Music!
Some may wonder why a blog with the title "Dancing About Architecture" doesn't have more writing about music. Others may have no idea what the hell I'm talking about. No matter: the point is, I love music and I've always loved music, so let's talk about music.
In the several months since I've started using Yahoo! Music Unlimited, it's become a larger and larger part of my daily music experience. I've ditched the iPod and replaced it with a Creative Zen Micro, which works with Yahoo. There are a hundred things that could be improved with this setup (the service, the client, the player, and the DRM), but the fact remains that this is the best way to consume massive amounts of music.
One of the cool things about the Yahoo! Music Unlimited (which I'm going to shorten to "Yahoo Music Unlimited") is that you can share playlists which are captured as xspf files. So, I'm going to start sharing xspf files.
The first best place you can go to fill up your player is to go to Ian Rogers blog. Of course, it's hosted at Y! 360, so you'll need to submit to a full body cavity search before being allowed to read it. But once you straighten up and get past that, you'll find Ian has done a wonderful thing: he's created xspf playlists for recent issues of Mojo magazine. There's no better way to get exposed to a wide range of new music than to download one of the Mojo playlists and hit "shuffle". There's a lot of great stuff and a lot of crap, but it's all new.
Here's the Sept 2005 Mojo playlist.
I'll follow this entry up with lots more music. And you really owe it to yourself to at least give Yahoo Music Unlimited a try. You may not think you'll like music rental, but you might be surprised.