Tech
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I have always wanted to be a furniture designer. (Full disclosure: I have many, many “when I grow up” dreams also including a world champion salsa dancer, supreme court justice and movie director). I also have sketchbooks full of furniture and 3D designs. I like thinking about how things go together. Turning stuff around in my head, figuring out what fits where (you’d think I would be a whiz at rubik’s cube). I use cafepress, zazzle and imagekind as ways of getting my art out there. I design, upload and sell what I love.
When I stumbled across this site my heart skipped a beat. This looks like a site for the frustrated furniture or 3D designer. What a great idea! A site where nascent designers can test their ideas out without having to pay prototype costs (which are usually sky high). This place is like Cafepress. Upload your ideas, get a prototype made and get it shipped back to you. I can’t wait to try it out.
I do have a complaint about the website. Mostly that while they do have a very nicely put together “making.pdf” about how to do this stuff the info should be more readily available. I shouldn’t have to drill down to find out about them. I am still somewhat confused about their showroom. Looking at the site it is nicely designed but looks young.
I look forward to testing them out. I really liked looking at the showroom to see what other people had made. Here are some of the things that grabbed my attention when I looked at the site… I believe the chair and the wine rack are for sale but not the boomerang. Check out the page on the boomerang. There are several pictures of how it was made and then put together.
This also looks like a great place for people who like costumes but might need specialized parts. Now you can design and make your own.
—Maureen on the Go (MoGo)
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I like these guys and I love the music they play. I like Brad “Martini” Chambers, he has that nice male disk jockey voice. Plus they play all my favorite Standards songs (yeah!) and they seem like nice folks. I listen on their iTunes channel because I am on a Mac but you can listen directly from their site. Please check them out and give them support. They rock! I even got a shout out from them once. Kewl beans.
They mostly play music but I like their patter and chatter.
And don’t hold their website against them. They are just starting out. They need help with organizing their huge amount of info.
—Maureen on the Go (MoGo)
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I was introduced to this a couple of months ago and I gotta say this is cool. I like internet radio and often listen through my iTunes but sometimes I want specific kinds of music and don’t want to listen to ads.
Pandora.com was the answer to my problem. You can create a station for all your moods. After signing up for the free service, simply click on the “create new station” button and type in the name of an artist or song and their database will start putting music up for you. (One downside is they don’t do classical music…yet.)
When music pops up you have the option to give it a thumbs up or down or ignore it. The best part is you can pause it with a simple tap on the space bar like you can with iTunes. If you like a song but feel you don’t want it on that station you can move it to a new station.
I like this because sometimes I only want to listen to fast paced music with not a lot of lyrics (my Chemical Brothers station–good for typesetting since I sometimes will type what I hear) or something hard (my Nine Inch Nails station) and sometimes I want to listen to standards (my Michael Bublé station). The cool part is that Pandora will go through its database and pick songs it thinks are a good fit. So you can run across stuff you will like but didn’t already know about. Which is very cool. And did I mention you can pause it? I did? Well, it was worth mentioning twice. I hate having to get up in the middle of my favorite song!
Another cool thing is holding down the command key on the mac (not sure what you do on the PC) gets a menu that allows you to favorite the song or artist or purchase the song from iTunes or Amazon. And once you favorite something you get a profile. You can put on info about yourself and it keeps a list of songs or performers for you. Your stations go on the profile.
When in the profile, if you click on a song or artist to get more info you will see a column on the left that shows “people listening to this artist”. I often follow this to check out user profiles and see what stations they have created. I like wandering through other people’s stations. It is like looking at someone’s personal library. You can see what interests them and see what sparks your interest.
Definitely check it out.
—Maureen on the Go (MoGo)
UPDATE: They have added classical music! AWESOME. And a Holiday channel, several actually, though my favorite is the swing holiday.
