Big Think – Nice Site, Join and Post

I was perusing the Big Think site this morning and decided to contribute a little something. I’m not solving global warming or helping you to protect what’s left of your 401(k), but this is something that has really helped me over the years.

click the image to head over to the site

New Site: LensPundit.com

Gave birth to a new site/blog today. It’s a site that I’ve been considering doing for well over a year. The glassyeyes site gets a lot of traffic and a small, but growing, percentage of the viewers have asked about my thoughts on contact lens retailers.

I only wear contacts for sports, but I needed some with the cold months coming — hockey anyone?

So the research began, the grid started to come to life and so did the site. I took a clean WordPress template and started beating on it to bend it to my will.

It’s called LensPundit.com. Take a look.

Like Music? Pandora.

Thanks to another heads-up my from my most excellent friend, Jim, I played all evening (along with about 6 — no, 5 — cups of green tea) with a great new(?) service at Pandora.com. I had other shit stuff to do, and once I got ‘er all tuned up I was able to get that, uh, stuff at least started — all to some similar and many unfamiliar sounds from the uncharacteristically strong sound from the ‘ol Toshiba laptop.

PANDORA was started by the guys at The Music Genome Project. They’ve been listening and catalogueing all sorts of music since 2000. Quite a gig if you can get it. Of course, someone had to catalogue the crap too. I’m not sure if that’s a valid category, but I can think of about 100 bands I’d save some time on and just batch into “crap”. I digress…

It works really well, and looks good to boot. Very clean.

You can rate all of the songs you hear with a “thumbs up” or the down version. How very TiVo-esque, but it works and it’s intuitive. They start you off with a track from the band you choose (you can also base a “Station” on a song — but that’s not how I listen to music) and then roll out the tracks based on the Music Genomes.

Hate a song (or somthing about it)? LOVE a song? You can take your feelings a step further by snapping the “Guide Us” button at the bottom right.

Right away I thought I stumped ’em. “Radiohead” comes up in a “Mountain Goats” station and before I hear it, I giggle. And then — it fits, perfectly. Wanna know why the system popped it in? Just ask.

• Mellow rock instrumentation? Not always, but in this case, OK.
• Folk influences? Check.
• Acoustic sonority? I like the sound of that — check.
• Major key tonality? It certainly is, although most of the time gimme a minor chord.
• Acoustic rhythm guitars? Yes.

Detailed and an interesting insight.

Want to share your “Station” with a friend or find public “Stations” to give a listen to?Couldn’t be easier.

The player has visual ads and when you sign up you are told that they’ll have audio ads too — gotta support it some way. They give an option to subscribe for $3 – $4 per month (based on length of subscription/donation).

Give ’em a try at http://www.pandora.com. 

Started a Photoblog

I repurposed an old blog — took me a half hour to delete all of the old entries and update a few things — as a Photoblog. Yes, you can still see all of the photos over at my beloved Flickr, but I’ll highlight some of the good (and bad, and ugly?) stuff over at the ropadope photoblog (http://ropadope.blogspot.com).

Word.

Etsy.com

I’ve been thinking lately as I try to consume less, especially in the areas of plasticy crap and unnecessary consumer goods (a new lens for my camera is NOT UNNECESSARY!), that human-made items and art are under-appreciated in our society. Now there is almost no place on the planet that I’d less want to be than a craft-fair, but Etsy.com has accomplished something that even I can appreciate. I was initially sucked in by the user interface. There are so many FUN and well-conceived ways to plow through the goods listed on the site. And then there is the stuff. Sure, some of it looks exactly like the crap you expect to see at the church “crapft fair”, but the vast majority is appealing.

We’ve started slowly adding art to our house in the past few years and would like to continue that trend. I think Etsy.com will be a good place to continue that. I’d much rather buy something meaningful from an artist (and help support them) than swipe my card for something fleeting and mass-produced in a factory in the far east at Target.

What a hippy I’m becoming.