Ben Shoemate

Scientists Develop the Most Relaxing Tune

Ben Shoemate — Tue, 01 Nov 2011 19:40:33 +0000

Sound therapists and stress specialists worked with the band Marconi Union to develop “Weightless”, the most relaxing song ever:

Weightless works by using specific rhythms, tones, frequencies and intervals to relax the listener. A continuous rhythm of 60 BPM causes the brainwaves and heart rate to synchronise with the rhythm: a process known as ‘entrainment’. Low underlying bass tones relax the listener and a low whooshing sound with a trance-like quality takes the listener into an even deeper state of calm.

Dr David Lewis, one of the UK’s leading stress specialists said: “‘Weightless’ induced the greatest relaxation – higher than any of the other music tested. Brain imaging studies have shown that music works at a very deep level within the brain, stimulating not only those regions responsible for processing sound but also ones associated with emotions.” [...]

The top 10 most relaxing tunes were: 1. Marconi Union – Weightless 2. Airstream – Electra 3. DJ Shah – Mellomaniac (Chill Out Mix) 4. Enya – Watermark 5. Coldplay – Strawberry Swing 6. Barcelona – Please Don’t Go 7. All Saints – Pure Shores 8. AdelevSomeone Like You 9. Mozart – Canzonetta Sull’aria 10. Cafe Del Mar – We Can Fly

Would you add any songs to this list?

via Scientists Develop the Most Relaxing Tune.

Help me pick a costume

Ben Shoemate — Wed, 26 Oct 2011 16:09:24 +0000

For women it’s easy to pick a costume – as long as you look cute, who cares what statement you make. For me, a Halloween costume is an excuse to either spend the entire party explaining what I am supposed to be, looking stupid, or having fun. I prefer to have fun. So I’ve narrowed it down to these:

Or I just go as my favorite politician – the original party animal himself.

What do you think?

Steve Jobs – a model for genius in the modern world

Ben Shoemate — Thu, 06 Oct 2011 00:40:11 +0000

I’m sad sitting here reading about the passing of Steve Jobs, who I never personally met. This sadness, is probably a simular feeling that others have had throughout history whenever a strong leader and visionary has passed, leaving us in a worried wonder of what if, and what might have been.

In retrospect, everything is obvious. But we fail to recognize that it is genius that makes it obvious. It took Isaac Newton to make gravity obvious after thousands of years of ignorance, same with Einstein, same with Jefferson and Adams, same with many countless others, less famous, but who all shared something in common – they refused to settle for the accepted answer. They chose to prove to themselves and to the world one basic truth: that we live in a world of our own making.

If you do not like something, it is within your power to change it. Right now you can change it. It does not require an act of congress, no government grant, it just requires you, rolling up your sleeves and doing the work. A loose board, a creaky floor, an inefficient process at work, a single missing pixel in the website your designing, a new world – design it, build it! It takes genius to make the obvious more, well “obvious” – but that genius is 100% human and its a crown any one of us can wear. I will miss Steve Jobs.

Question about Sharepoint 2010

Ben Shoemate — Tue, 04 Oct 2011 01:37:19 +0000

Ok – so I don’t normally use my blog as a platform to ask questions, but I got stuck tonight and want to see if the internet can help. I am trying to add a custom tool pane option in Sharepoint 2010. I have created a copy of of the Content Query Web Part and need to add a custom tool pane options (and then reference them in xsl) Anyone have any resources you could point me to..or any one with a deep understanding of this who would you like to earn some consulting cash helping us out for a couple of hours tomorrow?

Help me internet. Thanks.

Mac Lion not as natural as it seems

Ben Shoemate — Mon, 15 Aug 2011 21:36:15 +0000

I work with a lot of browser windows and other documents. It used to be a nice feature (in Mac OS X Leopard) to click and hold an icon to see all the windows of that type in an expose style view. To get the same view now, I had to first – google for the answer, then read through a forum, then learn to double click with 2 fingers. At this point it is starting to feel like I’m learning sign language. I don’t think you can justify this “natural”.

Suggestion. If we think of the icon as a stack of things of that type: a stack of browsers – then the natural thing to “scatter them across the desk to look at them” would be a click and toss movement. Click the icon and lightly toss it upward to see the windows.

As for the natural scrolling…pushing the page versus “scrolling” the page. It will take a while to adapt to that. I decided to wait a week before having an opinion. But when I went into the Apple store this weekend to pick up my new laptop, I literally thought the mice we upside down at first.

But after the first full day, I’m still finding it very hard to adapt.

Why it’s important to blog everyday – or not at all

Ben Shoemate — Sat, 25 Jun 2011 15:49:57 +0000

If you are going blog than do it. I have dabbled with blogging for a long time but never really took it serious – like a job. This approach is fine, but it will never turn in to anything. I have watched my web analytics rise and fall with my own activity and know how important it is to continuously post new content. So I’m going to try an experiment: a post a day, everyday – for 30 days.

It all starts now so if there are any questions that you would like to ask me, tell me in the comments. I would be glad to talk about anything from web design to world history.

Contact me on Skype

Ben Shoemate — Sun, 20 Feb 2011 04:53:36 +0000

Skype is my preferred method of communication these days. I use it more than the phone, more than email, more than real-life. If you need to get in touch with me, this is by far the fastest, most synchronous real-time way to do it. If you are on skype already great – just add me as a friend. If not, download the free app – they have it for windows, mac, iphone, ipad, android, etc.

My skype id is: ben.shoemate

Base22 team hard at "work" on Base22 Day (the 22nd of every month at 2:22pm we do some team building, in this case a Rubix Cube competition).

All the world’s computers equal to one human mind

Ben Shoemate — Wed, 16 Feb 2011 18:44:43 +0000

The time may come when a computer will be able to out-compute a human, but not yet. According to a recent study, adding up all the computation power in every laptop, server, mainframe, cell phone, and digital processors of all kinds, everywhere on the planet will give you approximately the ability to handle approximately 6.4 x 10^18 operations a second. About the same as a human brain.

All the worlds storage – paper, film, hard-drives, etc. would give you same amount of storage as human DNA. In other words, somewhere around 2011 the planet has enough computing power to account for 1 extra person. The vast amount of “thinking” is still done by organic chemistry. Read the article I read on ARS Technica.

Hey Technorati – I own this blog!

Ben Shoemate — Wed, 22 Dec 2010 19:07:38 +0000

Here is the proof you asked for: token Z4D6T6VT3RHJ

For the humans in the audience not familiar with Technorati:

“Technorati was founded to help bloggers succeed by collecting, highlighting, and distributing the global online conversation. Founded as the first blog search engine, Technorati has expanded to a full service media company providing services to the blogs and social media sites and connecting them with advertisers who want to join the conversation, and whose online properties introduce blog content to millions of consumers.

The leading blog search engine and directory, Technorati.com indexes more than a million blogs. The site has become the definitive source for the top stories, opinions, photos and videos emerging across news, entertainment, technology, lifestyle, sports, politics and business. Technorati.com tracks not only the authority and influence of blogs, but also the most comprehensive and current index of who and what is most popular in the Blogosphere.

Technorati now publishes high quality, fully edited, original content daily on a wide range of topics, written by hundreds of member writers.

Read more: http://technorati.com/about-technorati/#ixzz18rwdzUf1

Skype is offline – for those who were not signed in

Ben Shoemate — Wed, 22 Dec 2010 18:30:39 +0000

If you were already signed in this morning, stay that way. But if you had to reboot you computer last night like me, then you might not be able to get back in. They are reporting the status here: http://heartbeat.skype.com/2010/12/problems_signing_in_to_skype.html

But even though it says all is well as of 12:20 CST I’m still not able to sign in. You just don’t realize how much you need something till it’s gone. Now I have to rely on the phone, or email, or twitter, or my blog, or facebook to communicate…it’s like the dark ages..or google talk (but I stopped using that a long time ago). Truth is, Skype has become a mission critical tool for our company and has so few problems (other than a slow decent into unusability with each interface iteration – especially on the Mac).

Get it together guys.

Update (12:30pm): I forget sometimes that Skype is a peer-to-peer network. Apparently an update to the software took out some of the “super-nodes” (users that are online a lot – heck, I might be one of them). When those nodes failed, the network came down, at least for me.. http://blogs.skype.com/en/2010/12/skype_downtime_today.html?cm_mmc=PXTW|0700_B6-_-downtime-20101222

Update 2 (6:34pm) : A full day of yelling a Skype on Twitter yielded nothing but some mild comic relief. If you enjoyed this post – you’ll really like my twitter diatribe: http://twitter.com/#!/benshoemate