The Outsidr

Barack Hussein Obama is your 44th President. The inauguration was fantastic, Obama’s speech was outstanding and now we begin to see if Obama can deliver. I am uncharacteristically optimistic.

“Your people will judge you on what you can build, not what you destroy.”

A poignent quote and part of a message to leaders of hostile nations. Now, however, it is time to see what Barack Obama can build.

Am I the only one sick of seeing all of this Jim Goldman-bashing? He’s part of mainstream media, he got a story wrong and he tried to cover his ass. How is this something new? Maybe the fact that bloggers have no accountability is what draws so many to this story. Or perhaps it’s the fact that most of the bloggers covering Goldman’s bungle reported his initial claim as gospel and discounted Gizmodo’s scoop as a result…

Whatever the case, enough. Stop. Please. I’m a big fan of several of the blogs currently trying to cover their own asses by running several Goldman-bashing stories, sometimes reaching into the double-digits. Please keep me as a fan and get over it.

Back in early September, Ben Cooper announced on his site that he was beginning work on an experimental project I felt compelled to cover now that it has officially launched. Cooper, one of the few current artists I enjoy enough to write about, records under the name Radical Face, is half of the band Electric President and has played a hand in plenty of other projects. The project in question has been dubbed Patients and perhaps what I find most compelling is that it basically sits on the opposite end of the spectrum in terms of the direction music distribution has moved in recent history. Oh, and it’s a really cool idea too.

Cooper is constantly writing and recording material and only so much of it can find its way to a standard Morr Music release. Often times, Cooper offers up these homeless tracks for free in the news section of his site but in this instance he decided to have a little fun. Patients, 11 tracks in total, will not be sold in stores or online – in fact, it won’t be sold at all. Instead, the only way to obtain a copy of Patients is by way of the good old barter system.

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Sorry to all for the looooooong hiatus but things have just been too busy for me lately to focus on getting good content up on TO. Hopefully that will change soon and in the meantime, I’ve tried to get some interesting reading through to all of my RSS subscribers via Ma.gnolia.com.

As I have a few minutes of downtime right now, I wanted to put a little post together inspired by Papa Arrington. It’s actually a very cool idea – put together a list of products you “can’t live without” at the start of each year and see how that list changes 365 days later. Note that I put can’t live without in quotes because obviously I would be perfectly able to go on without any of the items listed below, but materialism and object-dependency are topics for an entirely different post…

So without further ado, I give you my short list of tech-focused products that I use and enjoy on a regular basis:

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