I’m sure you all have heard of “Snakes on a Plane”, right? Best movie concept ever. This screenwriter told an excellent story about being offered to help work on the script, including these two paragraphs which completely made my day/week/month:

Now out of both loyalty to the sacred bond between studio and screenwriter and also a serious desire to keep getting hired in this town, I will not give away any of the plot details of SNAKES ON A PLANE. But know this. As the great Sam Jackson would say: There are motherfucking snakes on the motherfucking plane.

What else do you need to know? How the snakes get on the plane, what the snakes do once they’re on the plane, who puts the snakes on the plane, who is trying to get the snakes off the plane…This is not for you to ponder. There are snakes on the plane. End of fucking story.

Not that I plan to add a 2mb WAV file to the bottom of all my emails like a PGP sig, but I was instantly intrigued by the iTunes Signature Maker, which analyzes your iTunes library and spits out a mixed and edited sampling of your music (or more specifically, you, if you want to get all music-nerdy.) I, of course, ran through the system a few times to check it out and test the differences, but I also thought it would be interesting to post mine and hopefully hear what the dear readers of Magnetbox sound like. So, here is mine:

itsm_magnetbox.wav

I will post the song contents in the comments, but if you can name more than 3 songs from this sampler, consider yourself incredible. For comparison purposes, here are the settings I used: 20 songs, no song repeat limits, based on ratings, 2.0 seconds, 3 layers.) Add yours into the comments!

A recent television commercial jogged my memory about a desired device that I had thought about in the past. I have no idea what the commercial is for, but near the beginning of it a man gets out of bed in his futuristic home, and while he is doing his morning routine in the bathroom mirror, a weather forecast is playing in the mirror. Although I desire a weather forecast at other times, getting dressed is easily the most important time. In fact, there is a web site whose entire premise is that the weather dictates your clothing choices. Pure genius.

What I want is that futuristic man’s weather mirror, but in today’s world. I know it’s either a) out there already in some sort of weather geek’s catalog, or b) hackable using wireless technology and some sort of computer programs and device. Most simple home weather forecast devices on the market estimate the conditions based on the current conditions when you set it up, and then the changing temperature and barometric pressure. I want my device to be a much simpler device, much like the getting the weather from television. It’s figured out and distilled for me, and given to me in the simplest form possible.

All I want to do is wake up, go to my dresser, and see the following:

• The temperature and conditions right now
• The temperature and conditions at intervals later in the day
• The most minimal amount of data I need to survive: temp, conditions and wind
• Nothing scientific (no barometric pressure, moon phase, etc)
• No clock (who doesn’t know what time it is?)

It also might be handy to have a configuration program as well, so that I might be able to change what information I see on the device, or perhaps changing the intervals, or perhaps even setting specific times that I want the forecast for (like if I know I’m going out at 10pm, I would want to know what it will be like outside.)

One way to execute this idea might be creating a program that grabs the weather from the Internet, parses it, and spits it out over wireless to this small device. Perhaps this device is a PDA? Who knows?

Any ideas or examples or existing products out there, anyone?

(If it helps, I have an old Handspring Visor and a (very, very) old Apple Newton.)

There is something afoot at the various places that produce promos for football games on television. A couple weeks ago, I noticed that in the intro/bumper graphics for something, they actually displayed “loading…” text along with a progress clock. Huh?! Then just this Sunday, I heard the intro for “Salad Days” by Minor Threat used as the background music for a quick cut-to-commercial video segment. Hell has officially frozen over.

So, after three years of using Audioscrobbler, I decided (and acted) on a whim to reset my stats on my account at last.fm. It kind of hurts to see all that “work” go away, but it was to the point that it wasn’t moving fast enough for me (I check it a lot), and now that I have my music ratings and taggings in a better place than before, I felt it will be much more accurate than in the past. My biggest pet peeve, which Last.fm can’t really help much, is how artists with more songs recorded get higher rankings than artists who have fewer songs in existance but are more favored. Hopefully with the right ranking system and party shuffle, things should even out.

I was presently surprised to see at least 3 users in my “neighbours” list who used to be there before, when I had 20+ thousand songs in my profile; a fine testament to the last.fm system and algorithms.

I doubt you need much more proof, but after talking about music with some people recently, I realized something that I find extremely nerdy and funny: I listen to my iTunes on Party Shuffle mode, yet thats not quite enough. Not only does it play based on a smart playlist (which is based on several cascading smart playlists), but I actually re-order the tracks as they appear in the queue (of which I have set only at 20 songs), in order to be a total DJ nerdfest. For example, here is a little playlist sampler of how clever I think I am:

• Modest Mouse – Breakthrough
• Skull Kontrol – False Ceilings
• Sadaharu – Memoirs of My Time in Purgatory
• Rainer Maria – CT Catholic
• Tight Bro’s From Way Back When – Make It A Habit

See? That shit is genius. Another stream that happened right after that: (I can’t always connect them since I have such a short queue. This disappoints me greatly.)

• Scene Creamers – Session Man
• The Donnas – Hook It Up
• Beehive and the Barracudas – Dirty Soughts
• Braid – Killing A Camera
• X-Ray Spex – I Am A Poseur
• Harriet the Spy – Sleeping Through the Money Shot
• Thee Headcoatees – Come Into My Mouth
• And You Will Know Us By the Trail of Dead – Days of Being Wild
• The Rondelles – Six O’Clock
• Slint – Good Morning, Captain
• Barry Manilow – Looks Like We Made It

See? That’s really dumb and nerdy that I make up little novellas based on my music playlists. I know noone else is watching (unless they were keeping very close tabs on my last.fm page), so it’s all just for my own enjoyment, but I still do it. Any one else care to fess up that they do this too? Am I the only one?

Please create a feature which allows me to map out alternative routes for directions. In particular, I would like to:

• Filter out the use of freeways. I would like to use your mapping software to get directions for riding my bicycle or scooter (or perhaps even walking), which means no highways or freeways.
• Filter by speed limit. If I am riding a small scooter, I may not want to (or be able to) go over a particular speed. If I am walking or bicycling, I would like to take a route that does not have cars whizzing by at uncomfortable speeds.
• Select or deselect particular streets, or stretches of streets. There are plenty of reasons I might want to avoid particular streets or areas, such as road construction, scenic detours, bad neighborhoods, preferred routes/streets, etc.
• Save routes and route preferences. I prefer going one particular way different from how you suggest. If you could remember that, it would be awesome. I could see saving these “hacked” routes as particularly useful information, both for myself and others. I imagine seeing how other people get around to places might benefit me. (For example, I would like to save a list of “ways to get home from work”. Depending on traffic and “feel”, sometimes I take the freeway, sometimes I take one of several side street routes. Saving those alone would be great. Now if other people could see these, and I could see other people’s “ways to get home” from the same location/area, that would be amazing.)

Thank you for your time. Love, Ben.

It’s very cool to see interesting places and famous landmarks in Google Maps, but to me it’s also interesting to see places that are important but don’t really have a fixed address. For example, here are all of the on the EPA Superfund (meaning hazardous waste sites) National Priority List (meaning the worst of the worst) that are in Minnesota:

• Andover Sites (Andover, MN)
• Arrowhead Refinery (Hermantown, MN)
• Baytown Township ground water plume (Baytown Township, MN)
• Burlington-Northern Brainerd/Baxter plant (Brainerd, MN)
• Champion International Corporation (Cass Lake, MN)
• Dept. of Army TCAAP (Hermantown, MN)
• Freeway sanitary landfill (Burnsville, MN)
• Fridley Commons Park well field (Fridley, MN)
• General Mills Inc. (E. Hennepin) (Minneapolis, MN)
• Joslyn Wood Products plant (Minneapolis, MN)
• Kopper Co. Gas & Coke plant (Saint Paul, MN)
• Kurt Manufacturing Inc. (Fridley, MN)
• LeHillier/Mankato (Mankato, MN)
• Long Prairie ground water contamination (Long Prairie, MN)
• MacGillis & Gibbs Company (New Brighton, MN)
• MPCA Perham arsenic site (Perham, MN)
• Nutting Truck & Caster Company (Faribault, MN)
• Oakdale dump (Oakdale, MN)
• Reilly Tar & Chemical Corp. (Saint Louis Park, MN)
• Ritari Post & Pole (Sebeka, MN)
• United Defense Armament Systems Division & Navy Reserve (Fridley, MN)
• USX Realty Development (Duluth, MN)
• Waite Park wells (Waite Park, MN)

Now you can get driving directions to and from your local dangerously unclean landmarks!

Update! I whipped up a Google Map of all of these coordinates together using their fancy new API. Enjoy!

Over time I have bookmarked news media sites that I find particularly well-designed. In particular I like to have the home page be the largest factor because of all that it usually has to cover, but I am also interested in well-designed “common” pages, such as a simple news article or collection/index of news articles. I am posting them for posterity’s sake, but also to hopefully garner some suggestions from the audience on sites that I am missing out on. These could be television, newspaper, radio, strictly online, or perhaps even something loosely based on any one of those. Here they are, in no particular order:

• BBC

  I actually liked their previous iterations better, but this home page is still an exercise in clarity and simplicity, given the scope of the organization. I wish more people could sell designs like this to similarly-sized companies.

• Bayersicher Rundfunk

  Nothing particularly breathtaking, but definitely organized and fairly uncluttered given the circumstances.

• Australian Broadcasting Corporation

  An excellent example of an organized bevy of text links. Could use some design polish, but it is very skimmable (is that a word?)

• Chicago Public Radio

  Nothing spectacular here, but a decent sense of design and restraint (although possibly because the rest of the site is fairly shallow.)

• Deutsche Welle

  The top navigation, map, and graphical arc are a poor use of real estate, but the rest of the page is templated and fairly well kept. This site would probably go downhill real fast if it had banner ads.

• dradio.de

  I love the boxed grid system, the simplicity of the navigation, and the choice of HTML over graphics in alot of places. Although some might argue the grayscale color scheme is a bit boring, I like how they use blue/red combo to both make the radio services stand out from the gray, and also connect the radio services from the top navigation to the right content column. A terribly clean gridded design.

• Schweizer Radio DRS

  An excellent grid system on several pages. I particularly like the display of the radio services across the middle. Although I’m not a fan of color-coding every section of a web sites, they at least handle it well by termpering everything with alot of gray. The news stories need some help, and those photos in the bottom right of people with headphones frighten me.

• Inc.com

  For all the ads and ad-like content on the homepage, I can still skim fairly well. The icon system and font size/color variety help alot with that. I love that header bar. Great design on the home and story pages, especially with way too many ads.

• International Herald Tribune

  The poster child for out-of-the-box news story thinking. The clippings feature and the customizable three-column pageable story text have been around for years, and people are still trying to copy it. Amazing stuff. Clean, simple, excellent grid system. I don’t think I’m alone in this, but I totally love the serif headline with sans text. I’m also a sucker for horizontal line backgrounds, good icon sets, and (if you hadn’t noticed it yet) grayscale color themes.

• Lawrence Journal-World

  The poster child for news site innovation in (at least) the U.S., along with it’s sister site lawrence.com. Decent grid system and color scheme, but I also wish they would use HTML more often, like for the “services” block, and for all the section headers on the page like “latest stories” and “local sports”. (By the way, what the hell are “top ads”? Who are you kidding?) I like the potential of the very large graphical news block at the top, but I’ve never seen it executed to much effect. The photos and accompanying display font text are lacking. Can’t get enough of the dynamic weather graphic.

• MDR (Mitteldeutscher Rundfunk)

  I absolutely love the cropped horizontal photo space on the home page. The simple navigation, grid, and color scheme aren’t half bad either. I like the balance of HTML text/navigation and graphics/photos.

• NDR (Norddeutsche Rundfunk)

  I’m a big fan of the top navigation bar with the logo, photos, sharp colors, and subtle rollover links. Great grid, good typography. The double-wide photo space on the first story in a list is a nice touch.

• WDR (Westdeutscher Rundfunk)

  Lots of spacing, big text, and thumbnails. The icon system could use a little work, but at least they have one. A very clean design, with a good balance of text and graphics.

I will add more comments to the rest of these as I get more time…

• Newsmap
• PBS (Public Broadcasting System)
• RTE (Radio Telefis Eirann)
• Special Broadcasting Service
• WBUR
• WGBH
• Radio Mark
• San Francisco Examiner
• Times Online
• Radio Canada International
• Hartford Courant
• SuperNaturale
• Child.com
• Seattle Times
• Thirteen/WNET
• ABC News
• Guerilla News Network
• AlterNet
• CANOE (Canadian Online Explorer)
• Cambridge News
• Sacramento Bee
• Knoxville News Sentinel
• WCCO

Please add suggestions in the comments!

Dan Hill passed me the
Musical Baton, so I feel obliged, even though I may have just been a sloppy second choice for him. Thanks, Dan.

Total volume of music on my computer

7,360 songs taking up 23.66GB of space. According to iTunes this covers 382 artists, and could last me 16.5 days of continuous listening. Everything is meticulously tagged through Musicbrainz, and rated by hand, so I know these statistics to be terribly accurate.

The last CD I bought

Jonathan Fire*Eater – Tremble Under Boom Lights, purchased used at Amazon. You can always see all my music, because I keep track of such this on the music page of my Web site.

Song playing right now

“You’re Right, I’m Wrong” by Thee Headcoatees, from the album Punk Girls. You can always see every song I’m playing, because I keep track of such things on Audioscrobbler.

Five songs I listen to alot, or that mean a lot to me

I could spend the rest of my life trying to figure out 5 songs that mean a lot to me, so instead I will take the easy, literal route and just look at my iTunes playcount and tell you them in order:

1. Converge – Forsaken (album)
2. Cursive – When Summer’s Over Will We Dream of Spring (album)
3. Descendents – Catalina (album)
4. Excuse 17 – Carson (album)
5. Born Against – Sendero (album)

Like I said, not necessarily the greatest songs, but it’s all weighted through ratings and party shuffle and iTunes’ (seemingly non-random) randomness… although Catalina has a special place in my heart. (This song made we want to learn how to play guitar. I brought this song on tape with my acoustic guitar to my first day to my teacher (who by coincidence was Bob Mould’s first guitar teacher), and we ended up going through and writing out this punk song in dorky acoustic chord tablature.)

Five people to whom I’m passing the baton

I will (try to) pass it on to George Hotelling, Alf Eaton, Irdial Discs, juniorbonner, and Paul Hammond…all of which are in my Audioscrobbler network.