An Apple a day keeps Microsoft away...

Hey hey hey! Just doing a mini-post from work, a habit which I could possibly develop if workload is low, but anyways, here was me saying I would blog more, and oh crap! we're already a month down of 2008. My friend Adam has decided to go on a solo
holiday to Amsterdam, and he's documenting his travel adventures here, so go check that out, it's got lots of lovely pictures (which can be enlargened oh yes!) and it's well written, but I've got a slight bias there.

Anyways, Adam was going through selling a lot of his stuff, and naturally being one of his good friends, I got first dibs on some of the stuff. I got a few games, Halo 3 legendary edition (yes, the one with the helmet! :D) and the ultimate amongst the list is the Mac Mini. Slightly embarassingly I have not properly set it up, but what began with mere curiousity to the Apple approach, is slowing becoming fanboy status of the sliding scale. I'm not there yet, but I would only keep Windows for games and really the only games I stick on my PC have been WoW and the football manager series, and it is possible to get Mac versions for those, and if that's not enough, thanks to the Macs being Intel-based, it's much much easier to get Windows apps or indeed Windows to run natively without any hacky emulators and the like.

I am slowly going to make the transistion. Although not really an Apple product as such, but around the same time, I've been checking out some podcasts. It kinda started out with ExtraLife Radio (please check out this guy he is super talented, so much so a part of me resents him) and having that play whilst I've been working through the tiresome later stages of the career in Forza 2. Oh yes, please check out the rest of the site, the web comic he makes is absolutely pr0, I stumbled on it thanks to the heavy WoW content much earlier on, but basically it's a geeky comic, so win!
This led me to check out iTunes, again with the Mac influence (I've tried it before and found it rather clunky compared to Winamp). Anyways, I will eventually get an iPod classic (I know, too many Apple products), so it's good for me to get familiar, make sure all my music is added etc. Anyways, I have to say that using the iTunes store to find podcasts is awesome, so I've added all my old subscriptions and a couple new ones, like the Jonathan Ross one which I still need to check out.

I also took this opportunity to check out the diggnation podcast which is really really good. I've got the HD one so I can enjoy it in all it's lovelyness through the 360. Anyways, it's basically two guys (which actually work for digg I later discovered) that have a chat on a couch over some popualr digg stories drinking beer. It doesn't sound much as a concept, but it's pretty godamn entertaining, and the two boucne off each other really well. It's so good in fact, I've downloaded some of the back catalogue as I really don't mind the chat about old stories such as the Halo 3 4 player online coop announcement etc etc. Yeah so check it out, I did it and think it's awesome.

All this podcasting stuff got me thinking that maybe I could knock one together, just have it be a light-hearted topical chat/rant show. From my limited past experience it is best to have 2 contributors, just 1 and it's just a monologue, not that great, any more, and there's just words everywhere. So, I'm appealing to the intermawebs to see if someone would like to be a co-presenter of some kind. Scott Johnson of Extralife seems to simply record his skype conversations, so it wouldn't be too hard to get up and running, and plus it would mean that I would be posting to here more often, so it's all good. Comment me up and that would be cool.

Anyways, posting in my lunch hour when I really should be lunching.
Take it easy

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Last.fm update - 20,000 songs yay!

Hey peeps, I have recently reached a landmark on last.fm music profile. Yep, I've past the 20000 song mark so I thought I'd take a quick look at how my charts are doing and make a blog out of it.

I think I remember mentioning in a previous blog when I hit the 10000 song mark and the artists at the top haven't changed much since. Yep, Coheed and Cambria still grace the top spot by a healthy distance, which is probably fair they are probs my fave band, and statistics prove this lol. I remember at the last milestone, Matthew Good Band were higher, once holding 2nd, but they've dropped down a few.

Checking my weekly charts now and again, I am quite proud that I can boast 100+ artists in some weeks, and well that does mean that the not-quote-so-popular artists grow at about the same rate and so there aren't too many fast climbers.

I have been listening to a crap load of MCS and Sparta, or at least what I thought was a crapload, but they currently sit in positions 31 and 28 respectively.

Some that I am suprised are still up there are the likes of bands like Bad Religion, but that is only because I have pretty much their entire discography and well some songs of theirs get played on my huge "All Music" random playlist that I feed winamp with.

The "Top Tracks" chart I was convinced was bugged as songs like Hundred Reasons' No Pretending and Coheed's The Suffering were up there pretty much since I signed up for last.fm and the chart hasn't really changed that much (again I think it's the same songs getting played at the same rate). Anyways, while I listened to the commentary to the playoff final featuring Shrewsbury (they lost sadly :() I decided to loop a small song and see what happens. 42 plays of Von Bondies' Going Down, and I can now confirm that the chart is working, like it always has been, no doubt lol. Yep, that song now sits in third in my all time top tracks (on last.fm).

Contrary to the disappointment of MCS and Sparta's poor performance in the charts, if the rolling charts are taken a look at - genius idea - it turns out those artists are very close to the top. When I discovered the Juliana Theory, their stuff got some heavy play and that has resulted in them lying in 12th.

Last.fm is a great idea, but one of the few criticisms I have is that the lists aren't weighted with how much material you have of a particular artist. Now this can't be implemented using the current online method, but bands like Bad Religion, Led Zeppelin, Iron Maiden etc are so high simply through attrition rather than geniune plays - don't get me wrong these artists have a load of good songs, just that sometimes the less-favourable songs get played cos they crop up more on the random playlist, simply due to the greater number of songs that belong to a particular artist. The idea of weighted lists is something I'd like to do in my own little music player if it ever gets off the ground.


Looking forward to the next milestone whichever I decide, whether it be 30000, or I wait till 50000. I'd like to think I could possible hit 50000 by the end of the year, and with my music collection growing and growing we'll see if Coheed will ever be knocked off the top spot. My music collection stands at about 40Gig atm, probably half of it I know pretty well and will listen to it comfortably, rather than making the effort of checking out a new artist etc.

I've just got winamp to add up all the songs and here are the results (lol):
I have 9783 songs (damn so close to 10G), which taking the track lengths makes a total length of 652 hours 3 minutes 55 seconds. That works out at just over 27 and a half days. Wow! I didn't realise it was that much. Ok, challenge to the masses, who wants to spend the entire of next February listening to every last song in my possession.

I have just under half of those songs of my mp3 player, and I may be slightly bragging that I can pretty much recognise them from the first few seconds of play - maybe someone would like to challenge me on that lol.

It blows my brain, I may have trouble sleeping, what with comprehending how music that is :S
Take it easy
J-Man.

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