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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.
A friend of mine sent me a message telling me about the music of “Girl Talk“, a DJ from Pittsburgh. I’m not such a huge fan of this type of music (or at least I didn’t use to be), but I’m starting to discover interesting stuff around that I actually like. Girl Talk samples popular music songs and remixes them into original work. It’s probably completely illegal (at least as far as the big business boys are concerned) and the only reason he hasn’t gotten sued yet is that he’s not that mainstream yet. (He still has a day job, which involves research and a large company.) I like it, interesting stuff. [EDIT: I have listened to the first 30 seconds of the documentary and there is an excerpt of a US House of Representatives meeting where Girl Talk was brought up, so I take that back. If the people of Washington in their ivory tower have heard of Girl Talk, then he must have gotten noticed by everyone, really.]
Here’s a link to an interview with the DJ.
Here is his myspace page with a link to a download page for his album “Feed the Animals”, which is pay as you want à la Radiohead. Interestingly, it’s a differential pricing scheme at the same time. (I guess Radiohead kind of had that too.)
- 0-5$ gets you the mp3s
- 5-10$ gets you mp3+FLAC (FLAC is a lossless audio compression)
- >10$ gets you mp3+FLAC+actual CD when it comes out.
I put 0$ since I wanted to listen to the album first and the websiste sent me to another webpage where I had to select an option to answer the question:
I selected 0$ because:
- I may donate later
- I can’t afford to pay
- I don’t really like Girl Talk
- I don’t believe in paying for music
- I have already purchased this album
- I don’t value musid from sampling
- I am part of the press, radio, or music industry
- Other reasons
As a bonus, here’s a link to a Danish documentary, Good Copy Bad Copy which apparently features Girl Talk. I haven’t watched the documentary, yet, but I definitely plan to. [EDIT: You can listen to the documentary online or download it via bittorrent. Donation through paypal is posible.]
On a legal standpoint, I was a little disappointed. Girl Talk’s music is made by sampling and reusing other people’s music in new and creative ways. There’s a text file accompanying the album I downloaded (Feed the Animals), which essentially lists the credits and the fact that the album was released by Illegal Art. Since the product is about sampling, it would be nice for Girl Talk to release his music with something like a creative commons license which explicitely allows relicensing. Maybe the fact that what he’s doing is illegal is kind of the point of the music, but I think Girl Talk’s creative reusing of other people’s works has merits on its own as music and not just as a social statement. I value more the fact that this is good and interesting music than the fact that this disturbs the established music industry. I would have liked to see this formalized by the artist in the form of an explicit license to sample his work. This would drive the point home that sampling is not copying and is ok.
A friend of mine has had me considering the Red River Century for over a month now. I was pretty decided on trying it out (and therefore training for it). I was going to start training seriously when I came back from New Jersey, at the end of may, but unfortunately I sprained an ankle a few days after I came back and had to delay the start of serious training for a few weeks. I went out today for the Bandelier Loop, which is a 28 mile ride. I did it in the counter-clockwise direction, which starts out with a steady climb of maybe a few hundred feets over 1-2 miles, then rolling climbs over most of the length, with one canyon in the middle, which goes down 400ft and back up 400ft and then one slow, steady climb over 5 miles and one steeper, steady climb over 2.5 miles. (Ok, I was going to add a google map of this, but I can’t seem to figure out how to make a proper one of those “my maps” thingies. I’ll see if I can get it working at some point.) In any case, it was a nice ride, which I did on my trusty marin muirwoods, which has just been augmented with a pair of aerobars.
This was my first ride with the bars and while I have to adjust a few things (seat has to slope forward so I don’t crush my balls so much and I have to push the aerobars just a tad forwad as well, right now I’m a little cramped), I can say it is indeed very comfortable. It will be interesting as I get better and better riding in the aero position. The final time for the 28 miles was 2:25, which is bad. I’m not on a fast bike by any means (steel, etc, etc) and I was somewhat loaded, but not as loaded as I would be on a long self-supported tour (which is what I actually keep in mind, I don’t really want to beat speed records) so one would expect I could do better. This is 30 miles, which means a full century is about 3.3 times this, accounting for the fact that I’ll get more and more tired as the ride goes on, a time of 2:25 on 28 miles means I would do something like 9+ hours for a full century, plus the stops. Not incredibly good, but at least I could get through it with some determination. Ideally, I’d cut my time on the Bandelier loop to 1:30, but I don’t think I’ll get there. This is the kind of time friends of mine do on road bikes. Let’s say I stay optimistic and I can cut this down to 1:45, that means, say a 7.5-8 hour century plus the rest stops. Not a speed record, but something I’d be satisfied with.
To be fair, I did many things wrong on this ride. I wanted to leave early morning, but was really tired from the rafting yesterday and the beer after that, so I only took off in the afternoon. I left at 16:20, which is the warmest time of the day (and it was 95F at that time). I only had a light breakfast and no lunch before I left, so I ate on the road. (This was stupid, I didn’t really plan anything.) Finally, I lost the rythm completely on the last climb up East Jemez road and went from a high cadence to a slow cadence. I should have pushed myself and tried to up my cadence again, but I didn’t so I went from cardio to muscle and that made that last climb just a killer.
In my defense, I did do one thing right! I brought 3 liters of water and went through exactly that. I was out for almost exactly 3 hours. I weighed myself before and after and I had exactly the same weight, so out in the scorching sun, under mild medium to high exertion, you sweat about a liter an hour. This is good, since that’s the rule of thumb everybody quotes. It’s fun to see this work out so well.
So tuesday, I’ll try the clockwise loop. Except this time, I’ll start at the crack of dawn to take advantage of the cooler weather and the low sun.
Now! What’s this about the open source collaborative software? Welll, it occured to me, while I was out, that Los Alamos is essentially an undevelopped sport paradise. There are already ample hiking trails of various lengths and difficulty. We have an olympic size pool at 7500 feet altitude, which makes it great for training proper athletes. We don’t have water outside, but hey you can’t have everything. Now thanks to all the mesas and canyons, road cycling here is really fun. If you wanted, you could ride down to the Rio Grande (at about 5500 feet elevation) and then ride up all the way to the top of Pajarito Mountain. The parking lot of the ski resort is at about 10000 feet (maybe a little more), so that’s an almost uninterupted 5000 ft climb. I’ll try it at some point. I don’t know how long it will take me to get to that point, we’ll see. It’s a challenge. In any case, I was just thinking that if we had proper shoulders on the main roads and a decent pavement quality, this place here would be a perfect one to attract cycling enthusiasts. We have plenty of opportunities to have really nice centuries around the area, really challenging one. We have a mountain biking race with the very evocative name of “Pajarito Punishment”. All we really need is to get such events up to a high enough level to attract semi-pros and enthusiast. We already have teams who come here for training.
So what’s up with the open source stuff? Well, I don’t think the county has the money to build and maintain all that. That’s where open source collaborative software (think mediawiki, the wikipedia software) comes in. We could use a wiki to allow the population to report washed out sections of the cycleways, potholes and so on. Maintaining high quality cycleways would probably be prohibitive. Given the large area we have around here, it would mean a lot of driving to inspect the road surface and fix stuff. If the county could harness the power of the local cyclists who would already use such ways, the workload would be reduced.
Now, the million dollar question is obviously “How much could you save with such a system?”
I don’t know. remember, I was thinking about all that while cycling in the hot summer desert sun. It’s probably all delusionnal talk anyway. 😉
I’m a strong supporter of free and open source software. To be honest, I’m a supporter of free and open source anything really. That’s why I contribute to wikitravel (sporadically, but still), why I started wikiscuba (well, still trying to make it take off, really), openstreetmap and anything I can get my hands on that suits my hobbies. I really started getting interested and involved with “FOSS and things” in october 2005. I started my phd in august 2005 and swore to myself that I would try and work with latex (the word processor, that is, not the preservative, although, kids, if you’re listening, using condoms is a pretty f****ng idea) for the majority of the stuff I write. I also had to log onto different machines and my supervisor strongly suggested (as strongly as advisors can suggest, which means it really was an order) I install linux. I decided to make the switch at home as well 2 months later and use FOSS for my personal needs and aimed to be windows free. Almost 3 years later, I’m pretty much there. I still have to use windows every once in a while, unfortunately.
For example, while I can get video going on msn using aMSN, I still haven’t found an msn client on linux which will easily allow me to use both voice and video. Luckily, between the phone and msn, I don’t boot windows for that reason very often.
Powerpoint is still an outstanding tool when it comes to presentations and the defacto standard at conferences, so I have to boot windows every once in a while to run powerpoint and prepare/show a presentation. All the supporting material though (plots and so on) are made on FOSS so I’m really only using powerpoint to make the actual slides.
Finally, some companies still haven’t caught on that it would be nice to just open up the protocols to interface with their devices, so I have to boot windows every time I want to upgrade the firmware on my gps or on my cameras (Pentax has this autorun archive thing I can’t unpack on linux yet, so I boot windows to extract the actual update and then reboot linux to do everything else. Garmin just ships you an actual program, so I have to run it in windows.)
Today, almost three years after embarking on this journey, I’m happy with the result. I only have legit copies of windows on my computers and I only run them when absolutely necessary…and even then I sometimes hesitate. Running windows just makes me curse and cringe now, which helps in no way my stress level when I’m at a conference and I have to give a talk.
Somewhere along the way of becoming windows free, I started to understand the subtleties of copyright law. I have been following one lawyer’s comments on the RIAA fight against their own customers and I think I’m now ready to make another change in my life. I call it the “6 months music challenge”. For the next 6 months, I will not buy a single CD. Not one. I will not pirate CDs either. I will find all the new music I will consume online for free. To show you my commitment to this challenge, every week I will write a blog post describing one new music album/group/compilation I have found online and listened to for free with the blessing of the artist(s). To be eligible, the songs will have to be downloadble. You should be able to download the songs in a convenient format and listen to them on your ipod/mp3 player if you want.So while I think it’s cool that artists put the little player applet on their myspace page, you’ll have to be able to do more. I’m not just looking for artists who promote their music online, I’m looking for artists who use their music as promotional material online.
So here at last, for my first submission, I bring to you Nerdcore Undercover and Old Nerdy Bastard, which I found following links from blog to blog onto, finally, the Hipsters, Please! blog, written by Z who, if I understand correctly, produced (?) the two compilation albums. Most of the music on there is hip-hop, more so on Nerdcore Undercover, while Old Nerdy Bastard is rather more eclectic. I’ve been listening to those 2 albums in the car for the last two days now and I’m looking forward to tomorrow. I’m going out of town with a few friends for the day and I’m going to introduce these albums to those same friends. Should prove interesting!
So here’s to the start of, I hope, a great blog post series!
I’ve been signed up on jpgmag for quite a while now, but I’ve just submitted an image for the theme “Creatures”. Go vote for me, now! (You’ll need to sign up, but I’m sure you want to anyway!)
[Update 1: I screwed something up. I wanted to submit a second image to the theme and discovered you can only submit one, so the system replaced my first submission with this second one. I reverted to the initial image, but now this link won’t change. If you wan’t to vote for me, you can go here http://www.jpgmag.com/photos/727008 directly. I have incidently discovered that one does have to be a member in order to vote.]
I think I came across a report on slashdot (the geek’s black hole of productivity) about the toplogy of wikipedia. Basically, looking at which articles link to what, they’re trying to figure out what the center of wikipedia is, the article from which you end up the quickest to any other article on wikipedia. Interesting.
I saw an ad for snap by lavalife while on the subway in New York this week and I was intrigued to say the least. Snap is actually a contest. Lavalife submit questions regularly along the lines of “Photograph your favorite or ideal pet” or “Photograph something with your favorite color”. It sounds cheezy, but I actually find it interesting.
Continue reading cell phone + camera + dating site + internet = ?
I just saw a link to the better world club on the PhD comics Cecilia’s blog. Ont he BWC website, I learned that AAA (and by extension CAA) lobbies, using money from the dues, against sensible environment-friendly policies. They lobby for more road construction and have been, at times, known to oppose policies that would impose better safety measures.
Better World Club is an alternative to AAA. They are an environmentally friendly group and you can even purchase cycling roadside assistance. To be fair, the cycling service isn’t excessively great, but, hey, better than nothing!
Read all about it on the BWC website.
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