There are a few artists: Bonnie Raitt, Joni Mitchell, Elvis Costello, among others, who can write and sing love songs that someone other than teens can associate with. There’s a complexity to their music and the relationships that they sing about. I think of them as love songs for grownups. There’s nothing wrong with love songs aimed at teens: it’s just not something I can relate to. But songs like this, Sheryl Crow’ s My Favorite Mistake, I can relate to. Here it is:

Can be seen here:

It’s an automated dashboard displayed on a Sumsung 460UXN-2 for the team at Panic to glance at for the latest and greatest info on their work and things related to it (like transit information!). This post describes all the information on the screen, as well as how they went about building it. Anyone who works on IT projects should consider building one of these.

Two good things:

1. a very substantial write up of Joanna Newsom in the NYTimes.com
2. a number of tracks of her music, including “Sprout and the Bean”

I am a big believer in the Couch Potato investment approach, and I highly recommend it everyone who finds money a) useful to have b) boring to think about. Now there is an ethical investment option. You can find out more about both here: The Ethical Couch Potato « Canadian Couch Potato.

If you want to aggressively manage your investments, then this is not for you. For everyone else, I highly recommend it.

It happens to the best of people, like John C. Dvorak.

If it does, don’t panic. Go to twitter, click on “Settings” on the top right of the page and look for “Password”. Go in there and change your password to something more difficult. Also, see “Connections”? Go in there and revoke any applications you don’t recognize or want.

You can find more tips here and here.

According to the site, English Russia,

In the end of 2009 the Uzbekistan Agency on Press and Information has initiated a criminal proceeding against a talented documentarian photographer and the first camerawoman in the country – Umida Akhmedova. She was charged with the “slander and outrage against the Uzbek people” in her photos. She is threatened to be sentenced to 2-3 years of correctional works or to 6 months imprisonment.

This is a shame: her photographs appear to be anything but slanderous and outrageous. Here’s a great shot of an old woman

and another of a young girl

There’s more at the English Russia site (as well as all sorts of fascinating stories from that side of the world).

If you liked the great job that was done in reanimating a scene from the Matrix, then you will love this video, The Force Unleashed. Equally well done.

As a side note, there is a site Bricks in Motion that looks to bring together Lego animators. Here’s hoping the result is more great legomation.

This article, Using a three-folder system to keep e-mail under control in Unclutterer is a good approach to simplying the time it takes to process email. I use this approach and have been for some time. Before I used to try and file my email in different folders, but it just took too much time and it didn’t help me much in locating lost emails. Having less folders is better.

However, before you file it, ask yourself: can I delete this? If you can, do it. That will save you even more time, now and in the future.

I think this explains itself: Israeli Raid Canceled After Facebook Leak from The Lede Blog on NYTimes.com.

Awesome. The author of this blog, in an attempt to better understand women, decided to watch 30 Chick Flicks in 30 Days and write about the experiment. As he says:

“How far would you go to understand the opposite sex?

That question has helped to fuel the idea behind this site, “30 Chick Flicks in 30 Days: One Guy’s Exploration of Romance Through Movies Loved by Women”.

First, you should know that I’m that “guy” exploring these films. Second, my name is Nick. I’m a husband, and have been for seven years. Third, no one put me up to this. And fourth, I’m not some professional film critic. I live in a small town in southern Oklahoma. I work in communications.

This little experiment will begin Friday, Jan. 15, 2010, and conclude on Saturday, Feb. 13, 2010—the day before Valentine’s Day. That’s 30-straight days; 30-straight chick flicks.”

I think there could be a book or movie here. Certainly it’s a good looking blog. Go see. C’mon….you know you are intrigued.  🙂

There’s a good article here talking about how JP Morgan thinks China has a huge labor problem. The article is worth reading, but a chart says a thousand words, so here it is:

Clearly labour costs are rising greatly. But is it a problem? That depends. It’s not like Chinese wages were high to begin with: if you are a Chinese worker, this is not a “problem” at all, at least in the short term. In the longer term, though, it will create some interesting dynamics both in China and outside when it comes to labour and capital worldwide.

Found at Andrew Sullivan’s site.

This is the teux deux web site: What deux yeux have teux deux teuxday? It’s associated with Swiss Miss, as you can see.

Now check out this site: TeuxDeux Clone

Can you see much of a difference (other than the word “Clone” appearing?). Nope, me either. But if you hadn’t heard of the original, you might overlook the clone part (“clone” being a fancy way of saying “rip-off”, I guess.) I’d like to think there is a good reason for ripping off the original site, but I can’t think of one right now.

Sad.

Now if you think the site is a great idea, then go to the original.

In this Funny or Die.com video (made by Ron Howard, no less), we see Will Ferrell, Chevy Chase, Ron Howard, Jim Carrey, Fred Armisen, Darrell Hammond, Dan Aykroyd, and Dana Carvey team up in one video, all playing the U.S. Presidents they did so well. It’s like a Beatles reunion! Well, not quite, but it is still remarkable (and funny, too). It’s for a good cause, but even the most rapacious of bankers will enjoy this video.

Great stuff.

There are all kinds of great thing you can get at 20×200, include great art for $20. Check it out. (Found via Swiss Miss).

It could end up with bad things being downloaded and run on your Windows PC. See Lifehacker if you want the details. In general, if a web site asks you to do something unusual, pass on it until you do some investigation.

With so many coffee shops offering cappuccinos and other old world coffees, it’s hard to imagine that once only places like Seb’s Cappuccino would have been selling them. The great thing is that places like Seb’s still exist and still offer great cappuccinos, according to BlogTO. So head over and enjoy. (The canolis look amazing too).

Related to the “Glow” post below, Kevin Kelly at The Technium has a post on the Game-ified Life. What does that mean? In a nutshell:

“It’s the last third of his talk where Schell really gets going. He offers a vision where ordinary life is gameified. Cheap tracking technology turns whatever you do into a “game” that accumulates points. As the gameification of life becomes ubiquitous, you go through your day racking up points and “getting to the next level.” Instead of getting grades in school you graduate to the next level. It’s a head spinning scenario, with lots to love and hate, but well worth considering.”

We all do this in a limited way now: I play “Punch Buggy” with my kids, people on the subway try to stand in the proper place on the platform to get on the train faster and get a seat easier, drivers try to find the fastest way home. What our new technology allows us to do is to play more sophisticated versions of those games. For example, it would be interesting to have a game that allowed you to track your carbon footprint for the day, week and month, and provide you with suggestions on how you could lower it. To make it more interesting, you could compete with out people who have the game. I can imagine all sorts of games like this. To people who don’t like games or bets, it may sound stupid. But for people who do like games and bets, it is a way to make the mundane more interesting. I can see it taking off.

RWW has a review of Glow: Location-Based “Feelings” for iPhone. Essentially you can enter your feelings on your iPhone, and Glow will somehow aggregate them with the feelings of others and put them on a map. It’s an interesting idea, and like Twitter or other augmented reality software, this one could end up taking off. If….and here’s the thing…it could take off if you could get more from it then you put in. One of the things I thing any such app should do is provide I high benefit/cost ratio. Users should think: wow, I want to use this, and even take the time to submit my status, because it provides me with alot of value. For example, with Glow, if enough people go to a place and report positive feelings, others might want to go and check it out. (Likewise with negative feelings).

I also think that iPhones and other devices should be able to gather some of this information automatically. Either through better sensors or through even faster inputs (e.g. if I had a bluetooth device I could quickly tap to send a signal).

Regardless of where this technology goes, I expect to see alot more of it in the future.

According to The New Republic and others, we now know who Carly Simon was singing about in “You’re So Vain”. Turns out it was David Geffen, the head of her record label at the time. Apparently Simon “resented the effort he put into promoting rival Joni Mitchell”. As it turns out, Joni Mitchell also wrote a song about David Geffen: A Free Man in Paris.

Here’s the latter:

To me it’s sad that Americans are latching onto Danny Williams going to the U.S. for heart surgery as some sort of proof that the Canadian health care system is deficient compared to the U.S. system. Indeed, at the Health Care Summit that the President recently held, Obama indirectly mentioned him.

To me,  Danny Williams actions prove nothing about the Canadian health system. Indeed, this article by Andre Picard, Williams’s heart surgery choice was based on ignorance in the Globe and Mail, argues that much better and more conclusively than I can. I highly recommend it.

Rather than pull down the Canadian system, Americans should focus on shoring up their own system, with its excess costs and millions of uninsured, and not pay attention to the likes of Danny Williams. I was going to say more about him, but the less said about him, the better.

Don’t believe me? See Your Mom Is On Facebook. Which gives me an excuse to post this:

The more I read about Facebook and the more I use it, the more I wish there was something else that did what they did but alot better. I believe alot of people feel the same way. So where is the competition?

I didn’t think so, until I read this at the Torontoist blog, which said that:

District 9 was directed, written, edited, and scored by Neill Blomkamp, Terri Tatchell, Julian Clarke, and Clinton Shorter, respectively—all Canadians. (Blomkamp was born in South Africa but moved to Canada as a teenager.) The film, however, was produced by Peter Jackson’s Wingnut Films (New Zealand) and financed by QED International (USA).

I think it is a great film, period. It’s good to see so many Canadians on it.

Erykah Badu needed to get Paul McCartney’s permission to sample from one of his songs. What could have taken days or weeks traditionally was done in hours, most by using twitter.

Now, it’s not all magic, of course. Badu who contacted Lenny Kravity, who connected her with Paul’s famous daughter, Stella McCartney. Those are likely not people who are going to respond to just anyone’s tweets. But the directness and quickness and connectedness of twitter is something that everyone can experience. This is just one famous example of it. Expect more to come.

For more data like this, see OECD Health Data 2009 – Frequently Requested Data

Here is an interesting chart from the blog, The Monkey Cage:

Based on this chart, Salon concludes:

Rank-and-file conservatives actually like big government.

In 2008, the American National Election Study asked a national sample whether federal spending on 12 different programs should be increased, decreased or kept about the same.

As the graph above illustrates, the respondents who identified themselves as “conservative” or “extremely conservative” had little appetite for specific spending cuts.

….Amazingly, the survey found that, on average, 54 percent of them actually wanted to increase spending.

Interestingly, foreign aid will also be a very small part of the U.S. budget, compared to military spending and social security. But those are some of the areas that conservatives are less interested in cutting spending. And if conservatives are not interested in cutting spending, I suspect in alot of case, liberals in the U.S. are not interested either.

And this is why governance is hard. People want the government to use less of their money (in the form of taxes), but they still want the services that governments provide. Having your cake and eating it too is challenging.

So says this chart:

Another great chart from CHART OF THE DAY: In Case You Had Any Doubts About Where Google’s Revenue Comes From

New York magazine has it. To be fair to Obama, this could be done for just about any politician. Still, it’s funny. Check it out.

Vatican City, of course. Over at mental_floss Blog one of the 10 Secrets of the Vatican Exposed is the continual use of Latin, even at banking machines. For…

‘The Vatican Bank is the only bank in the world that allows ATM users to select Latin to perform transactions. That’s just one symbol of the Holy See’s continued devotion to the language. Pope Benedict XVI has been particularly passionate about reviving the language and purportedly holds many informal conversations in Latin. (Pope John Paul II generally spoke Polish.)

The Vatican’s Latin Foundation tries to keep the language relevant by translating modern phrases into the ancient tongue. In 2003, they released an updated dictionary that included the terms “rush hour” (tempus maximae frequentiae) and “dishwasher” (escariorum lavatory). Interestingly, the translations can have serious consequences. A recent U.S. lawsuit was brought against the Vatican for conspiring to protect a child-molesting priest, and it was held up for months as the Church’s experts rejected the prosecuting team’s Latin translations of terms such as “conspiracy to commit fraud.” ‘

What could be finer than Corinne Bailey Rae strolling through Paris and singing in New York?

YouTube – Corinne Bailey Rae “Paris Nights/New York Mornings” [Official Video]

Brilliant. To capitalize on Wall Street firms paying their employees with stock instead of cash, S&W provides an online stock to steak currency converter where you can type in a stock name (IBM, CIT or as they say, “we’ll even accept GM”) and they will tell you what one of those stocks will fetch you at their fine establishment. If you want to try it out, go to  Smith & Wollensky’s Steak for Stock.

Now that people and organizations have been blogging, setting up Facebook groups, and participating in social media generally, they have had an opportunity to gather feedback. And some of that has been and will be negative. Alot of that feedback is valuable and worthwhile responding to. Other feedback (e.g. from trolls) is not worth your while and indeed may have been actively managed.

If you feel this applies to you, read this mashable.com post, HOW TO: Deal With Negative Feedback in Social Media

I like this story alot:

Several builders were on a construction site. A visitor asked the first worker what he was doing. The first builder replied, “I’m laying bricks.” The visitor asked the second, who replied, “I’m building a wall.” The visitor asked the third, who proudly answered, “I’m building a cathedral.”

I like this story, too, because I had been thinking something similar when I was doing mundane chores this weekend. At one point I was shopping for groceries, and I thought: I am not shopping for groceries, I am buying good food for my kids to eat so they can be happy and healthy. And later on, when I was cleaning up, I thought: I am not cleaning up, I am providing a clean house and a good example for my kids, so they will know the importance of taking care of things that they are responsible for.

Many daily activities can be boring or tedious, but in the proper context, they can be uplifting and meaningful. It requires just a bit of imagination and vision of what you want your life to be. It’s the purpose driven life, regardless of whether or not you are religious, for we all can aspire to a higher purpose, even if that higher purpose is to be a better parent.

From Sacha Chua’s blog, where you can find lots of good stuff! And great cathedral photo from Mercedes.. Life as I picture it’s photostream on flickr.com.

Reading this, I thought of the history of the Ford Pinto. Read Toyota boasted saving $100-million on recall, documents show in The Globe and Mail and tell me if you think differently.

For Toyota’s sake, it would be good if I were in the minority in thinking that way. These new findings will certainly make the path they have to make through the hearings in Washington alot tougher.

Conor Friedersdorf at True/Slant has put together a list with a summary of the best journalism (with links) for 2009. Just reading the summaries makes me want to read most of them. Check them out. (Via Andrew Sullivan).

Melanie Fiona  sings well and looks even better.  But what really impresses me  is how many approaches she takes with her material. She can go from vampy to soulful to 60s girl group (like this video) and more. For instance, here she is performing You Stop My Heart Valentines Day Version

and here she performs a very fun version and unplugged in the Staircase version of “GIVE IT TO ME RIGHT”

and finally here she is singing Monday Morning at MOD Club in Toronto last July

These are just a few examples. Check out more of her on YouTube and see for yourself.

I think she is going to be big, soon.

… I would find a way to use this version of “EMPIRE STATE OF MIND Pt. XXII” by Jay-Z & Alicia Keys, as performed by the so so sweet PS22 Chorus. Watch:

There’s even a short blooper at the end that makes it even that much better. Rock on.

(Tip from @ebertchicago. If you use twitter, you have to follow Roger Ebert.)