TLAPD Song:

Yes, this special day is once again upon us.
Get your pirate on tomorrow, because it is Talk Like A Pirate Day, 2006.

In a Colorful Night, The Clover Show, and In the Basement, all by the Wild Band of Snee

So this is more of a PSA than anything else, but this weekend is the Austin City Limits music festival.  If you’re not lucky enough to be there, AT&T is streaming the show in their blue room.

I’ve gotta say, if you have a good internet connection, and are at least curious about the bands playing this weekend, the blue room is a great service.  I was lucky enough to catch most of this years Bonnaroo on there, and it was a great experience, even if I couldn’t actually be there. 

The fest starts on Friday and lasts through Sunday, so theres no excuse to not catch at least one group.

The bands that jump out at me are:
For Friday, Guster at 2:30PM, Nickel Creek at 4:30, Thievery Corporation at 6:30, and John Mayer at 8:15.
For Saturday, Ben Kweller at 2:30PM, The Secret Machines at 3:30, Los Lobos at 4:30, String Cheese Incident at 6:30, and Los Lonely Boys at 9:00.
For Sunday, KT Tunstall at 2:30PM, Calexico at 4:30, the Flaming Lips at 6:30, Ben Harper at 7:00, Muse and then Tom Petty & the Heartbreakers wrapping up the night.
By the way, all those times are central, so adjust accordingly, or you might miss whoever you wanted to see…if you live on the west coast.

Yes, I know listed more than half the bands for almost every day.  I’ll probably be watching the ones I didn’t list as well, if I’m free.  Thankfully, the festival format introduces fans to bands they aren’t really familliar with. 

So, watch these great performances, if you can.  That is all.

Crossroads, by moe. with Sam Bush and Trey Anastasio

This whole show is incredible, if you’re interested, archive has it.

So if you look around my blog today, you’ll notice some changes.  I’ve gone and fully embraced Web 2.0.
What is Web 2.0?  Well, thats not exactly easy to say, but by the end of this entry, I’ll have covered the concept.
I’ll detail the recent changes, in the order they appear on my sidebar.

The first is the Links block.  These links come from del.icio.us, which is a social bookmarking site.  Yes, I know, that phrase alone means practically nothing.  The idea behind the site is that as you browse the internet, you can bookmark sites with del.icio.us, and these sites will be added to your del.icio.us account, where you can tag them based on the content of the site.  These bookmarks are shared with the rest of the community, and allows you to see what most people are interested in at any given point.  It can also help you find new websites you may be interested in based on simillar tags.

Next is my calendar from 30 Boxes.  30 Boxes is a beautiful web calendar, which you can share with friends who use the service.  So when you view your calendar online, you can not only view what you are doing, but you can see the events your friends have added as well.  And, you can syndicate your calendar like I have done, so it will display upcoming events within another webpage.

Now, the PagCam isn’t really Web 2.0.  At the moment, it isn’t even Web 1.0…because it isn’t working.  I’m still not sure why, but I honestly haven’t even tried to find out.  But what is worth noting is that I’ve increased the size…so now you know for sure that its broken…whatever.

Moving on, we come to Last.fm, which is a service I love more and more everyday.  With Last.fm, you install a plugin to your music player, and it will upload the details to their website, which aggregates and organizes what you’ve listened to into easy to read stats.  It will also share these stats with other Last.fm users, and recommend artists and songs which you may enjoy, based on other users interests.  This is a service that any music fan would appreciate.  I’m displaying a list of the ten artists who I listened to most in the previous week.

Then there is of course Flickr.  Hopefully, most people know about this service by now, but in case you don’t, Flickr allows you to upload and share photos.  And like del.icio.us, you can tag your photos, so they are searchable by the community.

And the last change, which you will probably not notice is the link to Performancing at the bottom of the page.  Performancing a plugin for firefox which allows you to write blog entries from a seperate window within your browser.  I’m writing this entry from within Performancing right now, and I love it.  And if you add a simple piece of code to your blog, you can get stats from performancing.  It even integrates with del.icio.us, so you can add and tag bookmarks. 

Now, I’ve used most of these services for a little while now (with the exceptions of del.icio.us and Performancing), but I’ve always kept them to their own sites, and never really integrated them together like I have here.  And I like it.  I like it a lot. 

Firefox has extensions for most of these services, which make them incredibly easy to access.  Some industrious coders have tried to integrate these extensions into the browser itself, and released Flock.  In my opinion, Flock doesn’t compare to Firefox with all the correct extensions, but it may be right for some people.

So I don’t think I’ve answered what Web 2.0 is yet. 

The term was coined by O’Reily (see their take in the link far above), and has since been adopted by everyone else to mean slightly different things.  But Web 2.0 is generally more interactive and ’social’ web applications, allowing people to connect and interact in new ways.  The key word in Web 2.0 is dynamic.  Web 1.0 content was static.  That is the largest difference.

I am going to take all of this into consideration when redesigning somjuan.com, and I plan to make it as accessible as possible. 
SomJuan 3.0 will be Web 2.0 compatible.

I Saw an X-Ray of a Girl Passing Gas by the Butthole Surfers

Yes, Nintendo’s Wii.

People in the know are expecting a price and release date announcement any day now(with good reason), and some retailers are already taking pre-orders.
Not only is the Wii backwards compatible with GameCube games, controllers, and memory cards, but it is also a dvd player. And it is smaller, better looking, and presumably cheaper than the other two ‘next-gen’ consoles.

But what will obviously make or break this system is the new controller. If it is easy to use (as most people have reported), then I wouldn’t be surprised if this system beats the XBox 360 (especially considering how poorly the 360 is doing in Japan).

Software-wise, Wii has both systems beat. Hands down. It builds off the existing GameCube library of games, and you’ll be able to download games from NES, SNES, N64, and even some Genesis games. Something that intrigues me, even more than the possibility of retro gaming, is that Spore will be coming to the Wii. And the DS. And since the DS will be able to communicate with the Wii, we can presume that there will be some interaction between the two. Whoa.

Hardware-wise, Wii is using a PowerPC CPU and an ATI GPU, which will give it graphics on par with both the 360 and PS3. Although both of those systems have more powerful hardware than the Wii, I really don’t see it making a difference, especially since game developers have yet to take full advantage of the 360s graphics, and the same can be assumed for the PS3.

If the price point is around $200 as it is expected to be…I may just buy this system after all…

Rebubulah by moe.

Facebook has been making a lot of people uneasy recently, and I’m not exactly sure why.
Wait, let me rephrase that.
I understand why Facebook is making people feel uneasy, but this feeling is irrational.

Backstory:
On September 5th, Facebook introduced what they call the News Feed. It displays all of the recent activity of all of your facebook friends. So if one of your friends changes some info in their profile, writes on someone else’s wall, joins a group, etc; this event will be noted in your news feed.

Now, the main complaint from users is that the news feed invades their privacy. The reality is that they never had any ‘privacy’. The news feed only shows the information a user had alerady chosen to show. The only difference is that instead of having to schlep to a person’s user page to search for something new, we don’t even have to leave the main page.

As far as being ’stalker central’ or ‘creepy’, I have no idea where this is coming from. Facebook has always made it incredibly easy to find information about people, and the news feed does not make this any easier. Unless you are worried about your friends stalking you, things have not changed. And if that is in fact what worries you, just remove that creepy person from your friends and your problem is solved. People who you have not friended on facebook still can’t see any more information than you had allowed them to see in the past.

Update: Facebook responded.

The fact is that if you are on a social networking site of any kind, whether it be facebook, myspace, or any other one of the hundreds of simillar sites, you have freely surrendered some of your privacy. If you’re not comfortable with that, then you may want to rethink joining.

Welcome to the internet, I can see you.

Conference Call by Conference Call

So it seems that there are still people out there who do not know about Last.fm.

More than ten million times a day, Last.fm users “scrobble” their tracks to our servers, helping to collectively build the world’s largest social music platform.

Last.fm taps the wisdom of the crowds, leveraging each user’s musical profile to make personalised recommendations, connect users who share similar tastes, provide custom radio streams, and much more.

You can see my user page at last.fm/user/somjuan. If you’re interested by this service, sign up, and add me as a friend. I’m always interested in seeing what other people are listening to.
And if you’ve already signed up for Last.fm and haven’t yet added me as a friend, this is your time to do so.