Monday, May 29, 2006

More hockey predictions

Okay, in this round Edmonton will beat Anaheim in 5 games, while the Buffalo-Carolina series will go to at least 6.

Also, I haven’t updated here in awhile not because of a lack of interest, but because I’ve been dealing with some personal issues at home. I think I’m ready to start writing here again, so we’ll see how it goes.

Saturday, May 20, 2006

Things I was wrong about, part one of many

So it turns out that “sad bastard music” is actually a reference to High Fidelity, which surprised me when I was watching it last night.

Also, I still suck at predicting hockey playoffs. Given a bunch of advance knowledge (2 games played in each series I think), I predicted only one correct result. The lesson, obviously, is that I need to wait til series are at 3-0 to make predictions.

Wednesday, May 10, 2006

And If I Could Find My Way Back Home, Where Would I Go?


Say what you will about the silly name, the new Nintendo console will feature a re-release of Duck Hunt, which erases any doubts I had about its awesomeness.

Tuesday, May 09, 2006

Uniformed prognostication

Any hockey predictions I make should probably be ignored, since I always expect that the Canucks will win the Cup, and get frustrated every year.

But anyways, Ottawa will climb out its 0-2 hole to beat the Sabres in 7, while the Oilers, Avalanche, and Devils will all lose their series in 5 or 6 games.

Thursday, May 04, 2006

More Listening Commentary

Continuing from this entry, some additional thoughts on listening frequency charts.

1. It seems there might be some issues with autocorrelation going on in the data. For example, it’s not clear whether the high position of “Meadowlake Street” is due to me really liking the song, or just due to the fact that it follows “Sweet Illusions” on the album. But then “When Will You Come Back Home” is played more than either of those, and is the fourth track on the album. So who knows? Subjectively, I remember listening to those three songs as a block all the time last fall.

2. It also seems to me that “number of times a song is listened to” doesn’t (or shouldn’t be expected to) correlate exactly with how much I like a given song.

3. Man I’m a sucker for sad or slow music. Of the Top 20, only five or so are rockers. It could be that I tend to listen to a bunch of different rockers while only a few slow songs will really grab me. Or that I just like listening to “sad bastard” music, as Loring puts it.

4. A few albums I listened to obsessively last fall are heavily represented: Iron & Wine’s Our Endless Numbered Days, Ryan Adam’s Cold Roses, and the Iron & Wine / Calexico split EP In The Reins.

5. I can’t believe that when I saw Iron & Wine with Calexico, they played every single song from the EP except “History of Lovers”. What the fuck!

Wednesday, May 03, 2006

Doodads and Whatsits

I’m still playing around with the format of the blog, but it’s starting to come together a bit. I’ve added a stats counter at Site Meter, and I’ve hooked up a Last.fm account as well. Both are down to the right on the sidebar.

The idea of the last.fm counter is that it listens to what I’m playing on my computer and iPod, sends it to their website, and then formats it into a chart that gets displayed back here. I’m not too worried about privacy issues here, but more worried about what people will think when they see that I’ve already listened to “Margaritaville” twice this morning. Once it’s got a bit more data to work with, I think I’ll switch to a weekly chart, rather than a “just-played” chart.

One drawback is that the count is only starting from yesterday, so it’ll miss out on a decade and a half of listening. But it does work well for getting an idea of what I’m listening to these days in general. For the sake of comparison, I looked at the data from my local copy of iTunes. This data goes back to November ‘04, when I started working on this machine. Here are the Top 20 most-played tracks:


Tuesday, May 02, 2006

Pearl Jam, Pearl Jam

Pearl Jam’s new album, cunningly titled Pearl Jam, came out today. First listen report: whoa.

I also picked up the new Tool album (both albums were only $10 today), and I can report that it has goggles.

Also, I didn’t die connecting the barbecue.