Music, 300, and Web 2.0

March 18th, 2007

Hi Folks,

It has been a while since I posted, I never really got into the habit and even was long out of the habit on my tech/geek blog, so it has been a while. But since I recently relaunched my tech/geek blog, I decided I would try to post more often over here too.

Music

Do you ever find a band that just grabs you, their sound is awesome, and their lyrics speak to you?

I recently discovered a band called Bayside that is all of that for me. As you can see from my Last.FM Profile, I have been listening to them a lot.

I encourage you to check them out and if you like them, pick up their latest album on iTunes

300

If you haven’t seen the movie 300, you should. If you don’t know what it is about go here and watch Trailer 2.

300 is a movie adaption of the graphic novel by Frank Miller, if you’ve seen Sin City, then you know how amazing Frank Miller’s work can be, when brought to the big screen. The movie chronicles the story of King Leonidis of Sparta and 300 Spartan soldiers who make a stand against the invading Persian Army, led by King Xerces I of Persia. As the movie is an adaption of the graphic novel, both have taken some liberties with the actual history, as the story is based on true historical events, but in my opinion as a history student, the liberties taken are no more than any play or opera would take.

I’ve seen the movie twice at the local IMAX theatre (if you have an IMAX available then DEFINANTLY see if there). The movie is graphically stunning and very moving, I think that it will be my favorite movie of 2007, by far, and in many ways, sets a new bar for movie adaptions of graphic novels and comic books. So I’ll leave this topic with two things.

GO SEE THE MOVIE!
“There’s no reason we can’t be civil” –King Leonidis

Web 2.0

I thought I’d take a minute to go over some of the fun Web 2.0 type sites and services that have caught my eye and suck up my time. I personally blame my friend Bwana McCall for any time wasted, as he draws my attention to most of these, and hops on every new Web 2.0 thing that comes out.

First is Last.FM, last.fm is a social networking site that focuses around Music. There is a plugin for iTunes on Windows called iScroggler (there is iScrobbler for the Mac) that will automatically report what you are listening to, to your last.fm profile and last.fm generates statistics of what you are listening to. It can also tell who has similar tastes in music to you, what they are listening to, and will try to recommend bands you may like. So it can be a fun way to find new music or people with similar musical tastes. Right now I mainly use it keep track of what I have been listening to and give people a passive way to view said information.

Second is Twitter, Twitter is a sort of “online presence” mashup. It let’s you constantly update your profile with whatever the hell you are doing, your “presence.” Some people call it an “away message on steriods.” Merlin Mann of 43 Folders and MacBreak Weekly (both of which are awesome) refers to this as part of the online phenomonon of “personality spamming.” I’d seen Bwana using it and had heard rumblings about it around the Internets and in podcasts and decided to start using it. It is pretty amusing, and a fun way to just throw up little blurbs about what you are doing, for those times when you want someone to know, but don’t have any who’s attention you can quickly grab. You can see my Twitter profile and get another little glimpse into my life.

Finally, there is Mugshot, this service is sponsored by Redhat and is open source, which is good! It is meant to be an aggregator of all your various online “identities.” I’ve only started playing with it today, and am not sure what I think of it yet, but I’ll post a more detailed review in a couple weeks when I’ve had a chance to get to know it better.