Goombah from Transpose connects you to listeners who like what you like. See what they are playing, then preview, buy, and download with the iTunes Music Store.

Installation is easy, operation is automatic, and the recommendations are updated all the time to keep bringing you the newest, most interesting music.

This is the project I worked on all summer and it's finally released! (Press release).

If you use iTunes on Mac OS X check out: Goombah for iTunes and let me know what you think.

Update: New release came out tonight (Dec 10) that fixes some bugs.
8:10:08 PM   []

Update: I know that appealing to people's fears is an effective mechanism for selling products and services but in this case it's just plain wrong since those fears and concerns are not based on actual threats (at least in Canada).

I think Puretrack's marketing strategy should sell based on the following:

• Faster downloads
• Easier searching
• Perfect 'rips'
• Proper tags/meta information
• Doing 'the right thing'

Of course, if the Puretracks service doesn't have the above they better get them in a hurry since to compete with free you need a superior offering.
8:04:09 PM   []

• Seattle 944 mm, 2170h
• Waterloo: 917 mm, n/a
• Winnipeg 505 mm, 2379h

7:24:37 PM   []

Some possibilities include:

• Everest Base Camp trek
• Kilimanjaro
• Machu Picchu
• South Africa?

5:25:39 PM   []

Students, staff and faculty wishing to access the network should take their laptops to the Laurier Bookstore for system verification and to register their computers. Those who own laptops with a compatible wireless card will only have to purchase the Odyssey Client Manager Software ($10 plus tax); those whose laptops aren’t equipped for wireless communication or aren’t compatible, will have to buy the recommended wireless card ($116 plus tax, which includes installation).

So let me get this straight. You have to buy special software? So this means if you have a Mac, run Unix,... then you'll be out of luck? You have to physically register your laptop? If you don't have a card they are recommending a $116 card!? All the cards I've bought have been ~$50.

I would also hope that since a lot of UW students take courses at Laurier that they too would be able to register to use their wireless LAN.
11:24:07 AM   []

Feds does not communicate with students or authorities at UW very well. Most of the ways in which Feds communicates pre-date the Internet and the World Wide Web. Feds needs to acknowledge that the Internet has introduced more effective means of communication. Furthermore, Feds needs to embrace and employ these new methods of communication. The status quo of meetings, agenda, minutes, ads in Imprint, broadcast web publishing, Feds TV, etc is not sufficient. Students do not talk to each other this way. Why should they talk to Feds this way?

He goes on to outline ten steps to better communications. I agree with most of the steps but would re-order them. I think the problem with mailing lists is that as their volume increases their usefulness decreases and so I wouldn't necessarily make them a number one priority.

My number one priority would be to give each Feds executive a weblog.

Concerned about cost? As Jesse suggests, use Moveable Type, it's free. Or use the hosted version, TypePad, which is reasonably priced. Certainly the cost of weblogs will be less than maintaing FedsTV or that stupid speakers corner thingy.

Concerned about time? Even if each Feds exec spent as little as ten minutes a week weblogging it would provide them with at least a 1000x increase over their current level of communication.
10:48:56 AM   []

Researchers hope the public archive of images, sound, video and text they are building at the University of Waterloo will be the largest of its kind in the world.

Drawing from every imaginable source, the unusual archive will be "the world's largest digital junkyard," said David Goodwin, a professor at the school.

Update: Maybe I'd ask how odd it is that we have enough hard drive space to store all this 'digital junk' but yet fourth year computer science students do not have access to enough hard drive space to complete their fourth year courses. This term I only had 32 megabytes of disk quota. This is when hard drive space costs approximately $1/gigabyte. I would gladly donate $5 so that they could offer me a gig of RAID'd space.
12:26:43 AM   []