I had an email thread going with some friends where we all came up with our list of our best albums of the 2000s. There are plenty of ways to define “best” but I’m going to go with the albums that I emotionally bonded with the most, those that felt like they came out of nowhere and changed the sonic landscape with a unique and creative approach. Mostly alternative music for me.
Anyway, here’s the list:
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Chutes Too Narrow – The Shins
I discovered this at the same time as Oh Inverted World, so the two kind of blur together for me. Catchy music, clever lyrics. That Zach Braff guy knows what he’s talking about.
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Hot Fuss – The Killers
Pop songcraft at it’s best. This album breaking was the start of the whole mainstream 80’s reincarnation that’s still going today. Everything’s been downhill since then for the Killers, in my opinion.
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Is This It – The Strokes
What a great divergence from all the high production pop crap that was in vogue at the time. The Strokes took it back to basics with a great slacker worldview to boot.
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Give Up – The Postal Service
Though it was eventually licensed out to every car company that wanted it for a commercial, this album started out as a decidedly non-mainstream side project of a band that itself was far from popular. Not just any artist can make electronic music sound so personal.
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Funeral – Arcade Fire
Wow, these scrappy Canadians came out of nowhere and helped redefine alternative music. Every song on this album is original and totally endearing in its amateur production and brazen creativity.
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You Forgot It In People – Broken Social Scene
Wow, these scrappy Canadians came out of nowhere and helped redefine alternative music. This band still doesn’t get the credit it deserves, probably because it’s such an amorphous collective of artists.
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Cast Of Thousands – Elbow
How can it be that still so many people have not heard of Elbow? They’re one of my favorite bands, and this album is a definitive classic. I love the gritty sound they lend to their instruments, and I love Guy Garvey’s coarse voice.
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Parachutes – Coldplay
This album is so phenomenal, track to track. Though I love the albums that came after as well, Coldplay was at their most warm and private on Parachutes, and with their subsequent stadium-filling popularity it’s unlikely that they’ll ever again write songs that feel so intimate…
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Sea Change – Beck
Much like my #1 choice, I bought this the day it came out, brought it home, slapped some headphones on and bonded with it. Holy shit, Beck. Way to go from disaffected junk culture to the most detailed, melodic melancholy brilliance I’d heard in a long time. I’m really hoping that his life falls apart again so he’ll write some more beautiful sad songs, produced again by Nigel Godrich (who’s also responsible for #1).
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Kid A – Radiohead
Oh Kid A! What else can I say about this album? Radiohead decided to follow up OK Computer (best of the last decade!) with a transcendent inaccessible masterpiece that blossoms further on each listen. It doesn’t matter to me that this album is #1 on many other lists. Honestly, I’m not really sure what this album is about, but I’m sure about what it means to me. I purposely don’t listen to Kid A very often, for fear that its powerful effect will diminish.
It really breaks my heart to leave off Spoon, Wilco, Bjork, The Flaming Lips, OutKast et al, but I suppose that’s what Top 10 lists are for… And then of course there are some great albums that I can’t include here because I never took sufficient time to emotionally bond with them, but I still think they’re truly great. Guess that leaves me lots of great stuff to go back and explore. If you’ve got any suggestions for me, leave them in the comments!
Over the past week many T-Mobile customers who use the Sidekick have been experiencing data outage issues. The problems came to a head this weekend, when T-Mobile announced that some customers may have experienced a permanent loss of data, including “pictures, contacts, e-mails, text messages, calendar entries, and to-do lists.” The data was held on servers maintained by Danger, a subsidiary of Microsoft. MIcrosoft and T-Mobile did not issue any additional press releases today, as they spent their time feverishly trying to recover data and respond to customer requests.
Though I’m not a T-Mobile customer, this episode did make me think about how much of my information I trust to the cloud. The advent of cloud computing has promised a new standard of data reliability and integrity, 100% uptime. But are we naive to think that this guarantee gives us license to never backup our information?
I’ve got data on Gmail, Facebook, Picasa, Flickr, Yahoo, Hotmail and other services that I trust will last indefinitely. Backing up my information from these services isn’t encouraged, nor is it even convenient. As we transition from traditional servers to cloud-based redundancy, there are bound to be some hiccups along the way. My only suggestion at this point is to keep multiple copies of your most important files, and hope Gmail doesn’t go down for more than the few hours that it does occasionally.
More information on the Sidekick situation can be found at http://news.cnet.com/8301-13860_3-10372921-56.html
During a trip to Seattle last weekend, the power suddenly went out on Sunday night. We looked outside the window of the apartment and saw all the other buildings dark too.
Plunged back to the stone age, we had no way to get any information about the situation. No TV news, no internet, no land line. I did have an iPhone, but the power outage was too recent and too local to be on any of the mobile news websites.
At a loss, I considered my Twitter app. I use Twitter occasionally, but I continue to be skeptical about its overall usefulness. But here was a situation tailor made to show off the strengths of the medium!
Using searches for tweets that contained “power outage” and “Queen Anne” (the neighborhood in Seattle where we were staying) along with searches filtered by proximity, I was able to get a realtime stream of comments from others nearby who were experiencing the same thing. I found out that the power company was just becoming aware of the issue, and that there was no ETA for a resolution. I also saw tweets from the local news stations that were taking this news and retweeting it. I even had one of my tweets retweeted a few times.
If you know what retweeting is, please roll your eyes *now* and proceed to the next paragraph. Otherwise: retweeting is when others who read your tweet reshare it with the Twittersphere (and more specifically, those who follow them). This behavior, when repeated, can lead to a viral spread of your original message.
This was my first time being retweeted, and it was really fun to see how people commented on my message as they forwarded it on. Based on my experience, here are a few learnings on how to get retweeted:
Useful tweets articulately impart unprecedented information. Be clear and intelligent in what you write (a useful strategy for life in general, of course). Your at an advantage if your tweet contains up-to-date and breaking information, and possibly your take on it. The idea here is to convey information that people will want to relay instead of rewriting it or tweeting their own take on the event.
For example, when Michael Jackson died, the Twittersphere was flooded. Retweeting was probably much less likely in this case, because everyone was more concerned with tweeting their personal feelings about Michael Jackson and his music.
Limit your tweets to ~100 characters. The maximum tweet is 140 characters, but if you want to be retweeted you’ll want to keep it shorter. Why? When someone retweets your message, your original tweet will be repeated along with an extra 4 characters in the message to call this out as a retweet (“ RT”), as well as a repeat of your user name preceded by an “@” to indicate the source. Assuming you also want to give your retweeters some space to put in their own commentary, you’ll want to keep closer to the 100 character mark to avoid them having to truncate or edit your original tweet.
As our power outage in Seattle cleared up, we were able to see the resolution in real time as those who were getting power back tweeted about it. This was very valuable information since we were hearing nothing from the power company or the news stations.
All in all, it was a shining moment for Twitter, and I look forward to the next disaster when I can use it. Well, you know what I mean 
