Blog

On Web 2.0…

Crossroads, by moe. with Sam Bush and Trey Anastasio
[audio:http://ia310130.us.archive.org/1/items/moe2005-02-10.DPA4021s-splt.v3.flac16/moe2005-02-10d2t01_64kb.mp3]
This whole show is incredible, if you’re interested, archive has it.

So if you look around my blog today, you’ll notice some changes.  I’ve gone and fully embraced Web 2.0.
What is Web 2.0?  Well, thats not exactly easy to say, but by the end of this entry, I’ll have covered the concept.
I’ll detail the recent changes, in the order they appear on my sidebar.

The first is the Links block.  These links come from del.icio.us, which is a social bookmarking site.  Yes, I know, that phrase alone means practically nothing.  The idea behind the site is that as you browse the internet, you can bookmark sites with del.icio.us, and these sites will be added to your del.icio.us account, where you can tag them based on the content of the site.  These bookmarks are shared with the rest of the community, and allows you to see what most people are interested in at any given point.  It can also help you find new websites you may be interested in based on simillar tags.

Next is my calendar from 30 Boxes.  30 Boxes is a beautiful web calendar, which you can share with friends who use the service.  So when you view your calendar online, you can not only view what you are doing, but you can see the events your friends have added as well.  And, you can syndicate your calendar like I have done, so it will display upcoming events within another webpage.

Now, the PagCam isn’t really Web 2.0.  At the moment, it isn’t even Web 1.0…because it isn’t working.  I’m still not sure why, but I honestly haven’t even tried to find out.  But what is worth noting is that I’ve increased the size…so now you know for sure that its broken…whatever.

Moving on, we come to Last.fm, which is a service I love more and more everyday.  With Last.fm, you install a plugin to your music player, and it will upload the details to their website, which aggregates and organizes what you’ve listened to into easy to read stats.  It will also share these stats with other Last.fm users, and recommend artists and songs which you may enjoy, based on other users interests.  This is a service that any music fan would appreciate.  I’m displaying a list of the ten artists who I listened to most in the previous week.

Then there is of course Flickr.  Hopefully, most people know about this service by now, but in case you don’t, Flickr allows you to upload and share photos.  And like del.icio.us, you can tag your photos, so they are searchable by the community.

And the last change, which you will probably not notice is the link to Performancing at the bottom of the page.  Performancing a plugin for firefox which allows you to write blog entries from a seperate window within your browser.  I’m writing this entry from within Performancing right now, and I love it.  And if you add a simple piece of code to your blog, you can get stats from performancing.  It even integrates with del.icio.us, so you can add and tag bookmarks. 

Now, I’ve used most of these services for a little while now (with the exceptions of del.icio.us and Performancing), but I’ve always kept them to their own sites, and never really integrated them together like I have here.  And I like it.  I like it a lot. 

Firefox has extensions for most of these services, which make them incredibly easy to access.  Some industrious coders have tried to integrate these extensions into the browser itself, and released Flock.  In my opinion, Flock doesn’t compare to Firefox with all the correct extensions, but it may be right for some people.

So I don’t think I’ve answered what Web 2.0 is yet. 

The term was coined by O’Reily (see their take in the link far above), and has since been adopted by everyone else to mean slightly different things.  But Web 2.0 is generally more interactive and ‘social’ web applications, allowing people to connect and interact in new ways.  The key word in Web 2.0 is dynamic.  Web 1.0 content was static.  That is the largest difference.

I am going to take all of this into consideration when redesigning somjuan.com, and I plan to make it as accessible as possible. 
SomJuan 3.0 will be Web 2.0 compatible.

Wiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiii!

I Saw an X-Ray of a Girl Passing Gas by the Butthole Surfers
[audio:http://buttholesurfers.org/Tejass-x/ButtholeSurfers-Xray(Live).mp3]
Yes, Nintendo’s Wii.

People in the know are expecting a price and release date announcement any day now(with good reason), and some retailers are already taking pre-orders.
Not only is the Wii backwards compatible with GameCube games, controllers, and memory cards, but it is also a dvd player. And it is smaller, better looking, and presumably cheaper than the other two ‘next-gen’ consoles.

But what will obviously make or break this system is the new controller. If it is easy to use (as most people have reported), then I wouldn’t be surprised if this system beats the XBox 360 (especially considering how poorly the 360 is doing in Japan).

Software-wise, Wii has both systems beat. Hands down. It builds off the existing GameCube library of games, and you’ll be able to download games from NES, SNES, N64, and even some Genesis games. Something that intrigues me, even more than the possibility of retro gaming, is that Spore will be coming to the Wii. And the DS. And since the DS will be able to communicate with the Wii, we can presume that there will be some interaction between the two. Whoa.

Hardware-wise, Wii is using a PowerPC CPU and an ATI GPU, which will give it graphics on par with both the 360 and PS3. Although both of those systems have more powerful hardware than the Wii, I really don’t see it making a difference, especially since game developers have yet to take full advantage of the 360s graphics, and the same can be assumed for the PS3.

If the price point is around $200 as it is expected to be…I may just buy this system after all…

On Facebook…

Rebubulah by moe.
[audio:http://cryptical.nugs.net/moe/961003/moe961003_08_Rebubulah.mp3?nid=null]

Facebook has been making a lot of people uneasy recently, and I’m not exactly sure why.
Wait, let me rephrase that.
I understand why Facebook is making people feel uneasy, but this feeling is irrational.

Backstory:
On September 5th, Facebook introduced what they call the News Feed. It displays all of the recent activity of all of your facebook friends. So if one of your friends changes some info in their profile, writes on someone else’s wall, joins a group, etc; this event will be noted in your news feed.

Now, the main complaint from users is that the news feed invades their privacy. The reality is that they never had any ‘privacy’. The news feed only shows the information a user had alerady chosen to show. The only difference is that instead of having to schlep to a person’s user page to search for something new, we don’t even have to leave the main page.

As far as being ‘stalker central’ or ‘creepy’, I have no idea where this is coming from. Facebook has always made it incredibly easy to find information about people, and the news feed does not make this any easier. Unless you are worried about your friends stalking you, things have not changed. And if that is in fact what worries you, just remove that creepy person from your friends and your problem is solved. People who you have not friended on facebook still can’t see any more information than you had allowed them to see in the past.

Update: Facebook responded.

The fact is that if you are on a social networking site of any kind, whether it be facebook, myspace, or any other one of the hundreds of simillar sites, you have freely surrendered some of your privacy. If you’re not comfortable with that, then you may want to rethink joining.

Welcome to the internet, I can see you.

Last.fm

Conference Call by Conference Call
[audio:http://www.joefonda.digitalspace.net/sounds/confcall_final.mp3]

So it seems that there are still people out there who do not know about Last.fm.

More than ten million times a day, Last.fm users “scrobble” their tracks to our servers, helping to collectively build the world’s largest social music platform.

Last.fm taps the wisdom of the crowds, leveraging each user’s musical profile to make personalised recommendations, connect users who share similar tastes, provide custom radio streams, and much more.

You can see my user page at last.fm/user/somjuan. If you’re interested by this service, sign up, and add me as a friend. I’m always interested in seeing what other people are listening to.
And if you’ve already signed up for Last.fm and haven’t yet added me as a friend, this is your time to do so.

Crank

Mental Health by Quiet Riot

For those of you not familliar with this movie, take a gander at the trailer. The premise of this movie is that the main character, Chev Chelios, has been poisoned and needs to keep his adrenaline up to live. Since he only has an hour or so to live, he seeks revenge on the man who poisoned him, and everyone associated with him. And the rest of the movie follows him through this.

This movie kicks incredible amounts of ass, and manages to be funny at the same time. Although its been rated relatively low by most critics, I would strongly recommend this movie to anyone who wants to be entertained for 87 minutes.

The movie not only uses some cool camera angles to great effect, but they used images from Google Maps for some of their scene transitions. When we would move from one part of the city to another, the camera zooms out to display an aerial view of the city, and we move to the next scene’s location.

After seeing it, I’m still not sure if I enjoyed it more than Snakes on a Plane. I think that Snakes on a Plane, in a theater full of enthusiastic fans, would be better than Crank. But on its own, Crank is a better movie. One of the best new movies out this year (not that it had very good competition so far).
See it if you can.

O’Rourke’s Diner

http://orourkesdiner.com/
If you haven’t heard yet, O’Rourke’s Diner in Middletown had a very serious fire.
The inside is a total loss, and they aren’t sure if they’ll be able to use the shell.
One thing that is for sure is that they have a lot of support, and if they should choose to try and rebuild, the community will be behind them 100%.
I for one loved the diner, and hope they will try to resurect it. Take a look at the website and forums, if you feel like I do.

SomJuan.com

Dance of the Freek by Keller Williams:
[audio:http://kellerwilliams.net/mp3/Dance.Of.The.Freek.mp3]

So I’ve brought the main somjuan.com site back online, and I plan on starting serious work on it in the coming weeks.

Here is the roadmap:

    1. Finish all basic coding by the end of September
    2. Put the site into open Alpha in October. This means that people will be able to sign up, and start making content, but the site will not be stable yet, and should be expected to act weirdly, drop data, etc.
    3. The site will go into open Beta in Feb, and will be stable enough for permanent use. The only change is that things will continue to keep changing until Mayish.
    4. Site goes live. Hopefully.

Damn, thats a long time from now…

Some other changes I’ve made (to this site). My Flickr photos are now all accessable from john.paganetti.com/flickr. Fun.
Also, I’ve included a thumbnail of my webcam in the sidebar of this blog. You can click it to see the larger image. I’m trying to find a better location for the camera…right now its pretty boring.

Stay tuned…

Spiralfrog

The site is spiralfrog.com, and it has a new concept of legal music distribution. The premise is, that they will offer users free downloads (secured my DRM, of course), and their service is supported completely by ads. You can play your music on one PC and two mobile devices. If you do not log in to their service once every month(to see the ads, etc), your music will cease to play. Universal Music Group (a massive record label) has already agreed to sign on, and Spiralfrog is in talks with the other major labels.

This BoingBoing post contains a lot of links to various sites around the internet who are reporting on this. Xeni at BoingBoing, along with almost everyone else contributing their opinion are skeptical at best of a service which I feel has so much potential.

This will cost no money to the end user, and the artist and record company are still compensated. If the company can prove to be profitable, this benefits everyone. In fact, the only real support I’ve seen of this service comes from the comments on digg. Now, I’m no fan of DRM, but my opposition of DRM only extends to things I have paid for. This service is free, I really can’t complain.

Most of the news articles on this topic are coming from the wrong direction as well. While they don’t exactly take sides, they keep comparing it to iTunes, which is blatantly incorrect. iTunes offers a completely different service than Spiralfrog intends to. In fact, all they really have in common is their product. What this should be compared to is Napster and Yahoo!’s music services, which allow unlimited downloads (again, protected by DRM), but for a fee. If this service should succeed, it could completely kill the already crippled music subscription services.

Why this is a step forward: Spiralfrog has discovered a way to provide a service that previously cost $10/month, for absolutely free. It also has the potential to decrease piracy, which gives the RIAA a little less to complain about (don’t worry, I’m sure they’ll find something).

And your song for this fine post? Taught to be Proud by Tea Leaf Green. This version is from a live show hosted here.
[audio:http://cryptical.nugs.net/tlg/060407/tlg060407ii_12_Taught_To_Be_Proud.mp3?nid=null]

Uh Oh

Thats right, I’m starting a blog.

Well, sort of.

I had a blog on the old somjuan.com, and I wanted to keep one running somewhere.

So this is it.

[audio:http://www.stolenogre.com/so2004-08-31_vbr.mp3/so2004-08-31d1t1_vbr.mp3]

I’m also going to try to include a tune from somewhere online that is good enough that you should be listening to it.

That is Jericho by Stolen Ogre, and you can find the mp3 here.

Imported Entries

Every entry on this blog prior to this one was imported by hand from the old somjuan.com blogs.

Because it was imported by hand, there may be some errors in the date, but the content is exactly as it appeared on the old site.