Anka does Idol

I'm not sure how to categorize this. My friends Glenn and Antonio were trying out this new (to us) restaurant Assenzio, in New York's east village.

They specialize in Sardinian fare, which you don't see every day. The food was great, the service was pleasant, it wasn't too crowded, and we were having a wonderful time.

But something was bothering me.

I know, it's the background music. I listen, and on the surface, it's particularly innocuous big band music, and I'm thinking, oh, it's some classic Frank Sinatra album, no big deal. And then, some of the lyrics leak into my brain, and I realize , the words coming out of the singers mouth are the lyrics to Nirvana's "Smells Like Teen Spirit". Oh my!

Now everyone at the table is listening, incredulously. The swinging big band sings Billy Idol's "Eyes without a face", and Michael Jackson's "The way you make me feel.", but we had to stare deep into the music in order to realize that's what was happening.

I asked the maitre d' what was playing, and he handed me the CD jewelbox for Paul Anka's "Rock Swings".

I ordered it from Amazon, and it arrived today. Look at the play list. Paul, you got guts.

Posted by BradRubenstein at 12:41 PM | TrackBack

Another Shameless Plug - New York Festival of Song

The New York Festival of Song, of which I'm currently chairman, is having its Winter benefit on Saturday, December 3.

You want to come to this. Audra McDonald will be singing songs of Harold Arlen (and others) in a small musicale hosted by the inimitable Steven Blier, at the studios of Rafael Viñoly Architects (creators of Jazz at Lincoln Center's Rose Hall, and many other public works of distinction).

Since you're reading my blog, I feel I know you well enough to slip you an exclusive invitation. Click here. Read it.

Posted by BradRubenstein at 12:17 PM | TrackBack

Lordy, how we tried!

I love Tom Bell's quote on the Miers nomination withdrawal, over at Agoraphilia:

... it seems awfully convenient that nominating Miers allows the Republicans to say to their evangelical wing, "We tried! Oh, Lord, how we tried! But how can you get a true Christian past those Godless Lefties? Perhaps more money would help. Please send some, just in case."

Posted by BradRubenstein at 11:43 PM

Community and Carnivals

Andrew Hughes says in AnyLetter: I'm a Moron,

As I've said before, the Carnival of Computing doesn't travel because I have to gather all the links by hand, and until that gets more automated, I can't with good conscience make someone else do that. Takes at least four hours, and I doubt that many people have that kind of time (hell, I sure don't).

I can't speak to whether he's a moron or not (I think his blog is great, but it could be that's because I'm a moron). I do think he's going about the process of building what should be a slam dunk carnival, backwards.

It's because you can't spread the hosting work around that you're stuck spending four hours collecting links. Why not instead work just a bit toward building the community of computing bloggers, and let the carnival come out of that, rather than the other way around. Anyway, that's the approach that Blog Carnival is generally taking, and it seems to be working.

Building carnivals is all about getting a critical mass of participants, not a critical mass of links. It's not that hard.

Posted by BradRubenstein at 02:28 PM | TrackBack

Living with VoIP

I have been POTS (plain old telephone service) free for a year, and life has been good.

For my landline, I use VoIP provider VoicePulse, which, for $15/mo, gives me a a 212 number in Brooklyn (or whereever I plug my SIP box into a broadband connection), voicemail which can be forwarded to e-mail, call forwarding, a web interface, unlimited local (new york area), and 200min national long distance. Verizon charges at least double (but of course doesn't require a broadband connection, which costs money).

I do use Verizon for my wireless service, and pay about $50/mo. It's nice they throw in a "free" dialup connection to the internet (my Kyocera phone has a Palm+Modem). It's slow, but useful in an emergency.

However, I'm really a big fan of Skype, and use it all the time. The main advantages are (1) I can call other skype users for free, and some of my friends who I talk to a lot are far-away skype users, (2) I happen to have a hands-free mic+headset that allows me to talk and type at the same time.

But Skype has some problems; the P2P setup is sometimes unreliable, I get disconnected more often than I'd like (though less than on my mobile phone), I have to pay one Euro per hour for calls to regular telephones (which is cheap at $0.022/min), but the Euro charges are no longer free of currency conversion fees), and the whole underlying system is based on a proprietary architecture.

But wait, enter Gizmo. It has the same download, ease of use of Skype, but it is based on the standard SIP architecture, and they chare for phone company access in dollars (cheaper than Skype for US calls, more expensive for Europe calls). They will give you a regular phone line dial tone for incoming calls for $5/mo plus usage charges, plus free voice mail (which you can use without a computer, just with a SIP box, as I do with VoicePulse).

So, roughly speaking, for 200 LD minutes, VoicePulse is half the cost of Verizon, and Gizmo is half the cost of VoicePulse, and Skype is slightly less than that.

I sense a trend.

Posted by BradRubenstein at 12:01 PM | TrackBack

Positional Alarm Clock

Here is a cool idea: AJ talks about using the locational detection capabilities of mobile phones to create a new kind of alarm clock, one based on position rather than time.

So instead of putting a note in my palm pilot that says "3pm - buy milk", I'd put one in that says "Grocery store - buy milk". Cool.

But with all this geolocating, I think we can go beyond fixed points. With a buddy list of friends, similarly armed and agreeing to geolocate each other, I want to set an alarm that says "Joey - ask him about IPods".

“Hi Joey! Oh, just a minute. My phone is ringing. Oh yeah, about those IPod's...

Perhaps I can e-mail Joey's phone a "proximity appointment": "next time you see me, remind me I owe you $10 for the movie last night."

Posted by BradRubenstein at 11:29 AM | TrackBack

Back from the Dead

Well, I haven't posted anything all summer. Actually, that's a lie. I haven't posted anything here all summer. Over at Blog Carnival, I've been going nuts. In a good way. They're up over 100 carnivals now, and it gets bigger every day.

I guess there's only so much blogging a body can stand.

Anyway, since I last posted, I've been in LA, San Francisco, Vienna, Budapest, Krakow, Prague, Boston, Santa Fe, Albuquerque, Dallas, New Braunfels, and Moab. And I've still been able to come back home every Wednesday to water my poor but happy rubber plant.

The picture on the right was taken at Sorrel River Ranch, near Moab, where Paul Woodiel gave us an extraordinary jazz concert with some of his friends. It's part of the Moab Music Festival. Every year, they float a Steinway down the Colorado river to do a chamber music concert in a grotto cut into the canyon wall (left). You all should go next year (but I'd suggest you get your tickets now).

More pictures at Flickr.

Posted by BradRubenstein at 11:02 PM | TrackBack