Month: September 2010

Sometimes I like to listen to a lot of music all at once. I often burn several albums to a CD as mp3 files, then listen to them in my car (which I also wish was scrobbling to my Last.FM). Having listened to many, many albums lately, and many more in the hopper, I decided I would start writing my versions of music reviews.

But to keep it interesting – I’m limiting my reviews to give words or fewer. This allows me to cover several albums at one time, and I hope it will inspire at least a couple people to seek out the music and listen to it. I’m also assigning a broad letter grade to each album I review, just so there’s no real question how I feel. Each will be LETTER ONLY, no plus or minus degrees of grading. And if you really want me to expand on one of these 5 word reviews, let me know in the comments and I’ll respond back with a little more detail, when I have the time.

Band	Album	Year	Comments	Letter Grade
Weezer	Raditude	2009	Rivers’ in love. Sappy love.	C
Weezer	Hurley	2010	Better, but still lovey dovey.	C
Linkin Park	A Thousand Suns	2010	Please, end soon.	F
Discovery	LP	2009	Lo-Fi fantasitcalism!	A
Anamanaguchi	Power Supply	2006	My childhood, reimagined.	B
Vampire Weekend	Contra	2010	Don’t change a thing!	A

While listening to This Week in Google 58, the table talked about how many billions of minutes have been “wasted” on things like Farmville and other casual games.

The Panel of guests talking on Episode 58 all wished that people would spend less time managing their virtual farms and contributing to something like Wikipedia. My question is, why haven’t we combined the two?

Maybe not wikipedia, but Decentralized Computing programs have simply missed the boat when it comes to getting extra CPU cycles thrown their way. Why should I go out and install, for example, the Folding@home client, when they could have their code inserted into Facebook games and take every few cycles here and there. Then, while I save a baby dolphin on my Happy Island, I could be doing micro-sized work units for things like Folding, Grid.org, SETI@home, BOINC, or whatever is deemed worthy of my computing cycles.

At first, these could be determined by the game designers – later this could be decided by we, the casual gamers – give us the option to choose which program we’re donating our cycles to!

My biggest fear when it comes to this? That the distributed computing folks try to design their own games and get people interested. Don’t! You simply don’t have the magic. I wouldn’t even propose contracting a company to try and design new games that utilize your code in the back-end. What needs to be done is that these “social game” developers need to think of it as their “social responsibility” to work with these distributed computing firms to allow us to give our computing cycles to worthy projects. Meanwhile, all you are doing is what you’re already doing: playing Mafia Wars, Farmville, Happy Island – all the while virtually compounding drugs to combat Cancer, AIDS, or perhaps searching radio frequencies to find intelligent life in other galaxies. Whatever your desired project, you should be able to voluntarily help it out, while not having to think about it. Then your 2.2 Billion Minutes of Virtual Farming could be 2.2 Billion minutes of being socially responsible, green, not wasting CPU cycles, all of that good stuff.