My Own Biggest Fan

Ping. Apple’s new musical social media experiment. It would be an interesting add-on to iTunes, but it falls far short of actually being useful. It reminds me a ton of Facebook, with it’s hard to read timeline and the vague “Like” function, and reminds me not-at-all of Last.fm, who got this exact idea exactly right. Apple has utterly ignored what Last.fm got right because of their desire to use Ping primarily as a way to sell songs through the iTunes Music Store and not as a fun and cool place for their customers to find new music.

How does Ping fail in both usability and in usefulness? Let me count the ways.

1: If it’s not int the iTMS, it’s not allowed. Ridiculous. Some of my favourite albums are not available there. Major label albums. Suede have zero songs there. Pulp’s final album? Like it never existed. All of the 12″ and bootleg remixes I find on mp3 blogs? Won’t find them here. Apple’s little network is so embarassingly MOR that it’s primary goal “To help people find new music” is laughably unobtainable.
2: No real-time display of what’s being listened to.
3: Can’t right click a song in my music library and add to Ping (have to add in iTMS).
4: No easy way to find friends.
5: The genres are too broad. (“Alternative”? REALLY?) / No sub-genres.
6:The “Music I Like” area isn’t self explanatory. At first I didn’t know it only pertained to that bit in the top right corner of my profile, I thought it managed all the info that went through my profile. How about calling it: “My Favourite Songs”?
7: No explicit notification when someone comments on one of your Posts.
8: What the heck is the difference between a Like and a Post anyway? A Post lets you comment, so why would I just Like something then?
9: Once I Like something, either an album or someone’s activity, there is no way for me to find it again, it just goes into the ether. If it’s meant to be a bookmark for later reference, it fails miserably at it.

What the hell is this?:

Where do you suppose the logic is in being able to Like the fact that I Liked an album? I’m amazed I can’t Like me Liking my Like. I can’t believe that sentence was something I felt I needed to write. I can even Like me Liking someone else’s Like of a song. The ability to do THAT is exactly what the internet has been waiting for!

Ping will probably to be something I play around for maybe the next week or so and then forget about. The first two items I mention are reason enough for me to not care about it. So, if you want, you can friend me there under Mason Hastie. Or if you want to ACTUALLY trade info about what we ACTUALLY listen to, you can go to my Last.fm profile.

So I’m the friend mentioned in the blog post found here. I suggest you read that before you continue with this. Trust me, Tyler is a better writer than I am and he has similar opinions to mine regarding the whole analogue v. digital debate.

Ok, so let me set the record straight on a couple of points. (pun mostly intended) First off, these records will not be melted down. Not only is it my intention to keep the records intact during the production of the furniture I’d like to create, but also consider that melting a record down is tantamount to burning a book — in my opinion. In fact, if you considered the amount of time I’ve spent listening to music and more so, TALKING about listening to music vs. reading, it would be fair to say melting down a record may be even more evil in my eyes. Yes, even UK hardhouse (progressive house? this old house?) 12″ singles, or whatever subgenre it was that Tyler spun when he was a vinyl DJ. The fact is, that no matter how you cut it, 300LB of vinyl is a valuable resource, whatever’s on it.

Secondly, I’m a vinyl lover. I’d be willing to say that ¾ of the music I listen to lately is from vinyl. If whatever musical itch I’m feeling can be satisfied by a record, I’ll go to it before anything. The reasons for this I could write hundreds of words on. I’ll spare you at the moment and just say I’m a huge fan of listening to records.

You may ask, “Well then, what do you have planned if you aren’t melting it down?” That’s for another blog entry, probably after I’ve tried, failed, tried again and hopefully, finally succeeded at creating something out of these records that both preserves their dignity and transfers their usefulness from medium to raw material. I just wanted it on record what was going on here. NOT a wholesale discard of music, just a re-appropriation of the material it was on — temporarily, at that.

So, if you are curious, stay tuned. Both to Lo-Fi Hi-Fi Me, and here. I’m hoping the results will be at least worth a glance. I gotta say, I’m feeling the pressure because my original plan wasn’t very impressive. I’m hoping that I can take it up a notch to make the whole thing worth keeping tabs on. Like I said, stay tuned.

You know what I think is an entirely reasonable thing to do?

Buy this book:

And then for shits and giggles attempt to download each piece of music recommended and listen to them in order.

I’ve spent the past two days attempting to find and download music from The Medieval, Renaissance, and Elizabethan Ages (chapter 1) on Bittorrent. It is as easy to find as you might expect. Short term goal: I’m hoping that when I’m done this chapter, Enigma won’t be my only point of reference when I hear a Latin mass being sung.

It’s a 700 page book, it seems to average about five recommendations per page. At the rate of — at most — three pieces per week… well, this isn’t a project I expect to finish anytime soon.

Linotype has made their formerly free software, the wonderful FontExplorer X, unfree. I have no problem with people asking for money for software, I have no problem with the trial version model, and I even have no problem with most companies changing something from free to pay. When FontExplorer X was first released, they essentially said “Look at what we did, we made something great, and we did it for FREEEEEE! Aren’t we the greatest?” and we all replied “Yes you are!” It was marvelous. They even supplied plugins to work with current versions of Adobe Creative Suite so that it could make our font experience as painless as possible.

Now, though, they’ve switched to a pay model, just at the time most places are upgrading to CS4. They’ve cancelled their support for the old version (although you can still get it from the website, which is a good thing) I know I’m not locked in, and I know they don’t owe me anything, but the whole business seems shady and it makes me angry. I don’t often feel a sense of entitlement for things that are free, but when the original “selling” point of the software was that it’s free, it makes it seem like we were using a “trial” version without knowing it.

I wrote a letter to the FontExplorer X people, and submitted it to their Support page.

My problem is that you create a piece of software which you shout about how great it is (rightfully), give it away for free, and then as soon as people are dependent on it, halt support for it. Now that we have to upgrade to CS4, and you are not making plugins for the free version to interact with it, you expect us to pay for it.

Shove it, you “bait and switch” jerks.

Incendiary? Yeah. A little aggressive? Totally. Somewhat warranted? You might not think so, I believe it is.

Recently I’ve fallen in love with the website Grooveshark. Essentially it’s the worlds biggest shared iTunes library. If you just go to the website you can pretty much listen to any song you might want. If you make an account, you can create playlists and mark songs as ♥ed.

I asked people on Twitter,

“If you had to make me listen to one song, what would it be? I’m making a #grooveshark playlist.”

I was pretty dogmatic about only letting one song per person in, I didn’t want any one person to influence it more than another. The resulting playlist which is, unfortunately, a little shorter than I’d hoped, actually turned out quite listenable.

I’m now posting iPhone pictures on my Tumblr account. I’ve started using Photo FX and Cool FX by the amazing Tiffen to edit my on-the-go photos; and I’ve been liking the results. If you want to stay updated, follow my Tumblr, Twitter, or check the Tumblr sidebar on the main page.

holy crap!

Here’s a little map outlining the interactions I have going on with various online tools. The Tumblr integration is still imperfect and changed from this, but the idea is there. The idea being, I need to get a life.

I bought myself a copy of Delicious Library because (a) I found myself not remembering what I had and what I had got rid of and (b) it was ten dollars off today. Delicious Library is the best way to get all this crap into a database because it lets you just scan the barcode with the iSight camera and it automagically gets the info and cover art. Version 2.0 is way better than the first one because it gets imported stuff better (it even got most of my Japanese CDs!) and the barcode recognition is much improved. And I guess I figured I needed to help Shipley buy ANOTHER Tesla. Good god. If I think that my money is going to @curvyboom and @majah‘s paycheques, I’ll feel better about it.

So, why do you care, dear friend? Not sure. But if you do, you can check out all my stuff at:

myownbiggestfan.org/library/
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Is on order.

24″ iMac
2.4GHZ Intel Core 2 DUO
1GB 667 DDR2 SDRAM – 1x1GB
500GB Serial ATA Drive
SuperDrive 8X(DVD+R DL/DVD+RW)
Wireless Mighty Mouse
Wireless Keyboard

I am so digging the Facebook app, Scrabulous. I love a good game of Scrabble, and being able to play a casual game over a few hours, or days really appeals to me. What also appeals to me is sitting and playing a game non-stop, not having to refresh the board or my “notifications” over and over just to see if it’s my turn yet.

The same people that made the Facebook app also have a website at Scrabulous.com. There people can play Scrabble in real time. Unfortunately I don’t think any of my friends are on that site, so I end up playing with grumpy old men and ten year old girls. The games are pleasant enough, but I am more interested in playing with my friends. So if any of you are interested, drop me a line.

Of course, the offer is always open for you to come down to my place if you are able. I do have a board.

Photo by Paul Goyette.
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