Posting via PHP Atom API

This post was made possible thanks to the PHP Atom API by Beau Lebens. With only a few lines of code, I was able to create a custom form for posting to my weblog--no trip to the standard form at Blogger.com required.

Looking Up

Shooting the Moon

I took some photos of the moon tonight. I had help with the exposure settings from Hack #96: Shoot The Moon in Digital Photography Hacks. I know I'm biased because I put together a book in the Hacks series, but I really found this book entertaining and useful (read most of it tonight). Unlike most Hacks books it has full color, glossy pages and is filled with illustrations. I don't know if it's because I'm used to the Hacks format—or because I'm the target market—but I feel like I got more practical advice from this photography book than any other I own. I wish there would have been more web/photography stuff (EXIF parsing, programmatic resizing, etc.) but I realize this is a book for photographers, not coders.

I'm not happy with this level of detail in the photo, and I'd like to get an adapter so I can hook my camera to my telescope. I want to see craters in my moon photos. (Here's a picture of the moon I took in 2002 by holding my camera up to the telescope eyepiece. The adapter should work better.)

Music Personality Score

Since talking with Gabriel at MusicStrands the other day, I've been thinking more about how we share our musical tastes with others. I was making the point to him that there should be a way to quickly relate the type of music you're interested in without forcing people to wade through months of listening data like the current social music services require. For example, you can see that my top two artists at Last.fm are Bob Marley and Mozart based on frequency of plays, but that doesn't mean that my top two genres are Reggae and Classical. (I wouldn't place those as my top two if someone asked me.) You have to wade through the entire list to see that I also like classic rock, indie rock, electronic music, and lots of other genres.

What I was trying to say to Gabriel, but couldn't quite articulate, is that there should be a Myers-Briggs style scoring system for musical taste. When I see that someone is an ENFP, I have one instant measure of their personality. If you could do the same for music, you'd have a way to instantly relate your musical interests. I'm not sure what the criteria would be—maybe I'm an ISAE (indie structured ambient electronic), or MECR (mainstream eclectic classic rock). And this would go hand in hand with a service like MusicStrands because they can analyze the last 1,000 songs I actually listened to. With the score in hand, I could paste it into the dozen or so social network sites I belong to, giving people a more nuanced look at my preferences than my top 5 bands or something.

The iTunes Signature Maker is one stab at this concept. This application wades through your iTunes collection and creates a short audio signature based on the music it finds. When listening to others' signatures I guess you could listen for electronica vs. distorted guitars, but it doesn't really give you a sense of music preference. This is more of a fun hack than a useful way to share your musical identity. It'd be much more accurate to analyze what you're actually listening to, and then do a bit of categorization based on meta info about those tracks.

Timestamps and Weblogs

I received a thoughtful response to my silly post about timestamps and weblogs the other day—

'The main reason I (and, I'm sure, plenty of others) don't use timestamps is that I sometimes blog from work and don't want the higher-ups knowing about it or (worse) being able to 'prove' that something was posted during work hours.'

With the cases of people being fired for their weblog, I understand why bloggers want to be careful. (We never hear about the stories where people are promoted because of their weblog.) I still feel like a weblog without timestamps cripples one of the weblog's primary functions. I think this problem points to the need for employers to clarify their stances on weblogs, and personal use of the web.

My Podcasting Aha Moment

One of my favorite programs on NPR is On the Media. I always seem to miss it on the radio because it's on at an odd time for me. So I've messed around with FM tuners on my PC, and TiVo-like programs trying to catch them. I could never find the right combination of hardward and software. They recently started podcasting their shows—On the Media podcasts—and I haven't missed one since. New episodes just show up in iTunes and I can listen to them whenever I have time. I didn't quite understand the appeal of the subscription component of podcasting before, but now I see that if there's a program I always want to catch, podcasting is very handy.

This is a placeholder post to push some text down the page. Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetuer adipiscing elit. Duis condimentum nonummy wisi. Phasellus id est eget neque convallis pretium. Aliquam erat volutpat. Latin.

The latest photos of my dogs are now on the righthand side of the page thanks to Flickr! woof!

You can chat with me if I'm online by clicking my new "Online Presence Indicator" over on the right. Thanks Yahoo!

"We're all sentenced to solitary confinement inside our own skins, for life." - Tennessee Williams