A couple of months ago, I started using Yahoo's Unlimited Music service. Access to the complete spectrum of big and medium label music was great and allowed me to do any CD spending on independent artists and still get to listen to whatever I wanted.

However, I am a software developer and was disappointed that the primary development toolkit for working with Yahoo Music is within their player as plugins. As I'm more interested in piping the information elsewhere, I pretty much abandoned doing anything with their toolkit.

Then, last week, I noticed that Rhapsody released some tools for working with their service. This included some RSS feeds of recently played items. That just so happens to be one of the things I've been looking for. There are plenty of tools to track what you play in Winamp or iTunes, but I don't really use them for listening to music. It used to be more of the MP3 player, but now is one of these services when I'm near a computer with the MP3 player filling in the rest, but mostly for mobile access to favorites.

When I listened to a track at the end of the day on Yahoo only to be completely unable to remember the artist's name the next morning, I decided I really wanted programatic access to my music attention data and decided to grab a Rhapsody subscription too. I'll run them side-by-side for a couple of months until I'm sure which one to keep and then ditch the other.

So far, I like Yahoo's player interface better, but don't really like either player. I am one of those guys who shuts all of the XP eye candy off. I hate black/purple/chrome interfaces and just want a basic, simple hookup without it looking like it was aimed at the Fast and the Furious crowd.

Digressions aside, Yahoo still does have a better ratings and recommendation system than Rhapsody, but the API's are making up for that.

So, I decided to give the Rhapsody API's a test run. Since the attention stuff is in RSS, I figured this might be a good time to give the new PHP RSS parser: SimplePie a shot.

I grabbed the most recent artists, albums and songs and put them into a simple page. The PHP code follows.

While it works well for the middle of the bell curve of use cases, SimplePie doesn't appear to have any way to grab the Rhapsody Extensions to RSS for extended artist/album/track information. Lots of these API-styled RSS feeds have extensions of one sort or another and neither SimplePie or Magpie have really good ways to access that information. Unfortunately, that can either mean digging through them "manually" and going without the convenience for the "normal" stuff or doing without.

For now, that simple script is giving me access to what I listened to and I have a better idea of what SimplePie can do, so mission accomplished.

Here's the code to the page for those who are interested.
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I love what I do for a living. I can't think of a profession I'd really enjoy more than solving problems with technology. However, every profession has downsides and there's one part of software development that I just hate: estimation.

Coding Horror talked a couple of weeks ago about just how bad people are at estimation in general. It underscores exactly what always bugs me about estimating. There's a basic paradox where you can either be confident or specific in your estimate. You can't be both.

You either give out an estimate like "something between 1 day and 3 months" or you throw out a number like "8 weeks" and roll the dice on whether you're right enough to keep everyone happy.

I'm not sure that anyone (including the author of the book mentioned) really have an answer, but it's good to see it acknowledged as the dark voodoo that it is. But, who knows, maybe this book would cut down on the number of chickens and goats required to produce a decent estimate.

Photo: fictures

As I write this, my pulse is 81 beats per minute. I know this, not because I checked at my wrist or on my neck, but because I can feel each and every heartbeat as stabbing pain in my lower left molars.

I just got back from the dentist where I got 2 fillings and the anesthetic is wearing off. The throbbing pain and general soreness are replacing the slightly numb feeling that was there for the last couple of hours.

I say "slightly" because novacaine doesn't work particularly well on me. After a bunch of nitrous oxide, they gave me the shots and gave me a double dose, because they know it takes a lot to numb me up. The first one was on the top and was actually the first filling of my life where I didn't feel the sharp pain of the drilling.

The lower one, however, was just a repeat of every other filling I've ever had. The drilling started and the sharp pain followed. When I winced and gripped the chair, she gave me a 3rd dose of novacaine and waited for it to kick in. I eventually felt more numb, but the pain never did (and never does) go away. I just deal with the pain like I always have (for things like a pitchfork through my foot at 15) and move on.

So, now I'm sitting at home waiting for my tongue to return to normal so I don't risk a major mess by eating or drinking something. God, I hate this.

I do want to say that this dentist is the best one I've worked with. She's considerate, careful and does good work. It's just that despite her best efforts, it's always going to hurt like hell and there's not much to be done about it.

So, if you see me in person tomorrow you don't need to wonder why I'm abnormally quiet.

Compare the following 2 accounts of the same hypothetical event and statement.

I received notice today that I received another round of financing to further my goals. CitiGroup completed all of the necessary paperwork to complete the deal today and I'll be putting the money to good use by next week. This financing will fund capital improvement projects including the expansion of my development workstation. CitiGroup and I have partnered extensively in the past to fund training initiatives.

OR

CitiBank raised my VISA credit limit today and I want to buy a new laptop next week. In the past, I used my CitiBank credit card to pay tuition.

I won't embarass the source, but today I ran into another press release that was pretty much the equivalent of my example here. I find these simultaneously amusing and sad. They're amusing because a lot of pretty boring stuff gets dressed up as though it were really important. It's sad because lots of people report this kind of thing with bated breath as though it really were important.

And, much like the passive voice in writing, it usually is covering something up or compensating for a deficiency in the actual event or idea. Fortunately, this kind of thing is becoming transparent to more people and harder to get away with for the spin doctors, but it's still out there all over the place.

I just finished watching the first of the Tivo'ed Nightmares and Dreamscapes from TNT, Battleground, with William Hurt and am seriously impressed. It has that blending of Twighlight Zone surrealism and Stephen King's warped sense of reality. This particular story is what would happen if you read The Indian in the Cupboard and ate a spicy meatball sandwich before bed. The resulting nightmare is presented in disturbingly silent video. While *things* make sounds, no one in the entire bit says a single word, making it something closer to silent film than has been seen in mainstream filmmaking.

I'm looking forward to watching the rest. If the quality holds up, I'll definitely be buying these on DVD as I'm sure they will be coming out failrly quickly.