geochurn.com goes live
.:it’s swelltastic!:.
i have now completed phase I of my blogging education and entered phase II. phase I was to just get a general blog up with some content. i used wordpress.com to create this, made use of a default theme, chose some topics to write on and shoved off into the world. i quickly became a little annoyed at how little customization i could actually do, and so i was determined to move up to phase II as quickly as possible.
as it were, waking up at 3:30 in the morning due to stomach issues has some advantages (glass is half full attitude…glass is half full attitude…glass is…), i’m finding out. when it’s that early and you can’t sleep, boredom tends to set in very quickly, and so this morning i said to myself, ’self, i think it’s time to play a game of ‘make it happen’ with the ol’ wordpress.org 2.1 install‘.
so here we are in phase II. i got it set up, imported all of my posts over from this location and set up a new theme and modified it (a little) so that it’s a little more cleaner and navigable. further learnings for phase II include:
- researching and deploying any useful plugins for wordpress 2.1 (although this is kind of a challenge right now because the upgrade to 2.1 broke a bunch of pretty useful plugins)
- setting up the metadata with keywords/descriptions and other general SEO best practices
- setting up adsense so that i can see if i can possibly make a couple of cents
- further narrowing down what i should talk about in order to more fully realize the above bullet
- rocking. more rocking.
in other news, i/we went to ikea up in roundrock, and that was an interesting experience. we’ve been to ikea several times before, and today, i’ve decided that the only reason that you should go to ikea is if you absolutely know that you need to get something and you have a general idea of what specific item you want. ikea has a tendency to make you want to blood eagle someone after being there for too long…
oh yeah, and i think i’m finally going to get a wii today. or rather, tonight. well…technically tomorrow, i guess. wal-mart is apparently going to have them available at midnight, and so i’ll be leaving here shortly to ensure that i’m on the list to get one. i’m determined to get one more than ever now because…well…just because. principle…general principle.
one final note: have to send out some congratulations to our friends jill & ben novak. they just had their second kid…another girl. the craziness is that she probably weighs maybe 102 soaking wet…and she went and had a 9 lb. kid. i am weak. women are strong. i am glad i am not a woman when i hear things like this.
.a.out.
i have no words…
well…okay…i have a couple of words…
1. this is probably not entirely work appropriate.
2. why, god…WHY?!?
3. sometimes i wonder about the world.
amie st.
.:the bleeding edge of new music:.
from the site:
- Discover and buy new, independent music at your price.
- Earn free music when you find great songs and recommend them to your friends.
- Download new songs to any mp3 player or listen to them from your Amie Street online library, on any computer, any time.
in a nutshell:
music community driven sales…the common man/woman dictates the worth of a song. gee…what a novel idea. here is yet another way that the music industry will have to adapt in order to please the thousands of niche music markets that now exist.
the idea here is that artists are able to upload their music to the site in DRM-free MP3 formats. this means you as a user can play them on any player you want. the MP3s start off for free. as people continue to download them, they begin to increase in price. a $.30 song generally means that the song is starting to become popular, and a $.99 song is apparently a hit according to the community. there are also some community voting tools too which also help out with how popular a song can get.
for an independent artist, this is pretty great, and they have some cool offerings to help you along. they have an embeddable player for songs that you have on the site…so, for example, it’s easy for someone to embed your music on their myspace site. there’s also a nifty little store application that you can use to sell your music on your web site. the artist gets to keep 70% of the sales after $5.00. i play music and have a CD and i personally think this is yet another great way to increase your reach into the market. every little bit helps…
i really like this idea a lot, main reason being that it is a consumer driven model. i trust my friends’ opinions much more than i trust a lot of music reviewers out there about what is supposed to be new and great. i can only see this not working in the sense that you may not have a diverse enough mix of a site audience in order to make it easy to find a diverse range of good stuff. for example, there may be a disproportionate number of users who are looking for/voting on/downloading a specific type of music; thus, the site becomes biased in its pricing model. the site states that ’songs in the $.30 range means that the song is gaining popularity. songs that reach $.99 are hits’. well…what if all the .99 cent songs are crunk? you could say this is good for the consumer because they’d be able to find really good music in a not-so-popular genre very cheaply, but bad for the artist because they aren’t reaping any of the benefits of becoming a more popular, and popularity in this instance translates into dollars for the artist.
avvenu
.:we’re gonna’ rock on to…:.
from the site: “With the Avvenu Music Player, your iTunes playlists are streamed from your home computer to wherever you are, whenever you want. Now you can listen to your music on your work PC, a laptop, a friend’s Mac®, or even on a Windows Mobile 5 smartphone.”
in a nutshell:
i’ve actually used something similar to this called hamachi, but it’s not an application specific to streaming music. in other words, you can do a lot more with it…but why get something that has a bunch of features that you aren’t going to use?
avvenu is pretty easy to use. let’s say you’re like me and you have a portable hard drive where you store all of your music. instead of hauling your portable drive with you everywhere, all you have to do is make sure that hard drive hooked up to a computer that is turned on and has access to the internet. you run avvenu and set it up (it’s pretty easy) and then you can pretty much stream your entire iTunes library through the web browser of a remote computer. in other words…your work computer…or your PSP…or even your browser-enabled phone. awesome.
another pretty cool thing (but i think it’ll eventually get nixxed) is that you can store up to 250 songs on their servers once you create an account. you can listen to those tunes without having your base computer online, and you can also share those songs with friends. they can’t download them…but they can listen.
there are only two real drawbacks i can see:
1. you can’t run this on a mac. well, you could…if you run bootcamp and you have windows xp installed…
2. songs that you’ve purchased through iTunes will not work right off the bat. there is, of course, a way around that. you just burn those songs to a CD and then re-import the CD…thus eliminating the apple DRM (digital rights management).
best of all…it’s free. i like free. you like free. go get it.
stolen ID search
.:pray that it doesn’t show up:.
from the site: “Is your social sercurity or credit card number safe? Search more than 2,345,708 compromised numbers.”
in a nutshell:
when i first saw the number of compromised numbers, i didn’t really think anything of it…considering that the US population is approximately 300 million, that would make approximately 0.7819026666666666etc.% people ‘compromised’. still…a couple million people is the population of a couple of good sized cities, and so i thought i might throw this out there considering how quick and easy it is to use. you just go to the site, throw in your credit card or social secrity # and it tells you whether or not it has found anything in their database.
you might say, ‘uhh…andrew…you’re an idiot. ever think that this might be a phishing scam? ever think that you may’ve just given your information to people who might use it against you?’ yeah, i thought about that…but this product was released by a company called ‘trusted ID’, which has been in the business for a long, long time. and they disclaim on the site that they don’t store any information you type in. and i did a little nosing around with whois and their name servers point to something legit. while this doesn’t necessarily guarantee anything either… i still feel alright throwing this out there. with the increase of stolen ID instances going through the roof, you should consider using as many tools as you can to make sure it doesn’t happen.
