Since I was actually employed for all of this year, I didn’t get to listen to as much new music as I did in 2007. Still, it’s a great time to be a fan of music, especially (for my tastes, anyway) ambient and techno.

Ambient/Drone

• Belong — Colorloss Record
• Deaf Center — Pale Ravine

Electronic

• AFX — Analord 1-11
• Autechre — Quaristice
• Ceephax — Volume 1, Volume 2
• Four Tet — Ringer
• James T Cotton — The Dancing Box
• Justice — A Cross The Universe
• Mr. Oizo — Lambs Anger
• Osborne — Osborne
• Squarepusher — Just A Souvenir
• Secondo — A Matter of Scale
• µ-Ziq — Duntisbourne Abbots Soulmate Devastation Technique

Pop/Alternative

• Fleet Foxes — Fleet Foxes
• M.I.A. — Kala
• M83 — Saturdays = Youth
• Sigur Rós — Með suð í eyrum við spilum endalaust

Time to conduct an arbitrary round-up of music that resonated with me this year. This is not a list of my favorite new music from 2007; much of it was released previously, some back in 1994. There are 22 releases in all.

Sorted first by genre, then by artist.

Alternative

• Antony & The Johnsons — I Am a Bird Now
• Blonde Redhead — 23
• Cat Power — The Greatest
• Charlotte Gainsbourg — 5:55
• A Northern Chorus — Spirit Flags
• PJ Harvey — White Chalk

Ambient/Drone

• Belong — October Language
• M83 — Digital Shades Vol. 1
• Stars of the Lid — And Their Refinement of the Decline
• Tim Hecker — Harmony in Ultraviolet

Electronic

• Ceephax — Megalift EP
• christ. — Blue Shift Emissions
• Clark — Body Riddle
• Daft Punk — Alive 2007
• The Field — From Here We Go Sublime
• The Future Sound of London — ISDN
• The Future Sound of London — Lifeforms
• Gescom — A1 – D1
• The Knife — Silent Shout – An Audio-Visual Experience
• Underworld — Everything, Everything

Soundtrack

• Clint Mansell — The Fountain
• Hilmar Örn Hilmarsson & Sigur Rós — Angels of the Universe

As per reader request:

• Still working at said new job. My time management skills haven’t improved since 9/23, but progress has been made in the various projects I am involved with. At any given time I have too much or too little anxiety. I drink too much coffee.
• Still no projects launched in my spare time.
• Miscellaneous statistics:
  • Google Reader summary: “over the last 30 days you read 1,506 items”
  • Last.fm summary: Tracks played: 2,547
  • Del.icio.us summary: 106 items posted
  • Flickr summary: 1 new photo
  • Twitter summary: 447 updates

Maybe soon, I will go into detail about something. Not tonight.

• Working at a new job — a real one, I mean. If you know me at all, this will not surprise you: my abysmal time-management skills are abysmal.
• (Outside of work,) had four project ideas. Launched zero projects, but at least they are minimally annotated in a list called “Project Ideas.”
• Miscellaneous statistics:
  • Google Reader statistics: “over the last 30 days you read 935 items.”
  • Last.fm statistics: “Tracks played: 2,274.”
  • Del.icio.us statistics: 74 items posted

If you think QA is only applicable to engineering projects, think again:

*puts on QA cap*

At first glance, I say it’s a P4 since the meaning of the area is not lost through the typo. It is also not necessarily easy to fix — not necessarily the technical aspects of painting over the letter and painting a new one, but more-so with regards to getting the contractor out to the site, having the correct shade of color, getting the work done for free (assuming it was their error to begin with), and so on.

But of course, this work was done for a corporation. A pretty large one, at that. This makes it a P1 pretty much by default — an incident like this might negatively impact the company’s image. And, um, that company writes your paycheck.

*takes off QA cap, now sweaty*

I can’t believe I even wrote this.

Surprisingly, the MIDINUX post is by far the most popular entry on this blog. I guess there’s more interest in the MID/UMPC field than I expected. (Granted, page views on an F-list blog is by no means a proper metric for this sort of thing.)

UMPC Portal points to a PDF that says Intel is collaborating with Red Flag Software on a linux distro tailored specifically to MIDs (mobile internet devices), appropriately called MIDINUX.

Apparently the UI is Gnome-based, which is very good news. Maybe they’ll adopt Tango, but if not it shouldn’t be too hard to create and install an appropriate theme/icon-set.

MIDINUX will support GPS, WiFi, Bluetooth, and i915 chipsets should they be present on a given MID. The PDF also cites drastically reduced boot/resume times & storage footprints over traditional linux distros (by means of kernel reduction, removal of unnecessary services, etc.).

To me, it doesn’t look like Intel will release their own MID anytime soon. They are more interested in getting a platform together while the market is young. By keeping the system open, this might lower costs while spurring developer interest.

Also: there seems to be some confusion between the terms “MIDINUX” and “MID Linux.” As best as I can tell, MIDINUX is the brand name for Red Flag’s distro; MID Linux is the title for Intel’s MID architecture.

John Tokash has more to say.

So, this twitter thing?  It’s pretty darn cool.  I’ve been using twitter for almost two months, and I really like it. You’re welcome to follow me.

Also: I’m trying to get my technically inclined friends to sign up w/ twitter. If that means you, consider this a form of asking nicely.

A list of garbage items on Amazon.com, presumably leftovers from their QA team. So awesome. [via]