Passing clouds of inconsequential observations
The good people at Spotify have announced an app for the iPhone.
Just what Apple plans to do about the imminent launch of Spotify in the US remains to been seen. Some are suggesting that iTunes will become a streaming service too but it has yet to be shown that anyone can make money out of such a system.
A demo of Spotify on an Android mobile phone.
Perhaps once they finish that Spotify will start to iron out some of the glitches in their catalogue listings….
Only one of these tracks is listed correctly. There are no prizes for spotting it or identifying all the tracks 😉 But…. [W:Ravens], [W:Crows]…. Near enough 🙁
I would have reported the errors but Spotify have moved to a Get Satisfaction forum. Why would anyone think this was a good idea?
I was distracted from the message when I noticed that the press contacts named on Apple‘s WWDC Keynote press release are [W:Teresa Brewer] and [W:Bill Evans]…. Which was almost as entertaining as their new ads…
Long before the Interweb had been thought of [W:Marshall McLuhan] had come up with the idea of the global village which followed on from [W:Network theory] which had explored social networks and developed the idea of [W:Six degrees of separation].
Now we have Playing For Change which records a musician singing a song and takes it around the world so others can contribute to the piece.
A few days off from work presents one with the exciting prospects of doing absolutely nothing. Of course actually doing nothing would be a far too difficult, bordering on the impossible, task. It may appear to others that what you are doing is nothing although you are fully engaged in some activity that, seemingly, has neither purpose nor produces anything worthwhile. The description by [W:R Crumb] of his working patterns strikes me as being pretty good template…
“It’s necessary to “waste†a certain amount of energy in order to allow new ideas to emerge from the random spinning off of doodles, scribbles, worthless foolishness, playful notions, silliness, aimless meandering, wandering down dead-end streets, a few of which may turn out not to be dead-ends. As I say, this is necessary activity… It’s not healthy to always be devoted to a specific direction, a certain idea… The mind becomes rigid, stifled… Sooner or later it’s necessary to break out, to goof off… This isn’t to say that during these relaxed periods you should allow yourself to be passively robbed of your energy [by others] such as TV, books, etc… Part of the time, at least, must be devoted to randomly wandering about in a creative way which may possibly lead to new discoveries within yourself!
It’s difficult to explain… forget it…â€
There is a splendid talk by Stuart Brown from a recent TED conference about the importance of play…
So that will be me for the next few days… just pottering about doing a whole lot of “nothing”.
Time you enjoy wasting, was not wasted. – [W:John Lennon] (attributed)