Ex temporaneous thinkings on Mr. Big.

originally i like the trump show apprentice.  i had no intention of watching it this season… but my wife did.  i am one of the easily distracted people that it is trendy to be these days…. the sopisticates call it multitasking but we all know a brain cant really multitask, instead it adhds and gets just pieces of what is going on… needfultosay i ended up seeing most of the season.

mr big really turns out to be mr small or mr afraid of litigation.  the minute that rebecca broke her leg, and my opinion was that she had to go bec she didnt shine and for not having the insite to realize how immature toral was…. i turned to my wife and said ’she will make it to the end, trump cant get rid of her after she hurt herself on one of his event.. it would be a lawyers dream.  i must admit i smile to myself and my wife as they came down to the final two and there was much lesser qualified rebecca.  i thought i was done, or atleast mr big was done.  i was right. but i was undone. i literally fell out of my chair when he offered them both to win and gave her a job.  mr big turns mr flake. wtf. this is more telling then ever book you will ever read by or about him.  doesnt this go against the premise of the show. isnt it the apprentice.  good for randall. he handled that perfectly.  nice way to steal the most qualified apprentices 10 seconds of fame by suggesting he share it with the least worthy opponent just bec she broke her leg.

since then i have bought industrial strength safety ear protection, think of what those guys on those ginormous catepillar machines wear, at the local lowes.  i will be donning them for the next season if my wife decides to watch.

now i am done.

Every #1 song ever to appear on Billboard Top 100 squashed into one long song

R. Luke DuBois has created an interesting piece of music out of the 857 songs that have appeared at the top of the charts in the Billboard Top 100 since 1958. The result, called “Billboard,” is 37 minutes long.

Billboard allows you to get a birds-eye view of the Billboard Hot 100 by listening to all the #1 singles from 1958 through the millenium using a technique I’ve been working on for a couple of years called time-lapse phonography. The 857 songs used to make the piece are analyzed digitally and a spectral average is then derived from the entire song. Just as a long camera exposure will fuse motion into a single image, spectral averaging allows us to look at the average sonority of a piece of music, however long, giving a sort of average timbre of a piece. This gives us a sense of the average key and register of the song, as well as some clues about the production values present at the time the record was made; for example, the improvements in home stereo equipment over the past fifty years, as well as the gradual replacement of (relatively low-fidelity) AM radio with FM broadcasting has had an impact on how records are mixed… drums and bass lines gradually become louder as you approach the present, increasing the amount of spectral noise and low tones in our averages.

Link (Thanks, Arwen!)

blogs podcasts and military and medical

I have been heavily into podcasts for the past 8 months or so. there is a lot of junk out there but there is some good stuff tooo…. ie TWiT. some of the so called bad stuff you began to enjoy as you become part of that community, think following a soap or tv show.

Blogwise, the things that interest me are physicians blogs talking about dealing with some of the variations of patients out there. www.medgadget.com has a best of 2005 lisitng. Also check www.corante.com/pipeline (In The Pipeline) www.medpundit.blogspot.com (Medpundit) www.gruntdoc.com (GruntDoc) www.docnotes.net (Family Medicine Notes).

Additionally, milblogs are interesting. especially in light of the war, guys blogging from overseas. this caught my attention as some of them were disciplined for this. others keep journals and transcribe them when they get back. some are upset, some are telling life to their loved ones at home and some are trying their own brand of journalism from their point of view and not from the horrific point of view of NBC (for one). daily brief, mudville, blackfive et al.
Best yet are some military medical blogs, ex military guys. gruntdoc comes to mind, check it out.

i should post my rss opml file somewhere, and or my bookmarks to del.ico.us or the like (once I clean them up, thanks am-deadlink).

rocket boom

Hey.  Anybody into vlog or video blogging?  i am a tivo beta tester and just found rocketboom.  this is the vlog pioneer and just may set the standard especially now that tivo picked her up.

check it out, it is worth the 3-4 minutes

www.rocketboom.com

Poll: More Americans prefer ‘Merry Christmas’ greeting

http://www.cnn.com/2005/US/

Wish List

Click here for my wish list

Newest gadget

I suppose this wouldnt interest you unless you were a runner…

or atleast a GPS junkie.

Check this out. You can find them cheaper these days.

http://www.garmin.com/products/forerunner101

Second life?

Anyone been there. Tried this. Check out the links below. The New York Times wrote it up and when copying the url I noticed it is in the travel section.

I was a beta tester for SimsOnline. Sounds sim-ilar. To me that was a big chat room.

http://travel2.nytimes.com/2005/10/28/travel/escapes/2

http://www.wired.com/news/culture/0,1284,69600,00.html?tw=wn_tophead_3
Second Life, for instance, has its own currency that is convertible to U.S. dollars at a fluctuating exchange rate. Users can buy the virtual currency using their credit cards, or sell it and get real dollars via checks or PayPal transfers.

Its 60,000 users trade $2 million a month, making its economy about the same size as that of the South Pacific island of Tuvalu. That’s small, but large enough that it supports about 100 virtual jobs, according to Philip Rosedale, chief executive of Linden Research Inc., which created Second Life. Some design virtual buildings, others design schemes of movement that make virtual bodies dance or perform other complex actions. There’s even a virtual journalist, though he’s employed by Linden Research.

Edward Castronova, an economist at Indiana University, estimates that real-money trading surrounding virtual worlds is at least $100 million this year, and probably many times that.

more click here city bought land to see how residents liked it in real life?! 

Beginning this week, a member of the Queens Community Board, Thomas Lowenhaupt, will take prototypes of parks and post 3-D models of them on the island for his neighbors to check out and give their comments

Coke to launch coffee-infused Coke Blak [Yahoo]

Is it any wonder Coca-Cola Blak, a combination of Coke Classic and coffee extracts, will be launched in Europe first? As much as we love our Starbucks here in the US, it probably makes sense that it would debut in France, since the French take their coffee beans a bit more seriously. The drink, which is mid-calorie kind of like the failed Coca-Cola 2, was initially launched in April 2004 and contains less sugar and carbs than regular soda. How much it will actually taste like coffee is still being tweaked, but the US should see Coke Blak sometime in 2006. Though I have a feeling it may go the way of Tab real soon.

Coke to launch coffee-infused Coke Blak [Yahoo]

You’ve got mail, and maybe gonorrhea

New sites are designed to help people tell sexual partners–anonymously, if they wish–to get tested for STDs.