Another of my forays into the UX of User Generated Content can be found here. That's right, it's a wiki. If you have any interest in toy cameras, join! But, um, realize that at this point I've only started roughing out a content structure. It's sooo not in any state of done-ness...as if wikis are ever "done", but you know what I mean.
If you could do anything you want tomorrow, what would it be?
Submitted by Becca-Pink.
Buy the Kona Sutra sitting at my LBS, load it up, and start riding. No real "end" destination in mind. Just riding and living.
So, I have a Livejournal where mostly I post the mundane details of my workouts. Why? Because I need some pseudo-public accountability and someone who likes to see those details reads my LJ for them (though he's been reading for *years*, he's never bothered to join...though he did randomly comment once). And I have a professional blog of sorts. And even though I haven't updated it in months, there are still plenty of things sitting on the back burner waiting to go up.
Given the existence of those two, why am I considering resurrecting this? Mostly because I've reached a place on my LJ where I'm not all that interested in sharing personal stuff--too many former friends and whatnot still lurk around that place. And also because I've found that in order to do my job, I have to not only maintain a presence in various online communities, but I have to be actively exploring and playing with the tools. (If you have even an inkling of an idea of how many UGC/community/socially focused sites there are out there these days, then yes, this is absolutely as time-consumiing as it sounds.)
And now, I'm off to poke at the Ning community that I've ignored for months.
This track is from his newest album, "Wolves & Wishes," which I guess kind of makes it the title track. I don't have any particular reason for posting this one, other than that it was what rocked out to on my commute home today. A lot of Dosh's work has a more hip hop feel to it, often with slow melodies on top of double-time beats, or vice versa. In this piece, most of the parts work at a similar pace, with swift, overlapping melodic lines on synthesizer and sax over a peppy drum beat, giving the whole thing an unusually upbeat feeling.
Is this thing on? Test....test.
So it's been a while. I used to keep up with this whole daily MP3 thing on this here little Vox blog, but it's been *checks archives* just over a year since I actually did anything here. In fact, I was 27 when I stopped this. Now I'm 29.
A lot has happened and I'm not going to tell you about any of it. This is not the place for me to do that, and no one is here to read it anyways (if anyone is here to read this at all).
But I'm going to try it again. As a refresher: this is a pseudo-daily excercise in sharing music. One song a day, plus one to two paragraphs of commentary. New music, old music, long time favorites and fresh discoveries. Novelties, gems, guilty pleasures. Whatever. No promises, I may skip days or disappear completely (again). So we'll see where this goes.
To start off, here is a song by my favorite band from Bellingham. I only know one band from Bellingham (other than Death Cab For Cutie, who got their start there), but still. I can't imagine liking another one better than I Love You Avalanche. It's a solo-ish project that I saw opening for a Northen California band called the Americas last year. Everything I've heard from her/them is super lo-fi, covered in tape hiss and room noise, but the sweetness of the songs shines through, and the layers of vocals are perfectly wispy and tender. This song in particular kills me. It gets stuck in my head from time to time, and I find myself needing to listen to it regularly. The lyrics, the wavery vocal melody in the bridge, the Major lift into the chorus, the overlapping counterpoints towards the end....it's like this song came forth as a fully formed ideal of the solo female folk song. It's also a perfect song for my life at the moment, all about friendship and loss, exciting and bittersweet, painful and exhilirating all at once. I hope you love it as much as I do.
Yeah, I totally disappeared from this place. I don't think that was intentional, so much as situational.
So, what's happened since I stopped posting here? Well, I rode a bicycle from Seattle to Portland. I obtained another bicycle--an awesome chromed wonder of singlespeedy goodness. I quit my job. I've started doing my own thing.
And I recently started a new site with a professional slant. So, if you have any interest in my observations, ideas, and bitchy rants on user experience and design, you can find that stuff over at http://www.dexocraticrevolution.com
Knees still weak after the 23 mile ride completed on Monday. First real ride since procuring Ferdinand. Ferdinand is a chap who prefers leisure over speed. I lagged behind often, pushing that bastard, coaxing it to move with the force of my evolutions. We made it. The ride has succeeded in convincing me another bike for events outside of short trips to the grocery store is needed.
On the threshold of a great change. I can hardly believe it myself. I've settled down considerably after the news and have attained focus, thankfully. Lots to do today, accomplished quite a bit so far. Because the weather is cooperating, a maudlin/introspective/mellow/nostalgic playlist has been arranged to accompany me throughout the day, ahem:
The Album Leaf, American Football, Ani DiFranco, Badly Drawn Boy, Beirut, Björk, Built To Spill, Carla Bruni, Clap Your Hands Say Yeah, Elliott Smith, Jose Gonzalez, The Kings of Convenience, The Knife, Neko Case, New Order, Of Montreal, Papa M, Sleater-Kinney, and Smashing Pumpkins.
Okay, back to work. Wow.
p.s. - rain, nice to see you again. I've missed you.
