Coding Music for a Drab Tuesday Morning

30/Oct/2012

This morning sucks. It’s cold out. It’s raining. I forgot my glasses at home so all the fonts on my monitors are 40px. There’s a FREAKING HURRICANE hitting New York City.

There’s nothing I can do about any of it, so I decided I needed some better music to listen to as I coded today. I popped open Spotify and grabbed a CD I don’t listen to as much as I should.

This is my normal progression when I find a new CD I like involves:

Hear it for the first time.
Realize I kind-of like it based on the one or two songs I actually listened to while I was working.
Listen to it a few times to let it sink in.
Realize it actually sucks except for the two songs I heard before.
Remove it from the rotation.

This one is different. I really, really like it. Going on my short list for album of the year.

I present to you, “The Peace of Wild Things” by Paper Route.

(You’ll need Spotify to get this to work. It’s free and awesome. Get it here. Don’t want Spotify? Check out the album playlist on YouTube.)

Let me know what you’re listening to in the comments below.

Connect An XBOX 360 to a Windows 8 PC to Stream Audio & Video

08/Sep/2012

Windows 8 is fantastic. The user interface is beautiful, it’s ridiculously fast, and it’s very stable. But if you don’t know your way around, things can get frustrating. They changed Windows 8 just enough to confuse their users. After I installed the RTM last week, I went to set up streaming video between my XBOX 360 and my Windows 8 desktop.

Since Windows Media Center is no longer an option for many users (not included and a separate download for Pro users only), the best way to stream between an XBOX and Windows 8 is to allow streaming through the Video Player app on the XBOX 360. This app uses your media library to directly stream many types of video from your Videos Library on your Windows 8 PC. Read More…

Recent Nielson Study Proves You Can’t Ignore Mobile Users

20/Feb/2012

My job at VistaComm affords me the ability to talk to quite a few of our clients about their mobile device strategy. Often we find during those discussions that they haven’t given any thought to it, and if they have, they feel that there isn’t any need at this time. Although I understand their reasoning, it couldn’t be further from the truth. Read More…

Ten Simple Rules to Secure Your Online Life with a Secure Password

14/Nov/2011

A week doesn’t go by without someone asking me about internet security. They tell me stories of their kids installing software that also installs malware, lament about Facebook changing privacy settings so all their personal information is public, or express concern over the latest internet security breach (e.g. Epsilon).

I know that for every one of us, online security is important. We spend so much time installing anti-virus software and tweaking our Facebook security settings that we forget one of the most important way we can secure our online lives. Secure passwords. Security doesn’t need to be about 16-digit alphanumeric random codes that make no sense in real life. I’ve written here my Ten Simple Rules To Secure Your Online Life with a Secure Password. Read More…

Favorite Songs of the Last Few Months

13/Jun/2011

I was playing around with ways to search my past Tweets, and came across the service, Searchtastic. It does a great job searching the tweets of a specific Twitter user for keywords.

I used it to search my past tweets for the #SOTD hashtag. I think that hashtag is wildly egotistical, even far more so than Twitter is in general. Who cares what song I’m listening to today? Evidently I think everyone who follows me on Twitter does, so I continue to do it. I’ve been doing it for a while, but am not nearly as good at remembering it as I would like to be.

Using the Searchtastic results, I compiled what I think are the best Song of the Day entries from the past few months (in no particular order). Hit up the results after the break and tell me what you think of my choices, and what you would’ve added to / removed from my list (I LOVE discovering new music).