Archive for January, 2009
January 27th, 2009 by Aaron
Rumor has it that last night three Junction City, Kan., police officers had their homes raided on suspected money laundering and drug trafficking charges. Supposedly, over the course of the last several months, they facilitated “ride-alongs” to persons they believed to be officers from neighboring counties which were in fact undercover FBI agents investigating the actions of the officers.
Again, this report is based on nothing but an unsubstantiated rumor. However, I’ll be watching the papers over the course of the next few days to see if anything develops of this rumor.
January 27th, 2009 by Aaron
I posted this article recently over on the other blog. I’ve recently become a fan – nay, a fanatic – of social music site Last.fm. It could be described as Internet radio, but with several twists that make it also a music recommendation engine. I started using the service several years ago, but only recently figured out how to truly integrate it into the day-to-day routine.
The service can be used a number of ways. At its most basic level, you can login to the site with a browser and simply play music from the website. You tell Last.fm an artist you like, and it generates a “station” that plays music similar to that artist.
Last.fm knows what’s similar not by someone making arbitrary associations but by the millions if not billions of plays from users who then rate the songs with either a love or a ban. When you click the love button, you tell Last.fm that the song it played is a match to your musical tasts. When you click the ban button, you tell it that you don’t like that song and not to play it again. Last.fm uses this preference information, in addition to the artist you picked at the beginning, to build an enormous database of music relationships.
Using Last.fm at this level is novel and entertaining, but I always found myself reverting back to playing music with the Amarok, Zune or, recently, iTunes music players because the sound quality was better for locally-stored music than that streamed over the Internet. A few weeks ago, I learned how to use Last.fm to scrobble music and everything changed.
Here’s the definition and explanation of scrobbling from the Last.fm website.
Scrobbling a song means that when you listen to it, the name of the song is sent to Last.fm and added to your music profile.
Once you’ve signed up and downloaded Last.fm, you can scrobble songs you listen to on your computer or iPod automatically. Start scrobbling yourself, and see what artists you really listen to the most. Songs you listen to will also appear on your Last.fm profile page for others to see.
Millions of songs are scrobbled every day. This data helps Last.fm to organise and recommend music to people; we use it to create personalised radio stations, and a lot more besides.
With the Last.fm program downloaded and installed, every song played on your iPod, iTunes or other supported music players is recorded on the Last.fm website. This data mining means that the user profile records all music played locally and adds it to the user’s Last.fm library to generate reports and charts, which can be embedded on websites or other social networks like the one at the top right of this post, showing the users preferences.
Last.fm is a music recommendation engine in that it learns what you like and then exposes you to other music that you should like, based on the algorithms and database of music relationships. The accuracy of the system is amazing.
Finally, Last.fm is a social network. What good is music if it can’t be shared? Like Facebook or MySpace, users can associate their profiles with other friends. Once you have a friend on Last.fm, you can actually stream his or her music library. Last.fm also ranks your musical compatibility with your friends on a graduated scale, so you can know how well you would get along with someone on a long car ride.
With Last.fm competitor Pandora releasing a new version of its iPod application within the last 24 hours, it seems like the game is afoot for Internet music. Last.fm wins with its scrobbling abilities, but there are services that will actually allow a user to scrobble Pandora songs to Last.fm. I say just use Last.fm.
If you’re a Last.fm user, add traffas as your friend. Here’s a link to the profile. www.last.fm/user/traffas
Are you a fan of Internet radio? Do you like Pandora more than Last.fm? Tell me about it in the comments.
January 26th, 2009 by Aaron
Finalizing the newest WordPress theme to carry the Aaron Traffas Band through 2009, I’m getting ready to watch an episode of House and then 24 with Diane and Erica.
Lucas “Booker” Maddy has lined up several more shows that helped fill up the new shows block on the home page. Look out, Manhattan. We’re going to saturate.
We welcome your comments and suggestions. Click the “comments” link for any post to leave comments. Through the new Disqus plugin, you can now leave video comments if your laptop or desktop has a video camera. Cooler things coming. Stay tuned.
January 25th, 2009 by Aaron
January 24th, 2009 by Aaron
I bought a guitar amplifier today. It’s a little Vox practice amp. I realized that I never, ever perform without running the amp through a microphone and, indeed, spend most of the time trying to figure out how to keep the performers on stage – including myself – from hearing the amp rather than the guitar signal in the ear monitors. With this regard, the purchase of the little – some would mistakenly say cute – amp made perfect sense for portability and price. Now I have to learn how to use it.
I purchased the device from Phil Uhlik Music in Wichita. I was distributing flyers for an upcoming auction of guitars, folk instruments and other like-kind items. I entered and was waiting to talk to Nick Uhlik when Phil walked out from the back. It was very good to see him – I hadn’t in the last several years. He’s always remembered my name since I started buying instruments and equipment from them over 10 years ago in high school, and it always felt good to be called by name when I walked into a store in the big city, even if it was by a guy who has a freakish ability to remember names. His kindness and friendly nature more often than not served to cause me to buy something more or something better.
January 22nd, 2009 by Aaron
I’m finally installing the Disqus comments system on the site tonight, and it may be a a short while before the comments are processed and put back. Don’t worry, I didn’t delete anything.
I’m winding down after a long auction tonight and one hell of a past few months. Developer sprints are tough when you’re the only developer. We implemented a fairly complete overhaul of the way the Purple Wave bidding system handles auctions in order to accommodate some of the overstock auctions we’ve been doing recently. The work is finally winding down, and I sincerely hope to be more of a presence on the website.
Chris “G” Goering had one hell of a blog post, and I hope you take the time to read it. Mason and I are excited about the new year and what musical possibilities it may hold. Trevor Burgess is activated again after having been off the grid for the last few years. Look for an acoustic show with the two of us at Bobby T’s on V-day in a few weeks. Lucas Maddy moved to Wichita and will be playing with us as much as the schedule will allow.
I’ve been a blogging fool over at auctioneertech.com, and that’s where I’ve been doing most of my writing lately. My auction tech blog was recently featured in the January 2009 edition of the Auctioneer magazine. I also started a podcast where I discuss what’s new and exciting as well as interview auctioneers and industry experts about auctions and auction technology.
I’m getting ready to head to Wichita tomorrow to the Kansas Auctioneers Association convention. It should be a fun time. I’ll be doing a fair amount of tweeting during the experience. I’ve become a huge fan of Twitter. Sign up for an account at www.twitter.com and follow me at twitter.com/traffas. The real-time updates and picture postings from the phone is pretty impressive.
That’s it for tonight. Hopefully this post will go through before Ubuntu Studio 9.04 resets my DNS settings again.
January 20th, 2009 by Aaron
Today marks the turning of a new chapter in American history and American politics. It is a chapter that will find Americans proud again. We will remember what it is like to be respected in the world. We will remember what it is like to feel safe and secure once more. We will understand that we no longer have to be afraid of our ideals – that they can indeed be realized and enabled by a benevolent government. While it is too presumptive to say that we and the world will know peace, it is quite realistic to say that we now have a fighting chance.
Barack Obama’s 2400-word inauguration speech was stunningly poetic, the writers having an intimate understanding of the English language not possessed by Bush’s writers nor, unfortunately, ever even dreamt of by Bush himself. Obama successfully blended hope with non-fiction, something in which his predecessor wasn’t the least proficiant. By referencing none of the cliche phrases and happenings that have become commonplace in presidential speeches over the last four-fifths of a decade such as September 11, nor the expected reference to Martin Luther King, nor even an uttering of his own catch-phrase during the campaign of yes we can, Obama showed that he is a mature leader who doesn’t have to riff from the same tired script in order to send chills down the spines of his audiences.
Satellite image by GeoEye
What an audience he had today. Men, women and children of all races and ages braved the literally freezing cold to see history being made. They were there to hear President Obama claim proudly that we “are a nation of Christians and Muslims, Jews and Hindus — and nonbelievers.” They were there to hear him proclaim that we “will restore science to its rightful place, and wield technology’s wonders to raise healthcare’s quality and lower its cost.” And they were there to hear him make what was perhaps the most staggering departure from the path of the last eight years, that “we reject as false the choice between our safety and our ideals.”
Obama has a large boat to turn around. The economy is still tanking. The powder keg that is the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, with Israeli army killings in Gaza leaving at least 410 children and 98 women dead out of the overall death-toll of 1300, should be – nay, must be – the first foreign-affairs focus. Education, social security and healthcare have been neglected for too long, and must soon be patched if not rebuilt. Attacks on medical science such as vaccinations, new sciences such as stem cells as well as old sciences and histories such as evolution continue to chip away at whatever moral standings we have left abroad and must be dealt with soon, a promise Obama made in is speech regarding restoring science to its rightful place.
We must be asked to sacrifice. We must raise taxes, and we must do it quickly and smartly. We must be asked to sacrifice. We need to increase the gasoline tax so that the currently plummeting price of oil doesn’t decrease the race for more renewable and less pollution-causing alternatives to internal petroleum or ethanol combustion. We must be asked to sacrifice. We must not eliminate the capital gains tax, as those who would hurt so much as to go hungry from it are exempted anyway. We must be asked to sacrifice.
Humans are never content without struggle. With all of the looming problems facing us and our country, there doesn’t seem like a shortage of struggle any time soon. With our new administration, however, I think it’s safe to say that we’re no longer facing a losing battle.
January 18th, 2009 by Aaron
January 11th, 2009 by Aaron
January 7th, 2009 by Aaron
![Reblog this post [with Zemanta]](http://img.zemanta.com/reblog_e.png?x-id=b0d8e95b-7d2a-4dac-9f58-47d6d012aa4e)
![Reblog this post [with Zemanta]](http://img.zemanta.com/reblog_e.png?x-id=5d9d1fe4-908b-4e35-9d29-37f1d94926ed)
![Reblog this post [with Zemanta]](http://img.zemanta.com/reblog_e.png?x-id=5b83906a-3a2a-487e-a295-332f110127e5)
![Reblog this post [with Zemanta]](http://img.zemanta.com/reblog_e.png?x-id=6f8ca051-13da-42fb-b175-683a575b362c)
