music
What I’m listening to
I’m so immersed in work stuff right now (all fun) that I don’t even want to attempt to make sense of it for a public audience, so here’s a throwaway post on the music I’m listening to right now, with mini-mini-reviews of each:
Wolfmother, Wolfmother: OK, the band’s name is Wolfmother — what else do you [...]
The Kinks are the Village Green Preservation Society
Anyone who has been living in Northern California for the past couple of months knows that it has rained, and rained, and rained. I don’t generally enjoy exchanging pleasantries about the weather, but I found myself doing just that recently, but less as a conversation starter and more of a plea to the [...]
Irony and digital music
So I’m sitting at home trying to organize various things (mostly computer-related) and I’ve been sitting at the computer for hours using Yahoo! Music Engine and dutifully rating various artists/songs and seeing what it spits back at me as recommended music. It’s doing a pretty good job, I have to say. When you’re [...]
Bono, Mark Hosler, and lost opportunities
So, Bono from U2 was here at Yahoo! yesterday (here’s the Flickr photo). As I’ve mentioned here before, we had Mark Hosler of Negativland pay us a visit barely a month ago. For the uninitiated, Mark and Negativland were sued by U2 for copyright infringement (see the Negativland entry [...]
Peter Guralnick: from Elvis to Sam Cooke
Peter Guralnick’s two-part biography of Elvis Presley (”Last Train to Memphis: The Rise of Elvis Presley” and “Careless Love: The Unmaking of Elvis Presley“) remains the most compelling work of non-fiction I have ever read (and perhaps the most compelling anything I have ever read). It’s an absolutely sprawling but thoroughly amazing [...]
My day with Mark Hosler of Negativland
Of the many fun aspects of my job at Yahoo! managing the “TechDev Speaker Series” is pretty close to the top. “TechDev” stands for “Technology Development,” the group I work in along with Jeremy Zawodny, Simon Willison, Ken Hickman, and now Tom Coates (welcome, Tom!) Bradley Horowitz is our leader. Every Friday, [...]
Quick thoughts on the music selection in Yahoo! Music Engine
Jeremy has a vibrant discussion going over at his blog about his experience with Yahoo! Music Engine, specifically the synchronization feature he recently used. (And there’s some discussion in the comments about the system requirements, but I’ll leave that to Jeremy’s blog for now.) Now that I’m working at Yahoo! and I’m using [...]
Wilco, Ken Waagner, and the future of music
Wilco is one of my favorite bands and has been since I picked up Being There sometime in the ‘97 timeframe. If you take a look at my Last.fm artist charts and you skip past the Pink Floyd (no apologies, fellow indie rock fans — I enjoy it without irony), Wilco is in the [...]