CNN.com reported today that musicians are finally standing up together to voice their concerns with net discrimination. RocktheNet.com has brought together lesser known musicians and indie labels to support net neutrality.
What is Net Neutrality? I’m glad you asked. To give a rough example: Imagine you go to a free (legal) music download website. You punch in your favorite independent artist and wait as their page loads. Funny… their download page is taking a little longer than you would expect for it to load… but lucky you, while your waiting, a pop-up shows its bubbly face and offers you a direct link to the latest *insert major label act here* single for free. It gets better… this major label song will download at double the speed of your indie artist’s tune! Essentially whats going on is that artists with a bit of financial backing are able to buy the faster bandwidth, advertising, profile data and service providers, in turn pushing the independent artist further down the totem pole.
Link: Musicians: Keep the Web neutral (CNN.com)
In the past year I’ve been exposed to a number of great websites/programs that you should definitely check out. I thought since I’ve got the blog back up and running, I would post 3 of them up and let you try them out for yourself. I wouldn’t have come across them if it wasn’t for LifeHacker.com, so please give them a visit as well.
– A search engine with a twist. While most search engines make a pile of money buy exposing YOU to advertising, GoodSearch takes 50% of its advertising revenue and donates it to the charity of your choice. All you do is punch in the URL, type in your search words, type in your charity and search away. Its powered by Yahoo, so you’ll get the same high quality search results you’re used to… and its good to get away from Google for a change.
– As their website puts it “Use the idle time on your computer (Windows, Mac, or Linux) to cure diseases, study global warming, discover pulsars, and do many other types of scientific research.” Its funded by UC Berkeley and allows you to choose what project your computer works on. Boinc uses your computer’s idle time to crunch numbers and do simple forms of analysis on projects in an area of research that you care about. It doesn’t slow down your computer and makes great use of all the times you accidentally leave it on. Works a treat on my Linux box.
– I just recently found out about LocalCooling.com. Yes, I do realize that it sits in conflict with Boinc, but it is good none the less. Download LocalCooling and watch as it reduces your computer’s energy consumption… really quite fascinating.
Thats it for now. I’m going to try and post links to interesting energy saving websites / software more often. If you have any sites that you’drecommend, please let me know.
OK. I’ve been just terrible at updating my blog, so I thought I’d start fresh with a new blog through WordPress. I’ve always been impressed with WordPress’ (is that right, or should it have an “s” after the “‘”?) templates and lack of advertising. I don’t know how I managed to convince myself that switching to WordPress would solve all my problems and that my blog would miraculously spit out postings once a week… but I did. I’ve decided that the key to keeping an up-to-date blog is small and frequent posts, so thats what I’m going to do. No pressure to write about every aspect of my life, just simple, concise posts. Realistically, I should just get a Twitter account and update my blog from my phone.
So… a quick rundown of last week. Went to my friend Sarah’s house warming, went out clubbing (haven’t been to a club in a long time) and had a few drinks (ok, more than a few).
My mom arrived on Tuesday and we had a great time exploring the Healesville Sanctuary, The FINA chamionships and the Melbourne Food & Wine Festival. It really was great having her visit and I wish she could’ve stayed longer. Unfortunately I didn’t have my camera and she took her camera home, so I’ll have to add photos later.
Right now its 7:54 pm and I’m still at the lab finishing up some experimental design. Its going to be a huge week. Hopefully I’ll have everything ready to go for participant testing by Friday. Off to dinner…
