Their songs are generally in story form so make sure you can hear them wherever you are, or wait until you can pay attention. Or just listen anyway! That’s cool too. If you like what you hear, you may want to read this interesting article about them: Diselpunks – Interview with Ed Saperia & Patrick Gleeson of Clockwork Quartet
This is their page on t61, where you can download these songs: t61: Clockwork Quartet
Update (10/19/2009): Nexus has closed down! 
“We shut it down because we no longer have time to maintain or operate it. We’re working on a lot of new things, but they’re unrelated to Nexus.” The source code is posted on their notice at http://apps.facebook.com/_nexus_/ if you want to give it a try.
Think about the people you consider to be your friends. Chances are, some of them know each other, right? If you tried to write down how they were connected to each other, you’d get a form of “The Chart” from The L Word. You can probably guess that it’d be split up into a few groups; your high school friends would be separate from your college friends; if you’re in a greek organization, those friends would be clustered; if you did an out-of-state internship, those friends might be off by themselves, possibly because nobody loves them.
Chances are you may have seen an application that does something like this for you. It’s certainly not a difficult problem to imagine, given our propensity to visualize things. My personal favorite, by far, social graph application is the facebook app Nexus.
Why do I like it so much? First of all, let’s look at what it doesn’t do:
After that little list, I bet you’re surprised that it’s a facebook application, right? It simply reads in your friends and how they’re connected and renders them as a spring graph and allows you to easily and logically navigate this graph. The only downside is that the graphs are somewhat computationally intensive (read: time-consuming) to generate, so it could take several minutes to generate yours. The time to generate the graph scales in proportion to the number of friends you have and presumably the connectedness of your friends.
If you want to see my graph to get a taste, it’s right here for your viewing pleasure, no installation or login required. Some patterns for you to analyze: I have a high school cluster and a college cluster; most of my convention friends (Dragon*Con and MomoCon) are somehow linked to people I know from Georgia Tech. Even my friends from FIRST are somewhat precariously linked back to my Georgia Tech network.
I’ve noticed a definite trend in music lately, or at least the music that I listen to; there seems to be a convergence between what I know as the various forms of electronica and the far more popular (at least in the United States) genre of rock. The two examples of this that come to mind immediately are the chiptune groups I Fight Dragons and Anamanaguchi. More simply, if you like Daft Punk or Crystal Method, you’ll like what I have for you here.
Justice doesn’t fall exactly into that grouping, but they have a sound that (as evidenced by their live album, A Cross The Universe) goes very well in a concert setting, the backbone of a good rock career. I initially heard their music in the Assassin’s Creed II trailer “Visions of Venice” and loved it. Thanks to the awesome iPhone app Shazam, I learned that particular song was Justice – Genesis, from the album A Cross The Universe, apparently released in late 2008.
Now, Genesis isn’t the only amazing song on the album. I’d heard several remixes of Phantom on thesixtyone.com, some of which are RAC – Phantom Part III (The Pragmatic Remix), Mr. Westmore – Phantom Strikes Back, and Jones Harth – Phantom pt. I and II (Jones Harth Mix). Similarly, I’m almost certain that I’d heard D.A.N.C.E. [youtube.com] before in one mix or another. That said, in my opinion, the live versions of these songs are all noticeably more exciting than the (still excellent) other versions/remixes available.
So go find this album online (iTunes link) or pick up a physical copy
There are a few places that everyone should try at least once. In Atlanta, that would be Fire of Brazil/Fogo de Chao (Brazillian steakhouses; think classy meat buffet), Chow Baby, and while it was here, Kool Korners (now in Birmingham, Alabama).
The best explanation I’ve read of Chow Baby is written by Creative Loafing. Summary: you put together ingredients for a stir fry out of a wide selection, they cook it, and it usually tastes pretty damn good. So if you haven’t been, give it a try.
There are two locations: one near Georgia Tech on Howell Mill and 11th Street; and another at the Cobb Galleria (near the intersection of I-285 and I-75).
Now that I have a shiny new iPhone, one of the many things I’m doing is finding cool free apps to extend my phone’s funtionality. There are, of course, an incredible number of paid apps as well, but being a poor college student, I’ll focus on the free ones that you may not have heard of.
There are certain free apps that everyone should already have by now, so I’m not going to cover them in great detail. Facebook, one of the Twitter clients, and any IM services you use (AIM and Y! both support push notifications, by the way) are must-haves. Read more »
