So that’s what’s in my pockets. My “Super Star” keys (inherited from the last person who owned my car), an albuterol inhaler (huffin’ and puffin’ and blowing nowhere), my Motorola MPx200 (slowly going the way of the buffalo), my iPod (longtime listener, first-time caller), and my headphones du jour, these little Sony in-ear wrap arounds (plus wires!). Oh - and my gigantic beast of a wallet that has dislocated a few of my lower ribs.

And that’s the bare minimum! Sometimes I carry even more!

I think I just notice what’s in my pockets more as spring creeps toward us, as happens to be the case right now. See, during winter, I don’t worry about being all pocketed out. I get a couple of free ones in my jacket! But then comes the sun and my jacket goes in the closet, while all of the stuff in my jacket goes into my little pants pockets.

I begin to look like I have actually shoved cargo into my cargo pants. I know cargo pants are just trendy because they have a bunch of neat little pockety things, but I actually use mine. In fact, when it gets hot, I have some old cargo pants I made into cut-off shorts just so I have enough pockets in the summer!

So what do I plan to do about all this?

Carry ghetto headphones! Replace my phone with a giant old-school two-handed cell phone! Pack around all of the original CDs now stored in my iPod, plus a portable CD player! Buy one of those giant key rings - and add fifty keys to it! And strap a bottle of oxygen to my back! And never ever ever throw a receipt away for the rest of my life!

Or maybe I’ll just wait for CargoPants 2004 to come out. I hear they have a zipper behind your knee that allows you to dump stuff in.

Woo Hoo! Mathcaddy.com is officially the number 1,212,941 most visited site on the Internet!!! I think we should throw a party!

The future of commercials? If so, count me in! I’ll watch Seinfeld & Superman ads any day, especially ones as well done as these. Who cares if the ad has almost nothing to do with American Express and only mentions “The Card” once?

Oh, yes! Wyoming! Oh, yes! I’m going!

Dear Future Me,
In three years, check the results of this search against the results for this one.

And while you’re at it, in ten years, compare them to this search.

Oh yeah - one more thing: You’re out of milk.

Thanks to Chris Pirillo pointing out the Internet Archive’s Live Music Archive, I’m now sitting here listening to “The Fools We Are as Men” from an incredible live performance of Ryan Adams in Paris with indescribable recording quality. There are a huge number of bands and shows available in the archive, but most of the best ones are done in “lossless” audio, so these are some big files, which is a bit of a downside. There are some MP3s, but most of them are Shorten files.

Shorten is an attempt to make high-quality lossless audio recordings available without needing a ton of bandwidth. (Just a half-ton of bandwidth.) From the little experience I have, a typical SHN file is about two to three times smaller than its counterpart WAV original.

You’ll notice right away if you compare the Live Music Archive’s selection of MP3s vs. its selection of Shorten files. Most of what’s there is not in good ole MP3. At first, I you might feel a little disillusioned by this. But don’t let a new file format keep you from enjoying a ton of wonderful live recordings from bands and artists like Ben Kweller, Spoon, Ryan Adams (21 shows), Jack Johnson (89 shows), Guster (131 shows!), Howie Day (185 shows!!), and much, much more. Plus, you’ll get our exclusive collecti– oh. Sorry. I thought I was doing an infomercial.

Anyway, if you like music, you probably enjoy (well recorded) live music. I know that I do. I have over 6 GB of MP3s of live recordings from Ben Folds /Five, Dave Matthews, Weezer, and a few others.

What you need to enjoy sonic liveness:
For playing the SHN files and/or converting them to MP3, you have two reasonable options: (1) Install ShnAmp, which will allow you to play them in Winamp upon download, or (2) [My recommendation] Download and install MKW Audio Compression Tool (mkwACT) to have a two-step drag-and-drop conversion from SHN to MP3 files. If you choose this route, note the additional installation instructions (primarily, you need to first install the binaries and not click “OK” when finished installing them until after completing the program installation, as well as check the options settings in MKWACT after you’ve installed it.)

Mathcaddy readers are probably a little familiar with Lawrence Lessig. If you’re not, you should be [mirror here] For those of you who have known me for some time, you know that I pursued going to law school and working in intellectual property. But my plans changed, so I get to sit and read Lessig’s new book, Free Culture instead.

And it’s GREAT!

And he and his publisher, Penguin Books, released it in under a Creative Commons license, as well as free download as a PDF.

Well a few people started thinking: The CC license for Lessig’s book says, “You are free: to copy, distribute, display, and perform the work [and] to make derivative works.” What if a group of bloggers got together and recorded this (wonderful) book as an Audiobook, chapter by chapter?

Within 48 hours, it was nearly complete. I even contributed a few chapters. Lessig was pretty excited himself about the project and said he wants to record one of the chapters.

AKMA, one of the originators of the idea, hosts the majority of the relevant conversation on this project, as well as the collection of links to each of the chapters. You can find the Audiobook project here.

Prompted by the allowance in the license for derivative works, another individual has created an eBook that’s much easier to read than the PDF.

Here are my three recorded sections:
Chapter 4: Pirates [9 MB: 25 Minutes]
I highly recommend this chapter, which is also available here in a recent Wired excerpt from Lessig’s book

Introduction to “Property” Section [2 MB: 4 Minutes]
I get to say “the thingness of picnic tables” here!

Chapter 6: Founders [10 MB: 29 Minutes]
Not the most thrilling chapter in the book, but it is essential to frame the historical issue of copyright and “free culture”.

I couldnt last more than 1 tenth of what this guy does in the ever popular “Dance Dance Revolution!” And I am proud of that, very very proud of that.
One legged dancer.

Im not sure why anyone would really want an e-mail address this long, but here it is!
World’s Longest E-mail addresses for free.

UPDATE!:
While looking for wizardry pictures for Eric’s new honorary title of Math Wizard, I ran into this picture. It just didnt make sense to me.
Magic at the pool!

Be sure to also check out Erics Award for his new title in Photo Mojo.

ARRRGH! Banning an IP incorrectly broke the comments feature for the past four or five days. Sorry about that. I didn’t notice until I just attempted to comment on Steve’s last post.

Blasted spammers!

Blasted me for mistyping the banned IP info!

Blasted!

Blasted? Flavor-blasted goldfish?

I got to thinking about the Pepsi iTunes song giveaway. The codes are 10 digits long with 36 possibilities for each digit. So that makes roughly 36×10x9×8x7×6x5×4x3×2, or 130,636,800, possibilites. Pepsi says that they are giving away 100,000,000 songs, so shouldnt there only be 30,636,800 possible invalid codes? That gives you only about a 23% chance that you will randomly pick an invalid code. I think that those are pretty good chances! The main factor affecting this is that you only had that 23% chance of getting a valid code on day 1. By now a lot of those codes have probably been taken and the chances are significantly lower. Oh well, not like I wanted super duper free songs anyways.

Please correct any errors in my math or information, its so late.

Finally we have some medical news to rejoice about!

According to this article, picking your nose and eating it is very good for you. I’m going to start under the seat of my car!

Wooo!!