Yesterday, it was announced that Spotify will tightly integrate with Facebook. That’s great for sharing music, but if you want to buy music instead of just taste-testing on Spotify, then you should really check out the Amazon.com MP3 Store.
Continue reading → Piping New Music: From Amazon to iTunes to Google Music to Spotify
Jersey City, New Jersey was founded in 1630. It’s an old and ancient East Coast metropolis. Jersey City is also, because of its geological terrain, a city that teeters in the past with no clear way into a stabilized future. Allow me to explain. Unlike most modern cities that bury their power lines and cable television lines and other communication cables, Jersey City still hangs all their municipal cabling from telephone poles hoisted along the streets.
The reason for this is simple: Jersey City is built on bedrock. In order to put the cables in the ground, you’d have to dig up massive boulders. You don’t dig precise trenches in Jersey City. You excavate pits. That Jersey City bedrock is both good and bad. It’s good because Jersey City is the definition of “rock solid” — the city core is incredibly sturdy — and it’s bad because your city looks like it’s stuck in the 1950’s with all sorts of wires and cables angling above your head every day. Another problem with telephone poles in your city is that they are made out of wood and they warp while in use and they need to be replaced. You can’t “bury it, and forget it” like you can with cables.
I’ve lived in Jersey City for over a decade and the first thing that struck me about the city all those years ago was the plethora of what I call — “Janky Poles” — telephone poles that look like they’re about to tip over and break from overuse. A few days ago, I took a half-hour walk on the streets of Jersey City to memorialize some of the sillier Janky Poles in my neighborhood and here are the best-of-the-worst for your perusal.
The first Janky Pole is the second pole in the distance. Every time I happen upon that particular Janky Pole, I always cross the street because I fear if someone sneezes too close to that chunk of wood, the whole thing will come toppling down.
We all love fighting a good moral brawl. When Slide stole 3,000 fake money coins from me in April of 2009, I was livid and I wrote about it in the early morning hours of the 23rd:
I enjoy playing Slide.com’s SuperPoke Pets and I’ve raved about SuperPoke Pets and ranted about SuperPoke Pets. Today, I am enraged — not by the game I have come to love — but rather by the lack of an artful and loving Slide.com technical response to what should have been a simple problem to solve. This is the story of a false accusation — an unfair incarceration of character if you will — and its ultimate unraveling in the light of indisputable, human, facts.
After I wrote my article, Google bought Slide for $200 million and recently decided to close down all the Slide games. There is now no more SuperPoke Pets. The game is over. People are furious. I was intrigued that I was mentioned last week in a Facebook comments stream where people are trying to save the game:
It’s great when things go full circle in life. As an example, I enjoy frequenting a site called NYC Taper, a site created by a gentleman known by the same moniker, who goes to concerts and (with the permission of the artists) records their set, releasing it into the wild as it were on his site. He does not ask for money for this endeavor however he requests that if you download a high quality audio recording of a band that you try to visit the band’s site and support them by buying their albums or merchandise.
Continue reading → Songs Telling Stories: Music of the Fiery Furnaces
I have been a big fan of the Kindle in the past. I have also been disappointed in some of the developmental decisions Amazon made in supporting the Kindle. I haven’t upgraded my Kindle hardware for several years because I was not impressed with the evolution of the product. Now, with the release of an HTML 5 Kindle Cloud Reader for your web browser, I’m back on the Kindle bandwagon! I recently purchased the Kindle version of Ron Hansen‘s excellent novel, Mariette in Ecstasy, and in seconds I was reading it on the web!
Continue reading → Kindle Cloud Reader in Google Chrome for Mac
I have been stumped why the miscreants in the Tea Bag Party haven’t been shunned and shown the curb by now when it comes to governing our nation. Instead of summarily dismissing them for their insane, anti-American wishes, the President kowtows to them and coddles them and attempts to pacify them. The Republicans are terrified of their own radicals and refuse to control them. What now? Unrestrained hatred will flow downhill into every creek and river to poison the land and foul the watershed until we’re all dead or dying.
One of the biggest arguments regarding profanity I ever heard in school at every level — grade school, high school, and even at Rutgers — was that profanity was arbitrary because people just decided that one word was going to be a profanity and another would not. Historically, words that were once rather vulgar can sometimes lose their insulting quality. Some terms that have lost their insulting quality to some extent include once highly offensive terms like dork, nerd, and geek. Now some people even wear the words as though they were a badge of honor!
I have a lot of Facebook friends, but I could have so many more if Facebook would allow me to “friend” more than 5,000 people and if others could “friend” me without getting a message that “this user has too many friends.”
The Facebook friends count is volatile as it jumps by a count of ten and then drops by ten throughout the day. One moment, you have 4,900 friends and the next time you update the page moments later, you’ve dropped down to 4,890 friends — that makes adding new friends a bit perilous and hard to predict because Facebook is sensitive if you try to add too many friends too fast, or if you accept too many new friendships too quickly.
Continue reading → Uptick in Facebook Friend Requests in the Wake of Google+
Panagiotis Ipeirotis teaches computer science at NYU in the Stern School of Business. After winning tenure, he decided to use TurnItIn‘s Blackboard integration to see how many of his students were plagiarists.
Continue reading → When the Plagiarist Punishes the Professor
As a child I would listen with joy to the calls of the different birds that lived in my Princeton Junction, New Jersey neighborhood. Sometimes when I was walking home from school or the pool I would hear a bird singing to another bird and try to imitate the call, hoping to get some kind of response from another bird. I suppose I must have been doing it wrong because I never got any sort of answer from other birds. Now it looks like studies are showing the reason for my lack of answer may have just been poor grammar on my part. Grammar — in a bird call? Absolutely, according to a seemingly unnecessary study by Kentaro Abe of Kyoto University in Japan.
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