Giving Thought to Landing
My name is Keith Adair, and these are things that are currently getting my attention
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I am not one given to hyperbole, but believe me when I say that I have discovered the greatest music player on any platform.
It’s called Noise, and it’s developed by the team at Elementary OS. It’s a simple music player that is made to avoid being over-busy. Can you buy music from it? No! Can you organize your podcasts? No! Can you watch videos? No! But you can simply listen to all your music, in a simple, pretty, organized fashion. It has a great Similar playlist function, similar to Apple’s Genius, that finds songs in your library similar to the one playing. In the right pane, you can find similar songs that you don’t own, and it will link you last.fm to buy them if you so desire. It’s simple, beautiful, function, and not overstuffed with cruft you’ll never use.
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Totally, utterly deserving. My favorite album of the year thus far.
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Sitting awake last night at 2:40 AM as Addie sat there and hiccuped. I wondered, googled, and found solace in the opinion of Doctor Lisa Dana. I wonder if she knows Ricky Bobby, another two-first-named phenom?
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This is going to be a new, hopefully daily feature, wherein I write down the articles that nabbed my attention from the morning’s news, as well as some other items of interest.
The Addie Update:
Still thinks that the middle of the night is the time when she ought to be awake, observant, and almost playful. It’s like she’s mocking me — I take her out to let Kim sleep, I feed her, change her diaper, swaddle her, and she just stares at me. I kill the lights, and she fusses. I pull out my computer, she fusses. I finally give up, and just hold her. I love her. She’s the greatest thing in the world. I’m going to die from sleep deprivation.
But that’s okay!
Starred articles from my RSS feed:
Neil Young and Crazy Horse - Americana (The Onion A.V. Club)
“Equal parts stopgap, warm-up, and crusty homage, Americana doesn’t take its subject matter, or itself, too seriously. The pre-fame Young served his time as a coffee-shop folkie, but he mangles whatever memories he has of that time with a blistering rendition of “Oh Susannah,” which kicks open the album irreverently, choosing to retool the entire song rather than pay tribute to it. “It sounds funky,” Young tells the rest of the band at song’s end, as the distortion pools around his feet—and he means it in the good way.” - Jason Heller
Splish Splat? Why Raindrops Don’t Kill Mosquitoes - NPR
So the team took the experiment inside. They fired jets of water drops at the mosquitoes and recorded the results with a super-high-speed video camera. They found that mosquitoes don’t actually dodge raindrops — they hitch a ride.
“As the raindrop falls, rather than resisting the raindrop, they basically join together kind of like a stowaway on this comet,” Hu says. “So as a result they get very, very little force.”
Watch Paul McCartney Play the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee - Stereogum
As a part of the proceeds, an extended bank holiday ran from 6/2-6/5, and that program consisted of a huge Diamond Jubilee Concert on the grounds of Buckingham Palace. Paul McCartney was one of the biggest names on the bill, performing “All My Loving,” “Let It Be,” “Live And Let Die” and “Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da.” Footage has surfaced of his performance which you can watch below.
The E3 2012 Murder Count: Microsoft - The Gameological Society
In celebration of the expo’s kill-riffic qualities, we’re crunching the numbers this week on the Microsoft, Sony, and Nintendo press conferences. Who racks up the highest body count? And what about the stories behind the deaths?
87 human deaths + 49 non-human deaths = 136 total deaths!
Obama - 46% (-1)
Romney - 45%
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Fiona Apple’s stunning ballad “Werewolf” is named Best New Track. Photo by Dan Monick.
I cannot overemphasize how glad I am that Fiona Apple is back to recording music.
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So I’m kind of exposing my nerdiness here: this is a screenshot of my desktop. I’m running Elementary OS Luna, which is a free and open-source operating system that is made to be simple to use, beautiful, and well-organized.. In a nutshell, this means that the developers are unpaid, and are merely doing this as a hobby, and maybe to pad their resumes.
You can learn more about Elementary at elementaryos.org. Also, the wallpaper is from Matt Katzenberger, at http://katzmatt.com/photos/
