13/01/2009

any song, any time

http://www.justhearit.com/ appears to be some kind of searching conglomeration of youtube, and.... I'm guessing mp3 blogs. except apparently they've paid up all the licence fees. weirdly enough, it doesn't have random stuff that's very unlikely to be on the internet, and other stupid questions i think of asking it... but it does have Flotation Toy Warning... and it seems to be crawling myspace too.. ...which makes it different from Deezer in that they're not actually hosting the content - probably not a bad idea. unfortunately, it does fall into the Deezer preference of a flash-only interface - which I maybe don't hate as strongly as this guy, but kinda, all the same.

ASCII spy..... half a post

Y'know, happens sometimes, you've got some contraband data you want to sneak out and spread worldwide, but under the radar, as it were. More importantly, wouldn't it be nice if this could just... be presented nicely, too? Is that too much to ask? These things make such a difference... We all already know and love ASCII art (right?) but most generator-type programs just populate the field with a bunch of random characters. This, new from Vincent Chu on googleapps will encode the data file of your choice (albeit at present with size restrictions) into an image, for example: ....this would be a lot better in every way if I hadn't been foiled by blogspot's stylesheets of course overiding any I tried to put in (to make text really really small, to render the image) ....I haven't been able to think of a straightforward way to do this ....something to come back to, maybe. (there was a hidden encoded file and everything!)

04/01/2009

Une Attrape-Salinger

Unrelated to anything, except maybe as a late Christmas present (though kinda wrecking my ideas about this maybe being an employment recruitment-friendly blog by pointing to what I'm guessing is copyright-dubious material), stumbled upon what looks to be the complete published short-story works of JD Salinger. Covering 1940 - 1965, Catcher in the Rye's there, too, if you reckon you can handle reading the whole book from the screen.

25 years is a short while, out in the world as well as in somebody's life, and it's pretty cool to be able to see not just his development as a writer -- technically, as well as in his perspective -- but also the wider social themes and fashions in social interaction; and in-between a few different first-person characters, one voice coming through now and again with the kind of over-thinking under a cover of casualness instantly recognisable in its similarity to Holden Caulfield. Which is one of the most pleasant, most comforting voices I know. If you've read Catcher, one in particular - This Sandwich Has No Mayonaise - is bittersweet.

Some other favourites so far:

The Long Debut of Lois Taggett

The Heart of a Broken Story

(later edit - forget the others, this one especially: ) For Esme, with Love and Squalor