iSawToday – The Coolest Thing I Saw Today on the Web

I just found these great new demonstrations of Google’s Andriod OS. Some of the functionality looks great and although not earth-shattering more productive than the IPhone. Still no examples yet of how Android might accept user input which IMO is what will determine how this fairs in the market. Will the OS support tactile feedback? Will it function with and w/o the Blackberry-ish keyboard?

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I was searching Amazon.com for a particular Beethoven album that I lost many years ago. It had a great presto piano concerto from Sonata No.7 (very fast piano playing) and I was jones-ing to listen. I found the cd I was looking for and examined the option to buy it used for $5 but paused to think; shouldn’t this music be public domain and basically free? After all Sug Knight wasn’t around to shake down Beethoven or Mozart. I did a quick search on public domain Beethoven music and found Musopen.com which has a large collection of freely downloadable classical music. True, the performances here aren’t by the London Pops but it’s not bad if you’re just looking for a few piano sonatas or a casual listener. Heck, you can even follow along and print the Beethoven sheet music. Here’s a link to a couple of my favorites:

Moonlight Sonata (also known as the theme song for the 1985 PC game Thexder)

Sonata No. 7 in D Major, Op. 10 No. 3

Enjoy!

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KIVA is a social networking site dedicated to connecting lenders willing to contribute a few hundred dollars to entrepreneurs in under-developed countries. For example you can help Rosa Josefa Marquez De Limachi further her shoe sales business, or Lucila Malagon in Ecuador grow her pharmacy.

Through a network of partners Kiva screens loan recipients and provides a transparent view of the loan status to all of the parties involved.

Kiva very clearly lays out the risks involved with lending in this manner even though the amounts are relatively small; under $5,000. In most cases the average lender only contributes one-two hundred dollars and can monitor the progress of the investment via a personal online portfolio.

Furthermore, the folks at Kiva have done an excellent job of keeping the site design simple and accessible to many different audiences. If you’re thinking of giving to a charitable cause I HIGHLY recommend Kiva.

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Problem:
I wear button down dress shirts every day but don’t like the look of a t-shirt collar underneath.

The options:

1. Constantly fight armpit stains

2. Buy tons of these AWESOME v-neck shirts from American Apparel

These great shirts let you look cool without worrying about sweat stains.

Thank you American Apparel!

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Back in 1997 I sold ice cream all summer in order to afford a small MIDI sequencer to record my homemade music on. At the time a $500 Yamaha QY-8 was the rage one of several options.

Today, I found this story on Wired.com that details KORG’s plan to release an application for the Nintendo DS that will surpass the sequencing power of my little Yamaha QY-8.

Luckily, my girlfriend gave me a DS for Christmas to ‘train my brain” so I’m ready to go.

Funny, the first and only video game system I’ve ever owned and I still don’t own an actual play-game for it.

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I’m sorry for two theater-related posts in one day but I felt compelled to promote the upcoming production of Les Miserables at the Lincolnshire Theater in Chicagoland.

Although this show is NOT a touring Broadway production it features a very solid Broadway cast and should be an interesting production.

I found very little information on this production so I wanted to link and promote the details I could find.

Broadway-esch Casting Notes:

Valjean – John Cudia (Has played both Valjean and the Phantom on Broadway)
Javert – Richard Todd Adams (Has played Roul in the touring Phantom)
Cosette – Leah Horowitz who just finished playing Cosette in the Broadway revival of Les Mis(closed in Jan)

Here are some additional resources I found:
- Another article talking about the show

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Finally, here is the trailer for the new Indiana Jones movie due out later this spring:

http://movies.yahoo.com/feature/indianajones.html?showVideo=1

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Back in 2003 I approached my friend and go-to designer Scott about a cooking website and not just any cooking website but one aimed at helping men cook dinner for a woman  the site was called www.dinnerforher.com.  Scott crafted an amazing logo and I started doing some research.  Here are some of the great books I uncovered in the process:

Win Her With Dinner

Cooking to Hook Up

Well, at the end of the day there just wasn’t enough interest in the subject matter for me to continue and the project stands where it is today.  I’m writing on this topic because Techcrunch posted an article yesterday about a new site with a similar goal: Culinary Seductions

Hopefully I’m proved wrong and millions of women will have dinner made for them tonight.

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For a long time I have had issues with portable music players.  I put off buying any thing ‘i’ relying instead on my Treo now Blackberry Curve to play music for me.  One problem that has always plagued me is easily controlling the music playing on my home stereo.  I partially resolved this with a D-Link DSM 320 Media Receiver which is OK but not amazing.

Today I read an article that gives me hope that the solution will soon arrive.  Blackberry is making a wireless stereo adapter for it’s phones.  This means that I will be able to plug a small box into my stereo input and control all the music playing right from my Blackberry Curve!  If the ipod had this feature I’d probably have shelled out the $400 for one already but alas.  Now one can only hope for the device to support streaming from other bluetooth 2.0 devices such as my laptop.

Read the full article here

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Amazon.com Empowers Anyone to Create Their Own Book

I came across a great article this morning on wired that talks about the growing industry of on-demand publishing. On-demand publishing means that an average person can visit a website, upload their book, artwork, music, or movies and have them distributed and printed to paper or disc at the time an order is placed. Thus making it easier for the masses to publish works of art that would remain otherwise unseen. Take a look at the following sites:

LuLu

Create Space

I would highlight the second choice CreateSpace as it is a product of Amazon.com. This means that once you upload your book it can be found on the world’s largest marketplace right alongside the likes of Martha Stewart.

That’s all fine and dandy but how much does an aspiring writer have to gain(or lose) by publishing his/her works in this fashion? I ran through a test using CreateSpace and found that to sell my black/white 200pg book via Amazon.com it would cost me roughly $18 per book sold. Not terrible if my manuscript is collecting dust in the closet or the ink on my recipe cards is fading.

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