Everything is going digital nowadays from TV, to music to books. Having music go digital has pros and cons.

You can now buy music by tracks instead of albums! So you don’t have to spend money on buying an entire album when you only like 1 song. You can sync all your music by various artists into one entire list instead of having to pop different CDs into a CD player if you want to listen to various songs etc. You can sync lyrics, track info, album info, album art, release date, album notes into a song on a program like iTunes. Everything you ever need to remember about a particular song or album is right there with a few clicks of the mouse.

Having your entire music collection go digital is actually quite fabulous. With iTunes, you can download a program called Last.fm to work in collaboration with iTunes so that it takes note of the type of music you frequently listen to and even recommends you similar artists that you might be interested in. Last.fm is also a social media application in disguise. It even recommends you people on last.fm who share your tastes, so you can make friends with them and share more music! What a way to expand your music collection and (virtual) social circle.

There is also a site called 8tracks where you can make your own playlists and share it with the world. Just upload your 8 tracks onto the site and arrange them however you like, there you have your playlist! Copy the link of the playlist and go out and share, its almost like making your own remixed CD.

But are the musicians’ livelihood threatened with the advent of technology? Technology in this current day and age will allow you to rip the music, post the download link somewhere online, share it with the whole world, rinse and repeat. This will definitely affect album sales.

Beyond album sales, even concert broadcasts are going digital! U2 recently brought concert-going to a whole new level with a live webcast of their concert on the 25th of October. The audience present at the live concert were 96,000 in strength. The live webcast though, had over 4 million viewers. People from all over the world tuned in to YouTube to watch the live Webcast of U2′s concert in California. For Free.

Is this really what music in the future will eventually become? I personally feel that nothing feels better than having the actual CD in your hands, looking at the album art etc. I feel that the balance right now is just right, I can buy single tracks online if I really like it. Or if I really like the album and/or artists, I would buy the physical copy of the album.

As for concerts, nothing is better than attending the actual concert itself, the thrill that comes along with just being in the audience, the euphoria that washes over you when you see your favorite musicians prancing on stage right before your very eyes, no more than 100m away. Such feelings and experiences is something that technology will not be able to replicate, you have to be there to feel it.

Impossible Christmas wishlist v1.0

(clockwise from the top left hand corner)
solitude / silk romper from journelle.com / 36 hours a day / $$$ / pet cat / pet owl / 15.9

Like say, mathematical formulas, money exchange rates, statistics, weather, geography etcetc. Basically, lots of different types.

You can find out how many moles are in 500mg of silver nitrate (AgNO3)

The current time in Tokyo!

Nutritional info for 1 bowl of corn flakes + 1 glass of orange juice!

lmao I love finding gems like this. Now if only Wolfram Alpha had something like Google Translate…

So anyway, if you need to compute anything or just numbers/statistical data in general, Wolfram Alpha is pretty good there’s a Firefox add-on if you’re a Firefox user and (intend to) access Wolfram Alpha pretty often.

http://www.wolframalpha.com/

Anyway, dang those cookies were good and double dang because that was an interesting lecture. Everything is interesting when you have that much sugar (thank you very much Oreos) in your bloodstream at such a godforsaken hour, right?! Half-right.

The other half to‘interesting’ was from the lecture itself. Pat Law showed us an entire slew of social media sites. How to search for news on the blogosphere, how to monitor specific topics on Twitter, find out how popular your (or anyone else’s) site is, how to find and meet people on Twitter whom you share similar interests with etc. I linked the sites that I found intriguing or particularly useful. Zam of citysand has very kindly compiled the entire list of sites that Pat Law mentioned to us during the lecture.

Having learnt about all these, the internet seems like a far scarier place. Anything or everything you say (or type, for that matter) is indexed and can be tracked. Protected Tweets? Nope. Private Facebook profile? Nope. Friends-only or password-locked online journals? Nope. I am guilty of doing all of the above, I wonder why I even bother anymore. Nonetheless, please be wary of the views you express. Anything with negative connotations should probably be kept to yourself.

Additionally, she taught us about Google Reader and Google Alerts! I started using Google Reader a few months ago, it is an amazing web-based RSS reader. I love how easy it is to scroll through my various subscriptions. Google Reader also allows you to group your subscriptions so that you don’t have different sites all over the place in Google Reader, it is so much easier to go through things category by category, no? Google Reader also features this read/unread function. If you scroll past it, that particular post will be marked as read. So you don’t actually accidentally miss any post!

So what exactly is RSS? RSS (Really Simple Syndication/Rich Site Summary) is a format that retrieves web content and syndicates all of it so that it appears in one location. You can then read all your subscriptions in that one location! Forget about the hassle of going through your 123456789 bookmarks to get the latest updates. Convinced? Here is a really short run-down on how to get started on Google Reader if you’re interested

Google Alerts is something that I have not explored extensively as of yet. But I can see myself using it a lot in the future (ie. When I want stalk Hello Kitty, lol no just kidding). With Google Alerts, you can track any one topic. So let’s say I type in ‘Hello Kitty’ in the search terms. Every post or article that has to do with Hello Kitty and appears in Google will appear under this particular Google Alert I customized! You can customize it even further by entering more keywords, choosing the region and/or country of the sites which appear in your Google Alert etc. You can then choose to have this customized Google Alert delivered to your email inbox or delivered to a feed! Ta-da, there you can have a Google Alert in your Google Reader! So I can surf all the latest Hello Kitty news in my magical gorgeous sweet amazing Google Reader.

All you need in order to enjoy these awesome sauce Google products is a Gmail account! Don’t I sound like a complete Google stan… but Google is really that useful, except that I still haven’t figured out how to use Google Wave and I have no friends on Google Wave and also no invite wave so I can’t invite friends to Google Wave very lonely like a pony.

In summary, the internet is a scary place haha-ha, its so easy to stalk people/topics on Twitter, Google is 20 different kinds of awesome and I am sleepy. Goodbye!

The story happens in year 2054 where Washington DC is almost like utopia with their crime-free records. Their crime-free state though is courtesy of 3 genetically-altered humans (otherwise known as Precogs) who can tell the future and can see murders exactly the way they happen …before they happen that is. So these scientists extract the Precog’s ‘visions’ and display it on computers etc etc. So basically, it goes through a whole slew of technology processes before normal plebeians can see these forecasted murder cases. So through these, the cops are alerted of murders before they actually happen and therefore have enough time to stop the murderer before he/she really kills.

That’s really cool and yeah imagine if there was a crime-free Singapore, there would be so much less angst. I doubt the notion of predicting murders will be made possible anytime soon though. Or is it? Sure we’re very technologically-advanced right now, but adding genetics to the equation makes it far more complicated. On that note, it would be kind of freaky to have technology intruding in your life like that. Imagine having someone being able to preempt your every move thanks to technology. Right now, technology is very much rampant in our lives. But having technology have access to your thought process is just …extreme. Right?!!!?!?! There will be no privacy to speak of.

But anyway, if that’s the case. That might very well mean we can record a person’s entire though process and lay it out for analyzing. That will probably be very useful in the medical field, they’d be able to analyze the way a psycho’s mind works!

I guess technology swings both ways (as do most other things), you win some you lose some.