Girl Talk started the set in a full suit (coat, tie, vest, and all the trimmings) and ended in only boxers, screaming to Nirvana while crowd surfing and choking himself with his mic cable. And he was the first opening act… he danced like a whirlwind, tearing up the stage with audacious spasms. [...]

My blog has been quiet lately because I typically write at night, but I’m in the middle of a concert binge. I went to Clap Your Hands Say Yeah (Architecture in Helsinki and Takka Takka opened) yesterday at Summerstage in the park. I’m going to Diplo, Girl Talk, and Peeping Tom tonight at [...]

At Stanford I heard a guest lecture by Danah Boyd on the failures and lessons learned from Friendster about social networks in general. The important points from the talk are captured in this paper. This guest lecture was easily one of the best I heard during my undergrad career.
The reason why I bring [...]

A number of people asked me why did you name your blog “The Gong Show?”
My answer is contained within the awesomeness of this video:

(A link for people reading in an aggregator that doesn’t display YouTube embeds)

My commute from home to work is 30 minutes. A few of my friends around the city have commutes closer to 3 minutes, but I don’t envy them. I treat my commute as a buffer between work and home where I can chill with my iPod and people-watch in the subway.  Therefore, my [...]

The lack of iPod scrobbling support “out of the box” in Last.fm is killing me. So, when Fred’s commentors mentioned a way to enable scrobbling on an iPod, it caught my attention.
Scrobbling in Last.fm is virtually useless to me because I listen to all my music on my iPod, not my computer. Doesn’t everyone have [...]

There has been a lot of commotion on the web today over TechMeme’s new advertising. Michael Arrington’s headline goes so far as to say, “TechMeme Invents New Kind of Advertising”
How is TechMeme’s new ad model so revolutionary? I don’t see it.  It’s a section of real-estate on a page reserved for ads. Granted, ads in [...]

By Jared Tarbell
Description doesn’t do this site justice… just go: Complexification.net.
The site is by Jared Tarbell of Etsy.
Update: Thanks to David Chen for pointing out that I completely blew the URL and all the links. That’s the last time I write URLs by hand… only copy and pasting for me from now [...]

The Serena Maneesh self-titled album has been in heavy rotation on my iPod for about nine monthes, and I don’t see my listening waning anytime soon.
They’re like an edgy My Bloody Valentine with more variety in instrumentation and less looping.  I wouldn’t dare compare Serena Maneesh to Loveless, but they definitely beat Kevin Shield’s latest [...]