My musical gender plot as compared to @applefanbe's

Gender Plot – Last.fm’s Playground: "This plot shows artists from the chosen top for each of the given users. The positions are determined by the average age and gender of their listeners. The dots indicate the combined score of the top ten for each user."

Women like me love listening to Ani DiFranco, Cat Power, Janis Joplin, Antony and the Johnsons, Andrew Bird, Billy Holiday, Aretha Franklin, Joni Mitchell and Sufjan Stevens.
Men like Gil love Seasick Steve, Donald Fagen, Iron Maiden, Black Sabbath, Dire Straits, Uriah Heep, Joe Jackson, Deep Purple, The Prodigy, The Presidents of the United States of America, and Pink Floyd.
Oh, and Donald Fagen, Joe Jackson, Ry Cooder, Rabih Abou-Khalil and Mink Deville have a particularly "old" audience (33-40 years old) compared to the other artists. My musical age seems to be 26 on average (so I'm not an old tart after all - thank you Last.fm!). And my music preferences are neither male nor female. Nothing wrong with wijvenmuziek mind you...

What does your plot look like?

Fight spam, make the advertiser happy

Digital Marketing: Security Tech CAPTCHAs as Advertising - Advertising Age - Digital: "'Ads are just getting bigger and louder as attention online is getting so scarce,' said Solve Media CEO and founder Ari Jacoby. 'So we're fishing where the fish are,' he said, referring to this untapped space where users are forced to spend time."

Solve Media from Solve Media on Vimeo.

The Unseen Sea over San Francisco Bay Area

happy sails to you Get Shouty: "This collection of time lapses taken around the San Francisco Bay Area was roughly shot over the period of one year. It got me thinking about ebb and flow. About our own unseen seas."

The Unseen Sea from Simon Christen on Vimeo.

Books take us to faraway places and explain the world around us

The Future of the Book. on Vimeo: "Meet Nelson, Coupland, and Alice — the faces of tomorrow’s book. Watch global design and innovation consultancy IDEO’s vision for the future of the book. What new experiences might be created by linking diverse discussions, what additional value could be created by connected readers to one another, and what innovative ways we might use to tell our favorite stories and build community around books?"

The Future of the Book. from IDEO on Vimeo.

The .doc file of J Alfred Prufrock

copperbadge: measuring your life in login codes:

Let us go then, you and I,
When the evening is spread out against the sky
Like a laptop, put in sleep mode on a table

On Mygrid, Walden Zones and the art of disconnecting

Now that I'm moving to a new house, I find that having a lot of gadgets is simply annoying:

• I have a basket full of tangled cables and power cords and no clue which gadgets they belong to. Brands like Apple and Nokia have a nack for inventing new plugs every time they bring out a new product range.
• There's another basket with assorted gadgets, but for some of them I misplaced the power cords.
• I annoy my children by checking messages on the Blackberry, iPad, laptop every time I see a little red or blue light blink from the corner of my eye.
• There are gadget-less power plugs plugged in in every room, like next to the sofa, on my night stand etc. This is just sloppy (and in the case of my night stand: charging your gizmo next to your bed is probably not healthy either).

What's the solution? Not sure, but I'd like to create a Walden Zone in my new house. You enter the house and drop your gadgets on a grid. When you leave the house, you take the gadgets - and they'd be fully charged, no power cords attached!

What is a Walden Zone?
Last month I read Hamlet's BlackBerry: A Practical Philosophy for Building a Good Life in the Digital Age by William Powers, a book about Walden Zone "today—extreme busyness and a consequent loss of depth". According to Powers, in order "to lead happy, productive lives in a connected world, we need to master the art of disconnecting".

You know the cliche about [American author, poet, historian, and philosopher Henry David] Thoreau is that he ran away from society. In fact, he built his cabin a short walk from town, and was back and forth all the time. The real point of his experiment was that he established a ZONE where he could be “less” connected on a regular basis, and allow his inner life to flourish. So I think any of us can do the same today, inside our homes. A Walden Zone is a room or other kind of space – it could be the front porch – where digital screens are not used. A place for non-screen togetherness and solitude. Sounds kind of nice, doesn’t it?

How would you charge all these gadgets?
With Duracell MyGrid, which I could try and use for a couple of weeks, "you can easily charge up to four mobile devices at the same time. Simply attach a Power Sleeve or Power Clip to each device and drop it onto myGrid to charge." Here are some pictures (thanks to Gil):

The Grid itself looks rather nice actually.

Some of your gadgets will have to wear one of these rubbery Power Sleeves. Other can carry some kind of small Power Clip.

And it wouldn't be Duracell if they didn't offer big strong batteries for those times you and your gadgets go - wait for it - off the grid.

I think this might work. Not just the charging (I checked that, and it does work like a charm), but for the whole Walden thing too. What do you think?

Carlashes to make your cute car look even cuter

Carlashes "eyelashes and crystal eyeliner are the newest hot products for your car. The trademark Carlashes is a new automotive aftermarket brand created to allow cars to be personalized with a feminine touch."

The carlashes (one pair, two lashes) cost 25 dollar; the matching crystal eyeliner is yours for about 20 dollar more. Girly afterthought: if you get two pairs and park the cars front to front, you can have them try a butterfly kiss

How to compensate for over-sharing how many expensive new gadgets you have at home

Home Security Innovations for Modern Living

Hashtags: a sign of superiour wit. Or maybe not.

Three of the web's most awkward phrases - CNN.com: "the hashtag has also become a way in which to emphasize certain ideas on the microblogging site ('This weekend has completely murdered my soul #whiskeyandheartache), and, more recently, to denote sarcasm and caustic wit ('Wow, I really enjoyed that show. Etch-a-Sketch art is totally dope. More free wine, however, would have made the experience much more tolerable. #JustSayin')."

I remember noticing a smiley in an email for the first time. And lately I've used #hashtags in text messages and Facebook status updates, resulting in awkward replies from clueless people...

Shadow on a moon

Umbra (HD - 2010) on Vimeo: "An explorer adventures into an unknown world, yet it seems that he has been there before. A short animated film directed by Malcolm Sutherland in 2010. With music by Alison Melville and Ben Grossman, and sound by Leon Lo."

Umbra (HD - 2010) from Malcolm Sutherland on Vimeo.

Hands up for Detroit, our lovely city

Palladium Boots #7: Detroit Lives: "Once the fourth-largest metropolis in America—some have called it the Death of the American Dream. Today, the young people of the Motor City are making it their own DIY paradise where rules are second to passion and creativity. They are creating the new Detroit on their own terms, against real adversity."
Your guide is... Johnny Knoxville.

Embracing "good enough"

Amazon Kindle: The Paradox of Choice: Why More Is Less:

As options increase, the effort involved in making decisions increases, so mistakes hurt even more. Thus the growth of options and opportunities for choice has three, related, unfortunate effects. It means that decisions require more effort. It makes mistakes more likely. It makes the psychological consequences of mistakes more severe.

This explains why what author Barry Schwartz calls maximizers are so prone to depressions: maximizers have very high standards that they actually expect to meet. Example: "Media and peer pressure tells us that obesity is a matter of choice, personal control, and personal responsibility, that we should aspire to look perfect, and that if we don’t, we have only ourselves to blame."

The alternative to maximizing is to be a satisficer. To satisfice is to settle for something that is good enough and not worry about the possibility that there might be something better. A satisficer has criteria and standards. She searches until she finds an item that meets those standards, and at that point, she stops.

Some tips on how to be a satisficer:

1. Unless you’re truly dissatisfied, stick with what you always buy.
2. Don’t be tempted by “new and improved.”
3. Don’t “scratch” unless there’s an “itch.”
4. And don’t worry that if you do this, you’ll miss out on all the new things the world has to offer. [Your social graph will be there to tell you what's new]

Alors on danse: Pink Ribbon Bal Moderne 26 September in Brussels

It's become a bit of a Sanoma Magazines Belgium tradition: the Pink Ribbon Magazine [NL/FR, made to raise awareness of breast cancer. We're still building the web site, and there are serious plans for a tv channel on Telenet and Belgacom TV, but first: an invitation to dance. On Sunday 26 September at 14:00 CET the 2010 Pink Ribbon projects starts with a Pink Ribbon Bal Moderne on the Sint-Katelijneplein - Place St. Catherine in the heart of Brussels. As you know, each Bal Moderne starts with 45 minutes of dancing lessons. We'll all get pink ribbons (obviously) but it would be nice if you wore pink shirts or sweaters, too. The Pink Ribbon campaign partners xanderes, Marie Jo and Novartis each pledge 1 euro per Pink Ribbon Bal Moderne danser.

I'll be there. What about you?

Woody Allen in your ear

If you buy only one audiobook this year, let it be one from The Woody Allen collection. Or even better: get the whole collection, available from iTunes and Audible.com. Highly recommended, even if you don't like hearing a genuine Noo Yoak accent, or jokes about Freud, Nietsche and what happens when you pronounce the word schnecken too often.

Everybody likes teal and orange!

5 Annoying Trends That Make Every Movie Look the Same | Cracked.com: "Just like an early 90s parachute pants designer, movies lately have decided the only two colors they need are teal and orange. As some very sharp-eyed bloggers have pointed out, it's usually unnaturally orange-tinted skin tones against blue skies."