dianaschnuth

Audioscrobbler was, at first, a curiosity for me. I downloaded a plugin, and it gave me stats about the music I listen to. It could also spit out an RSS file of what I’ve been listening to in the recent past, which was also quite cool.

It suddenly got cooler.

Audioscrobbler has rebranded itself Last.fm, and can now give even more statistics. Click the “recommendations” link, and Last.fm will look at your favorite artists and give you some other artists you might want to check out. (For me, Last.fm suggests The White Stripes, Wilco, Weezer, Badly Drawn Boy, and Ben Folds Five, among others. I’m already a White Stripes fan, but I don’t listen to them much anymore — Last.fm doesn’t know that, though.)

The absolute coolest part of the new Last.fm, though, is the free Last.fm player. Without paying for a premium Last.fm subscription, you can download the player, click the “Start Radio” link, and select “neighbour radio” to listen to music selected from your Last.fm Neighbours, people who share similar musical tastes with you. Plus, the Last.fm Player transmits the songs you’ve heard, so that they count in your own Recent Tracks and get added to your stats. If I thought shuffle play on my iPod was sweet, this kicks it up a notch. BAM!

But wait! There’s more! On certain artists’ Last.fm info pages, you can click a “preview track” button to listen to a stream of 30-second previews of the artists’ songs. Very cool feature, and it saves the time of going and searching for the most popular song by an artist and downloading it and deciding whether it rocks or sucks before downloading (er, I’m sorry, I meant buying) the entire album.

No, I was not paid for this plug. I’ve just enjoyed discovering this new aspect of my cute little Audioscrobbler. I mainly use Audioscrobbler / Last.fm for finding new music, and this makes the process much more streamlined.

There are some bugs with the system, though. The Last.fm Player is still a touch new, and the buffer stutters sometimes, but I haven’t had too much trouble with it and it’s starting to bug me, especially when it totally stops playing and I have to relaunch the app. Also, the Audioscrobbler plugin for iTunes doesn’t upload the play count from my iPod — which is unfortunate, as I listen to most of my music on my iPod these days (several hours at work vs. a couple hours at home).

It’s fun, though. Go sign up. I’ll be your friend, and it’ll be keen.

I don’t want to like it. I don’t want to look forward to it. I don’t want to even hope it will be “good.”

But… damn. I just can’t help it.

Could it be…? Characters in which we feel a vested interest? Plot that draws us in? The dark, ominous feel that we all loved in The Empire Strikes Back?

Is it too much to hope?

Genealogy.

It’s been quite a while since I worked on my family history, but the thought crossed my mind this week that I’d promised my Grandpa Cook that I’d send him copies of some of the work I’d done. Yeah, that was back in August of 2004. I’m a bad granddaughter. :-/

So, this evening I made it my mission to fire up the printer and scanner and copy the pages Grandpa had requested. During this operation, I realized that there was a death certificate I had received a while ago that I never recorded in my genealogy software… Then I remembered that I’d wanted to search for a decent genealogy program for Windows, so I wouldn’t have to fire up the now-obsolete Power Mac just to do genealogy work.

Next mission: burn a hybrid disc of all the stuff on my Mac that I might need in the future, including importable genealogy files. No problem.

Now I had to find some Windows software to one-up my wonderfully-simplistic and long-beloved genealogy shareware for Macintosh (called Gene). See, I’d appropriated a copy of the popular Family Tree Maker years ago, and decided to stick with Gene because I found FTM way too fussy. Too many features for my taste.

But, tonight, I found Brother’s Keeper, which is working smashingly for me so far. It does have a slight learning curve, but I’m liking all the features that allow me to fix my database, relinking spouses and children and such. It even has a search for “unreasonable” dates, like a parent being less than 14 when a child is born (or, in the case of a few of my entries, a child being born before a parent).

So, I’ve spent all this time playing with the database-streamlining features of BK, and I still haven’t entered Granny Maudie’s mother’s death certificate. I’ll have to do that before I go to bed.

Damn… Like I said before, too many hobbies.

Before I begin my review of Wil Wheaton’s latest book, I’d like to take a moment to point out one thing.

I think that I’ve figured out the difference between us simple plebes and the blogging elite of the Blogosphere™. They don’t necessarily have something wittier, funnier, stranger, or generally more worthy to post—well, OK, maybe they do. The point I wanted to make, though, is that when the rest of us post, it’s almost stream-of-consciousness. At best, it’s a first draft. You can’t make me believe that when Dooce or Wil or any other well-known blogger posts, that they haven’t at least read and edited once before they hit that Save button. Sure, I skim for spelling and grammatical errors and other indignities, but I don’t draft my blog entries like I once drafted ENG 112 syntheses.

And maybe I should.

Now, for the review…

My husband bought me Wil Wheaton’s latest book, Just A Geek, as a Christmas present.

I read it yesterday.

OK, I exaggerate. I read one chapter at the laundromat Sunday, the end of the appendices at work today, and the rest I read yesterday. It was that engaging.
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