Archives for category: Music

August, September, October

November 10, 2009 //

I moved at the end of August and that consumed a lot of my time in September. Then I was sick for a bit in October. It’s November now and things have started to settle down a bit.

I’m still mountain biking and still loving it. I’ve been trying to ride at least once a week. Evening rides are harder now, at least if I want to ride in the woods but I’m hoping to join a night ride later this week. I think I’ll need to pick up a better light though.

This past weekend I rode twice – once with the NYC MTB meetup group and once by myself. The Saturday ride with the group was excellent. We spent time practicing various technical bits at Sprain Ridge Park and a few of us even went for another ride afterwards. I brought my video camera and my new GorillaPod camera stand and took a bunch of footage of us.

The previous weekend I also rode with the NYC MTB group, that time in a long ride around Lewis Morris Park in Morristown, New Jersey. I really had to push myself that day, especially when I decided to go for a second loop with the group. I was definitely the slowest of the group but I managed to stay not too far behind. We did a bit of practicing on this ride as well, though not as much as this past weekend.

The weekend before that was a ride in Mianus River Park which was probably one of the best ride I’ve been on. That park is really beautiful and the guy leading the ride took us on a really nice route through Mianus. I’m glad I have it stored in my Garmin GPS.

Back in September I made the trek up to New Paltz, NY for mountain biking festival at Lake Minnewaska. I was initially disappointed because they had no single track but after seeing the following view my opinion changed completely.

And while I’m throwing all this video at your I should mention my friend Will’s new band
Gotham City Mashers. Here’s my favorite song of theirs so far:

You can see their entire recent gig at Don Hill’s:

The opener was The Anderson Council, who’s entire set I also taped:

Categories Biking, Music

last.fm Dupe Bug?

March 29, 2009 //

Hi last.fm,

I really like your site and the services it offers. I really love music and appreciate finding people with similar tastes, reading up on bands I like, expanding my own library by finding other bands through your site and just letting people know what I’ve been listening to.

But lately I’ve been experiencing a bug that’s been annoying the hell out of me: after scrobbling my latest songs I check my Recently Listened Tracks and find songs show up twice or more when I know I only listened to that song once at that time.

I thought maybe the problem was with the scrobbler so I updated to the latest version and took some screenshots of what it was doing. It showed each song only once so all looked well there.

When I checked my recent tracks on the web site I saw duplicate entries for a number of bands.

The biggest culprit seems to be Hammock. I’ve seen their tracks show up over 20 times on my playlist at the same exact minute.

The only thing I can offer about Hammock is that I fall asleep to them most every night, but definitely not on infinite loop. But this problem also happens with other bands, so I don’t think it’s Hammock specific.

So my questions for you are?

Are these songs showing up twice in the database table (or whatever) for my “song plays”?

When I try to delete one of the dupes, both/all entries end up getting deleted. I don’t see this until I refresh the page though. From poking around your code I see the following:

The HTML for the dupes show the same exact JavaScript code for deleting the dupe tracks: rmrecenttrack(this, 21617457, 1238250572)
The rmrecentrack method is defined as such: rmrecenttrack(link, trackid, listendate)

So both the trackid and listendate are the same. That explains why they both end up getting deleted – they are in fact the same entry. But if they have the same exact listendate… why are they showing up multiple times?

My only guess is that you have duplicate entries in your database, or whatever is feeding your view code is generating duplicate entries. I wonder where this is coming from if the scrobbler is showing a single entry for these songs. I’d love to help you figure this out.

Are these dupe entries also counting as duplicate plays towards the play count for that song/artist?

This is the only answer I really care about. I don’t want these dupe entries messing up my play counts, especially when a song can be duped up to 20 times. I suppose I could do some more digging on this but I’ve already spent an hour looking into this. It seems to be happening to others as I’ve found other people complaining about duplicate entries in the last.fm forums.

I know I don’t pay for your service (I’m sure you’re doing alright on ads, yea?) but would appreicate knowing if you’re aware of the problem and if you have figured out the cause and know how to fix.

Categories Music, Programming

In A New York Minute (Ooh ahh ooooooh)

March 26, 2009 //

Last Friday I worked form the city again and by the evening I found myself eager to do something that night. Being stuck in a cast for several weeks tends to make you a little stir crazy. I started scouring meetup.com for things to do that evening. There was a Battlestar Galactica Finale party that sounded very cool but it was full up with a 20 person waiting list.

I continued looking and came across The New York Composers Meetup Group. The meeting for that night was full as well but I decided to join the group anyways. Within a few minutes I got an email from the organizer telling me to come by since they usually have a few no-shows anyways. I grabbed some dinner at Pret and then headed down to the meet up location by taxi. I got there a little early so I did some reading while I waited for people to show up.

The meeting eventually started and there was a wide variety of people who showed up. The format for the night was to listen to pieces by a few people, get a little lesson on digital recording, and then do some more listening. Everybody’s songs were good and some people were very impressive, either in their music or their lyrics. During one of the breaks the people next to me struck up a conversation with me (the cast is an easy conversation piece) and I learned that the girl is a composer and the guy is a Ruby on Rails developer. I didn’t get to play the song I wanted to share but after hearing some other pieces I already started to critique my own piece.

I left the meet up at the same time the couple did and they invited me out to get something to eat. We took a few taxis and eventually ended up at a diner where we had a great conversation about meaningfulness, jobs, careers, callings, doing good things, music, programming, psychology and a bunch of other stuff. They picked up the bill, refused to let me pay (the cast really works!) and helped me flag down a taxi to send me on my way home.

All in all it was a surprisingly joyful night. And I even got some new friends out of it.

Next Thursday the cast is supposed to come off but I’m going to probably be back in the bracing boot. I’m not sure if I’m going to be able to put weight on it yet. But at least it means things are getting better. I’m just really eager to be able to drive but realize that I’ve got to take it slow.

This Wednesday is the next New York City Boardgames & Cardgames Group meetup and I’m uber-excited for that. I’m planning to bring Robo Rally and Abduction this time and have been reviewing the rules in anticipation. My new friends from the composers group may be joining me as well.

Categories Gaming, Geekdom, Music

New Music

September 19, 2008 //

Here’s a bunch of bands/musicians I’ve recently discovered and have really gotten into, though my last.fm charts might disagree:

The Album Leaf
Band of Horses
Bleu
Count Zero
Hammock
Jackdaw4
Linus of Hollywood
Loscil
The Nines
Pugwash
Sugarbomb

Categories Music