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Pandora - Find New Music, Listen to Custom Internet Radio StationsCan you help me discover more music that I’ll like?

Those questions often evolved into great conversations. Each friend told us their favorite artists and songs, explored the music we suggested, gave us feedback, and we in turn made new suggestions. Everybody started joking that we [...]

The music critic Ivan March has selected the new Alan Bush Claudio CD as his Critic's choice of the year in Gramophone Magazine, December 2002.In the November 2002 issue he reviews both the Claudio CD, which features the Violin Concerto and Dialectic, and Chamber Music Volume 1 by the Summerhayes Trio.He says of both discs "I cannot recommend them too highly".

MusicWeb also has two other reviews of the Claudio CD, both very favourable.
Rob Barnett's review can be seen at:
www.musicweb.uk.net/classrev/2002/Sept02
Peter Grahame Woolf's review can be seen at:
www.musicweb.uk.net/classrev/2002/Oct02

There is also a review in the orchestral section of International Record Review, December 2002.

  Listen to tracks from the Claudio CD
The Violin Concerto CD can be purchased from Claudio Records

Also on MusicWeb, Chamber Music Vol. 1 was featured as recording of the month for November 2002.
See the review by Rob Barnett at:
www.musicweb.uk.net/classrev/2002/Dec02

There are other reviews of the CD in International Record Review (December 2002) by Piers Burton-Page and BBC Music Magazine (December 2002) by Michael Oliver.

Piers Burton-Page writes "...a superb CD...these new recordings of his chamber music, convincingly played, excellently engineered and attractively presented...should be on everyone's shopping list".

Michael Oliver says "There is very little British Chamber Music of the Thirties that approaches the intensity, passionate eloquence and intellectual rigour of his Concert Piece, very little from the Forties that can be compared with his Three Concert Studies for exciting economical power and an expressiveness all the more profound for its restraint".

  Listen to tracks from Chamber Music Volume 1
Chamber Music Volume 1 can be purchased from Crotchet Records

Wednesday 26th November 2003 at 7.30pm Bowdon Rooms, The Firs, Bowdon, Manchester.

Nicholas Ward

The Northern Chamber Orchestra, led by its Artistic Director Nicholas Ward, will perform Alan Bush's English Suite for String Orchestra in Manchester on 26th November, in a programme of music for strings spanning 200 years. Formed in 1967, the NCO has a formidable reputation throughout the North West of England. Playing without a conductor, the ensemble members are all distinguished musicians who play as principals with other orchestras and regularly appear as soloists.

In 1994 the NCO recorded Bush's English Suite - one of his more important works - on a CD for Redcliffe Recordings, Music by Alan Bush. You can listen to the Passacaglia movement on the Listen section of the website.

Podcasts. At first, I thought the idea was a bit terrible: amateurish radio full of self important types who wanted to hear their own voices. Listening to someone read their blog? No thanks.

Then, of course, came the Ricky Gervais podcast. It was suggested, by various people, that I give it a go so I did, and I've never looked back. Half an hour of bizarre rants by the incomparable Karl Pilkington, coralled by Gervais and writing partner Stephen Merchant. For the journey to and from work (back when I had such a thing), it was care-free easy entertainment in half an hour.

Despite reading 250-odd sites via their feeds, I can count on one hand the number of podcasts that I listen to. Why? They're almost always far too long. Unless you are a top comedian or niche commentator, chances are you don't have the talent to make it worth most people's while to listen for half an hour. That's a long time to give up in one solid block. It's not even that your material doesn't warrant a listen, it's just that it requires a great deal of effort to sit down once a week or so for that length of time. There are a few podcasters that I would like to listen to, Dustin Diaz being a prime example, but it feels too much like adding a signficant burden to the already considerable pile of stuff to do, the masses of other media already taking up my time.

The solution? Make shorter podcasts! I, and I'm sure many others, would be more receptive to six 5 minute podcasts a week than one half hour effort. It's only five minutes that needs to be squeezed in -- heck, you can do that while checking your email at work in the morning.

And you know what? It'll be good for some of you (not pointing any fingers) to show some editorial skills and restraint. Sure, the banter is important, but it often threatens to overtake important messages. Bite-sized is best.

I think this is my new theme song Code Monkey.  (I know its been around for a while, but I just heard it, never bothered before)

Thanks to Mark Wagner for blogging about it, so I would actually listen to the song.

The new PodShow+ site, unleashing pretty darn soon, has a personal bio feature called 'The Legend of me'. I just filled mine out. Here's what I wrote:

I'm a programmer with an apetite for timeshifted media. That pretty much sums it up. In 2000, before I'd heard of RSS, I was using Voquette Media Manager to record Real streams of This American Life, which I'd lovingly burn to CD and listen to on long car trips. Later, in the days of 'audio blogging', I used the Radio Userland news aggregator to automatically pull MP3 files from enclosure-bearing RSS from Dave Winer, Chistopher Lydon and Doug Kaye. I'd then locate these on my hard drive and drag them, one at a time, into the media management software for my Neuros MP3 player. It worked, sort of, but was too much effort, and there was still too little content (especially after Chris took a break) for practical daily use. Adam Curry switched me back on in 2004 with a steady stream of daily content, developer feedback, feature ideas and a critical insight that made the medium: we needed automatic sync to the listening device. The early innovations in podcasting were nearly all Mac-only, which as a Windows user drove me nuts. Erik de Jonge's 'iSpider' project had a decent command-line Python/Applescript codebase, and were up for doing a cross-platform GUI product, which is where I wanted to go. Bringing in some modest COM knowledge that Pieter Overbeeke's 'i-podder' javascript helped me learn, I joined the iSpider team and Lemon was born. Nearly two years and one Ceast and Desist later, Lemon is now known as Juice and has accumulated over 2 million downloads. Along the way, Martijn Venrooy and I built the GigaDial 'podstation factory' (October 2004), and in Fall 2005 I joined PodShow and moved my family from Boston to San Francisco. At PodShow I do a mix of engineering (DGAP, Golden Tickets), developer relations (developer.podshow.com, DevCasts), technical reviews of potential partners and, when anyone will listen :-), talent scouting. I'm bullish on New Media and on the lookout for cool new stuff to build, to make listening and viewing better.

Pretty verbose --- it fills the alotted space on my profile page --- yet it barely scratches the surface.

• Microsoft Media Player shreds your rights: 'Think DRM was bad already? Think I was joking when I said the plan was tostart with barely tolerable incursions on your rights, then turn thethumbscrews? Welcome to Windows Media Player 11, and the rights get chippedaway a lot more.'
• Microsoft DRM To Get Even Tighter: 'I think I'm going to wait for Windows Media Player 12 to come out, whichreportedly will include DRM that doesn't let you listen to your music atall. All the major recording labels are on board with this format, so we mayfinally get a realistic alternative to iTunes without the clumsy Mac-likeinterface. Plus, it won't cost much more per track than the average iTunessong now. There will also be more visualizations included to help youimagine what the music you're playing actualy sounds like.'

Gonzaga star Adam Morrison went to Charlotte at No. 3 with the Bobcats' first since pick Michael Jordan became a part owner of the team, in charge of the basketball operations, earlier this month.

“It would be awesome if I could get some hands-on instruction from Mike,” Morrison said. “Any time the greatest player of all-time is telling you what to do [...] if he told me how to tie my shoes a certain way, I would probably listen.”

[From Yahoo! Sports]

Adam is mostly known as being a diabetic. He injects himself insulin during games. He's also known as the guy who cried big tears seconds before a stunning loss in the March Madness college tournament. First time I saw Adam Morrison play on TV I was wondering who the skinny and scraggy guy with the wild hair and the mustache was. He's the total opposite of a college jock, yet, there he was, making almost all his shots and getting everybody's attention. I wonder how he'll fare in the more rougher NBA with its bulked up athletes. Either way, his plays are cool to watch.

Technorati Tags: adam, draft, morrison, nba, quote

My friend John Rubio has launched a new site: CREATEaPro. A steady flow of good essays is already filling up the site. His latest, 10 Essential Tips to Becoming a Successful Creative Pro, is equally applicable to a wide range of disciplines, not just designers, illustrators, animators, or other artists the site is aimed at.

I like this paragraph from his introductory post:

'If I could go back, I would have paid more attention. I would have started my education not then, but at 8, when I first discovered the blackroom they had stashed behind my uncle Richard's light table. I would have spent more time studying the racks of lead type before dismissing them as just things that got my hands and homemade clothes covered in ink.'

It underscores what seems to be the main theme of the site: get working and stay confident.

Sometimes I worry that I wasted too much time with trivial stuff, pushing away time for what is really important. But then I'll encounter an artist or visionary who got a late start and still made the best of it. It's never too late.

Unless you listen to John Kricfalusi: 'After 24 if you haven't already become really good, you will stagnate and your powers of learning and your rebellious youthful attitude will have died.'

I was watching Catalyst last night, it had an episode about lie detection, the part I found interesting was the fact that we as humans find it hard to detect deception. They think the reason we can't reliably detect it is because we evolved in small trusted groups and it was to the benefit of all the young to trust the other members of the group.

Its interesting that this is innate in us, because I think an essential skill for our generation and future generations is critical thinking. For our parents generations (baby boomers) they really only had a handful of sources of information. They could watch the TV listen to the radio or read the newspaper, mostly the interests of these media groups were all the same, so if they all have the same political agenda, an alternative view might not be conveyed.

These days we have the internet which allows people to put out any view, skewed or otherwise. But how does innate ability to not be able to detect deception affect us? Take for instance the blogging world, how do I know the person I'm reading is an authority on a particular subject? I think we need to put more effort into educating our young ones that what you often read, hear or see isn't necessarily what’s really happening. It's already clear that this is what’s happening, even when I was at school critical thinking was present and pushed, but maybe it's place needs to be stepped up a little more.

From a technology side of things it's possible to measure the number of hits and other metrics that could in a simple way see how much of an authority a particular outlet is, but just because a large number of people frequent a particular 'authority' doesn't mean they are in fact one.

In the end I don't really think there is a definitive solution, but an open medium that allows us all to put a view out is probably the best answer, you just need to think about what people are saying and decide for yourself, which in my experience is something people don't like to do (thinking ... do I have to ..).

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The ability to install an iPod in a BMW has been around for a few months now and I hadn't given it much attention or thought until now.  Mainly because I now have a car that the technology supports.  So here's a mini review...

Installation: No idea if it's hard or easy, but it didn't take long for the dealer to do the work.  When it's complete there's a normal looking iPod cable in the glove box that disappears deep inside the car.  Other than that there's no indication that it's been installed. Once connected the iPod also gets charged, so after driving for a while you can take your iPod out fully charged.

The system is limited to playing five playlists on the iPod with a sixth option of playing everything.  You need to setup the playlists ahead of time and give them names that start with BMW1, BMW2 etc...  Easy enough to do, I created smart playlists to find all content that matched a certain genre, artist or was created in the last 60 days.  With those set up all I had to do to get everything to work was plug in the iPod.  The car believes the iPod is a CD changer and so changing to the right mode on the stereo starts the iPod playing.

Control: The iPod is controlled from the stereo controls in just the same way as that the radio and CD player work.  The preset buttons move between the playlists with just a brief pause for the iPod to find the right playlist.  Once it's playing it can be fully controlled from the controls on the steering wheel.

There are some limitations though.   Being limited to playlists is not a major problem, but if you want to listen to a specific album or song it could be difficult to get to it.  None of the details of the song are displayed either on the iPod or on the stereo when it's playing which may be a problem for some people.  For me, I almost never look at my iPod when it's playing anyway, so not being able to see the track info isn't a problem - it's a nice to have feature, but not a deal breaker.  A limitation introduced by BMW is that shuffle or random mode isn't remembered when changing playlists or when changing modes.  This appears to be a 'feature' of the stereo system as a whole and isn't unique to the iPod.  Lastly I've noticed a slight background hiss, but I've yet to determine if that's from the files on the iPod itself (192kbs transcoded from lossless WMA9) or part of the system.  I can only hear it when changing tracks or during quiet parts of a track, but it needs more investigation before I know where the problem is.

Ultimately though, I really like it.  Having all my music available in the car is great compared to the six CDs I was used to that I rarely changed around.

• It all comes down to great experiences; magical moments
• Great experiences demand a great ecosystem fit. The more you can think about the broader ecosystem the better fit the experience will be
• Desirability (human factors), Viability (business factors), Feasibility (technical factors) are all factors to consider in the ecosystem
• Desirability is key to design thinking: it starts by being human-centered
• Design thinking is defined by: the “mind of a child” (being innately curious open to new and different experiences) balanced by wisdom (the ability to learn from mistakes and listen to what the world is telling you).
• Learning from the world requires building to think, which means lots of prototypes and rapid iteration.
• Most business schools teach analytical thinking. Stanford’s d-school adds design thinking to the top of the “T” thereby creating t-shaped people: deep expertise in one area (the vertical part of the “T”) and broader, generalist knowledge in many (the top of the “T”).
• Design thinking is the glue between the top of the “Ts”.
• We’re biased toward action because design is about doing things
• Tip 1: Ensure desirability for users
• Tip 2: Balance desirability across all stakeholders
• Tip 3: Fruit flies, not elephants; put something out quickly and learn from it

• Context is King: the collisions of context are ripe with innovation
• Context guides narrative: it influences characters, and behaviors (it defines the setting of a story)
• We crave stories: self-actualization
• We are wired for stories: we have a neural imperative to process stories
• There’s a cycle here: context informs design and design creates context
• Learning about people is not innovation
• Discover cultural context; identify what cultural norms are
• Look for overlaps (things that don’t fit into one end or the other). These are opportunities for innovation.

• Taoism is the connection of things that are opposite. In the Western world we stress the extremes of the opposites not what brings things together
• Examples of opposites converging at Target: upscale discounter; expect more, pay less
• What makes Target work: trend focused, guest focused, and design driven
• Target had to differentiate or die as it could never beat Wal-mart on price
• “Trend from the inside out” not “trend forward”: figure out what is important to people not what’s next
• We are entering an era of the right brain. “MFA in the new MBA”.
• What we can count is important. What we can’t count is vital
• Measurement & Intuition. Left & Right brain. Embrace these “opposites”
• Growth is a creative process not an accounting process
• Stage 1 (preparation) Left Brain > Stage 2 (incubation) Right Brain > Stage 3 (illumination) Left Brain > Stage 4 (verification) Left Brain
• Companies need to provide space and time for incubation

• Gadgets are not stand alone products anymore
• Most companies are trying to keep control over user experience but openness is a better path to innovation especially within the complex ecosystems that exist today.
• The biggest obstacle is getting people to change how they think about media or systems. People are tied to things that work for them.

• Do you need to be vertically integrated to develop a successful consumer experience? In the short term yes, but long term no: openness wins out.
• When experience isn’t good enough yet power goes to closed system; once we figure out archetypally how the ecosystem works the power shifts.
• Designers are better trained to empathize with end users but they need to bring business folks along to overcome inherent fears.
• You can create new context through hooks into products (APIs, etc.)
• Change is constant; adapt or fall behind

Technology writer, Peter Svensson, wrote an interesting story called "Will video break the Internet?". From a technical point of view there are many factors to consider. If a large number of web "surfers" were using the Internet as their primary way to watch TV, there would be a problem. More capacity is clearly needed, especially as HD-TV becomes more prevalent. The pessimists -- and some telecommunications operators -- see rising fees to pay for the bandwidth expansion. Optimists know that various technologies such as multicasting, caching, digital video recorders, etc. are dramatically improving the Net's ability to deliver video content and in parallel the cost per unit of technology continues to decline. History would suggest the optimistic view is the right one.

During the 1996 Olympic Games in Atlanta there was a bomb blast. Native Atlanta ex-patriots living in Japan and Germany and other parts of the world wanted to get as much news coverage as possible about the status but had few choices (there were no blogs then). The Internet Technology team at IBM in Southbury, Connecticut was running a large web infrastructure for the Games at the time and one of the engineers, Andy Stanford-Clark, got the idea to "stream" a local Atlanta radio station over the Internet using an IBM technology called Bamba. It was a very successful project but only a handful of people could listen simultaneously due to the limitations of the technology and the Internet. Some people thought that if there were large numbers of listeners "audio would break the Internet". Today millions of people consider audio over the Net as commonplace. (Listening to crystal clear classical music from KUSC-FM in Los Angeles through my Sqeezebox as I write this). Based on the tens of millions of daily visitors to YouTube, it is clear that video has also become commonplace. Another leading indicator is what is happening on campus. A number of universities have decided to use the Internet to deliver cable TV to their dormitories.

One of the issues Mr. Svensson raised in his story is "net neutrality", a term that means different things to different people. The fear is that the really large telecommunications companies that provide parts of the "backbone" of the Internet may decide to not only raise fees but also to be discriminatory. In the extreme it would mean that Verizon would block access to Google because they made a deal with Yahoo! or visa versa. The telcos have never been successful in getting into the content business so a new angle for them might be to make deals with content providers that would make their video move through the Internet backbone at a higher priority in return for fees. These fears have gotten the attention of lawmakers who are now talking about legislation to insure net neutrality. Legislation is the worst possible way to address the issue.

What is really needed is more competition. In Japan, the Internet service available to consumers is significantly faster than in the U.S. and significantly less expensive. For example, Yahoo! Broadband offers 8 million bits per second for about $20 per month. Up to 100 million bits per second is available. What technical breakthrough have they had? None. The breakthrough was to separate the various infrastructure elements of Internet service and allow "Adam Smith's invisible hand" to go to work. More competition means higher speeds and lower prices. In the U.S. we have legions of lawyers and lobbyists at work doing their best to gain protections for themselves and to slow the spread of innovation such as municipal wireless and voice over IP. Will video break the Internet? No. The biggest threat to freedom of choice for content at competitive prices is a lack of competition.

Misguided or overly-prescriptive legislation can have unintended consequences. It can often fix one problem and create two new ones or add yet another layer of protectionism. Mike Nelson, former Director for Technology Policy at the Federal Communications Commission (and former colleague at IBM), says "a lack of competition which lets companies exert monopoly or duopoly power is probably the biggest damper on innovation". Not all legislation is bad. It is possible to use it to increase competition and decrease regulation, to fund e-government pilot projects, "connect the unconnected," or fund university education and research.


Other patrickWeb stories about Internet Technology
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