The Gong Show

I’m off to a new apartment in less than a week. So long upper west side. I’ll miss the proximity to Columbia, but I’m off to greener pastures (and better pizza) down in the west village. My new WalkScore looks great.

But, of course, going off to a new apartment means I must deal with the dreaded “M” word: Murd-uhh, wait no… Moving! Sometimes it feels like murder. Danny should have wrote “gnivom” on the wall.

My father sent me my theme song for the next week of my life, which I thought I’d share with you all.

I vaguely remember a very relevant scene from a Woody Allen movie. I’m paraphrasing, but it goes something like this: A bunch of people, including Woody, are standing around a coffin at a funeral. One of the bereaved relatives says, “Oh, it’s so sad. What a tragedy.” To which, Woody responds, “It could be worse. He could be moving.”

I’ve found myself listening to a lot of Prefuse 73 lately. It’s amazing how versatile this music is for me. I can listen to in intensely and let myself become engrossed in it… but I can also just hang out with friends and let it chill in the background. It works in the gym, but also works while studying. The only time it doesn’t really work is on the subway (because there are too many quiet nuances that get drowned out by squealing subway breaks).

Prefuse 73 is actually a recording name for Scott Herren, who records under a few other names (each name carries a different tone for defining the project). The Prefuse 73 stuff is definitely my favorite. The music is often described as “glitch”… which just means, a constantly moving mix of some hip-hop/electronica/rock sampling. Another example of glitch would be Girl Talk (an artist I live-blogged while at his show).

The two albums I have are One Word Extinguisher and Surrounded by Silence. If you’ve never heard of Prefuse 73 before, I definitely recommend starting with One Word Extinguisher, but I think that Surrounded by Silence is very underrated, especially for awesome the hip hop samples. Surrounded by Silence is louder, and it earns its intensity.

Check out “Busy Signal” off of One Word Extinguisher. Prefuse 73 just passed through NYC on tour, and I really regret not going. I’m hooked; come join my addiction.

Whoa… Just found out that the last company I worked at, Homestead, is being acquired by Intuit. Homestead gave me a GREAT first job, and they were a really great group of people to work with. Congrats to everyone there; I hope they all made out well in the acquisition. Time to go dig out my stock certs to see if I own more than “decorative non-equity wallpaper!” :)

That quote is from my favorite Dilbert cartoon (from the series where Dogbert is a VC). I searched everywhere on the web, but I couldn’t find a copy… I’m guessing that Scott Adams is aggressively protecting his copyrights.

I have a lot to be thankful for over the past year, but one thing I’m thankful for that’s particularly relevant to this blog is my readers. So, thank you to everyone who reads this blog. It’s has been a lot of fun engaging with everyone here over the past year, and I’m looking forward to writing more and continuing the dialog.

This Broken Social Scene song is an excellent way to reflect on that past year. I went to see them in concert, and they ended with this song in a sing-along with the audience. It’s called “When It Begins” and it’s the final song on Spirit If…

There’s been much discussion about the exchange over Facebook Beacon privacy issues and MoveOn.org’s stance on the issue. First off, kudos to @caroliiine for great coverage on the subject coverage.

I don’t want to be a broken record here; I want to talk about this is an end-user. I had my first “Beacon-ing” yesterday when I bought tickets for my family to go see No Country for Old Men. I used Fandango, and upon hitting the final page of checkout (the print-your-ticket page), a little toast popped up in the bottom right corner of my browser that told me that Facebook was going to tell all my friends I had just bought tix on Fandango to see No Country of Old Men. They gave me the option to opt-out. But, since I wasn’t really sure what was going on in the first place, I didn’t know what I was opting in or out of…

Overall, I didn’t get any end-user benefit by Facebook broadcasting my Fandango purchase. I didn’t really want to spam my friends that I was going to see No Country for Old Men. More importantly, I didn’t want to advertise for Fandango in the process. I don’t like Fandango; and I’m not a fan of using a online broker to buy a movie ticket, but in New York it’s a necessary evil.

So, as a user, I think this feature should be opt-in by default, not opt-out. I think MoveOn’s getting a little carried away (don’t think have an election to worry about?), but guts of their opinion is correct:

“The bottom line,” MoveOn spokesman Adam Green said in an interview with CNET News.com, “is that no Facebook user should have their private purchases online posted for the entire world to see without their explicit opted-in permission.” [from Caroline's post]

I clicked on my first Facebook ad today. While I was playing Scrabulous (if you’re a Scrabulous fan on Facebook, lets play! I’m hooked.) I saw an add for “unexpected gifts” from Oxfam America. My mother has an active role in Oxfam America, plus I’m interested in new models leveraging digital media for philanthropic lending and giving (Kiva, Donor’s Choose, etc), so I clicked on the ad.

It’s actually pretty cool. It’s called Oxfam America Unwrapped, and it allows you to give a friend/family-member/loved-one/etc a sheep or a can of worm or something else as a gift. The item given goes to a a village in need in a third world country. And all the gifts fit into Oxfam’s higher mission in line with the old saying: “give a man a fish and it feeds him for one day, but teach a man to fish and it feeds him for the rest of his life.”

I think Oxfam America is missing a larger opportunity though. They should tap into the virtual gifting market, except the gifting should only be virtual to the gifter and giftee, and the physical item gifted goes to a third-world village.

For example, on Oxfam America Unwrapped I can gift a sheep to a friend, but what the friend actually receives is a physical card. Perhaps the recipient will put the card on display in their house, and a few house guests will see it. That’s the maximum virality of this idea in its current implementation. Instead, I propose that the friend receive a digital representation of the gift too, on Facebook or in a widget that’s embeddable on a blog. Then, if I were the recipient, all of the people that read my blog or see my facebook profile would see my gift, thus, significantly increasing the viral distribution coefficient.

The Causes app on Facebook should be doing this too. I hope they’re already on it.

Sorry for all the dead air lately on this blog. It will get better soon. While you wait, why not watch a funny, viral video? Here’s a quick reblog of a great take on the writer’s strike:

Digression: Hey, striking stagehands and fat-cat theater owners! Get back to the bargaining table! I have tickets for Stoppard’s Rock n’ Roll next week that are currently “canceled.” Bumming me out.

On Friday, I used GOOG-411 to find the address of an Indian restaurant I was going to in the upper west side. GOOG-411 failed me before I eventually stumbled on the restaurant. But, in spite of Google’s failure, I was really curious about the “holding” noise that GOOG-411 makes while it’s performing a search. It’s actually pretty interesting because it varies so widely. Sometimes it’s a quick “beep-boop,” and other times its a long chain of similar, but not identical, looping “biddy-biddy-boops.” It sounds like a friendlier version of the computer out of War Games.

Anyway, thanks GigaOm for reading my mind and satisfying my curiosity by telling us all about the origin of the “biddy-biddy-boop” noise.

FreeRice is amazing. Improve your vocabulary and help cure world hunger at the same time. I hope the business is sustainable… I wonder what percentages of the ad revenue go to site maintenance vs actually buying rice? Regardless, thanks for the vocab less FreeRice! I wish every game left me feeling like this.