I started off this quarter ending my random listening. I wanted to listen to certain artists I really enjoyed. I figured I could go back to random once I got bored of choosing the artists I was listening to. Additionally, in between picking certain artists if I wanted to hear a certain song, I started going through my library alphabetically by artist. Let’s see how these trends panned out over the quarter.

Monday night, as I walked to the Ram’s Head Live concert venue, I had no idea what to expect. Earlier in the year Daniel had retweeted some strange, witty tweets from some dude named Childish Gambino. Based on the name I thought it was some weird Italian joke tweet account. Then, a few months later, I joined tumblr after seeing Dan’s tumblr posts on his blog’s sidebar and determining there was some neat stuff going on there. That’s when I came across the site Hipster Childish Gambino and saw posts like these:

I wanted to take a look at my music listening habits quarterly to see how each quarter’s stats stack up against the final numbers at the end of the year.  I started off the year listening to some of the new artists I’d bought, then just switched to random listens for the rest of the quarter.

1.  Girl Talk (294 plays) - I discovered Girl Talk at the end of 2010.  I really enjoyed the latest album.  Quickly acquired the rest of his albums.  I enjoy all of them other than the first one.  Listened to each of the albums a few times.  Then when I put my playlist on random, of course a few of them kept coming up because of how many tracks there were. 2. Doctor Octoroc (279 plays) - I got into chip tunes at the end of 2010/beginning 2011 via I Fight Dragons.  That caused me to check out Anamanaguchi, who Dan had been recommending for a while.  Then I came across Doctor Octoroc.  Got his chiptunes version of the Dr Horrible soundtrack and his chiptunes album “After These Messages”.  Enjoyed it for a while.  Quickly tired of it.  I don’t think I’ve listened to it once since the initial push. 3. The Beatles (132 plays) - I went through my Beatles rush in 2010 when I first got all the songs.  The Beatles are in third place solely on the basis of having SO MANY songs that they’re bound to come up often why I’m listening to my entire collection on random. 4. I Fight Dragons (109 plays) - I have all three of their EPs.  One was available for joining the mailing list - the other two I bought.  I really enjoy this group.  They’re a regular rock band that embellishes their sound with chiptunes.  The topics are not as nerdy as you’d expect from a chiptunes band.  They have a good sound, the singer has a good voice, and the songs are good.  I wouldn’t say they’re awesome, but they’re enjoyable enough that I always get happy when their CDs come up in my rotation of CD-Rs are work. 5. Anberlin (89 plays) - I own all their CDs so I’m surprised they didn’t come up more often.  I like all their albums to varying degrees.  I’m partial to their earlier work, although their latest CD had me falling for them again. 6. Relient K (54 plays) - I also own all of their CDs.  Although the first two CDs are awful compared to their later albums, there are still a few songs I enjoy on the first two.  I’m not a big fan of their absolute latest album, it forays a bit more into a country type of sound.  I’ll probably have to listen to previews of their next CD rather than blindly buying it. 7. “Weird Al” Yankovic (49 plays) - I have a ton of his songs, but I often had to skip them to keep from annoying Danielle.  Perhaps now that I’m mostly listening with headphones there’ll be more listens. 8. Billy Joel (43 plays) - nearly all of these plays come from a greatest hits album of his that I bought.  Around this time, I stopped listening at random in order to listen to my newly bought music. 9. Five Iron Frenzy (40 plays) - I’m a huge fan of Five Iron Frenzy, but they’ve fallen to the wayside as I’ve explored other non-ska music recently 10.  MxPx (33 plays) - I hadn’t heard any MxPx music in a long time.  They were one of my favorite bands from middle school through high school.  But I hadn’t listened to any of the three of four albums I own in a long time.  Listening to my collection on random brought them back into my radar. 11. GRITS (33 plays) - all their plays came from listening to my collection on random.  After their second album, I only like selected songs from their further albums. 12. The Hangovers (29 plays) - all from their latest album Three Sails to the Wind.  I really enjoy this album a lot. 13. Anamanaguchi (28 plays) - I really enjoy listening to this group.  It’s weird having groups producing music without vocals nowadays.  But I wonder if this is the future evolution of symphonic music. 14. Tom Lehrer (27 plays) - A great musician who rivals “Weird Al” for making me laugh. 14. ???? (Nobuo Uematsu) (27 plays) - I don’t have any of his solo work.  All these are from Final Fantasy soundtracks.  He is a great composer.  I think some of his songs rival movie soundtracks.

I was born and raised in the USA, so I am not sure if it’s fair to call these songs racist, I think that racism requires malicious intent.  And, given that the US has a different and unique relationship with its non-caucasian descendants than Latin America, I’m not sure there’s the same level of maliciousness as in the US.  All I can do is view these songs through the perspective of an American.  The song that sparked this article is by La Banda Gorda and is called “El Negro Pega Con Todo” which means “black matches with everything”.  I’d heard it before, but I was listening a little more closely to the introduction this time around.

I wrote this code a while back because a website that does the same thing seemed to miss my posts every other week.  So I figured I’d write my own in python to do the same thing to me.  Then I just put it into a cron job to automatically run it every Sunday.  I’m going to be posting the code on my GPL code page.  Here it is for you to see and for Google to index.  Just fill in the appropriate variables with the secret keys you get from each site’s API.

So, as I mentioned before, I wanted to try and make sure to get mostly unheard music on my random playlist so I could go through all my music.  So I put in a bias to make sure that there was an 80% that the next song picked was unplayed.  I started getting even more played music showing up than before!  I was baffled!  Then I realized it was my piss-poor understanding of statistics at fault.  Telling it that there should be an 80% of the music selected having never been played is equivalent to saying there should be a 20% change that the music selected should have been played before.  What the heck is going on?  So, if you look at my collection - when I moved to KDE 4, it lost the previous stats.  So all of my music was unplayed.  Let’s say I have 10,000 songs.  So when I tell it to randomly play music (with no bias), there’s, at first a 0/10,000 chance of a played song coming up.  After that, there’s a 1/10,000 chance of a previously played song showing up.  After a day, there’s a 26/10,000 chance of a played song coming up.  So because of randomness I could end up with previously played songs.  Stats only tell us what will happen in the long run.  In 10 flips of a coin you could get 10 heads.  But in infinite flips you should get half of them heads and half tails.  26/10,000 = 0.26% chance of a previously played song coming up.  So, when I set the bias so that theres a 20% of the songs that come up will have been played, I’m greatly increasing my changes of hearing a song again vs just leaving it on random!  At least for now.  Once I’d listened to most of my collection, it should flip.  There will be so many previously played songs that those will be random enough to satisfy me.  Right now not enough of them have been played relative to my collection’s size so the same ones keep coming up.

So, a while back I caved and got an iPod shuffle.  While it worked well at first, over the last year it has been a constant pain in my butt.  All I want to do is use gPodder to get my podcasts and listen to them on the way to work and at the gym.  I went with the iPod shuffle because it was sub $100 and I didn’t really need to spend the money for the screen in the Nano.  Not having a screen meant just listening in order and having to check gtkPod to make sure I’d listened to all the podcasts before clearing the iPod.  Let me get into my workflow and why the shuffle became a real pain.

As I’ve mentioned before, I used to be really excited about KDE.  It’s been a while since I last looked at KDE.  Well, technically, I couldn’t really do much there.  But there’s this time I was able to look at it.  Let me just say that I no longer agree that it’s uglier than Gnome.  Take a look:

At first I was confused because the desktop background was not carried over to my right monitor.  When I went to change the background I saw that they no longer put it all into one dialog.  You need to go to each screen and manually set the background.  While counterintuitive at first, it actually makes more sense this way.  You can see my micro-blogging widget, calculator widget, and some folder views.  The taskbar is looking nice and slick now.  The KDE version of the system try is looking really nice.  It has a very good slickness to it; to quote Aaron Seigo, “like something that might come out of Cupertino”.  My FAVORITE part of KDE 4.4 vs Gnome 2.30 is the little “i” i the right corner.  If you click there you can scroll back through all the system messages.  So, whereas you might miss that in Gnome if you’re looking somewhere else or away from the computer, you can easily find and review the messages in KDE.  At first the desktop was really slow and I thought “here we go again.  I’m going to have to once again write off KDE 4.x as useless.”  But it turns out that it was just Strigi/Nepomuk indexing my home folder.  It’d be a year or more since I last loaded KDE 4, so it had a lot to index.  When I also had some errors with Amarok (which I’m about to get to), I gave it a reboot in case KDE was having a fight with SELinux (as has happened in the past).  Anyway, when I came back, Strigi was done and KDE was much more responsive.  Konqueror had also been slow during the indexing, so I’ll want to test that in Part 2.  I took a look at my old friend, Kopete.  It was looking nice, if a bit cartoony compared to Pidgin.  I’ll also want to take a closer look in Part 2.  It didn’t support Facebook chat (as is supported in Pidgin via a plugin) which isn’t a killer, but it’s not good.  Perhaps there’s a plugin there too?  I’ll have to investigate that.  What I was most curious about was Amarok.  It was one of my biggest anchors to KDE back in the day and really my favorite music player.

Dan’s not the only one that can post videos. Here’s one I really enjoyed. I heard about this guy in a podcast that covered a steam punk gathering in London.

Danielle and I recently went to see " Peter and the Wolf" at the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra.  Danielle and I both grew up watching the Disney animated adaption of “Peter and the Wolf” and we loved the idea of being able to listen to the music as performed by the BSO.  I don’t care how amazing the speakers are in your home theater system, nothing sounds as amazing as the orchestra.