catcher." I could not figure out what in the world he meant by a catcher. I asked him, "What kind of catcher," and he said, "A Maggie catcher."

Tuesday, December 4, 2007

Changing the Color of the Inbox Label in Gmail

I have read a ton of blog posts today about Gmail's new function of colored labels.

I was happy for two minutes until I saw this ugly gray box at the top of my email: "Inbox".

I realized that the default label for any email is "Inbox", but currently you cannot change the color of that label. Why did Google miss this function? Why did they pick such a horrible default color? I probably would not have even noticed the "inbox" lable if it had not been such a glaring eyesore on the otherwise beautiful GMail page.

I have already emailed Google with this issue. Hopefully, bringing it to their attention will get it fixed quick. If not, please write your own email to build up support.

Thanks!

Season versus Holiday...

Season versus Holiday Season versus Shopping Season. Why are so obsesses with what shopping season we are in? When we hardly pay attention to what season we're in and we only get excited about the weather when it's becomes a potential obstruction or listen

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Thursday, November 29, 2007

Just trying out my first...

Just trying out my first blog through Jott, jott.com. Create website, [...] be transcribe what your saying to the phone into text. Can uploaded to your blog like this. Or can, upload to remember the milk to do for kate to do list and I encourage you to check it out. We'll see who this blog, blog works what I most interested is what the title one that been... listen

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