Friday Morning Link Post
Attended a great Tweetup in Austin last night, lots of smart folks and great conversations. I’ll write a followup with my thoughts, but for now, I will leave you with some linkage:
- If you are a music nerd, you probably use AudioScrobbler/last.fm, which generates all kinds of Top 25/100/500 charts for your listening habits, but did you know that they make the data available through an API for other people to crunch that data and do really neat mashups? About a month ago, they consolidated a lot of those projects into one site - build.last.fm. You can read about its launch here. Here are some of my favorite projects on build.last.fm:
- Extra Stats: Cool downloadable (Windows) app for generating big visualizations of your listening habits
- Last.fm Normaliser: This one is a good one for people whose music collection has tracks of widely varying length. Under normal circumstances, last.fm only does its statistics crunching based on the number of plays a track/album/artist gets, but what about artists who have concept albums that are just one long track? Shouldn’t a play from them get weighted higher than a punk band with songs that are two and a half seconds long? That’s what this webapp does - you can see my results here.
- Gijsco’s Desktop Generator: Takes your music history and generates a wallpaper image for your desktop, using album covers from your listening history
- Extra Stats: Cool downloadable (Windows) app for generating big visualizations of your listening habits
- Ever wanted to take telecommuting to the extreme? Try working from the Caribbean - this two-post series has a great writeup of some of pitfalls of working out there.
Trouble In Paradise: Freelancing From A Tropical Island, Part 1
Trouble In Paradise: Freelancing From A Tropical Island, Part 2Paradise: Balmy tropical nights with the sound of tree frogs, crickets and more. Beautiful bougainvillea, palm trees and other colourful plants. All of these add to the attraction of freelance writing in the tropics.
Problem: Insects. They grow big in the tropics, not as big as in Australia, but still big enough to be scary. - Finally, Penelope Trunk, of Brazen Careerist fame, has a great post from a while back titled “Try to be funny, even if you?re not,” how can you lose with a title like that and opening line like this:
Men are hard-wired to think they are funny.
As a man, I take offense to that, because I actually am funny (whatever). Seriously though, this article is a great look at how the genders look at humor and our evolutionary need for it (depending on how you look at it).
Have a great weekend folks, drive safely and don’t forget to tip your waiter/waitress.
Leave a Reply