Tech-ish

How to Access the Log File of Your Blog

Fri, 17 Feb 2012 13:49:14 -0800

*#Here’s the article on 40Tech: How to See What’s Happening On Your Site in Real-time Using Your Log File

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Comparing Tumblr and Posterous

Fri, 17 Jun 2011 10:59:10 -0700

I wrote a guest post on 40Tech.com comparing Tumblr and Posterous.

Check it out here: http://bit.ly/itr436.

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Some Predictions About Books By Way of Some Predictions About Music

Mon, 05 Jul 2010 13:01:10 -0700

There's been a lot of talk lately about the "future of publishing." After all, books have never had as much cash to spare as the recording industry, and look at the mess they're in. Already it is not so difficult for a self-published manuscript to sell itself on Amazon.com. What will happen when everything goes digital? The suggestion is that there will be an opening of the gates, and the latest best-seller will stand on the same virtual shelf with thirty self-published manuscripts. The optimists claim that this is where the great unpublished books will be discovered and pessimists point to the unleashed masses of poorly thought-out, half-written tomes filled with spelling errors. But it doesn't matter if fantastic self-published books are available if they're drowned out by countless other books vying for the consumer's attention.

I'm thinking of this issue again because Chuck Wendig just wrote a post on this very subject. I must requote a quote that he included in his piece from a Salon.com article (“When Anyone Can Be A Published Author")

Furthermore, as observers like Chris Anderson (in “The Long Tail”) and social scientists like Sheena Iyengar (in her new book “The Art of Choosing”) have pointed out, when confronted with an overwhelming array of choices, most people do not graze more widely. Instead, if they aren’t utterly paralyzed by the prospect, their decisions become even more conservative, zeroing in on what everyone else is buying and grabbing for recognizable brands because making a fully informed decision is just too difficult and time-consuming. As a result, introducing massive amounts of consumer choice leads to situations in which the 10 most popular items command the vast majority of the market share, while thousands of lesser alternatives must divide the leftovers into many tiny portions.

Chuck says in response, " that doesn’t sound like what will happen when the FUTURE OF PUBLISHING is made manifest. It sounds like what happens right bloody now."

As it is, there are about 100,000 brand new titles published and printed every year, and it is fair to say that even the most devoted readers may touch 1/100th of that. That doesn't take into account the thousands of reprints of absolute classics that exist. I am pretty sure that if I devoted my entire life to reading I would not get through every book on my imaginary wish list before I breathe my last breath. Now imagine compounding this with an onslaught of unpublished manuscripts, from gorgeous to garbage, that would land on the market place if the result of this revolution were a totally leveled playing field. What would happen?

Actually I am in a bit of a unique position to answer such a question. I work in publishing, for a small but very successful independent press in Berkeley. But I am also heavily involved in the online music streaming community, which, I believe, is how most of us will get our music as access to high-speed Internet expands.

Once again, it is fitting to compare publishing to the music industry because they are in the midst of the revolution that is only beginning to touch the world of print. It is already the case that any jerk with a recording device can start a MyFace page and share their music with the world. This doesn't get them into their local sound exchange. But very occasionally that is enough to launch a very good band onto the wider scene, where they achieve success first and the contract comes second (Los Campesinos!, Little Boots and Arctic Monkeys come to mind).

Despite this, most of us do not go galloping around the world wide web listening to entirely random bands. We all have a filter. It used to be that radio provided this for us but as the radio has become more repetitive and trite, most of us are slowly moving to the Internet to find our next favorite musician. This is important because most consumers forget the recording industry provides two services, not one. The first service is to actually record the music so that it can be purchased en masse. The second service is to provide a filter that those who distribute music can use as a starting point for what is quality. Thus they are critically tied to the music being distributed en masse.

The internet is making the second service obsolete. Plenty of music sites are finding a way around the traditional distribution model. Sites like The Hype Machine and Mog give us a way to sample what music bloggers are pontificating about. Sites like Last.FM, The Sixty One and Blip.fm allow us to find music from people who like what we like already. There are tons of others, and that's not even getting into music labels that are skipping the traditional recording model all together. My absolute favorite song of 2009 was put out by a band without a record deal; this will become more commonplace.

The first stage of the publishing revolution will, like music, be one of fear. Less risk will be taken and more books will be published that rehash past success. In music, this happened when bands like Limp Bizkit found success riding on the back of similar but profoundly more talented Rage Against the Machine (there are plenty of newer examples of course). The second wave of this revolution will happen when the fear of risk becomes so odious that publishers will miss several installments of "The Next Big Thing" and be forced to make changes or admit they are obsolete. This is the current state of the music industry. The hottest bands of the last few years still have label representation but they aren't part of the corporate radio pay-for-play cycle (I'm thinking Passion Pit, Phoenix, or currently The National, The XX...I could name fifty others that are adored by critics and fans and virtually unplayed on the radio). Instead, they relied on bloggers to spread the word.

My prediction is that when we find that we can trust these sites to distribute the music it will become less important who is printing and pressing them. Small labels that previously couldn't get enough exposure to survive will find they can profit in this new distribution model. While the industry heavyweights moan about their drop in profits, the musicians seem to be weathering this revolution just fine. But this revolution won't really come to full fruition until enough people have discovered these alternate filters and in the interim, there will be some terrible growing pains. We are already feeling this pinch in music, which is why people who rely on radio are misled into believing "they just don't make good music any more." On the contrary, there's so much fantastic music out there it's hard to keep up with it all! This is why I have confidence these websites are the future of the music industry: because I know they work. The people who are best informed about new music are the people who are using them.

Conversely, we have come to expect the recording industry to be as methodical and cautious as possible when picking their next big hit. They will plaster it everywhere and overplay it so even what was once good becomes an irritation.

Chuck Wendig sees this fate already touching the publishing industry:

Thing is, I think it’s important here to create a a separation between trust in the people and trust in the system. I trust the people. I trust my agent. If I get an editor, I trust that editor. And I hope to even trust the publishing companies themselves, but the entire system is one that could maybe use a little oil for its joints. This system produces bestselling novels of dubious quality. This system produces minimal support for good authors. This is an ecology with an uncertain life cycle—books get returned, books get lost on shelves, authors find themselves frozen out, robust advances can be a curse instead of a gift, and so on.

Though we don't have a neatly tied conclusion to rely on, I think it is clear where the future of publishing is heading. Because publishing a book requires an investment it is a risk and because it is a risk, choosing to put it into print is a mark of quality. Where there is no risk, there is no motive not to publish everything to land in the slush pile. However, there will come a time when readers will find other filters to rely on, as they are just starting to with music. It is not even that the websites are lacking. Sites like Urbis and We Book are finding ways to bring undiscovered gems to to forefront. There will be more sites as the wave rises but it won't crest until a critical mass of people discover them. Wikipedia (and the net itself) has taught us not to under-estimate the power of crowd sourcing and I have no reason to believe that amateurs can't be rewarded for ranking manuscripts the way music is ranked on The Sixty One. It's simple supply and demand. When the publish industry begins to sag under it's own hubris and the consumers are itching for it sites will pop up left and right to help crowd source what we should be reading. In THE FUTURE OF PUBLISHING (as Chuck so grandly caps it) book lovers will no longer rely on the books table at Barnes and Noble (which, like radio is not a real indicator of quality and is totally inaccessible to self-published artists). They will turn to a site that aggregates not one person's but thousands of people's opinions on what they should read next. These books will be cheaply and readily available online.

Publishers that survive will only print (on ink and paper) the very best of these. The publisher will still stand as a mark of quality because it will be understood that if very few people buy physical books then books that make it into print will be among the very best, as opposed to the 100,000 we see today. Smaller print runs will become the rule but a wider diversity of titles will be available online and, more importantly, accessible---as aggregator sites help push the cream to the top. Marketing gestures that focus on treating books as collectors items will best succeed. One publisher who I think is doing an exemplary job with this is Flatmancrooked Publishing. Their second edition is print-on-demand while the first edition is an extremely limited print run (400 copies) with a handwritten letter from the author accompanying each one.

Even if physical books disappear all together, traditional publishing still offers professional typesetting, editing, marketing and publicity. These things cost money, and thus require a risk. So even in an entirely digital future publishing will still have a place as a quality filter. Sure, like the music industry, the behemoths will shrink a little. They will have to invest lest money in chasing a carbon copy of last year's vampire/zombie/wizard. Good riddance. Perhaps there will be less presses all together. But if (as I predict) the smaller presses still remaining are better able to distribute their finds into the hands of consumers than we'll all be better off.

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The Increasing Irrelevance Of The Major Record Labels | Techdirt

Mon, 05 Jul 2010 00:22:42 -0700

The Increasing Irrelevance Of The Major Record Labels

via techdirt.com

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We Don't Need Facebook

Mon, 07 Jun 2010 00:09:00 -0700

Facebook has given privacy a kick in the groin. If this is news to you, you should probably check out: Facebook's Gone Rogue; It's Time for an Open Alternative [Wired] or Top Ten Reasons You Should Quit Facebook [Gizmodo] or Facebook Further Reduces Your Control Over Personal Information [EFF].

FB Privacy Policy: Longer Than the Constitution

Those who've been watching the plucky start-up were already aware that Facebook is mired in accusations that it was founded by a crook and funded by a nut and some gooks. Into this fray comes Facebook's controversy over their privacy settings. It used to be that Facebook provided a space that was just for friends and family. "Just" as in "only." As in, not public. The new privacy settings even led to a movement last month to have a "Quit Facebook Day." Even if you manage to tackle FB's labyrinth of privacy settings, don't use any apps, or never use FacebookConnect you still can't control what happens when your friends fail to make their stuff private. You can't stop Facebook from censoring your messages. Even if we all flock back to Myspace or Friendster or Tribe [or Whatever] we have no guarantee that that data won't be given away. It would probably be wise to consider anything hosted on a faraway computer you can't control as potentially public, even email. At the very least we should commit to using sites that have consistent and reasonable privacy policies (thus the total opposite of Facebook [1][2]). But entrusting Facebook is clearly no longer the way to go. Here's why. In my myriad conversations about this issue, I get one of three responses:

"I don't care about who sees my data or my friends' data. I posted it so anyone could see it."

This person shouldn't be on Facebook. There are much better public sites that do everything Facebook does but better and more beautifully (more on that later).

"Privacy isn't a big deal to me but there are some things I'd like to put online that I don't want the whole world to see."

This person shouldn't be on Facebook. These are the people Facebook seeks to confound with their myriad privacy on-off switches, e.g. most of us. Because these folks aren't too concerned about most of what we put out there, we won't be meticulous about making sure everything is set to private. We won't think of our Facebook stream as a blog for all the world to see and eventually we will accidentally post something that will get us embarrassed, fired, divorced or deported.

"privacy is very important to me. I only want to share stuff with my friends."

This person shouldn't be on Facebook. Because this person cares about privacy. If anything, they should be boycotting Facebook. Wake up: Facebook wants our info to be public so they can make more money on their ads. Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg has admitted he's ok with the whole thing being confusing because he doesn't believe in privacy.

email? I shit you not; I'm in love with this site. It's very similar to Tumblr: You can make your stream private so only your friends can follow you or make individual posts private. You can have as many streams as you want, but unlike Tumblr you can post to them simultaneously (like say, for example, I want to post a political song to both my music lifestream and my political lifestream). But unlike Tumblr, you can import all those old Myspace blogs (or whatever) and unlike Tumblr, did I mention you can POST BY effing EMAIL? Oh, I did? Well, it's a really convenient feature. Also, you can search for users on Posterous, while on Tumblr you can only search for tags. Join me on Posterous!

There you have it: the key to getting the hell off Facebook.

All we have to do is pick one or more of these sites and set it up to deliver what we post to Facebook automatically. This is my current solution to the Facebook debate. People think I update Facebook daily but I actually update all these other sites and it shows up on my Facebook lifestream too... now I just have to wait for everyone else to figure out these, other, better ways of sharing things exists, so I don't have to login to that-one-site to see what they're up to. I'm happy to help if you have any questions, though I assure you the point is that they're plenty simple! Do you have easy-to-use sites that you are using to connect with friends? I know there are a ton of others. Recommend them in the comments.

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Photos: Maker Faire Saturday

Sat, 05 Jun 2010 22:59:00 -0700

What is the Maker Faire? It's bad-ass-art and tech-as-art.It's steampunk and 8-bit. It's hackers and coders. It's robots and lasers and explosions. It's cities built of legos or recycled cardboard. It's the art of Burning Man without the burning heat. It's zinesters, knitters, stitchers, and crafters. It's virtual reality and 3-D and glow-in-the-dark LEDs. It's giant Tesla Coils. It's long-lost arcade games and the technology of tomorrowland. It's gadgets and gizmos a plenty, whosits and whatsits galore. And more specifically, it's Make Magazine's huge conference celebrating acts of glorious creation. I was fortunate enough in that this year I was able to attend both days for free because I was helping out with my pals at Simbol Rides. So I alternated between helping folks in and out of their personal motion simulators and checking out the hundreds and hundreds of booths that make the Maker Fair so overwhelmingly nifty. Our booth was in the big room between the woman who grows her own sheep to make her own wool, the museum of Pinball, and the city of Legos.

See and download the full gallery on posterous

Legos and Maker Cars Ancient drums playing automatically by computer

See and download the full gallery on posterous

Dub Machines: builds his own musical instruments with microprocessors and industrial gadgets

See and download the full gallery on posterous

Children defeat the (cardboard) robot uprising

See and download the full gallery on posterous

Tesla coils and other electric fun in the LED room

See and download the full gallery on posterous

Robot chess, a rocketship and A peice of the Milleneum Clock

See and download the full gallery on posterous

Hand-printed messages and personalized poetry served on demand

Posted via web from The Bay is Better

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Happy Birthday Firefox! Now if you'll Kindly Step Aside...

Tue, 10 Nov 2009 06:42:00 -0800

Or: The Hardship of Being Ahead of the Curve

Much excitement today surrounds Firefox's fifth birthday. We're reminded how this product that seems indispensable to us today didn't even exist in 2004. Firefox usage is a clear line that separates the old fogies and Luddites from the young, hip and with it. Indeed I can't even imagine who these sixty percent are that still use Internet Explorer—perhaps people so behind they don't know what a web browser is, and therefore haven't figured out you can use a different one? Most of us have experienced the frustration of trying to convince someone that it really is worth the five minutes it takes to download and install Firefox because the features it provides will improve your life on a daily basis. I want you to take a moment to dwell on this feeling, until your brow is furrowed in relived vexation. I'm asking this, dear reader, because in moments you're going to do the same thing to me. What if I told you that there was a browser out there that was hands-down superior to Firefox, Chrome, Safari and (of course) Explorer? This browser is never mentioned on the articles comparing Firefox's rise to its lesser competitors. And since the techno-sphere is spending the entire day fawning over the Mozilla wonder-child, I get to experience this annoyance all day long. So I'm going to take this opportunity to patiently explain to you, for the second time, why you should download the Opera web browser immediately. Because I care, dammit. Now get that glazed look off your face, the one you see when you try to explain to grandpa how to send a text message. Remember when you figured out that tabbed browsing saved a bunch of memory and was way more convenient than having twenty windows open? It was a big part of why many people switched over to Firefox. Yeah, tabs: Opera invented that. Not only that, they do it better. You can resize your tabs. Hovering over a tab creates a preview. You can duplicate a tab. You can create "follower" tabs: Once designated, any link you click in the current tab will open in the follower tab. When you close a tab it goes to the most recent one you used, not the first in the list: a small thing, but having it do the other way in Firefox drives me bananas!

I made my tabs huge, but you can have them normal-sized too
You can select any text and right-click to save it as a note. This feature has saved me so much time! Fuck notepad! When you hit the back button, Opera keeps the page in the cache, so it loads instantly. I cannot understand why other browsers don't do this. You know how sometimes you're on a webpage that's coded for a larger screen and you keep having to scroll to the right to read? Opera has a little button that will fix that: "Fit to Width." So simple it's brilliant. You'd be forgiven if you didn't know Firefox has added the "recently closed tabs" option, because it is buried in their history menu. Opera had this feature first, and they put it in a more convenient location to the right of your tabs. There is a magical thing called a Torrent file that allows people to download large files exponentially faster than a normal download. To use one of these files, you need a separate program like BitTorrent. That is unless you're running Opera, where you can download the entirety of Army of Darkness with a single click because they have torrent downloading within the browser. A new tab has a speed dial where you save your favorite sites. I think some other browsers are adopting this now, but in Opera you can change the size and layout of your speed dial, and even put any image as a background. You can also run any speed dial by typing it's number into the url. So when I open a new tab, I can click on the little pic of my gmail to take me right there. Or, in the window I'm in, typing the number "two" and hitting enter will take me there. That's faster than Brittany Spear's little sister!

Please keep reading! Or Hula girl gets a lethal shot of Opium!
It's little shortcuts like these that make me miss Opera when I'm stuck on someone else's computer. Opera has a number of these, but the one that won my heart is the ability to run every search from the URL bar. I have tried explaining this to Firefox users and they point to their lame-ass Google toolbar. Yeah, I have that in Opera too and it's collecting dust. Why? Because it's only convenient if you're searching Google. If you want to search wikipedia, you have to scroll down, switch to wikipedia, run the search, and then remember to switch it back to Google. In Opera, I can type "w anal fisting" directly into the URL bar, hit enter, and I'm learning the ins-and-outs from Wikipedia as soon as the page has finished loading! Speaking of the URL bar, in the newest release, you can make a nickname for any site and run it from there. So if I want to visit the Glenn Beck website, instead of typing glennbeck.fox.com (or whatever), I can set it to be called "crazytown." Then I only have to type "crazytown" in the URL bar and I'm there! These are not all of the features that Opera has on other browsers, merely the ones that keep me hooked. I've been trying to get you people to try Opera since September of 2006, out of the goodness of my heart, but no! You don't listen. Admittedly I still love and use Firefox too. The thing Firefox still has going for it is that, because it is so popular, it has a lot more apps. And the developers won't start making the cool apps for Opera until you (and you and you and your cousin Lenny) start using Opera. And I want those apps! Dammit! I've shown my true colors. So you see I had a selfish motive after all. Who cares! It's better! Just stop blinking at me inexplicably and go download it!

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Trust No One

Tue, 02 Oct 2007 07:17:00 -0700

My boyfriend got miffed at me a few weeks ago. I had put his email in a list that would invite him to join Shelfari. Though he was slightly annoyed to get email from them, he was more annoyed that I gave this site my google name and password. It really didn't occur to me that this was possibly insecure. I would have challenged him as paranoid but the day before I had been downloading aps for facebook. I came across a particularly lovely app that would auto-check your myspace and tell you if you had any updates. But the programmer who wrote the nifty app had taken it down. He had an accidental security hole that allowed the username and password to be transmitted transparently, causing malicious folks access to the email info of those who had the installed the application. I have to remind myself that just becuase I trust the programmer that wrote the program not to do anything shady with my info doesn't mean that its safe to pass it along. Here's another way to look at it: If you have a password, one reason you don't give it out to those you trust is because if there is some kind of security breach -- whether it be a home robbery or online identity theft -- you can detective* out how your password got into the wrong hands. The more people who have access to your info, the more difficult that is. And I have heard of cases where the source wasn't resolved and the same asshole cracker** came back and socked the victim again. This is all a long lead-up to this link, from hackademix.net, about four recent security weaknesses in google. This is particularly telling, as google is so widely respected. I don't know about you, but I'm holding my passwords a little closer to my chest in the future.

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This is What My Computer Dreams About

Wed, 27 Dec 2006 06:37:00 -0800

Let's hear it for the internet. Through constant innovation, the web seems to be buidling a better everything. Or in this case, a screensaver.

I was just sitting here, in rapt awe of my screensaver, and I thought I'd take a few minutes to tell you why my screensaver is more bad-ass than yours (unless you have the same one, of course). Anyhow, I really want all of my readers to listen to the Derrick Jensen speech I posted in my last blog so I didn't want to have any heavy reading in this one.

The screensaver I use is called "Electric Sheep", so named for the Philip K. Dick novel, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep. It starts with a fractal. Now, I'm used to the electric art of Winamp visualization plug-ins. This makes those look like a fourth graders computer class project (or a Windows Media Player visualization, same thing, really). Each of these fractals is a "sheep". But people who have the screensaver can vote, yay or nay, on whether or not they like the sheep, as the screensaver is going.

The bad ones drop and -- here's the beauty part -- the winners breed. The original sheep is soon lost, as all over the world thousands of people vote for their favorites and these beget newer, more beautiful sheep, for sheep-generations. This adds to the beauty because the sheep are always delicate and extreemely complex, with the whisps and shadows of their electric ancestors still vaguely visible. It also makes them less predictable than your average pixelated visualization, because patterns are not based on a program but on previous sheep. It does all this while your computer is sleeping.

Because people are always voting, the sheep are always changing, so no matter how long you run it, it never gets old. There's no Paula Abdul overseer, the screensaver blends them automatically. However, if you go the website, you can look up a sheeps "lineage" and "genomes." It's a great concept with a stunning execution. If you're still using that bouncing Windows logo, you might want to give this a try. It's freeware. It works for Linux too, but obviously wouldn't be recommended for folks with dial-up connections. http://electricsheep.org/

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the Ever Expanding Blogosphere

Mon, 18 Dec 2006 06:31:00 -0800

Last night I was looking for a good way to host pictures on myspace when I got sucked into the blog mashable until three o' clock in the morn'. This is a blog about blogs and the social networking sites, specifically the economics and business models they are using. But they also do a lot of research and talk about various newcomers to the scene.

Here is a summation of what I learned:While everyone knows that myspace has the lead when it comes to the width and breadth of social networking sites, there are some contenders for specific interests. I had heard of deviant art (for artists) but not urbis.com, social networking for writers. There is a new competitor for art by the name of humble voice, which supposedly has a noteably more beautiful interface than myspace. Urbis's strength is the opportunity for criticism of one's work. Both sites have a ranking system, in the tradition of sites like hotornot.com but judging your work, rather than looks. I will most likely start an urbis account for my creative writing, as this blog isn't the appropriate outlet for it.

I am also excited to start an account with bikespace, a social network for cyclists. On bikespace, you can create route maps, form groups of riders, and evite folks on rides. Bikespace is still in beta so newcomers could be influential.

If you are looking for someone to host all the pics and songs you want on your page, try badongo.com. They give you a gig and you can upload files from your computer. They will spit out the html to put it on your page. The only catch is that they delete your content if you are inactive for a month.

If you just want to throw some pics on your myspace, most folks have been using flickr and photobucket. But I am more excited about tinypic, allyoucanupload, and imageshack, which don't require any login information. I'm not a professional photographer, I don't want to chat about my pics. I just want to get them up and out to myspace.

Another interesting addition to the blogoshere are the remixing sites splice and jamglue. At these sites, you can take songs and sound clips with creative commons liscensing and remix them to make new songs. I have been downloading mixing plug-ins from winamp.com but now you can just do it all on the web. Then you can upload it to your blog for all the world (okay, the myspace world) to hear.

I am most excited about weedshare.com. Put your pipes away, my Oakstermdam friends; it's a music sharing site. If you have been looking for a way to give money to the bands you love but want to keep downloading and sharing music, weedshare might be the answer. Personally, when I get my hands on good music I can't wait to share it with others, particularly because the music I like is not playing on MTV (but then, what is?). The problem is that bands need distribution and the only way to do that has been through record companies. But with weedshare, you become the distributor. You can play any song free three times, then you buy for five dollars. If your friend wants the track, instead of buying it from itunes, they can buy it from you. You get a percentage of the money. Then if your friend passes the song on to someone else, they get a percentage, too. It is a concept so beautiful it makes me want to cry (or are is that the last vestiges of PMS?). More on this later, after I've thoroughly checked out their site.

All in all, the mashable blog raises one particularly interesting point: the more myspace expands, the more it cuts into the business that it is creating. If myspace video becomes hugely successful, youtube will lose their business. While this looks unlikely, it is certainly possible for smaller contenders like those mentioned above. Yet add-ons like this are what made myspace hugely popular. On the other hand, one can't blame myspace for wanting to provide everything, so folks don't have to look to other websites to complete the social networking experience. All this means to my awesome, devoted readers: you will be seeing more and hearing more on my blog in the future.

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Opera -- It Ain't Your Mama's Browser Anymore

Sun, 03 Sep 2006 06:11:00 -0700

I remember when my mom was trying out the Opera browser. She's always quick to find the next trend. At the time, you had to pay to use it or have pesky ads on your desktop. Those days are gone. The new Opera is free and fast. Are you ready to leave Mozilla behind?

I know, you're all attached to Mozilla as the only alternative to IE and the blessed-bringer of tabbed browsing. Guess what? Opera invented tabbed browsing. They were also the first to have a google toolbar.

The new opera has this feature where you can use any search engine in the url box. For example, if I wanted to search for the '"history of Crete" on wikepedia, I would type: “w history of crete” into the url box; hit enter, and it will take you straight there. And you can set Opera to do this for any search engine you want. I have ones for the urban dictionary and infoshop.org, though these would never be included in a standard browser.

This wasn't what won me over, though. I'm sure you're not spending countless hours on bittorrent because that would imply that you are downloading copyrighted stuff and I don't know anyone that does that. But let's just say, you know, that guy, your cousin's friend, who downloads torrents. If he uses Opera, he can just click on the torrent and it will download like it's a regular link because Opera has a built-in torrent program.

The thing that won my heart is the Notes feature. Often I keep a word processing program open just so I can copy/paste things into it that I found online. Opera has a built in note pad. You just select the text and on the right-click menu you can add a note. It will save this text in the '"notes" area as well as the url you got it from.

They also have these widgets that you can use to further customize your Opera experience: mp3 players, video games, calendars, news feeds, a '"to do" list, etc. You can make your own widgets.

I'm a little skeptical of widgets. On the one hand, if all you do all day is browse the net, then why not have everything attached to your browser? On the other, why use a widget sketchpad (for example) to draw pictures when I can use the Gimp or Photoshop?

Hey, Ray**, when you're looking at porn, don't you generally have ten or twelve tabs open at a time? When you hover over the tabs in Opera it shows you a little thumbnail of the page (similar to the way Safari does it) so you know just which throbbing man-muscle to click on.

But wait, there's more! Remember how when you do a google image search, first you have to click on the link then click again on '"see full-sized image"? Opera has a rewind and fast forward button that you would use in situations like that to zip past the middle pages. Those programmers all the way in Norway have me figured out. Amazing.

Dear Mozilla,

It's been a beautiful love affair. But I've found someone better, with more features. I won't forget you. Can we still be friends?

Love,

*If your still using the antiquated Microsoft Explorer, get out of the Bronze Age my friend. Do you still listen to 8-tracks?

**Insert here the name of your friend whose internet porn collection rivals the number of records at your local college radio station

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Plug Plug Plug Pandora

Sat, 02 Sep 2006 06:10:00 -0700

Imagine a radio station that could predict what kind of songs that you like and only play those songs. As the music plays, you can customize it further by voting for or against particular songs.

But of course, my hipster friends, you all ready know that such a station exists; it's called Pandora. You know, as well, that the idea behind Pandora is to imagine each song can be broken down into its own DNA structure. They achieve this by listening to thousands of songs and breaking them down into specific pieces.

For example, Pandora indicates that I like songs that feature folk influences, major key tonality, prominent organ, acoustic and rhythm guitars. (Wait, maybe I should add some Le Tigre to de-emphasize the folk aspect. Just a minute.) It knows this because I told it four or five bands that I like and created a playlist for me. Correction, it is constantly creating a playlist for me, perfecting and selecting for my listening pleasure.

Pandora is not for people who want to listen to the same five bands over and over (and over and over) again. It is for people who use Myspace as a way listen to the newest bands or download streaming audio of their favorite D.J.s.

Speaking of Myspace, remember when no one used it because we were all on Friendster? Personally, I switched over to Mspace because of the ability to customize the music on my profile. Friendster has, in a stroke (the Strokes are a good band, hold on while I add them to my Pandora list ) of brilliance, decided to partner up with Pandora to create customized radio stations. So if you have a Friendster account and you haven't logged in for a while that would be an easy way to check out Pandora, if you haven't all ready.

The interface is not perfect. It is hard move forward and backwards in your playlist. There's no way to post your list on a blog (this may be of questionable legality, anyway, but people are doing it as is). You can't give incremental or weighted rankings, only yes/no votes. Yet it is intuitively easy to use. As long as they have that, and the program works its magic, they will work out the kinks (oh! I like the Kinks! Just let me add them to my Pandora list and I'll be right back). And the beauty part is that it does work. Part of what people seem to get sucked into with the new technologies are the various abilities to customize their experience. Now we have a product that you can spend time tinkering with or just leave it alone and it will perfect it for you. That's pretty damn special. I'm putting my money on this as the next big net phenomenon. Or I would be, if I weren't spending so much time playing with it.

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