Grooveshark wins for now; here's the "Confessions of a Sock Monkey" playlist and here is the accompanying story. I might have liked to have the Sinead O'Connor version of "Why don't you do right?", the Peggy Lee version of "You'd be so nice to come home to" and especially the Rosey Grier version of "It's all right to cry", but close enough.
So far I'm fairly impressed with Grooveshark's selection, but their interface feels a bit clownish with the noisy ads.
I also hate their search engine; it throws up a lot of chaff when searching for a track, and does things like rank "Where the Hood At" and "Ride Wit Me" as more relevant to a search for "You'd be so nice to come home to" than several versions of the actual search term. This means I almost always need to click the "See all" button. All in all, not nearly as satisfying a user experience as putting together the mflow "Confessions of a Sock Money" playlist, even if mflow came up a few tracks short. Mflow's search field to "Quickly add tracks to this playlist" especially kicks the ass of anything Grooveshark had to offer.
So, I want mflow's interface and Grooveshark's database.
Been playing with some Chrome apps. A friend recommend We Are Hunted, but while I like the idea of having a "radio" that plays through new music, I had to keep stopping what I was doing to skip to the next song, and at the end of the day, I had about 4 songs marked that I kinda sorta liked. So I went hunting through the music section of the Chrome apps store, and Mflow was highly recommended.
The search isn't bad; it starts showing results as you type and separates the results into artists, albums, users, and tags (sadly, not tracks here, though if you do search by a particular song name, the search results do show a tracks section). The track listings also helpfully show which album the track is pulled from, which is important when you want the version of "Pressure" from the Nylon Curtain and not the one on the Greatest Hits album.
I'm having fun with this, because I can check out holes in our music collection, and confirm things like:
- we're good to go with Prolonging the Magic and don't need any other Cake albums
- we're good with just the first two Cranberries albums
- same with Ben Folds Five's second and third albums and can skip his solo career, though I might be convinced that we need "Rockin' the Suburbs"
Sure, previewing music online isn't new, but my prior experience with places like last.fm gave me the impression that most places just gave you clips, and while you can hear full tracks youtube, it's less convenient to listen to whole albums (and I'm still a bit of a sucker for albums).
What I'm not entirely satisfied with on mflow is the selection. It occurred to me that creating and sharing mflow playlists would be a good replacement for mix tapes; however, until they have more Shelleyan Orphan, that won't work for us.
So what other services are out there? Here's another situation where Wikipedia is really helpful, with a list of online music databases, and in particular the streaming services. Of these, I need to check out Grooveshark, and maybe I'll check last.fm again, but the rest seem like they won't suit my needs. The one that allows me to share "Confessions of a Sock Monkey" as a cloud mixtape soonest wins.
...of course, there's also Mixcloud, which would allow me to put in my own audio -- very helpful when the mix includes a sample from Mahler's 5th, or if I want to read the script as part of the mix. I'll have to look into that, too.
Google and Chrome have killed my once compulsive bookmarking. Our Firefox bookmarks have been accumulating since before we moved to Vermont; since Sarah no longer uses the desktop for her primary web browsing, she's given me license to clean house. Some of the things I bookmarked were interesting, like my high school district website... as if I would have difficult finding it if I needed it.
At any rate, they had linked to this Newsweek ranked list of the top 500 public high schools in the U.S. (though you can't tell that from the title), because OTHS made the list. I don't know if I have the time or energy to properly criticize this kind of endeavor, but while they seem to mostly be interested in the "best" *college prep* high schools (as determined by a narrow band of statistics), at the same time they don't account for where kids are going to college (presumably Newsweek's definition of "best" would rank a HS that sent more kids to 4-year colleges than one that sent more kids to 2-year colleges; look at the NJ Monthly ranking to see how the 2-vs.4-year college matriculation rates vary wildly across schools). This is like the bad old days of baseball statistics where the Cy Young award was generally simply given to the pitcher with the most wins, with strikeouts and ERA as a tiebreaker, with little regard for factors like run support or BABIP.
So, the top 25 of Newsweek's rankings is littered with magnet schools, and all I can think is: Really? No kidding? When you get to pick which kids go to your school, your students all perform well? Wow. That's about as insightful as putting Harvard and Princeton at the top of U.S. News and World Report's list. Get me some pre- and post-testing and we'll see how each school is really performing.
There's also no idea here of what the difference is between ranks. There's this "Newsweek Score", and presumably there's very little difference between 2.874 and 2.807, but how much better is 2.8 vs 1.8? And are we supposed to be whipped into some sort of competitive frenzy by this? Where did OTHS place, anyway? Somewhere in the 400's? Yup, just ahead of... rival school Red Bank.
Woooowooooo! SUCK IT, Red Bank! In your face! ;-)
I've put the Newsweek rankings data in a spreadsheet on Google Docs, so if you're interested, you can analyze it however you like, but I'm afraid it's mostly GIGO.
Twelve years together; that's the bathroom anniversary, right? No, technically it's silk/linen? Well, close enough.
We just hit 10 years living at our current address -- it was the day Irene hit VT, and while there wasn't much at all in Burlington beyond some wind and rain (no flooding, no power loss) we were still distracted enough to have forgotten about having a minor celebration of the date. Also, technically, I didn't start living here for another four weeks, because I was finishing development work on SPSS 11 before moving.
