Thursday, April 27, 2006

Pop Conference

emplive.org - Visit - Education - Pop Conference: "The 2006 Experience Music Project Pop Conference-Seattle - April 27 - 30, 2006" It's the annual Pop Music conference at EMP this weekend. I'm going to try to make it over on Saturday, as a bunch of the panels sound interesting.
I'm trying to find some new songs to download from the iTunes store tonight, but nothing really looks interesting. I wish they had better recommendations, although honestly, my amazon recs are never terribly great for discovering "just been released by a new artist" stuff either. I have lots of thoughts on music recommendations and the new (to me) artist problem that might best be summed up by "I wish there was a way to make a taste template and then match new songs against that." Lots of work has been done in lots of places to define what a "taste template" might be, but I've never seen one that really works. For instance, I love hip hop, but how do I describe the songs that I love and the songs that make me switch the radio station? What attributes do I rank Ride on against Slowdive against Curve, and what of those attributes make me not like a lot of newly released shoegazing?

On a less geeky note, remember the feeling you'd get in grade school the night before the last day of school? Ahhh bliss. Summer vacation never really quite lived to what you might have hoped it would be like, and you knew it, but right before it started was always the greatest time. I liked it even better than Christmas or my birthday. So, I haven't felt this way since I was about 10, and I'm loving it.

Monday, April 10, 2006

Drambuie Cocktails

Traditional Scottish Recipes - Drambuie Cocktails: Warm Woolly Sheep
1 measure Scotch whisky
1 1/2 measure Drambuie
Fill with warm Milk
Mix Scotch and Drambuie, top with warm milk.

I always drink my Drambuie either straight up, or by putting a few drops of it on top of a small glass of scotch. I'm half tempted to try this one, though; I can't even imagine what warm milk and scotch would taste like.

Today I decided that I'm moving back to the east coast. I'll be just shy of 7 years at amazon- 7 years which felt like 6 months. I feel like I just launched the Kitchen store last month, web services last week, and blinked and then here I am. So here is my favorite amazon memory... in summer 2002, Russell got me to sign up for his broomball team. It was Jeff Bezos's team, made up of a bunch of people from various parts of the company. I'd played on Jeff's team before (I got a compilment from him on my creative goal tending skills one year when I sat down on the ball to stop it from being pushed over the goal line), and always one of the big problems was coordinating everyone out on the field. So we decided to hold a practice game out on the south lawn after work. It was an amazing August evening- sunny, warm, just beautiful. I went out and helped tape up some broomball sticks. Then we assembled on the grass and split the team in two. Jeff was out there with us- I seem to recall he was playing barefoot in his work clothes. I was marginally more sensibly dressed in some running gear. We all faced off, and played an hour of great broomball. At the picnic, we made it to the semi-finals, but didn't win. It was still a ton of fun.