Sometimes I listen to myself

The Titan Arum in Milwaukee is about to bloom. To allow everyone to share on the experience, there’s an HD feed of the flower available. If you can’t access it or if you’re not inclined to install VLC, then I suggest you go to the static image feed updated every 5 seconds. More details on the flower here.

As for me, I’m enjoying watching the HD stream. It’s a very intense “people-watching” experience. I can’t wait until the flower blooms and the rotten corpse smell overpowers the room.

If you’ve seen the original ads, you’ll probably find this hilarious.

Originally seen on Undercover Black Man.

The french legislature switched from windows to linux in July 2007. ZDnet ran an article a year later (in french) with several first hand accounts of the effects of the transition. The conclusion was that everything went well.

Now, the German foreign ministry is in the process of migrating its 11 000 desktops to linux with about half of the work completed. Interrestingly, a source in the foreign ministry says that the cost of operating the desktops has gone from about 3000 euros to 1000 euros per year per computer. While the situation may be a lot more complex (maybe the foreign ministry has linux wizards on its payroll) it is definitely something to consider if you’re running a business that uses any number of computers. With a potential economy of 66% of your operating costs, even a small business using only a handful of computers, it may be beneficial to switch. The cost of transition (per computer) may become quite high, but with such savings in operating costs, I bet a migration to linux will be self-financing in a very short time.

It may be beneficial to run the numbers for your business. Then again, if I had to run the numbers for a business of mine, I wouldn’t know where to start. There may be money to be made here.

Well, apologies are in order. First off, I must apologize for not having posted anything in a long while. Mostly, I was busy with a conference and just dropped the ball when I came back, but I also had some website problems, which leads me to my second set of apologies. My website was blocked with this “You will probably die and your computer will explode if you access this site” welcome screen from google. Very dramatic. I had gotten infected by some hacker person of some sort. Not fun. I believe I cleaned the infection dilligently, but it still took a while for google to decide that my site wasn’t a bearer of the pleague anymore. So, with this, I’ll have to be more dilligent with updates.

Ok, now back to business. I was tempted to keep the site of undercover black man to myself and just rip off his music recommendations as my own, but I figured it wouldn’t be too ethical. Instead, I figured it was probably best if I just relax the requirement that I find a new musical artist every  week for my 6 months music challenge. To be fair, how many people do you know (with a job outside the music industry) discover a new musician every week?

Undercover black man is an interesting blog. It covers more than music alone, with the broad theme being “everything to do with black culture”. Now, I’m using the term “black culture” loosely here. For one thing, there is definitely not, on a global scale, such a thing as a black culture. I think I was aware of that a long time ago, but it definitely became clear to me when I moved to the United States (of America) in 2005. I’d just moved to a smallish town in Illinois when I went to comcast to get cable connected. The person serving me at the counter was african-american and, I swear, she must have spoken to me for 5 good minutes before I could get a word in the conversation and let her know I hadn’t understood a thing she’d just said. She looked at me perplexed and proceeded to articulate in a way I could understand. While the slang used in everyday conversations is only but one aspect of the culture of a group, I’ve come to realize that I have very little in common, aside from the colour of my skin, with the black people of the USA. I’m the son of an immigrant who was never a slave, french is my first language, etc, etc. Historically, linguistically, financially I share more with my swedish office mate than with african-americans. So there you go. A long rambling to say that, while I don’t believe there’s such a thing as a single black culture, that’s how I’ll describe the blog I found.

Musically, there are, on undercover black man, links to many artists who distribute single songs and whole albums, covering many different musical styles. I personally wasn’t too excited by most of the artists presented there, but I still peek on there regularly as I found that once or twice, there was a suggestion I liked.

Enjoy!

This one comes straight from my own town. Geneviève et Matthieu are a duo singing eclectic music. I’ve never been an incredibly great fan, a little too crazy for my taste. It appears that, lately, they’ve been exploring music which is more, well, actually music.

This group satisfies the criteria for this challenge since they give music away on their site, in unrestricted mp3 format, for free. Right now they distribute a single song, “Ne pleure pas”. I hope they’ll distribute more songs in the future. I guess the business decision one has to make is to determine how many songs are enough to get a non-listener (imagine, well, me) to buy the album or come to the show, while not giving away too many so that people don’t care much for the entire album. In this particular case, I’d like to see a few more songs, let’s say 2-4 more to give me a better taste for their music and an option to either buy the album in physical form or just download it for a small price. For example, right now, after listening to this one song, I could be tempted to buy the whole album in crappy mp3 for 3-5$, but I wouldn’t be ready to spend 10-20$ to get the physical CD. It just doesn’t mean enough for me right now.

Ultimately, this is one of the great assests digital technology give essentially unknown musicians and bands. The distribution medium itself (the internet) gives you access to a wide market and find new fans who will ultimately buy the full quality product. Alas, that’s not the only advantage. The digital format also gives you the option of selling directly, for a low price, a lower quality version of your music. People like me who aren’t really interested in the full quality product, but would be willing to listen to the mp3 version and pay a few dollars for it. So there you go. There’s really two ways to find new customers for your music in the digital world.

[By the way, there's also a video clip of the song "Talons aiguilles" you can watch on their website.]

The bastard fairies is an eclectic type of stuff, yet interesting. This particular scheme is to give away a good part of the album (in this case, 12 of 17 songs) and sell the full album for a price (in this case in physical form). I actually downloaded the free 12 songs a while back (before the full album came out) and I was pleasantly surprised. I was tempted to buy the full album but at some point I realized it was maybe a little uniform for my taste. Yet, pretty good music and I recommend you give it a go. It’s a little annoying to have to give personal information to get to the download page, but not the end of the world.

Enjoy and with this, I’m back on track for this series… at least until friday.

And here’s a promotional video that was produced for the bastard fairies’ debut (and I think so far only) album, Memento Mori. Watching it again is making me want to go and buy it this time. It was really pretty good.

I struggled for the last two days about including Jon Lajoie in this series. This artist is a comedian and while he makes music and distributes it for free, it’s all parody. (And there seems to be a whole lot of his work which isn’t music.) Still, I wondered whether I would include stuff by Weird Al Yankovic on here as music. I finally decided that it should. This stuff is too funny to pass up. Some titles are just great. I’m thinking about “Everyday Regular Normal Guy”, a rap song about a regular guy who makes a pretty good spaghetti sauce and is really good at making paper planes. Some titles are a bit more offensive (”Show me your genitals”), but again this is parody and you should approach it as such. The artist posts all of his videos on youtube and other services, so feel free to watch the videos of the songs. Here are a few of my favorite.

Ok, I know, I’m really late, so let me try to get a couple entries in two days here and catch up for the time lost. (You’ll have to forgive me for the delay, I was busy with my Ph.D. preliminary examination.) For the week that ended on July 4th, let me submit to you Jane Siberry/Issa. (If you’ve read the old article which talks about Jonathan Coulton, you’ll have noticed where I found out about her. Use the name you want, there’s been a recent name change, so it’s really Issa, the artist formerly known as Jane Siberry.) The music is available as a ‘pay as you want’ scheme.

I don’t have much to say about this artist. It fits all my criteria for this challenge. I just don’t like it. I really don’t like it. Not that the artist is musically incompetent, the style is just very, very, very far from what I would want to listen to. It’s some sort of ‘pop folk music’, whatever that means.

As a little extra, go see the page of Oldelaf and Mr. D (a french group). There’s a great clip called “Le Café” (The Coffee). Even if you don’t know french, the visuals and the progression in the song’s rythm and volume will clue you in to the protagonist’s state of mind. Delightfully funny. I hope this group will consider distributing their music using some sort of “new distribution scheme”. I’m already amazed by this song. If I could hear more and enjoy it, I might just go out of my way to hear them in concert.

I’m 4 days late, sorry, I’ve been preparing my preliminary exam and haven’t had much time to update. This week’s (well last week’s) artist is Jonathan Coulton. I’ve actually known about Jonathan Coulton for quite a while, so this is a little bit of cheating, but I was keeping his site and music for a rainy day, when I wouldn’t have much time to find a new group. I guess this day has come. Coulton is sort of an internet sensation, since he’s released “Code Monkey” (and I actually like it quite a lot too!) and started linking to videos people have made about it. Coulton actually started a contest with another one of his songs “I feel fantastic” which, if you feel like having an annoying, catchy tune stuck in your head for a week, just put it on repeat 2-3 times in a row.

Coulton’s music distribution method is to let you listen to all the songs on his website in the music section. You can also download (as a no nonsense non-drm’ed mp3) a selection of his songs from his site. You can buy all the other songs directly from his site. [From the New York Times article linked to below, it appears that one can also buy CDs, although I've never seen such a thing. I know Coulton only through 'the tubes'.] In addition that that though, he posts online pretty much all the lyrics and most of the chords to his creations, so you can play them yourself if you’d like. His original creations are also licensed as creative commons (specifically CC-by-nc, so you can take his songs and play with them, remix them if you want, so long as you credit him and don’t make money off of it).

Coulton is not part of a big label. Until recently (2 years ago it turns out), he was a coding engineer by day, but now he makes all his money from his art: from shows, selling stuff (like t-shirts) and music (mostly sold on his website) and also from licensing (and recording) songs for different type of media. He recorded, not long ago, a song for the end of ‘Portal’, an extenstion of some sort of computer game I personally don’t know anything about.

If you’d like to appreciate Coulton’s dedication and relationship to his fans, here’s a really good 2007 article from the New York Times.

Enjoy discovering Jonathan Coulton and tune back this weekend for installment 3 of the 6 months challenge!

Didn’t ride much all week but I went out today for a 28 miles ride. (28.6 to be exact.) Same ride as last week, which I did in the other direction this time and I was back in 2:15 (plus stops), which is 10 minutes faster than last time. The weather was much nicer, lots of clouds and a cool breeze. I also slept the night before and ate before I left, so that helped too.

All the details are

• 28.6 miles
• 2h15
• 12.7mph pace
• cadence aroune 82 average ( a bit low, I chocked at the end there, I’ll try to bring this up to 90)

the 12.7mph pace brings just under an 8 hour century (assuming I can keep this pace for 100 miles), which is good. I’ll try to improve this further. Hopefully, I can brin this up slightly above 13mph pretty quickly. I’ll have to find myself some 1h-ish training rides I can do at lunch now.