lockbox

pattern #4

pandora, last.fm, blip.fm

a while ago my friend sent me an email to check out pandora. later that day i checked his moblog, and there was a post that looked just like the email i received "check out pandora". later on i logged into facebook and my buddy had posted "check out pandora".

and that's around the time i realized that some automated pandora promotion tricked him into spamming every single contact in his address book.

his official twitter comment: "wow, pandora, really? you are the worst..."

now i've never really jumped on the pandora bandwagon, in fact i somewhat dislike pandora. up until recently i've been a last.fm diehard. okay, not so much a diehard. but i've been scrobbling with last.fm for quite a while.

you can check out my recently played tracks, as well as artists, albums, and songs categorized by playcount. tracking that information is pretty interesting and effortless with last.fm [my stats]. as you can tell i'm pretty into tegan and sara.

there's a pretty good comparison of the two music discovery services previously mentioned located in this post. it seems that there's always a pro and a con, nothing completely does the job 100% perfect each time in each area. welcome to the real world mr.

honorable mention goes out to blip.fm:

think twitter, but every tweet requires a song attached to it. you wanna say "i had a crappy monday" you better attach a song to it. the songs are pulled from all over the net, not uploaded by you (or other users). it's an interesting perspective, i've started my own page, for those who can't get enough of my inactive twittering or want to hear what i deem worthy to 'blip'.

the 61 is also a different new music discovery site. the think i like most about this site is that no matter where you click (with the exception of the pause button) the song you are listening to continues to play. most other sites don't support this.

there's so much music, and now there's so many ways to consume it. i'm currently in process of performing an analysis of how i consume music. document the flow, assess, and then streamline for maximum efficiency. that's another post.

pattern #3

kneeling tree

gourmet sabzi

today is attempt one at a staple persian dish. granted they didn't use a slow cooker to make this dish back in the day, i'm trying to be as efficient as possible.

the above picture is taken at the point where i let everything cook together for hours and hours. ~10mins before i'm ready to feast, add the kidney beans and i'm done.

well kids, you guessed it - touchdown, homerun, he-could-go-all-the-way!

the dish came out great, i don't think i'll ever pay for this dish again. come to think of it, i've paid for this dish 4-5 times in my life, so it's not really as life changing as i am trying to make it appear.

pattern #2

pattern #1

my first attempt at drawing a pattern. a 2" by 2" square that i filled in, then photocopied 4 times and put it together to see how it looked.

pi

inspired by the number pi and the song 'deserter' by matthew dear.

bring a friend to work day

i feel like i know my friends fairly well. i know their likes, dislikes, dating history, fears, hopes, shoe sizes, top three most embarrassing moments and more. but my friends lead a double life. matter of fact i lead a double life as well. i've touched upon this topic before, the 'work' personality and the 'life' personality.

thing is, i only see the 'life' personalities of my friends. technically i've worked with a few friends, but a misguided startup company environment doesn't necessarily bring out the professionals in all of us i'm going to discount that experience. things would have been very different if that same group of friends worked at a company of 2,000 people or more that's established (and actually generates revenue).

granted the white collar environment isn't too exciting. a cube is a cube, an office is an office, if you've eaten at one cafeteria you've eaten at them all. but i find it fascinating to see what my friends do when they are out of my presence and at in the real world earning cold hard cash.

i'd be thoroughly entertained to see what my friend's workspaces look like, where they spend time heating up their lunches, what meetings do they participate in, who are their allied or enemy coworkers and how they deal with them.

i'd love to have a 'bring your friend to work' day, and be able to shadow my friends to experience this other life that they lead 5 days a week. though, lately i have many friends who only lead the life i know. i blame the current economic climate, there's no way my childhood friends have grown up to be slackers.

i also have nurse friends, i do not have the stomach to see everything that they do. conditional bring your friend to work day it is!