Driving > Disco

So, I know I haven't posted in a while, but this is not just one of those "filler" posts. I was looking back through all my various posts about music I had first been exposed to on commercials. Though there have been many different commercials, advertising many different wares, the one common thread would have to be Apple.

I don't know if it is my new found iPhone lust that is making me easily influenced by the Apple ad agency or what, but it seems that music from any of their recent commercials hooks me in no time. I've dug up some evidence and I promise I'll try to keep things as chronological as possible here, but I'm sure I'll get something out of order.

I'd say the first one I remember was for the Macbook Air with Yael Naim's "New Soul."

Next up we have a video iPod refresh with Feist on "1234."

These next few did not have individual blog posts on here (at least not yet), but have all moved quickly from the Watch List to a spot on my regular rotation. Chairlift did "Bruises" for the latest iPod nano refresh.

I believe the iPod Touch's bump to 32gb brought about The Asteroids Galaxy Tour's "Around the Bend," which is so new, they don't even have their album out yet (but I still love this song).

Lastly, since the iPhone's jump to 3G, a particular song has been playing in the background of nearly all commercials for it. Usually in instrumental form, the latest spot, which touts the Shazam client for the iPhone, feature The Submarines' "You, me & the Bourgieosie." These guys are currently on my daily playlist and I still can't get enough of them.

Speaking of Shazam, there website has a great tool called Music Explorer, that'll let you plug in an artist or songname and will show you a graphical display of related or similar acts that you might enjoy. I'm sure there have been other tools like this before, but I figure I'd throw it out there, for your perusal.

Here's a little something for the technophiles out there. Everyone else, feel free to ignore, since you'll probably write it off as boring.

I've used a ton of different bit torrent clients in my day and just about decided that BitTornado was the best. It is lightweight, isn't a memory hog, has customizable speed options and probably a ton of other features that I'm not even using.

However, for the last couple of days, I've been using μTorrent, and even though it hasn't been very long, I must say that I'm very impressed. It has an easy to use gui, uses almost no memory (the faq claims that it'll stay below 6mb most of the time...I have two torrents running right now and its sitting at 2.4mb) and, one of my favorite features, it can handle multiple torrents in one window, as opposed to BitTornado, which required a separate instance of the program for each torrent you were running.

I'm not saying that μTorrent is perfect, or that I'll never use BitTornado again. I just thought I would spread the word about a cool, new to me program. It's been around for a couple of years now, so I'm sure most of you are already using it. For the rest of you, head here.

Well, if you've been wondering where I have been, it is not surfing the net. (I've actually been remarkably busy at work, but that is beside the point.) The reason I'm not surfing the net, aside from work, is that Jessica has, for all intents and purposes, killed the internet for me. How could lovely Jessica have done such a thing as "killed the internet," you ask? By introducing me to the Google Reader. All it does is read rss feeds from web pages. I know there have been programs to do that for almost as long as there have been web pages. There is just something so simple and functional about Google Reader.

Obviously, if you have a Gmail account, you automatically have a Google Reader account (not to mention Blogger ;-). Not that it would matter, since they're both free anyway, but it is nice to already be signed up. Next, you can put all your favorite pages' rss feed addresses in there, and it'll show you whenever they have a new post. No wondering if you missed something over night; no scouring the web in your daily "routine" to get up to date; no more juggling 20 tabs and trying to remember the order you want them placed in (as well as checked in). None of that. Reader gives you one page, with all the content you normally check, kept up to date for you. Another nice feature is basically a "stumble upon" type of discovery system, that shows you feeds that Google thinks you would be interested in, based on what you already have in your reader.

Like everything else, its not perfect. I've actually seen it take a while for a page to update in Reader, that I know has already updated in the real world (although there is a refresh button, for you nervous types). Also, in my experience, I've found that if I'm on the Reader page for a website, and that website gets updated, the update will sorta get stuck in limbo: it'll tell you there is a new item, but you can't see it without changing the view to "new items only." Not a show stopper, but plenty annoying.

Check it out. You'll save time, get more work done and wonder what all the fuss over this "internet" is all about.