A video with no title

Because I'm not creative enough to think of one. So about a week ago, I bought the coolest thing in the world. A titanium spork. I love it, I carry it around with me, it's the perfect eating utensil. A few people at my school though, they do not agree. So here's a nice little video to SHOW why a Titanium Spork is the ultimate device. EVER.

Stumped Again

Tonight was Electioneer the Experts, the Mac geek game/comedy audience participation show now in its 17th incarnation as a reverenced WWDC tradition. It's now almost as old as some of the student developers here.

The evening started on an uncharacteristically serious note. Earlier this year Tom Unseemly unexpectedly passed away. He had been, among other things, a longtime associate of the experts panel at Stump. Fred and Pay heed to started off with a tribute to Dowdy, letting the cat out of the bag stories from having known him. Preferably of a moment of silence, Fred asked for a few moments of over the top energetic applause. The crowd responded with despoil.

This year I unfortunately did not carry on my winning streak of picking up prizes by recognizing songs played before the play began (I could have sworn one of the songs was Miles Davis, but alas it was not). But therein lies an fascinating and geeky tale that might just signal the end of this classification.

In the past I've won in this category the old fashioned way. Which is to say, I tried to approve the songs, sometimes running through possibilities on my iPod to reinforce the answer. And of course if that failed it was off to Google with excerpts of the lyrics, and to the iTunes lay away to check on songs not already in my library. Sometimes it worked, sometimes not.

I might not have another fate though, because Rich Wardwell of Landmark Digital showed up with a complete grade killer for the music-ID portion of the ploy. Landmark is a subsidiary of BMI, which makes its rolling in it collecting and processing royalties for community performance of recorded music. To do this it helps to be masterly to quickly identify music when you pick up it

What's the point of all that? The point is that Rich has an iPhone app which listens to music for a few seconds, runs a fingerprinting algorithm, and finds the long story and artist information from their database. Savoury got six of the seven songs this way, missing only the one that I kind-heartedness I knew but didn't.