Jon Todd

Settling in San Francisco

Jon Todd — Mon, 12 May 2008 06:36:07 +0000

So I’ve officially moved to San Francisco and started working at the new job. I’m living in the in a place called Marina Cove which will be home for at least the next few months while I get my bearings and a better idea of where I’d like to be long term. The marina area is nice, right by the bay, beach, presidio and a few other parks but the general crowd might a bit too fratboy for me. On the plus side I live right next to the area’s Safeway grocery store so not having a car hasn’t been a big issue and eating well is easy. Also the 30x express bus stop is two blocks away and gets me to work in under 15 min.

More to come about SF

Dub’s Heavy Rotation 2 - Hot Chip ‘The Warning’

Jon Todd — Mon, 12 May 2008 02:46:07 +0000

Think I first heard these guys at Pieter’s place. I can’t stop listening to this album. It’s very electronic really dig the following songs:

How to create a Dub style heavy rotation smart playlist in iTunes

Jon Todd — Fri, 18 Apr 2008 03:17:00 +0000

Let’s face it, you know what songs you’re listening to a lot but what if you wanted a playlist that gave this information to you so you could say blog about which songs are on your own personal top 10 list. My goal was to create a playlist which will show me that songs I listened to the most in the last week that I’ve recently added to my collection. This isn’t really possible in iTunes smart playlists since the play count doesn’t actually store the dates of each time you listen.

That said, here’s a set of rules that gets pretty close:

Last Played - is in the last - 7 days
Date Added - is in the last - 1 months
Rating - is greater than - (no stars)

Then to get my top X songs I just order by rating.

I’m sure I could improve on this and would be interested to hear about your creative playlist ideas.

Dub’s Heavy Rotation 1 - ‘New Magnetic Wonder’

Jon Todd — Thu, 17 Apr 2008 02:50:30 +0000

Music is a very large part of my life and my typical work day. I’ve been thinking for some time now how to share what I listen to with you. I’ve thought about podcasting but figured it’d be hard to keep that commitment up, plus I’d want to play tons of copy-written material. I’ve thought about doing album reviews but there are so many people far more eloquent who do a better job. Instead, for now, I’m going to simply post songs/albums/artists that are in my heavy rotation play list. I’m doing this to hopefully start some dialog and learn about great new music from you.

So for the first installment I bring you Apples in stereo’s latest album New Magnetic Wonder. My favorite 4 song on the album in order of awesomeness:

Same Old Drag
Energy
Sunndal Song
7 Stars

Visit their website to give the songs a listen.

Computer Science, Liberal Arts or Tech School?

Jon Todd — Wed, 16 Apr 2008 15:19:52 +0000

This question was raised on slashdot today:

I’m a high school senior who is trying to pick a college to attend. I’ve been accepted by two comparably selective schools. One is a highly regarded tech school, and the other is a highly regarded liberal arts institution. I prefer the liberal arts college, but the computer science program is small, graduating about a dozen students a year. The course load is heavily theory based; programming languages are taught in later years. How much would the tech school vs. non tech school matter? Are CS majors from non-tech school considered inferior? What would an HR department think? What would you think if you were hiring?

There is a good series of responses on slashdot about this topic and its very interesting to hear what people have to say from big universities as I’ve gone the liberal arts route.

Hypnotise A Chicken

Jon Todd — Tue, 15 Apr 2008 18:09:55 +0000

This is no doubt the optimal way to hypnotize a chicken: