Over at the First Crack Podcast, I ask Tim Quirk about the forthcoming Wonderlick album ‘Topless at the Arco Arena’, the pay-what-you-want models, and music’s changing landscape. [mp3]
Author Archives: Garrick van Buren
First Crack 120. Wonderlick’s Tim Quirk on Truth Through Music
I’ve been a fan of Tim Quirk’s music for 20 years – easy. The playful melancholy in throughout his songwriting continually resonates with me. When he announced the new Wonderlick album was in the works and available for ‘name-your-price’ pre-order – I jumped on the opportunity. When I started hearing about how successful the campaign …
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Garrick’s SXSW 2009 Showcasing Artists Picks
5 Stars Cable TV by Fol Chen Poppy beats and seductive vocals about doing absolutely nothing. Except watching cable tv. An prime example of the oft overlooked SlackerRock genre. Nothing At All by Madi Diaz Like chasing a butterflies through a field on a summer day. Winona by Totally Michael A love song to Winona …
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Kindle 2.0 USB Cable Died, Not Charging
My Kindle‘s been dead since yesterday. My initial thought was that maybe it no longer liked being charged from the USB hub. I plugged it into the wall and the charge light didn’t come on. Hmmm. Thankfully, it’s USB so I’ve got plenty of cables lying around to test. I grabbed the USB cable from …
DickensURL.com – Extra Short Stories
There’s lots of silly URL shorteners. Some of my favorites – not just because of their silliness, but because they offer some interesting potential; GiantURL – takes a regular URL and transforms it into a multi-line, unreadable, hash. Potentially, the information you’re sharing could be encoded into the hash, rather than redirected. Hmmm. what’s the …
Relevance Continually Trumps Timeliness
There’s lots of push lately in the tech community to chase the dragon of real-time. I do see real-time it most valuable during events that I’m not able to attend in person (the recent IgniteMpls event comes to mind immediately). Even then, there’s always delay. Each second delay brings an opportunity to filter for relevance. …
Goofy Side Projects
More Usable URLs: Twitter.com
URLs are consistently the least usable aspect of our interaction with web-based information services – which is terribly unfortunate considering their prominence in how we access, share, and interact with these services. With that in mind, let’s take a look at how Twitter’s URLs could be more usable – by either being more logical, more …
A Proposal for Shorter Google Maps URLs
I was adding a link to a Google map into my iCal and noticed Google is encouraging me to share the the map URLs in email and IM. But there’s a problem with the Google Maps URLs. They’re +/- 155 characters. Here’s the full URL: http://maps.google.com/maps?oe=utf-8&client=firefox-a&ie=UTF8&q=the+red+pepper,+plymouth,+mn&fb=1&split=1&gl=us&cid=1854680882426337660&li=lmd&z=14&iwloc=A This URL is neither short, nor easily memorable, nor …
How To Cache Highly Dynamic Data in Rails with Memcache – Part 3
In part 1 and part 2, I laid out my initial approaches on caching and performance in Cullect. While both of them pointed in the right direction, I realized I was caching the wrong stuff in the wrong way. Since then, I tried replicating the database – one db for writes, one for reads. Unfortunately, …
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