Industry Figure Tom Chappell

My good friend Chris Ravenscroft has long touted the Glory of a Roomba, but I’ve maintained a healthy skepticism. Sure, it’s a robot that takes care of your mundane vacuuming chores, which has got a nice Jetsons feel to it, but aren’t there downsides? In the books I’ve read, sometimes robots kill you [...]

At long last, tomchappell.com has moved to a VPS (a Virtual Private Server, an entire virtual machine running in an emulated environment that goes mostly at full speed, but whenever the operating system tries to talk to the hardware it finds itself cruelly interrupted and redirected to a controlling authority, which then issues the appropriate [...]

My big find on Pandora.com today was Sufjan Stevens. I quote from iTunes:
“Like an indie-folk Don Quixote, this singer-songwriter has imposed upon himself a ridiculously ambitious mission: to write a concept album for each of the 50 states.
Strange as it may seem, the sublimely beautiful Greetings from Michigan suggests that the whole [...]

Sean and his friends are all over this pandora.com thing by now; they’re just raving about it (along with me), but I’m having trouble getting my own friends revved up about it, with the exception of Industry Figures Tam Pham and Stephen Newell, who were leading us all in Pandora-awareness.
I set up three channels with [...]

Rachel Maddow featured an incredibly nifty web site, Pandora.com, on her radio show yesterday, and interviewed their founder, Tim Westergren.
What it is: you define ’stations’, seeding them with songs or artists that you like, and then they just start streaming music at you, whole songs, and you rate them with a Thumbs Up, [...]

It’s time to break free of the logjam that has been keeping new posts from arriving. I go on vacation for part of the coming week, and all of the next, so in the next sixteen days, I’m going to get in at least 16 posts on the big board.
There won’t necessarily be a [...]