Finally My version of Christmas Present!!!  A nordic Viking that has an accent halfway between Arnold and the Swedish Chef from the muppets.  I am holding in my cage Ignorance and Want, in case you were wondering the skeletons I did not make... but everything else I made from scratch.  There eyes light up red like little terminators and the mouths are electronically puppeted via hidden switches.  I love this character he my favorite! Each year I try to improve the costume this year it was Ignorance and Want.  This is what I do for the entire month of December all the way up until Christmas.  We just finished our run for the year and now I'm looking for a little me time and some well diserved time off.

Merry Christmas to all and as Tiny Tim would say, "God Bless US Everyone"

If you have been living under a rock (or in a tomb with a rock in front of it), You may not have heard about Guru Alison's new book Switchcraft! If you have time to kill this season, purchase a copy of her book from the link below, and try your hand out at some of the many neat projects in the book. Who knows, you may get inspired to grow up and become a Guru like us!

Games With a Purpose

Even after getting your copy of Alison's book you still find yourself looking for stuff to do, then I suggest you play a game with a purupse. http://www.gwap.com

Games with a purpose are games like MoodSwings that are fun to play, but actually help "teach" computers something that computer's can not compute on their own. Try it out and enjoy!

Google TechTalks

If after playing moodswings, gwaps, and building all the projects in Alison's book, you still find yourself looking for something to do, check out Google TechTalks! Google TechTalks are presentations given at the Google headquaters. There are some great presentations there on topics ranging from copyright 101 to website development 101. Check the presentations out at http://www.youtube.com/view_play_list?p=A44D476C50BAB197 and dont forget your notebook and your pencil!

Before I explain and setup the lyric search, I want to briefly explain the monetization portion of the site. For those of you who have played around with the mood player, you notice that you only get to hear 30 seconds of the song. Well, If I had created the 7000 songs that we have so far, I would be able to play the full song. I didn't so I can't. But all is not lost! Thats where our friends over at Amazon come in to play!

Amazon.com has a really great affiliate program setup for bloggers and web developers to integrate their products on to other websites. The program is free, and only requires you to fill out a web form and have a bank account. Once you are approved you recieve an Associates ID that allows you to link any product in the Amazon catalog to on your blog or site. When people visit your site and click and purchase an item, you will recieve commision (or a percentage of the sales price). The more people buy from you the better the commision!

For my purposes, I am interested in Amazon's extensive Music Library. If you buy your music online, you no doubt have probably purchased a song or two from Amazon. Its usually 1 buck for a single song and 5 to 15 bucks for a whole album.

Linking the Searches to the right item.

Now I could go in and manually input a link to Amazon for each of the 7000+ songs we have, but that would take forever and be just plain silly. (Not to mention the millions of other links that will be available via the lyric search.) Instead, Amazon provides a Search API (or Aplication Programming Interface) that allows me to dynamically create the links to the proper item in the Amazon Catelog. I actually found their API to be attractive and easy to implement. Visit http://aws.amazon.com/associates/ for more info on the API.

Why Just Amazon.com?

I am using Amazon for the first version because of its ease of use, and extensive catelog. My plan for future versions is to setup a custom system for independent artists, song writers, and producers to quickly and easily share (or sell) their music. One of the biggest questions I get from indpendent artist is how they can effectively market and sell their music, without the need for a large record comapany deal. Well, the goal of musicinstantly.com is to be inclusive to all music, and we've made it a goal to ensure independent artist are included as well.

So while development is under way, Play around with the mood player!

Day 3 of the Development of www.musicinstantly.com and things are progressing well. I completed the first version of the Mood Search, so now you can use the mood graph to generate a playlist of songs of the selected mood.

Try it out!

Next up is to complete the lyric search then....

Monetize!

Monetize!

Monetize!

Enjoy! (:

Ok so The first stop to our tradition is of course to find a tree!!!  This looks like a good one!!!  I love choping things down with chainsaws there so loud and so fun, kinda like me!!!

Next We go to the Trains!  Nothing says Mechanical Monster more more then trains! Roadside America is a great place to see and I love it!!! 

This place is great!!! Its a giant train display the was built back in 1953!!!!  Who needs 3-D movies and all that flashy stuff when you have real honest to goodness gears and motors that You operate yourself!!!  The really cool part about it is that it hasn't changed since my dad came here when he was a little kid!!!!  Not many places can claim that!!!! 

These are the buttons that are all over the place and they operate different things, this button activates the playground!!!

This is the playground that the button above operates, it makes the kid swing and the see-saw go up and down. 

After the trains we go to grab somthing to eat and since where in Pennsylvania Dutch Country, why not get some family style meals!!

Here we are at the table waiting for the food!!!

Our last stop is the Koziar's Christmas Village of lights!! A beautiful outdoor display of lights!!!  It's always cold but It's always beautiful the best part of this place is when you come over the last hill you go down in the valley and see the whole village on top the hill it's gorgeous!!! 

We wanted to get our picture with Frosty!!!  Thanks for reading and finding out a little more about the heavy-metal handyman Guru Brian, happy holidays and Merry Christmas!!!

With that in mind, I began a project almost two years ago with the goal of training a system to understand how we interpret mood. As I mentioned, music is sort of a gateway into human emotions. Thus there are two main components of the trainer: Music lyrics, and mood.

Although not all songs have lyrics, those that do sometimes have an impact on the mood of a song. Take for example the Blues. Most blues singers are singing about some negative event that may have transpired in their life. Thus when the audience listens, they relate to the somber mood of the artist. In such cases the lyrics of the song aid in determining the mood of a song.

Searching for music by Lyrics

When I embarked on the task of setting up a search engine strickly for lyrics, I had to think of an approach that would be optimal for finding songs across different genres. So instead of searching just a single lyric site, I decided to search them all.
Google keeps a directory of websites that are organized into categories. This directory ranks each site based on Google's pantened PageRank system. This system takes into consideration things like page hits, server speed, and so on. Within the Google Directory there is a category for music lyrics. Google Lyric Directory.

Using this directory page, I created a custom search engine that searches only the sites listed on this page. I rearranged the ranking of the page to give a broader set of results, and in the future I plan to implement an even more focused search using information about the searcher like their favorite genre. You can check out the alpha version of the search here.

Determining the Mood of a song

By now many of you know about my work with MoodSwings. If you don't read the following articles:

Lloyd has MoodSwings...

More Feed For the Chickens

The data generated from MoodSwings aided in the development of te Porter Feed System.

Putting it all together

This week I am rolling out the beta version of MusicInstantly.com. This site will combine the the lyric search engine, the mood graph modeled after moodswings, and a social networking component to help you find the music you want.

Adding Social Networking to the site.

Recent Google started a new service called Friend Connect. This service allows web developers to allow visitors to log into their websites with a Google, Yahoo, AIM, or Open ID account. Its pretty easy to setup, and will save on the time needed to develop a user login system.

Facebook recently released a similar service called Facebook Connect. The great thing about Facebook connect is that when someone logs in with Facebook connect, I have access to their information, paticularly their favorite music! Using this information, I can create custom tailored searches on the fly for each user.

Follow along this week as I bring this site to life. Check out the progress at www.musicinstantly.com.

Wii + Roomba = Wiimba!

Surfin'ba!

Wii Balance Board Used to Control Roomba.

Ryan Howard and the Science of the Swing

Maiche' Word Interviews Alison

Cute Video with Alison and Maiche'

Backstage with the Techno-Guru's of My Home 2.0

Us Guru's acting silly.

And last but not least..

Fox News Blooper - Moral of the story; cheaters never win

Warning. Very Funny.

Graphite, or Graphene in this case is a 1 atom thick carbon bond that is a conductor of electricity. Memory made from graphene differ from current transistors because they operate more efficiently at a smaller size. Currently transistors are comprised of a source, drain and gate. Millions (and in some instances billions) of transistors exist on your memory cards. these transistors store your precious information like that picture of me being attacked by a buffalo in Wyoming.

Field Effect Transistor

Me attacking a live Buffalo

These transistors can be maufactured as small as 45 nanometers. The graphene memory essential has just the source and drain, thereby reducing the size of each transistor to only 9nm! This means that you can pack more memory into the same amount of space.

Time for a Lesson!

To help give you an idea of what I am talking about, I will break down bits and bytes for you.

Bit - Binary Digit - The basic unit of storage of information. It can be either a 1 or 0 (think of it as on or off).

Byte - An orderded collection of 8 bits. 1 byte = 8 bits = 2^³ bits.

kilobyte (KB) - 2^¹⁰ bytes. 1024 bytes or 8,192 bits.

megabyte (MB) - 2^²⁰ bytes or 1024^² bytes or 1,048,576 bytes or 8,388,608 bits.

gigabyte (GB) - 2^30 bytes or 1024^³ bytes or 1,073,741,824 bytes or 8,589,934,592 bits.

Ok! So for every GB we need over 8 billion transistors! Most transistors today are in the 45nm range.

Micron, a leading company in memory development I worked for a few years back, delivered the first transistors smaller than 40nm a few months back. This has enabled increase storage capacity in memory cards and solid state drives. With this advancement from Micron, SSD now have capacities up to 256 GB.(http://www.physorg.com/news131294239.html)

Now imagine reducing the size of transistors to 1/4th the size Micron introduced. That would mean that SSD have the possibility to grow larger than 1TB!  This also means that the memory cards for our cameras and phones would be able to store more high quality music, pictures and video.

Graphene memory has the potential to offer other advantages other than storage capacity. Rice professor James Tour commented on the other features.
"While generating little heat itself, graphene memory seems impervious to a wide temperature range, having been tested from minus 75 to more than 200 degrees Celsius with no discernible effect", Tour said. "That allows graphene memory to work in close proximity to hot processors. Better still, tests show it to be impervious to radiation, making it suitable for extreme environments."

So When am I gonna get my Pencil Lead Memory??

The team at rice are working on ways to manufacture the memory. The lab tests show that the memory outlasts current flash memory significantly. Did you most flash memory out today only has a data retention life span of 10 years? If you are looking to archive data, dont plan on using flash memory. You will be pretty upset in a decade when the information suddenly has disappeared!

Well this weeks Tech joke are my pick as the top three Consumer related technology videos.

In Third Place...

Bill Gates Last Day at Microsoft

This video features our favorite Tech Guru himself in a parody of his last day working at Microsoft. "Billy Gee" has a great sense of humor!

In second place...

Design Coding

This video is a rap by the Poetic Prophet and is hilarious, yet informative video on proper techniques when designing a website. Quite entertaining.

(Drum Roll)

And the number one pick of Funny Consumer/Tech video is...

"Computer Friends"

This video by the Sniper Twins is a rap video for Seagate hard drives. Hilarious!

Have a great weekend!