This is awesome. I got a beta invite about two weeks ago, and I’ve used it nearly every day since. Here’s why it’s awesome.

I spend about 90% of my weekly computer time on my work computer, far away from the hard drive I’ve worked so hard over the years to cram full of music. Sure I have my iPhone, the Hype Machine, Pandora, and (until they made the move that turned me against them — restricting their mobile app to paid subscribers only) Last.fm, and they’ve all done a great job of keeping my musical needs covered, but all have fallen short in some way. They never have exactly what I want when I want it. It’s always hard to find or bookmark specific songs. I was missing MY music library.

Then Google comes out with what I believe is their most selfless and philanthropic use of their gigantic servers. Over the last two weeks (yeah, it took that long which was lame, but c’mon, it’s a once-and-done process) I’ve been able to upload nearly 100GB of music. I’m sure it gets compressed heftily, but as far as streaming compressed music goes Google Music sounds pretty darn good. Imagine if every user uploaded a similarly large music library. That’s a lot of space Google is giving out for free. Sure sites of theirs like YouTube will surely always top Music’s disk-space needs, but it’s covered in intrusive ads. None of those on Music…yet at least.

Sites like Mashable have come out and said they’re not really excited about Music and think it leaves a lot to be desired…but what the fuck do you want from a FREE service? They cite things like the inability to purchase music from the site like you can on Amazon’s comparable service, and you surely will be able to from Apple’s forthcoming iCloud. But you know what you CAN do? Go to those other sites (that would charge you long before Google would to store the same amount of music), buy the songs you want, and upload them to Google. Now was that too difficult? And the lack of offline caching? How often are you not connected to the internet and really itching to hear that one song? Yeah, never. Mashable, get off your high horse.

Anyway, now I have my whole music library accessible from my work computer and my home computer without an external hard drive tethered to it. That is awesome right now.

github

This is mysteriously awesome. I can’t figure out why it’s useful to me, so that’s why it’s a bit of a mystery that I’m so infatuated with it right now. Maybe I like it so much because it’s the only “social network” that I’ve signed up for that requires you to enter terminal-style commands to set it up and create updates. That’s badass. [Side note: working with terminal commands is pseudo-awesome right now. I'm really excited when I type in a totally geeky command to a black and white window with mono type font and see shit happen.] Their entire site forces you to use https. It’s secure, and they flaunt it. Are you listening, Facebook?

If you care to follow me (and improve my code, I guess. Is that the point of the site? I really don’t know…what is it good for?!?), check my shiznit out at https://github.com/kohnmd. It is awesome.

being engaged

This is romantically awesome because my financé is awesome. I’m so excited to get married!

• Local Natives opened up the concert, but Ally and I were at a party at her mom’s house a little late and missed them. We weren’t too heartbroken.
• Arcade Fire

Ally’s former babysitter (Rebecca) from nearly 20 years ago posted on Facebook that she had two free suite tickets up for grabs to the concert. Ally tried to get them, but somebody beat her to it. Then she got a message from Rebecca saying that the person that got the tickets couldn’t find a babysitter, and couldn’t accept the tickets. So Ally was next in line. Apparently Rebecca and her husband run a branch of a mortgage company, and they own a suite (like, their company name is written above the door to the suite…that’s how hard they own it) at the Broomfield Event Center so that they can give their clients tickets as gifts. Whenever they don’t have anybody to give them to, they pass them on to friends (or Facebook friends). We got to sit in awesome leather chairs in a suite that smelled like nachos (we didn’t feel comfortable eating their fancy food since it was never offered to us, so we just drank ice water out of the sink in the suite’s minibar/kitchen…yeah).

The concert itself was amazing. Arcade Fire rocked, and played all of their best music. We moved around to behind the stage for then encore. This was the first concert I recorded with the iPhone4, and am impressed with the quality over the 3GS. It’s still shit, so I recommend searching YouTube for a better version.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=6kepLfvxVbM

I have a goal to bike 5000 miles in a single calendar year, and I’m tracking my progress in the RWM Sandbox. The number 5000 is pretty arbitrary, not some holy grail number for me or anything. One day I was talking to my boss Nico about what kind of millage he puts on his bikes every year. He said that he doesn’t keep track anymore, but suspects that it’s somewhere in the 10-12,000 mile range. That’s a goddamn shit ton of miles. So I thought to myself, “It would be thoroughly impressive if one day I rode even half as many miles as Nico, Biker Extraordinaire,” and committed to making an attempt.

So far, things are not looking good. Of the 31 days in January, I’ve either been sick or snow has covered the ground for about half of them*. And of the remaining days, the majority have been freezing cold, I’ve worked all day and have had to commit to riding at night, or I simply just didn’t have the time to ride. Things are looking bleak already.

Excuses aside, I actually think this challenge is going well and I’m having fun tracking my progress. I recently joined a gym that prides itself on catering to bicyclists, so I’m definitely getting some millage out of their stationaries. It might be cheating just a little to include stationary miles, but let’s be honest, I need as much help as I can get. 5000 is a big number. That’s 96 miles PER WEEK.

Anyway, there’s a screenshot of January. Let’s see where I get to by the end of this month. Hopefully I add more than 67 miles, but I won’t be disappointed if I don’t. I figure numbers will start to skyrocket come springtime.

* Even when the weather turns around and starts melting the snow, I still can’t ride much. I try to stay off of wet and icy roads with Sven as much as possible, and let’s be honest, there’s no way I’m riding 5000 miles on just Helga. She’s a little too big-boned for that.

Yesterday Dustin and I bought used tennis rackets and played until the sun set. We were in tshirts/shorts the whole game. Today, 24 hours later, it’s 1°F outside. Crazy Colorado and your wacky weather.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=EEEsX69iIxY

www.youtube.com/watch?v=TeqLYvcznWY

Where have you discovered community, online or otherwise, in 2010? What community would you like to join, create or more deeply connect with in 2011? #

response

I think the word “community” is thrown around way too much by the new media crowd. It seems like the new word used to gloat about how many followers you have. I don’t consider myself to be a part of a community, and I don’t necessarily plan to.