Grant Cerny

I built this igloo yesterday afternoon. Unfortunately because the rain was coming on, I didn’t get my real camera out and I only got this pic with a Blackberry.

Grant's Igloo, took 2 hours to build.

Then it rained all day today. What a terrible day weather-wise for the day after Christmas. The kids had been planning to play Eskimo Family, or Russian Tea Party again, in that igloo. But no, we were indoors all day while the Igloo slowly melted away, but to its credit (and to the credit of its craftsman), it still hasn’t actually fallen, it’s just a withered, low-weight skeleton of its former might. Maybe this is the way to create featherlight igloos. OK, enough futurism. Here is the withered igloo.

It still holds up, but barely. Surely signs of excellent craftsmanship.

I may post future updates on the demise of the Igloo of Christmas Day 2009, in subsequent updates to this post. Which I’m sure would be very well appreciated by the igloo-spotters amongst you.

Fancy post title – simple update. Maeve started crawling last week. Right now she’s making her first laps around the kitchen island, just like the “Circus Maximus” of Ella & Isabel fame. It must be wondrous to discover that the world is not only so colorful, but stretches out so many places you can go! Her world will keep getting bigger every day now… just like she’s getting bigger. That kid is turning into a little tank! Go, tank, go!

Today Dan Kantor and I attended the Music Hackday Boston, at the Microsoft NERD (New England Research & Development Center) in Boston. What a day. I was only able to attend for the one day, while Dan is here the whole weekend.

I caught up on everything that’s going on with Playdar, the open music-resolver technology started by Richard Jones, founder/former CTO of Last.fm, and pretty widely embraced by the whole music hacking / music product innovation community, whereby running a lightweight server on a local host can take any given bunch of requested music tracks, and find local or networked matching media files, to “resolve” or find sources for, the music in question. Given that we were all on the same local net and running the playdar localhosts, it was fascinating to see how hacking devs (and me, a has-been dev, now product evangelist) created new ways to express music discovery within and amongst our local media collective, as well as the many extensions offered by the EchoNest APIs, and other sources. I am loathe to have to head home in the morning, since the demos of everyone’s hacks are being reviewed Sunday. But Dan will catch me up on his hack and all the rest.

The very long day resulted in a great deal of critical thought and creative energy for me. I came up with a number of ideas regarding Music Influencer extensions, which I think can result in an ecosystem of incentive for platform providers (such as EchoNest), integrating developers, catalog-holding providers (such as Last.fm), music publishers, labels and artists themselves. The thrashing of the music industry will be solved, one way or the other, in the upcoming few years, as labels and artists regain equlibrium in the new value chain, and it’s likely that the resolvers like Playdar and the platforms like EchoNest are positioned to offer the mediating layer which properties on all levels of the chain can utilize to restore playfulness, fun, extensible openness and scale to Music in the new, networked, real-time web world.

We ended up at Jimmy D’s in Davis Square, at the “EchoNestival”, a party thrown by the EchoNest sponsors, where we three acts played, and got progressively more intense and awesome – Faces on Film, The Bodega Girls, and EL – P. I have at least three new albums to buy after tonight’s lineup, that’s for certain.

Many thanks to Microsoft, the EchoNest and other givers in making today’s hackday (and tomorrow’s which I will miss) a great success.

It was also great to meet Paul Lamere, Tristan Harris and Brian Whitman from the EchoNest, as well as to catch up with Jason Herskowitz, and to meet Lucas Gonze and get philosophical about how real-time, space-erased data availability can modify and multiply the progress of cultural and psychological evolution.

I look forward to reviewing the results of Sunday’s hack presentation demos.

I don’t often get around to writing about music, and that’s probably indicative of how long I have to listen to it. But I’m finally getting around to the new Yeah Yeah Yeahs and I LOVE it. Alternatively jammin and strong, then slow and evocative, but always VERY full of sound. Well done. Strong recommend.

http://www.yeahyeahyeahs.com/itsblitz/

Have you ever heard a song in a dream?  I did, last week.  And it had the best sound I’d ever heard.  I’ve asked a few people who remember dreams, if they ever remembered hearing music in their dream.  I didn’t get anyone who remembered.

Dreamtime.  I was a hundred feet or so above a far-spreading ocean panorama as the day neared sunset, and I was riding some sort of combination flying-saucer / jetski.  I was on the right side of the craft, and a flight partner was on the left.  We held on with some kind of synthetic tether, and flew through the air.  It was warm.

Suddenly, music started playing everywhere.  It was “Dakota” by the Stereophonics, and the sound surrounded me.  I was consciously quizzical about it.  I had not consciously identified that this was a dream, but it still seemed very unusual, much more unusual to me than flying a saucer jetski.

I looked over at my flight partner and he smiled and nodded his head, and we turned our nose down toward the ocean.  We dove and dove and dove as the music played on, in better sound than Dolby or THX or Dick Burwen ever dreamed of.

Then we hit the water, and our craft continued to dozens of feet beneath the surface.  We could breathe, and the water was clear, although dark in the increasingly setting sun.  Dolphins sported around us.  We were exploring a new world, and the Stereophonics played on the best stereo ever heard.

>> Play “Dakota” by the Stereophonics.  (Note:  this song is also in my Streampad playlist, but you can play it immediately (and once only for free) with the Lala player here.

The sisters having fun with milk bubbles…

Earlier this week Mark Zuckerberg posted his status (FB status presumably stating “Spotify is so good” and the whole digital music space thumped with billion-dollar bass 808s.

While we all look forward to what Facebook will be doing with Spotify as Spotify works on its US domestic licensing (which prevents the US public at large from accessing the increasingly-coveted product, as the EU-based public has for some time enjoyed,  ad-supported or premium ad-free), the music internets went into high BPMs after Mark issued his vote of approval.

So there is a madding crowd for Spotify suddenness, and US access is in high demand.   Luckily, I have had Spotify beta for several months now, and liked it a lot when I first tried it, but later got distracted and went back to my mainstreams:  iTunes, iPod, SHOUTcast, and Streampad music blog discovery mostly on Tumbleblogs.   But Spotify is indeed good… first of all, it’s good software.  The UX is very fine.  The graphic design is like a strong, heavy, and ultimately winning weapon.   Most importantly everything links and is draggable.

What’s missing?  I guess I am not quite satisfied with the Now Playing experience during discovery, and the fact that Radio basically means “lean back listening” these days not “Radio”, but I will always find something missing in anything, while still being positively impressed.

The largest “miss” which is probably next on their product backlog is social services.  Beyond Last.FM scrobbling, there is no social integration.  For example right now I am listening to David Guetta, album One Love, track David Guetta – On The Dancefloor (Featuring Will I Am & Apl De Ap) .  I want to be dancing in a club, not in my kitchen geeking out with headphones while my family enters dreamland.  I’m in a zone.  I want to share with my peeps and maybe find out who else is in the zone, with Guetta or maybe the same genre or maybe even on the same downbeat in the same BPM.  Why not?  Why couldn’t I find friends who are on the same beat?  There is no reason why not with the technology we have.  Once that’s done we could mash up the tunes against the synchronized beats.  But… I digress.

Spotify currently has no social integration.  I’m not talking its own SocialNet like Last.FM approaches, but just the social services such as FriendFeed or Ping.fm or other innumerable offerings out there.  I’m sure that’s coming soon… unless a Facebook deal shutters out the openness.  I hope that won’t happen.

I hope that Spotify will emerge as a surviving player amongst the corpse-ridden battlegrounds of digital music knights:   Napster (not dead, just different) Total Music (dead), Rhapsody (not at all dead, just bleeding), and all the playlisters including Muxtape (dead), Seeqpod (pretty darn dead!), and about six others I could remember if I rifled around in my email.  I guess 8Tracks is still gaining momentum and that’s great – good for David Porter and his crew, making me think the only playlisting model that’s sustainable is for the brand to pay royalties at lowest rate possible and make the play-time such a great experience that it can be adjacently monetized, probably by the context adjacency of other user value.

This post started off as a tweet.  I guess I had way more than 140 characters in me.  Thankfully I do have a blog for these rare occasions.  Now heading back to ‘da club!

I visited Yosemite National Park as a sixteen-year-old in 1989 with my parents and one of my brothers.   I was awestruck and filed Yosemite as a “must return” location for future travels and generations.

This was reminded to me today when I read a poignant observance in the Bob Lefsetz Letter, which really, really made me think about how I contribute, and collect, and gain satisfaction (or not) from what I contribute (daily work).  Most of what I’ll discuss below, however, has to do with Yosemite.  I expect Bob will have no problem with my reprinting his post below.

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… Yosemite is an amusement park of the mind.  Rather than going on rides, being turned upside down by mechanical contraptions, you look at the landscape and your mind does somersaults.  How did this happen?  It’s hard to imagine a glacier that creates Half Dome, and how can El Capitan be almost perfectly vertical?

At the visitor center near Yosemite Falls there’s a bit of cell service.  But you get no e-mail on your BlackBerry, you’re disconnected from everything deemed important.  You’re placed in natural perspective.  We’re here for such a very short time.  What do we want to do, what do we want to accomplish?

Money won’t help you if you’re hiking in Tuolomne Meadows and it starts to rain.  Rich people get no better view from Glacier Point than poor.  In Yosemite, we’re all in it together.

On a nature walk behind the Ahwahnee Hotel, the ranger told us the John Muir story.  It’s stuck with me.  It’s shown me that those Americans not on the cover of “Us”, not featured in the “Forbes” 500 are not losers, but in many cases winners.  Money is not the only priority.  You need it to live, but how much?

Would you rap if there was no Biggie, no Jay-Z?

Would you play the guitar if there was no Eddie Van Halen?

Would you be in the music business if David Geffen hadn’t made all that money?

If not, give up.  Please.  You’re hurting yourself.  And you’ll leave no lasting mark.

But if you need to play, don’t lament that you’re not a millionaire.  The music should be enough.  If you’ve got a roof over your head, if you can pay the bills, you’re on the map.  Affecting a coterie deeply is more important than being a momentary comet, burning brightly and then flaming out.

So don’t do what you should do, do what you want to do.  Even if your chosen field is not perceived to be a road to riches.  Who knew all those chefs would become stars on the Food Network?  Who knew you could make a career in extreme sports?  Who knew gaming would outstrip both music and movies in revenue?

I’m not saying to forgo an education.  Fundamentals are important.  Only by establishing a foundation do you have a place to build.

It’s time to establish your own independence.  To make your own decisions.  So when you’re on your deathbed, surrounded by loved ones who will soon reach their demise also, you’ve got no regrets.

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Anyone who hasn’t been to Yosemite, who has reasonable means to go there, should go   Bob is right.  The magnitude, the amplitude and majesty of nature’s might must be witnessed, serves to humble any size of ego that approaches, tames it, and suggests much greater things extant and capable in this life we all share.

This is what I find striking.  At the age of 16, filled with libido and pop culture, I filed Yosemite in the “must take kids to” category, for the impression it made upon me.  I imagined coming back with my own kids, doing some mountain biking, camping with some tents, spending more time there exploring, much more time than my brief visit with my parents had allowed, and sharing this experience with my future family.  Twenty years later I have a family of my own and I plan to bring them to Yosemite at the first opportunity… very likely this September!

Today was my first foray into team athletics for about 15 years.  I had already bought a new mitt and broke it in, having failed in finding my high-school baseball mitt from my parents house.   I went out at lunch today and bought some cleats from Paragon in Union Square, on the warning that I’d injure myself without them, and was all set and wearing my AOL Softball jersey (number 00) and joined the motley bunch of colleagues who were ready to head to Central Park to play against the current opponent, “Highbridge”.   As we gathered in the office lobby and desparately tried to determine if we would have enough players, and enough mitts, we discovered one of the players wasn’t coming because she was covering the story of Michael Jackson’s heart attack.  It seemed unbelievable.  Late, we rushed off to the subway.

When we were walking up to the field, a catcher on another game stood up and yelled loud “Michael Jackson has left the building!”  A buzz went around, people saying that Michael had died.  Again it seemed unbelievable, and random jokes went around that it was a hoax to relieve the troubled star from his upcoming European tour.  By the time we were settled in at the bench, the sad truth was confirmed… indeed Michael had passed away.   The game was about to start.  We warmed up for five minutes, and the umpire called game on.  We grouped up to cheer and chose to cheer for Michael.

I had already discovered that I was doing a really cold start for anything athletic, having not worked out in the area of sprinting, or throwing, or any sort of quick-twitch action, in…. well a really long time.   The warmup had already got my hamstrings ready to seize.   Our coach Jake smartly moved me from right field to first base, where I was much more comfortable not having to run so much, but ready to catch and throw.  The game began and we started off smart, one of our guys Tony stealing home in the first inning and holding back the opponents with a zero.  Things changed quickly after that.  The other team, clearly, were not as motley and either had great experience or had actually practiced a bit.   I found that I enjoyed myself a lot, even while we worked our way to a spectacular loss of 15 to 1.  While doing my best to focus, be ready for the quick catch, and doing all I could to coax my 36 year old office-bod into base-running sprints, I marvelled at playing a game in Central Park for the first time, in a verdure of green with actual spectators watching, surrounded by tall buildings beyond the trees, and rediscovering the baseball I had last played in high school 20 years ago.

After the game we checked our devices and got caught up on the story.  Everything was confirmed, indeed Michael had passed, creating a double tragedy to a day starting off with the passing of Farrah Fawcett who had bravely battled cancer for so long.  Apparently while we played the game, a lot of controversy had ensued between the people who had openly voiced opinions about hoax-theory as we had jokingly done on our way to the field, and the people who indignantly replied with later, better information about the sad truth.

I joined the team for a couple celebratory — even though we lost abysmally — beers, which we raised to the departed, then I headed home to my suburban life and family, including doing baby-duty til now.   All in all, I have to say that the diversion from the ordinary in the way of softball was really wonderful, and made a bit surreal by the surrounding tension of a world responding to several losses of  significant magnitude, certainly worse than losing 15 to 1.

I am now migrating west* from the Blip.tv moving party.  Mike Hudack and his team sure know how to pick an office space and throw a party.

You enter the office and it’s comfy chairs, brick walls, screen projection, make your way past a large floor of production desks (which were shielded for the party by big taut colored fabric dividers), then to the far side where there is a big space.  Music was spun by YouTube DJ, George (I didn’t get his card so don’t have his last name), playing an awesome mix of electronic and nostalgia, and everyone I talked to agreed with me that the music was right on.  I wanted to hook in my laptop and download it, it was that good.   Moving on:  then there’s a Scandinavian-style kitchen, with a beer tap, which was flowing with microbrew provided by Six Points Brewery.  Then you move further beyond the kitchen and there’s an elevated stage, with windows that look north up Lafayette.  Perfect for preparing product presentations, perfect for embarrassing karaoke, or anything else toward which a stage lends life.

What’s more, Blip is doing great business, and all the best in video were there to celebrate and network.  I met guys from Boxee and TubeMogul and a new group called Branded Evolution.  Hundreds of folks I didn’t meet.  Well done on the office move, Blip!  And thanks for the party!

* “migrating west” is a newly-coined vanity expression for commuting home on NJ transit to New Jersey.