Ryan A Graves.com

chilirec is like TiVo for internet radio. You log in, choose your music that you want to record, and within about 5 minutes you have music that has been recorded for you off the internet. chilirec then stores the music in “your personal space” on the web and you can return to listen to it whenever. This service is totally free, however, it is questionably legal (just like this entire genre of services). For you say.no.radio’ers the quality of music is subject to the web radio stations. If you can find good indie channels you will probably be able to record, save, and listen via chilirec.

One awesome feature of the service is that you can actually upload a copy of the playlist you create on chilirec directly to your ipod and listen on the go! No need to be tied to your comp. Awesome. chilirec is still in beta release so check it out.

How it works

for more cool music stuff check out say.no.radio

post inspired by TechCrunch

I’ve just added the MyBlogLog widget to ActionsTalk. Be sure to join the community so that you can know who else reads ActionsTalk and we can begin to connect.

I once again feel obligated to apologize for my post bashing the Twitter faithfuls. It is truly an awesome and affective web app! I am now fully on board and would encourage any of you who are not yet sold to try it again. It took me two tries to see how useful the tool could be. I’ve met some awesome people on Twitter and have had some great conversations with existing friends via Twitter.

The next step at least in my head is, how I or others can use Twitter in the workplace? How can Twitter contribute to Enterprise 2.0? Well, Tara Hunt author of horsepigcow.com tells you just how companies can make good use of tweets in the professional environment. Twitter is legit, jump on or get left behind!

Must watch videos of Y-Combinators start-up school.

http://omnisio.com/startupschool08 

David Heinemeier Hansson at Startup School 08

My take: This guy is a riot and he makes a great great point. Where are the good Italian food placeson the web?

Mike Arrington at Startup School 08

My take: Really, you’re going to have technical difficulties at an event like this? Get your cake up Mike.

Paul Graham at Startup School 08

My take: This man is one of the clearest thinkers in the web start-up space. He gets it. He’s not the best speaker in the world but he is a phenomenal writer and everyone needs to listen to this man.

Paul Buchheit at Startup School 08

My take: Again these guys are hear because they are good entrepreneurs not because they are good speakers. Well worth the watch.

Greg McAdoo, Partner at Sequoia Capital, talks at Startup School 08

My take: He is a partner at Sequoia. You better listen. Also, he really knows how to listen to entrepreneurs. He was the first speaker to do a Q&A (I think).

Marc Andreessen at Startup School 08

My take: Maybe one of the most experiences speakers. Lived through the bubble and the burst and still stand as a successfull entrepreneurs in the web space.

Jeff Bezos, Founder of Amazon.com

My take: The guy started selling books online and now stores millions of companies data. There are plenty of companies that simply wouldn’t exist without Amazons data storage models. Brilliant.

Sam Altman at Startup School 08

Jack Sheridan

David Lawee at Startup School 08

Peter Norvig at Startup School 08

Post compliments of BlakeSamic.comTwo new applications I’ve been impressed with are Piclens and Animoto.

Piclens is a plugin for Firefox that lets you view photos on the web in a new, completely immersive way. Once you have it installed, it integrates with all the major photo sharing sites: Flickr, Facebook, Google Images, Smugmug, etc. With Piclens you can view sets of photos on a virtual wall, and fly through them with a drag of the mouse.  It can make the most boring Facebook album seem interesting.

Watch the demo here, then download it — Trust me.

Animoto is a new site that lets you create amazing videos by combining a group of your photos with some music. I’ve never seen an auto-generated slide show come out so well! You can make the videos for free if you go with a length of 30 seconds, and it’s cheap to make a longer one (~$4). After your video is complete, you can embed it on your website, Facebook, etc. As I sift through 1000’s of pictures from my time in Europe and try to put a video together, I’m thinking it makes a lot more sense to have Animoto do it for me. I would be very surprised if Animoto doesn’t get bought up by Google or Yahoo (think Flickr integration…) in the near future.

Here is my first crack at an Animoto video

Y Combinator news is down! Due to the community that is actively involved in Y Combinator it became one of my favorite news feeds to read. The combination of tech and entrepreneurial focus was awesome!  Now…it’s down.  Does anybody know what happened over there?

To go along with my recent acceptance of Twitter, I noticed that Twitter is the 5th largest Rails app. This is an interesting ranking of apps that use Rails. Check out (http://rails100.pbwiki.com/). Being some what familiar with the +’s and -’s of PHP, I’d like to learn more about Ruby and the Rails framework. If anyone out there is great at using the Rails framework I’d love to hear what the experience is like. Why would I use it over PHP or any other language? What flexibility does it give you? Lets keep this discussion going in comments…

This is a project is a collaboration between the Interactive Media Division and the Institute for Creative Technologies at the University of Southern California. This video is yet another example of an awesome application of a mash-up of technologies. It will be fun to see the final product.

“Viewfinder” is a novel method for users to spatially situate, or “find the pose,” of their photographs, and then to view these photographs, along with others, as perfectly aligned overlays in a 3D world model such as Google Earth. Our objective is to provide a straightforward procedure for geo-locating photos of any kind, and our approach is to engage a community of users for a certain amount of human help. We specify that a 10-year-old should be able to find the pose of a photo in less than a minute, and we are convinced that this goal is achievable. While we are not entirely there yet, we are getting closer. This is our progress report.

April 3, 2008

When MTV started airing ‘Elimidate’ (and other equally worthless shows) and permanently abandoned their roots, music, many were very upset. When Fall Out Boy became “Sell Out Boy” and abandoned their indie roots, many others were very upset.

Pitchfork.tv provides and awesome combination of what MTV and Fall Out Boy stole from us, great indie music with great indie videos. Not only does pitchfork.tv hook up some great videos they are on the ball with offering some mp3’s and blogs along with the usual fodder of photos, reviews and interviews.

In the words of the founders: “Pitchfork.tv is the first-ever music video channel dedicated to the documentation of independent music. As a visual extension of the music coverage Pitchfork Media has provided for more than a decade, and a means of updating and advancing the music television format, Pitchfork.tv brings you closer to the artists you love, through original mini-documentaries, secret rooftop and basement sessions, full concerts, exclusive interviews, and the most carefully curated selection of music videos online.”

My take: Site well built. The UI is phenomenally creative where the video playing never leave center stage but you can still read your reviews and get the concert schedules. As a say.no.radio faithful this is a welcomed combo to my favorites.

Aren’t you getting tired of hearing people talk about the Work – Life balance? I am, and it’s mostly because I don’t understand the concept. It’s not that I work 80 hours a week, or than I don’t have a social life, because I do, I have a great one. The confusion is derived from my confusion around what we are balancing. Things need balancing when they are opposites right? Black and white have grey; good and evil have, well, humans. But why do work and life need balancing? If your work and you’re life are such polar opposites you are definitely in the wrong line of work. If you hate your job so much that you don’t consider it part of your life then we have issues.

People wonder why they’re not performing well at work, Peter Berner, author of Career Moments would tell you, “You’re in the wrong job!” Somebody can do a job without actually doing anything, but nobody can do work without doing anything. If you find a career or work that you enjoy it can become your life and that is OK! Believe it or not you don’t actually have to hate your job.

So, forget trying to balance your work and your life. Let your work become a part of your life and something you enjoy. Enjoy your life. I guarantee that when you find work that becomes your life and that is enjoyable the rewards will be exponential. The largest of those rewards may even be financial rewards which can also improve other aspects of your life. All of a sudden when you begin to enjoy your work the need to balance is gone.

post from Ryan’s Blog.