the tomgrom blog

Ah, VSL, you’ve done it again.

This time you hooked us up with weird and wonderful music, courtesy of Root Strata’s Blog and Mississippi Records.

Dig around and download some of these tapes, and be transported to other worlds of sound, from old beat-up dregs to hipster funk, soul, and psychedelic. There’s even some great world music thrown into the mix.

Not all of the downloads are still active, sadly, but most are, and please be prepared for a more … organic … sound. Each MP3 is one side of a cassette recording of old records, and it sounds every bit like it.

Matthew Irvine Brown has instantly become a musical hero to me, now that he’s released a series of tracks that can be loaded in iTunes’ shuffle mode and played as one big, endless song.

Beautiful, brilliant, and inspiring electronic music.

[via Waxy Links]

VSL reveals the power of new media to engage us like nothing else by highlighting the National Film Board of Canada and Goggle’s Welcome to Pine Point interactive documentary.

The story is haunting and resonant, and the experience richer because of the active role we have engaging in it. This effort pulls together talented storytellers, visual artists, musicians, animators, filmmakers, and web programmers in a novel way.

If you think it’s all been done before, you’re wrong (and, to some extent, right, but who cares if it’s done well?).

It’s out! Get on the cutting edge of web browsing with today’s release candidate (RC) of Firefox 4. I’ve been using the betas for several weeks, and find it to be a great improvement over Firefox 3.

Keep in mind that some add-ons won’t work, and that the final version will be out soon, so there’s no problem with waiting either…

I’m just the kind of geek who can’t wait to try something new.

It’s very compelling to see how Canadians are reacting to planned changes in the way their Internet access is billed. This Ars Technica article describes where things stand at the moment.

Metered Internet, where you pay based on the amount of bandwidth you use, is being pushed for adoption in this country, too, and has an excellent chance of succeeding. Online video takes a lot of bandwidth, after all, and it competes directly with the cable and phone companies’ own products. Why wouldn’t they want to make it more costly to avoid using their overpriced services, especially with the influence they have in Washington? It’s easy to spin this into a “use more, pay more” story, rather than confront the truth behind it.

Like Canadians, the citizens of the United States subsidized the bandwidth infrastructure that’s currently in place to the tune of billions in tax breaks. We continue to allow these telecommunication companies to act as monopolies, as well, preventing competition and the operation of a free market. I have yet to see any believable evidence that, once the data infrastructure we paid for was in place, more use of it (higher bandwidth) costs ISP’s more money, other than the usual upgrades and maintenance that they’d be expected to perform regardless.

What surprises me is that so few people in this country seem upset about the direction we’re going in. Perhaps the Canadians, who are making real progress at preventing these changes, can teach us something about standing up for what’s right. I hope that we can get a little angry about this, make our voices heard and get on track to become competitive with countries that don’t have such entrenched interests.

Right now we’re stifling innovation in the name of preserving the traditional business models of communications and entertainment companies that wouldn’t be there in the first place if it wasn’t for the taxpayer’s largess.