Michael Hanscom

Enthusiastic ambivert. Geeky, liberal, friendly, curious, hopepunk; trying to be a good person. (he/him)

MOG: Last.fm with poorer English

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I’ve been using last.fm for some time now to track what I’m listening to. I have no idea if anyone actually pays much attention to it, but it’s all handled for me in the background without my having to worry about it (as iTunes plays music, the last.fm client sends info on what I’m listening to to their servers), so I just let it go.

Now there’s a new upstart service looking to do much the same thing, in much the same way. Sign up for MOG, download a small application (on Mac OS X, it’s a system preference pane), and MOG will track what you listen to and link it to other people with similar tastes. Here’s my MOG page.

Right off the bat, I really can’t see what MOG offers that last.fm doesn’t already have…there really doesn’t seem to be much differentiation between the two services.

Save for one little thing.

Under a link called ‘Share my MOG’, you can spam notify all your friends of your new MOGspace. You can either write your own little note, or you can use the provided boilerplate text. All pretty standard — except that MOG’s boilerplate message made me cringe. Out loud.

what’s up?

thought i’d share my spankin’ new MOG page with you.

you can find it at: http://mog.com/djwudi

MOG automatically creates a page for me that lets you see what’s in my music collection and what i’m playing (and does a whole lot more). There are serious music freaks hanging at MOG. see you in the MOG-O-SPHERE. later.

Out of seven sentences (well, six plus a farewell), not a single one is actually well written. Grammarians more versed than I would be more able to point out all the problems (and probably see some that I don’t identify right off), but…yeesh. Capitalization is nearly nonexistent, dropped subjects left and right, missing punctuation, and a general disrespect for the English language.

It’s bad enough that a disturbingly high percentage of ‘net users have little to no critical writing skills (or even casual writing skills, for that matter) — do we really need to encourage this wholesale slaughter of the language?

Ick.

Yes, it’s high-falutin’, snobbish, and elitist. But damn if that isn’t enough to knock MOG several steps down in my estimation.

iTunes “00 No One Takes Your Freedom” by Beatles/Franklin, Aretha/Michael, George/Scissor Sisters from the album www.djearworm.com (2004, 5:15).

Bachelor Week

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I’m a bachelor for the next week! I just dropped Prairie off at the airport, sending her down to Palm Springs, CA to visit her dad. They’ll be spending a few days there closing up her grandparents’ winter home, then driving back up the coast, and she should be back next Saturday at some point.

I’ve got a few days of work, and a few days off. Rumor has it that my brother may be stopping by on Friday at some point, other than that, things are pretty much unscheduled. Knowing me, that means I’ll probably be spending a lot of free time at the keyboard here catching up on some projects. I do have a few ‘boy movies’ lined up from Netflix that Prairie had no interest in seeing (or even being around for) — Catwoman (“Worst. Movie. EVAR.”, according to Prairie), The School of Rock, and The Chronicles of Riddick.

And now, back to bed for a few hours sleep before I have to drag myself into work.

iTunes “Embraceable You (From the musical “Girl Crazy”)” by Finck, David/Previn, André from the album Panorama: George Gershwin (1998, 4:57).

2nd Quarter done!

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The last quiz in my music class was last week; the last test in my math class was this morning. As of now, I’m done with my second quarter of college, and it’s officially summertime! :)

Official grades won’t be posted for a bit, but I’m quite sure of an A in my music class, and either a high B or (possibly) low A in math. Go me!

Two quarters of good grades in a row. Quite the change from my high school career.

iTunes “Eclecticism” by DJ Wüdi from the album Difficult Listening Hour (2002, 1:17:32).

X-Men: The Last Stand

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We went out to see X-Men III today. Overall not bad, but not nearly as good as the first two were. I really think that the switch of directors from Bryan Singer (The Usual Suspects, Apt Pupil, X-Men, X2) to Brett Ratner (Rush Hour, Rush Hour 2) was a big factor in this. A pity, because of how good the first two were, and the possibilities presented by the “cure” for the mutant gene (which ended up feeling more like a Macguffin only of use to set up the big battle scenes at the end, rather than the issue at the core of the film).

Had Singer been given the same script to work with, I think he’d have come up with a much more watchable movie — Ratner just tried to pack far too much into 90 minutes. Too many new characters to keep track of, and too much reliance on action over plot. While the big set pieces were quite well done and fun to watch, they also were too big, hard to track, and went on so long that “nifty!” soon gave way to “okay, can we go to something else now?” Occasional editing goofs went a long way to pulling you out of the film, too — apparently the sun goes down in seconds in San Francisco (or Magneto and his bunch stood on the end of the bridge admiring Alcatraz for a couple hours), as the bridge moving took place at sunset, and immediately afterwards it was dark night.

Still, it was fun, not bad for a summer action flick, and probably wouldn’t seem nearly as shoddy if the first two hadn’t set such a high bar for the series.

One last thing, though: while apparently I’m greatly in the minority here, “I’m the Juggernaut, bitch!” wasn’t funny when it first appeared on the ‘net (I’ve never been able to get through more than about ten or fifteen seconds of the video before getting bored and turning it off), and it wasn’t funny in the movie. Rather, it was out of place, didn’t seem to fit, pulled me out of the movie (since I knew of the source), and suffers from the same problem that the Shrek movies suffer from (as good as they are): most pop-culture humor is only funny at a particular moment in time, and only if you ‘get’ or are a fan of the reference. A few years down the road, that line will just be another forgettable one-liner.

iTunes “Snake and the Moon” by Dead Can Dance from the album Dr. Martens: Shoe Pie (1996, 4:12).

My Father’s Eyes

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Me, Feb. 2005:

Prairie, Grayland, WA

Dad, early ’70s’:

Berta Contemplates Lake Huron

Me, Oct. 2004:

Seattle Arboretum, Seattle, WA

Dad, early ’70’s:

Stone Steps Near Lake Michigan

Me, Aug. 2003:

Bumbershoot, Seattle, WA

Dad, early 70’s:

Child Feeding Gulls

The more I see of my dad’s photography as he scans in old slides and posts them to his Flickr pages, the more it becomes clear to me where my eye for photography came from. Few exact matches, but lots of similarities in the compositions and subjects that we like.

Thanks, Dad!

iTunes “Oh, Lady Be Good! (From the musical “Lady Be Good”)” by Finck, David/Previn, André from the album Panorama: George Gershwin (1998, 4:20).

Missing: One Pink Monkey

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At some point over the past few days, it appears that someone ducked into our car after we’d forgotten to lock the doors. Thankfully, they didn’t take much — what they did take was this cute little monkey.

Monkey, Woodland, WA

She’d been the mascot for the car for the last year and a half, so it was a bummer to see that she’d gone missing (though a relief that nothing else was taken). Our best bet is that some kid saw us getting out, ducked in, and grabbed the cute lil’ monkey, but didn’t want to take the time to go through the rest of the car.

So — should anyone in the Seattle area happen to see some nefarious monkeynapper with our lil’ monkey, feel free to kick them. Hard. In the shin.

(If the guilty party happens to read this, Prairie would like you to at least please remember to pet the monkey’s nose. She likes that.)

iTunes “I Am Streched On Your Grave” by O’Connor, Sinéad from the album So Far…The Best of Sinéad O’Connor (1990, 5:35).

6:66 6/6/06

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You’ve seen it everywhere else already, of course, but it does bear mentioning that today is 6/6/6 (at least, it is as long as you drop the leading zero on the year notation).

I figured as long as I was making a post about that, I might as well post it at 7:06 pm…or, rather, 6:66 pm, but as our hours top out at 60 minutes, that wraps around to 7:06. And yes, AM would have been better (as then it would be correct using military time, while the evening version is 1906 or 1866 rather than 0666), but I wasn’t awake at six in the morning, so this will have to do.

iTunes “Burger Queen” by Jason Webley with Jay Thompson from the album Eleven Saints (2006, 3:21).