Embracing Chaos

Yesterday morning I woke up feeling like a zombie and was happy to figure out that with the end of daylight savings time, I had an extra hour to do homework. I started turning the clocks in my house back. They were all pretty easy except one. My inappropriately named “smart phone” just needed to reboot (not at all uncommon) to get its clock reset. But before too long I realized that not only was my smart phone was smart enough to move back its own clock, but that it also moved back every appointment in my calendar by an…

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A little while ago, I got my hands on a MacBook Pro. I’ve been slowly switching over to it as my primary machine. It’s pretty. It’s fast. When using it, I feel calm and happy as if I’m sitting in a japanese garden. (I bet if it wasn’t so expensive, this effect wouldn’t be so pronounced. But that is part of the charm too.) I haven’t had the guts to switch over to it as my mail e-mail machine yet, but maybe the new .mac email will convince me. Here are a couple of thoughts on why I’m liking it…

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Small note of personal pride and pride in my team at work: www.rhapsody.com has stripped off its “Beta” branding with a fresh new design and cool new AJAXy features including an improved web player and better personalization. We launched last night, which was unusually stressful. Our load test numbers weren’t glowingly positive. And if the servers couldn’t handle the load, things could get really bad. Normally, we’d just roll back to a previous version of the code, but because of marketing requirements around a new product launch, we couldn’t do that. So last night after we launched and the servers…

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I’d like to send props out to everybody at the Decibel Festival for a great weekend. The music I got to listen to was great, and I hear that the seminars on creating electronic music were also really instructive. I’d especially like to thank to Dean Carlson for putting together a great panel discussion. It was a great mix of artists, people from terrestrial radio, print publication, music labels, and music technology. I found the discussion quite thought provoking, and plan on posting about several of the ideas that we discussed in the panel. Thanks, everybody! I look forward to…

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Yesterday I summited Mt. St. Helens with some good friends. Due to a tragic ipod accident, we had but a single song to listen to for the entire drive down and the hike — the DRM licenses files all blew up, so the only thing I had left was the one song I had in mp3 format to ensure it survived for Corrie and Mason’s wedding dance. I’m glad it was a song about timelessness and repetition, because I think having a hiking anthem about novelty playing on repeat for hours would have been a jarring. If you’re looking for…

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This weekend I’m going to be part of a panel discussion on Music Discovery and Distribution in the Digital Age. It’s part of the decibel festival which has been bringing phat beats to Seattle for 3 years now. If you’re around and interested, come check it out!

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I ran across a neat tool to build a map of all the places in the world you’ve been. Really you can use it to highlight any set of countries you want, but the suggested usage is to show the places you’ve been. Here’s where I’ve visited: I’m leaving out places I only stopped for a couple of hours or visited before I could talk coherently. This picture makes me want to visit Russia just to mark that whole big chunk of land as red. ;)

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The first time you have to ask a friend to wipe your ass for you, that’s when you know you’re getting old. I’m only 32, but a few weeks ago that’s where I was: lying on the floor moaning, almost passed out from pain, needing my roommate to help me wipe my ass before we went to the hospital. Good thing we’re so close. You can also be pretty sure that surgery’s a good option in your future when you can dislocate your shoulder just by trying to wipe your own ass. Yay for modern surgery! It’s also a good…

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