But it is about music.

One thing that technology has done to music is the decline of shared musical spaces. Years ago, it was habit for me to bring a boom box and a pile of tapes or CDs to the office & play music every day. Music was a shared experience — coworkers would bring in and trade CDs, vote some stuff on or off the playlist, even make office mix tapes. It wasn’t a paradise — especially when your co-workers had very different musical tastes — but it was more social.

Now, each of us sits at our desks plugged into our own private music streams. Nobody has to argue about whether or not [Band X] is good work music, or negotiate a preferred volume level — but also we’re more isolated from each other.

On the whole I’m not sure it’s a step in the right direction.

I couldn’t resist. I should be focusing on getting my trip photos dealt with, but instead I did a little hack project this weekend.

The fact that the Dell Mini 9 is one of the few netbooks out there that can run OSX has not gone unnoticed. And after hearing from one of the Adobe community folks that the method for turning a Mini into a “Hackintosh” really did work as reported, I was intrigued. So when an extra Mini crossed my path, I decided to give to a try.

The necessary ingredients:

One Macbook Pro, One Dell Mini 9 (1 GB RAM, 16 GB SSD HD), One copy of OSX 10.5.6, One 16GB USB drive. Not pictured: a 2nd USB thumb drive for the bootloader.

How I did it: the “Two USB Drive” version described here.

It was actually quite easy. The only pain in the butt was getting the ISO of the OSX install disk onto the thumb drive — it took a long time. Other than that, though, everything worked as described. After the standard installation and setup process and a few reboots, I had this:

There was only about 2GB of free space left on the drive after installation, but Monolingual cleaned out almost 3GB of additional space. I used Xmark to sync my bookmarks onto Safari, threw on a copy of NeoOffice in case I need to do any basic document editing, and added Last.FM so I can listen to music without having to load any MP3s onto the Mini.

I haven’t tested the Bluetooth yet but everything else is working like a charm. I can stream videos, listen to music, check email, and do pretty much anything else I need to, on a machine that’s small enough to fit into my purse. I can even plug SDHC cards from my camera right into the Mini and then upload photos to the cloud. And I don’t have to put up with Windows to do any of it. The only drawback is the tiny keyboard on the Mini. It’s fine for a few emails but I wouldn’t want to use it for extended writing.

And yes, installing OSX onto non-Apple hardware is most likely a violation of the EULA (and may void the Dell warranty as well) so bear that in mind if you decide you want to give this experiment a try.

(Hint: Having a sweet little Hackintosh is worth it IMHO)

Not to sound like a total corporate shill but Photoshop CS4 is the utter shizz. Isn’t this neat? I dropped a few photos in, Photoshop did all the stitching. Took almost no time.

I was struck by something when looking at some website analytics today.

This is the image I was looking at:

Notice that line of dots across the middle of the state? That’s no accident. Here’s why:

The Erie Canal was a major engineering feat of the early 1800s and was a key transport path for over 100 years, although after around 1950 or so it stopped being a significant part of the commercial transportation network.

It’s kind of neat that the canal is visible from cyberspace.

Despite my relative blogging paucity of late, I’m hardly shy about putting personal information online. Between Twitter, Facebook, Flickr, and the various other odds and ends of my online life, I’ve shared quite a lot over the years. And given my relatively unique name, it’s quite easy to enter a few search strings and pull up an awful lot of detail about me. But Google Latitude is a bridge too far, even for me.

Here’s a quick rundown on Latitude, if it hasn’t gotten onto your radar screen yet:

This Wednesday, Google launched its much-anticipated location-tracking service, Latitude, which uses the GPS hardware found in smart phones (such as Google Android phones and BlackBerry and Windows Mobile handsets) to pinpoint your position on a map and share that information with your friends.

I’ve always been very clear about the line between personal and private information, and Latitude falls smack into the camp of private, as far as I’m concerned. It’s too much sharing. I’ll happily tell the world what I just ordered at Starbucks, but that doesn’t mean I want to world along for the ride as I walk down the street carrying my coffee.

Perhaps it’s a gender thing, but I find the concept that someone can know exactly where I am at all times to be more than a little scary. My work address is easy to find, but being able to see exactly when or what direction I’m walking in when I leave at night? Sorry, but that’s just not something I want the world to get access to.

And yes, I know that by default Latitude wouldn’t share anything unless I actively made the choice to share it, and yes, I know that simply by having a GPS-enabled phone, the phone company already can track me if they want to. If some government agency forces AT&T to give up my personal data, there’s not a whole hell of a lot I can do about it. But if a person I’ve shared my location with gets their phone stolen, their account hacked, or even decides to sell access to their account, that’s a different story.

I know not everyone feels this way, and they’re perfectly happy checking in on Brightkite or adding everyone in their address book to Latitude. I wish them well. But that’s a party I’m just not joining.

We, the United States of America, your top quality supplier of the ideals of liberty and democracy, would like to apologize for our 2001-2008 interruption in service. The technical fault that led to this eight-year service outage has been located, and the software responsible was replaced November 4.

Early tests of the newly installed program indicate that we are now operating correctly, and we expect it to be fully functional on January 20, 2009. We apologize for any inconvenience caused by the outage.

We look forward to resuming full service and hope to improve in years to come. We thank you for your patience and understanding.

Sincerely,
THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

It boggles the mind a little when you think about how young the Web truly is and how much the world has changed due to one innovation:

Almost precisely 17 years ago, a young British researcher from Cern, the European organisation for nuclear research, gave a presentation in Texas on a technology that was to change society dramatically. That same month, the Cern newsletter announced it to the world: it was called the World Wide Web.

It’s hard to imagine life today without it.

Click through to read the rest of the article, which is an interesting look at the “open web” versus command and control structures. Here’s a sample:

The web succeeded too quickly to be controlled. It conquered skepticism by existing. But imagine that we had had a chance squarely to consider its likely benefits and dangers. In place of what we have today I think we would have invented a tamer, more controlled web and a different underlying network on which it operates. We would restrict openness of access, decrease anonymity and limit the number of actions that a network participant could perform.

The benefits would be undeniable: it would cut down on spam, viruses and illicit peer-to-peer file sharing. But at the same time, it would undercut the iconoclastic technological, cultural and political potential that the web offers, the ability of a new technology, a new service to build on open networks and open protocols, without needing approval from regulators or entrenched market players, or even the owners of the web pages to which you link.

So… I’ve been messing around trying to get Pandora working well for me. I set up a channel and added several song / artist seeds. Then I started thumbing up or down the songs that Pandora suggested for me.

The problem is that now it seems that the only music Pandora plays for me is the stuff I thumbed up, with very little in the way of new music.

What am I doing wrong? Should I un-thumb some of the stuff I previously thumbed up? Add more artist or song seeds? Clear everything out and start over?

Or is Pandora just confused by my admittedly picky listening preferences?

If anyone has suggestions, let me know. And here’s a link to the channel in question, if you’re curious.

Registration finally opened for WordCamp 2008 in SF, and I’m all signed up.

Are you going to be there? Let me know!

Winston Zeddemore: Ray. If someone asks if you are a god, you say, “YES!”

ZDNet’s new Social Media blogger Jennifer Leggio posted an interview with Twitter‘s Biz Stone this weekend.

What does that have to do with GhostBusters? This:

Q. Finally, the big question seems to be… is Twitter considering a paid model?

A. No. Not for the usage we are talking about now. It is very important that Twitter remains free for people to remain connected. Some people are suggesting a paid model so that we can improve the service but money is not our issue; we have plenty of money. It’s about getting the right architecture in place and boosting reliability. We want to keep it free.

Biz. Please. Right now, Twitter is a God. Do you realize how lucky you are that people are BEGGING you to take their money? Shut up and take it.

You don’t have to roll out a SLA and a full suite of fee-only tools for the paying customers. Start small. Let people pay $25 a year to have a little icon next to their photos (al la Flickr Pro). They will do it gladly and it won’t eat a lot of development cycles.

You’re not going to be in this spot forever. Take advantage of it while you can.