This morning at work I was chatting with a colleague about my morning commute, and I don’t know what got into me… but for some odd reason I confided that I wished to be a big katamari ball, rolling my way to work and grabbing everything in my path.

Then, adding to the strangeness and freaking out my poor katamari-less colleague, I started singing “Na NAAAAAAAAA na na na NA na na na, na Na na na-na naaaaaaaaaaa!”

* * *

What… you aren’t familiar with Katamari Damacy, the psychedelically funky and happy video game in which you, Little Prince, must help out your hungover King of the Cosmos dad by rolling up everything on Earth to make stars that your daddy accidentally splatted during his previous nights’ bender?  If you have a PS2, *go out and get this game now!* You won’t be sorry, except perhaps for the temporary loss of productivity and your embarrassment from singing jazzy goofy charming jazz/j-pop tunes to all your friends.

And, indeed, the musical score is that great.  Listening to it is just bound to cheer anyone up.

Unfortunately, trying to actually buy the soundtrack is not nearly so pleasant.  Amazon?  Nope (they’ve only got a misleadingly-labeled CD that’s inspired by the Katamari tunes… it doesn’t actually contain the songs!).  iTunes?  Nope.  Yahoo Music? Sorry.  Rhapsody?  Sadly, no.

So far, I’ve only seen it via Play Asia… >$30 for the CD + shipping :-(.  I’m actually willing to pay that much, but not very pleased about the idea.

Anyone know:
1) Other places to get this CD for less money?
2) WHY such a charming, beloved score is not available via an American label?
3) Why Amazon.com and other American retailers would carry the game, but not the soundtrack?

I’m guessing most of you probably just think of me as an Internet geek, but I used to be a classical pianist geek, choir geek, and jazz pianist geek.  I have performed over 200 times, won a bunch of Bach festivals, and studied under jazz greats Ashley Alexander, Frank Mantooth, and others.  This does not inherently make me a wonderful person, but it does (IMNSHO) give me a right to talk smack about some fellow musicians and a nasty trend which I’ll detail below.

Sadly, though, there’s little proof of my musical history, or at least little proof that I can share; for instance, I recently called the music department of my alma mater (Northwestern University) to get copies of my jazz performances in ‘90-92, and alas, they no longer have the recordings.  Ack! :-( So you’ll just have to trust ol’ Grumpy Gramps today.

So what’s my cranky rant for today?  Well, I’m sick and tired of jazz musicians ignoring their audience… more than that, downright ignoring the beauty of musicality.  More and more often, I hear jazz performers—young students and adults alike—musically belching through way-overlong solos that—despite oft-impressive technical wizardry (wow, he can play 743 notes a minute!)—bore everyone to tears… perhaps even the solo’ist himself.  And I think back to one of my fabulous jazz teachers at Northwestern who gave me a delightfully straightforward and valuable piece of advice:

“Play less.  Say more.”

Lots of us love music and we love to share it; I think that’s even more powerful than simply “grab lots of music for free”—it’s the sharing that excites us, motivates us.  Music is a shared experience!

Why, then, hasn’t anyone made it easy to share music snippets legally from a simple iframe, a simple widget that someone can cut and paste or even drag and drop into their blog?

Let me give an example of how painful it is to share (within, IMHO, fair use) a music snippet:
1) Identify song you want to share with others.  Determine that it’s DRM’d.  Ack!
2) Remove DRM (yes, I know this may technically be illegal, but frankly I don’t give a damn.  Call it civil disobedience)
3) Use software to grab a relevant thirty second snippet and save it as an mp3.  Make sure tags are still embedded.
4) Upload to server.
5) Before all of this, download and install a good flash player so others can listen to your snippet whether on a Mac or PC.
6) Embed the appropriate code into your blog entry.

Check out this entry on the emotional wallop of strings for an example of the result. 

I think it took me at least 20 minutes just to prepare, upload, and post this one clip.  Does that sound very conducive to sharing to you?!

So you know what massively puzzles me?  Why on earth hasn’t any major player (Amazon, Rhapsody, Napster, Apple, etc.) made this process easier… not only facilitating the discovery and sharing of music by the increasingly powerful blogosphere, but increasing subscriptions and download sales?!  Let me explain how I envision this working…

Love Avenue Q?  Appreciate Jewish humor?
Watch what happens when the cast of Avenue Q mashes up with the cast of Fiddler on the Roof!

P.S.—I’d like to hat-tip a fellow blogger, but I can’t remember exactly where I first saw this (I just re-found it via a YouTube search).  Much apologies.  Next time, I’ll be more careful about blogtribution.

Unless you’re a fan of the RIAA or a bitter, clueless artist… I urge you to run, er, click, not walk to go hear Weird Al’s new ditty: ”Don’t Download This Song.” [warning: music autoplays].

I’m looking forward to the music video promised for this evening, but in the meantime, you can hear the song in its entirety (and, of course, download it!).

Brave Combo is 26-year-old (!) “hot jazz quintet, a rollicking rock’n’roll bar band, a Tex-Mex conjunto, a sizzling blues band, a saucy cocktail combo, a deadly serious novelty act, a Latin orchestra, and one of America’s dance bands par excellence.” [see their bio page] But they kick ass for many other reasons, too.

For those of you with short attention spans, fine… you can skip the rest of my brilliant commentary and go directly to Brave Combo’s music. 
A variety “dozen sampler"(tm) I recommend:  Breslau, Canto a la salsa, Down at the Friendly Tavern, High Bounce Polka, Hokey Pokey, My Tears are Nothing, No Work Today, Spaghetti Twist and Twirl, Swing it Baby Swing, The Hustle, Three Ducks Ondo, Waltz in C Minor,

Aside from the fact that this band is made up of great musicians that play a huge variety of contagiously fun music, it’s damn cool that they’ve made decent-quality one-minute segments of a ton of their songs available on the Web, no?  In fact, their Web site is informative, entertaining, and pretty comprehensive—a sad rarity for band sites, IMHO.

Here are other things that highlight why Brave Combo is an amazingly kick-ass band:

I grew up with snakes.  A Burmese Python named, appropriately enough, “Julius Squeezer.” Lots of harmless king snakes and gopher snakes and more.

You see, my dad (a biology teacher) was friends with a herpetologist, and the two of them would often conduct hands-on educational seminars around the area to help people understand that snakes are our friends, not something to be feared nor chopped up with a garden shovel.  My dad and his friend also helped out the local sheriff by being part of what I called “The Snake Patrol”—comprised of environmentalist folks who’d go out to a house where some person—who had moments ago called 911 or whatever screaming incoherenantly about a deadly snake—was about ready to take drastic, lethal action against a harmless baby king snake or whatnot.  My dad would go out there, put the snake in a pillowcase, and release it into the wild. 

One time, alas, it was too late.  The frantic woman, who had spotted what she KNEW was a deadly snake outside by her trash cans, could hold off no longer.  About ten minutes before my dad arrived, she had repeatedly bisected the critter.  The purely rubber critter I might add.  Methinks that snake wasn’t posing all that much of a threat, eh?

As part of all these efforts, my dad would sometimes temporarily bring snakes to our home, where I got to hold them and learn that they weren’t slimy or (generally) deadly or even venemous.

Plus snakes eat things like wild rats, which are generally NOT our friends when they’re carrying diseases into our homes.

Microsoft Access is for masochists.  It’s expensive, a pain to learn, and—frankly—quite overkill for nearly any home application.

So, for too long, folks like myself have kept lists in Excel.  This works… sort of.  But it’s a pain to share, and it lacks a lot of the usefully-database’y features that make working with data multidimensionally both useful and fun.

For instance, I’m trying to keep track of where I’ve traveled around the world, what sets of pictures I’ve taken, where those pictures reside (online, in photo albums, etc.), who I have yet to share them with, and so on.  I *could* do lots of messy filtering and sorting on Excel as I try to handle related action items, but a database (featuring multiple persistent views) would be so much easier!

Well… dabbledb and Zoho Creator to the rescue!  Below I’ll talk about my initial experiences using both services, some advantages I perceive in each, and I’ll also demo my first “app”—a filterable/sortable list of movies I’ve seen and want to see (all 217 of them so far!)

First, a quick note to those SEOs who are still reading my blog hoping for detailed Google search-related tidbits.  It’s still unlikely.  If I ever do post nuggets of search wisdom here, I’m sure you’ll hear about it .  With that said, Google is moving ahead to improve communications, both internally and externally; I recently enjoyed visiting and discussing Search Quality issues with Googlers in Berlin and Dublin and also had a great time meeting with folks at the London Search Engine Strategies Conference.  Photos online soon, I hope!  And yes, we’re further extending the coolness of Sitemaps and related Webmaster tools, improving documentation, and much more. 

Okay, enough about that, though.

I wanted to bring back the musicness of my blog and so today I’m featuring a catchy tune by my friend Tat Tong… a lousy Webmaster (sorry, Tat) but a fine musician and award-winning sound recording engineer.

The short song below, Revocation, was composed, arranged, and sung entirely by Tat.
NOTE: Broadband connection required.  Sorry, I’m not dealing with bandwidth detection and uploading multiple / inferior clips anymore.

At Tat’s recording studio Web site, you can hear more of his recording work and learn about the awards he’s garnered.

I got a free ticket to go see the movie Da Vinci Code and while it won’t say it was worth what I paid for it… well, it wasn’t worth a lot more than that, either.

The movie in a word:  Joyless.

I can count the number of times the characters smiled on one hand.
I can count the number of times I smiled on probably one or two fingers.

I haven’t read the book, but judging from my reactions to this movie and the 7th-grade-level writing abilities I slogged through in one of Dan Brown’s other books, I can’t say I’ll be clamoring to read the Da Vinci Code anytime soon.

Things I *did* like about the movie: