PKB

The team at FoxyTunes have launched a music portal. Transbuddha summarizes:

FoxyTunes Planet acts as a music portal that will gather up YouTube, Pandora, Google, Last.FM, and Rhapsody media for the artist, as well as related lyrics, Amazon products, and Flickr photos.

I did a cursory search for Billy Ray Cyrus and here’s the output:

Can’t wait to see how this does. (And I love that last.fm and Hype Machine are both in the aggregated results for searches.) StumbleUpon is the poster child for building a thriving web service on the back of a popular Firefox add-on — it’s great to see another addition to the mix.

Things that made me happy this week.

• lolcats. I resisted. Beltzner, robcee and deb pulled me over to the dark side.
• The Nirvana Nevermind baby grew up.
• Handy Mail.app Smart Mailboxes. Just have to remember to actually implement these.
• Pickiest computer users in the world pick Firefox.
• “Office” platform.
• Clive Owen needs to reprise Children of Men and star in the film adaptation of The Road. Someone please make the movie of A Canticle for Leibowitz. I’ve got a blog post brewing on dystopia.

I found Luke Chueh’s portfolio site over the weekend while I was switching my blog theme over to fSpring. Along the way I briefly dabbled with the GlossyBlue theme by n.Design but there were too many colors to sort out, and I suck at making gradients. (I do have to say that Kuler was really useful last night for testing color combos.)

I was trying to find an icon I could use as a sort of spirit animal for this blog. (”Spirit animal” being a high-falutin’ way of saying “cute mascot with portentous undertones.”) Anyway, a few searches later I found Luke’s site.

I really like this style. There’s a bunch of other people in L.A. and Tokyo working this vein. I don’t really know what it’s called, but “ugly cute” works for me. Check out Kozyndan, Mori Chack and Yoshitomo Nara for more.

Here’s the icon I was going to use, built off Luke’s Monkey King painting. I’ll find a home for him yet.

Tim O’Reilly points to a bundle of Greasemonkey hacks for Gmail that Gina over at Lifehacker’s put together. Great observation at the end of the post:

In the old days, Microsoft and Netscape fought to lock in users with incompatible extensions. Here we see the same thing happening simply because that one platform is open and the other is not. The users themselves are evolving the browser. There’s no intentional incompatibility (and it’s not in the browser itself). It’s just that one browser is getting more capable than the other as a result of its user community.

In an alternate reality, this was the headline in the New York Times on the aftermath of the Virginia Tech shootings.

The actual headline was “Korean-Americans Brace for Problems in Wake of Killings” in today’s NYT. Personal accounts of hate delivered to and fear felt by Korean Americans in reaction to the murders in Virginia follow.

What happened in Virginia was an atrocity.

My heart weeps for the losses suffered by every single family involved.

Calling out Cho Seung-Hui’s ethnicity shifts focus and responsibility from the individual to a group. Once Cho’s ethnicity was discovered, news media highlighted his Korean roots in their headlines and stories.

From Forbes (via AP):

“Police identified the classroom shooter as 23-year-old Cho Seung-Hui (pronounced Choh Suhng-whee) of South Korea. ”

“Cho was in the U.S. as a resident alien with a residence established in Centreville, but living on campus in Harper Residence Hall, the university said.”

Cho immigrated to the US at the age of eight. He was acculturated in America. Yet he isn’t identified as an American in much of the coverage. Instead, he is the other, the stranger.

I don’t care that Korean Americans are planning to hide out until this blows over. Focusing on Cho’s ethnicity is a smokescreen that gives the rest of us an easy out from dealing with the root problems we have with violence in America.

The elephant in the room is how easy it was for Cho to acquire weapons. No other Western democracy suffers the murder rate that we do.

I’m an American. Bracing for problems, and hoping for solutions to our easy access to the tools of violence.

Update: via John, a perspective that speaks truth to the situation.

I’m a case study for vendor lock-in and switching costs.

I still use Yahoo! Mail - six years and counting - even though I’ve got at least three Gmail accounts. (I use Gmail just for newsgroup posting. There’s also this nagging feeling I get about being logged into the mother ship while searching, but that’s another story.) I tried the Yahoo! Mail beta a bunch of times, but always came back to the old school version because it felt way faster on my G4.

I also still use Bloglines, even though all the cool kids moved over to Google Reader an eternity ago. I’m just used to it, and it gets the job of plowing through feeds done.

But I have to admit loving the shiny.

Thanks to some fine design hacking by Jon Hicks, part of the original Firefox visual identity team, I am enjoying a much prettier Bloglines tonight. (Ironically I found the Bloglines skin at a post Jon wrote about skinning Google Reader.)

To wit:

Before

After. Yeah baby.

So thanks Jon. You made a design geek very happy.