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:

• It doesn’t spam your friends with wall posts
• It doesn’t spam your friends with notifications
• It doesn’t spam you with emails
• It’s not a quiz app
• It doesn’t use java

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.

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 and give it a listen. Thanks

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).

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.

Music

• Shazam – Identify music that’s playing. Can be difficult in environments with a large amount of ambient noise, but is capable of identifying even rare music.
• Pandora – Listen to music on the fly. Sadly, you have to keep the app open while you’re listening.
• AOL Radio – Listen to local radio stations over the ‘net. For Atlanta, this includes 92.9 daveFM, Dave Roots, News-Talk 1380 WAOK, and V-103. I’d care more if they included WREK in that list. I never thought I’d ever recommend anything owned by AOL other than Winamp and Engadget, but here we are…

Web/remoting

• WordPress – Lets you edit, publish, delete, etc posts and pages, as well as approve, edit, and delete comments on any Wordpress blog. Very elegant interface. Most of this post was actually written with this app.
• bamAnalytics – Google Analytics app Lets you get a quick view of the most important analytics information.
• VNC and RDP by MochaSoft – These let you remote into a system, if you didn’t already know. If you know what these are, you’re probably already looking them up in the app store.
• Remote – Lets you remotely control a copy of iTunes on a network. Fairly neat if it’s set up and you have a use for it.

Images

• Flickit – simple app to upload images to Flickr from your phone. It’s not as simple as I’d like, but it works.
• xFractal – Fractal generator, with Mandelbrot, Multibrot, Julia, Newton fractals, four available color schemes, and some manually adjustable settings. You’d be surprised how many people don’t know what a fractal is.

Math/science

• Quick Graph – lets you graph multiple functions in 2d or 3d. My main beef is that they don’t have a factorial function, but I’m okay with that, it’s free and keeps me from having to dig out my TI-86.
• iHandy Level – it’s a level. Not much else you can say about this one.

For the lulz

• FML – If you need a quick dose of schadenfreude, fmylife.com has a mobile app.
• SpinTheCoke – You flick a coke bottle, and it spins. Yes, an app version of Spin The Bottle.
• MyVibe – The funniest of the bunch, for which you can really say, yes there is an app for everything – it’s got one button in the middle of the screen, and some intensity controls on the right. You figure it out.

The activation process didn’t work correctly and I had to call and read numbers to them that their automated system should have prompted me for. A couple weeks later, I got a text message saying that my phone had “exceeded $20 in text messaging charges this month” so I called them up and apparently the text messaging plan I’d selected was never actually applied to my account, but that was easily taken care of and retroactively applied.

Device review

I have been extremely satisfied with the device itself. My initial reservations about the on-screen keyboard have gone away; I have a very decent typing speed on the phone, especially with two free hands. I wasn’t really able to type one-handed on my Windows Mobile phone due to the device’s design. I’ve never owned an iPod before, preferring standalone usb key-type players, but I find myself using the integrated iPod functionality on a fairly regular basis, especially the “Genius” mode.

While the voice recognition is neat, it can’t really distinguish things I feel that it should; and there are certain people/song names that I can’t get it to recognize, even after repeated tries and variations on pronunciation. The funniest of these is Monty Python’s “The Lumberjack Song.” I also don’t know too many commands, which is sad because you could probably do some very neat things with voice recognition on a phone.

Service review

Signal is generally good, although I live in a major metropolitan area so I’d hope it would be. I didn’t get any signal in the panel/conference rooms in the Sheraton (one of the Dragon*Con hotels) although I did get signal in the deepest rooms of the Hyatt, which didn’t work for me under Verizon.

At the recent football game against Clemson, I went from having five bars when the stadium was half-full to not being able to connect to the network at all with the stadium full. That’s a pretty serious problem to me; big sporting events are one of those places where you use/need/depend on your phone. Hillary has Sprint on an ancient phone and was able to connect just fine.

Today, June 30 at 12:30 PM (afternoon), I received an email from AT&T stating the following:

Unfortunately, we cannot validate your credit card number. Please call us at your earliest convenience with a different credit or debit card number so we can complete your order: 1-866-499-8008, Monday through Friday, 8 a.m. to 9 p.m. Eastern Time.

So I called the number listed there, which apparently the number for their web services division or something along those lines; the part of the company that deals with orders placed through their website. Their system has an hour hold time, as opposed to the general support number which had a (generally) very short hold time.

After what was likely an hour of listening to their surprisingly catchy hold music, I explained my experience from the previous day and asked him if a similar thing had happened to my card again. This guy suggested that it had, and recommended that I call my bank (Wachovia) to find why they are denying the transfer, despite my strong suspicion that the problem was actually on AT&T’s side.

First, I checked my Verizon voicemail just in case Wachovia had left a message; they hadn’t. The person I talked to at Wachovia did see some activity on my account, so they transferred me to their “loss prevention” division so that I could find out exactly what was going on. Each previous time I’ve had suspicious activity on my account, Wachovia Loss Prevention had called me to verify, so I found it mysterious that they didn’t do so here as well. After several detailed identity checks, the guy at Wachovia Loss Prevention told me that my account had initially been charged on the 19th, and that charge was still in the system, so the two subsequent charges (on the 23rd and the 29th) were rejected as duplicates of that one. He did give me an authorization number and a term id for the charge on the 19th that was supposedly valid, so that I could give those numbers to AT&T. Finally, I had what I needed to know to solve this, or so I thought.

I wasn’t free to call AT&T until about 6:30pm that evening. I called their general support number this time (1-800-331-0500, Mon-Fri 7am-10pm, Sat 9am-6pm) under the theory that they would be able to use this new information. Fun fact: it apparently took me three minutes to explain my story (up to that point) to this guy. He told me that he (regrettably) could not solve my problem, and that he’d need to connect me to the 1-866 number in the email, but that he was going to give me a $25 credit on my account for my trouble. He also conferenced me into the other number because “it has better hold music” something that he didn’t need to do. This was a guy I’d probably have a beer with, and high five. He could only stay on the line on hold with me for ten minutes, so I sat through another hour of holding to give the transaction information to this AT&T web rep.

Around 7-something, I was connected to a very nice girl, and explained what I had experienced so far to her. This was by far the most informational and productive conversation; the kind that you experience once in your time with a company. She was initially confused by the bank’s provided authorization number and transaction id for the charge on the 19th, and consulted with her supervisor a couple times. She then suggested that I needed to call Wachovia back and tell them to drop/reverse the charge from the 19th (which was “pending”), as it was apparently canceled on AT&T’s side.

This sounded like I was getting passed back and forth, so I tried a different method; I inquired as to why the order/charge from the 19th was canceled in the first place. After consulting the notes on the account for a few minutes, she determined that because I was switching from Verizon to AT&T, AT&T submitted a “port request” to Verizon. When Verizon didn’t return my port request in time, the transaction was automatically canceled. Then a human looked at the order on the 23rd (the second working day after I had ordered); the port request had presumably been returned, so they resubmitted the order, and recharged the card, which (again, as far as I know) was then declined by Wachovia as a duplicate charge.

The girl I was talking to then discovered that the charge from the 29th was actually going through, but whoever charged my card hadn’t updated my account status or notes, which is why the email was (apparently mistakenly) sent out on the afternoon of the 30th. That does not answer why the first person I spoke to on the 30th did not realize this, but I don’t pretend to be a support tech, so I don’t have the answer to that. So to this date I didn’t receive an email when I should have, and received one when I shouldn’t have. Classy. I did get a “confirmation number” from this girl, should I have any further problems, and which will presumably work in some field on their website. This girl also provided me with a free upgrade to priority shipping. She put a note on my account that I wanted more than a $25 credit, but was not authorized to provide it herself. Presumably, my order has been rectified, and I’m doing pretty well at this point.

I asked about getting a copy of these mysterious notes on my account emailed to me (mostly for intellectual curiosity, partly because they might be useful in actually getting a damn iPhone in my hands, partly for the purposes of writing this entry) but she apparently wasn’t able to do so, but said that the general support division might be able to. So, another transfer and a short hold time later, I explained what had happened to yet another person and made my request for some sort of record of what had happened emailed to me. She wasn’t authorized, so she transferred me to a “resolution specialist” who verified my information and almost immediately transferred me to a “manager.”

Out of all of the people I talked to, this “manager” guy was the least useful; from his voice, I pictured a douchey-looking white guy in a cheap suit with an MBA. No offense if that’s describing you, dear reader. He was pretty hostile to this request for the account notes; I clarified that I simply wanted a written record of my plight sent to me, preferably through email. Apparently any description of what has transpired would include AT&T’s “specific business practices” and that he could not even send me a summarized version; “nobody in AT&T can.” Again, I tried a different method; I walked him through some of the people I’d talked to, and pointed out which were most helpful to me, emphasizing the girl who (hopefully) fixed my order and gave me free priority shipping. After I’d run through that, I said that I still wanted more than a $25 credit, and he transferred me to another number.

At this point it was around 8:30 pm, I believe. This hold period was blissfully short, too. She had my account notes, but we worked out that I would tell her what had figured out so far (as detailed above) while she read the notes that corresponded to my story. She put me on hold for a few minutes while she verified my story and “found out what [she can] give me.” She came back and briefly asked which text messaging plan I’d selected and said that she was talking to a “resolution specialist” before I was put on hold again. When she came back, she told me that she was able to give me an additional $100 credit on my account, for a total of $125 and free priority shipping on the iPhone 3GS. I was pretty satisfied with that, and we joked a little and I told her to have a good night.

So, to summarize, I talked to two people at AT&T on the 29th; one AT&T and two Wachovia on the afternoon of the 30th, and six at AT&T on the evening of the 30th, for a total of eleven people over two days. I received a credit of $125 on my account for my trouble, and free priority shipping on my iPhone 3GS when it is available. The only downside here is that the order was technically placed on the 29th, when my bank account was (re)charged, so the 7-10 day wait starts from there, and not from the 19th, when I had originally placed the order. Throughout this process, I was always calm and respectful to the people I talked to, as they’re just doing their job, and (in my opinion) if they can’t do something, it’s better to ask them to transfer you to someone that has the ability to do so instead of yelling at them. Let us all hope that this truly is the last “My Problem with AT&T” post.

Update (June 30 @ 9 PM): much has happened since I posted this, and my issue has been resolved through many, many hours on the phone with AT&T. I am in the process of writing that up.

I’ve had Verizon since August 2004, and after several years of mediocre service (that is to say, nothing horrible or particularly exceptional happened) I decided that I wanted an iPhone, which meant switching to AT&T. Now, I have particular reservations about using AT&T as a service provider for anything due to delivering your world… to the NSA. However, the allure of the iPhone and my several iPhone-toting friends won me over.

Compounding this issue is my rapidly deteriorating phone. I have had a VX6700 (which I previously reviewed) for 2.5 years; this phone worked great until a few months ago. The battery rapidly showed signs of memory effect culminating in a grand total of three minutes of talk time, until it wouldn’t charge at all. It will no longer turn on, even when it’s plugged in, so I am currently without a working phone. I particularly loved the 6700’s full, tactile keyboard, a feature that the iPhone lacks; the keyboard is also the primary reason why I didn’t purchase an iPhone years ago. My wittiest summary of the 6700 is that “you know it runs Windows because you have to reboot it every day.”

For the past year, I had been looking forward to switching to the HTC Touch Pro 2 which features an absolutely beautiful interface, large screen, and the full keyboard that I love so much. Unfortunately (as far as I know), its availability date on Verizon is still unknown; I believe it’s only available on T-Mobile at the moment, and their coverage is too limited for my needs. One of the things that pulled me to want an iPhone was the innumerable apps; my favorite example is being able to find the name of a song that’s playing. The application support for Windows Mobile is generally lacking, to say the least.

So after much deliberation and urging from my many Apple fanboy friends (love you guys) I decided to take the plunge. I was advised to wait for the next generation of the phone (which I did) and on June 19, 2009 I placed my order on AT&T’s website to migrate my number and purchase an iPhone 3GS. I received a confirmation email for my order that stated:

We estimate your order will be shipped within 2 – 5 business days pending approval if applicable. We will notify you by email when it is approved and shipped.

Your order may be subject to AT&T eligibility and credit requirements. If we have any questions about your eligibility or your order, we will contact you via email.

I realized today (June 29, 2009) that it was the sixth business day, and I hadn’t heard anything. The order status page stated that the order was “processing” and was last updated on June 23, 2009, the second business day after my order. So I went to AT&T’s website and went to their online chat; they simply referred me to the 1-800 number despite my having told them that I didn’t have a working phone. No problem, I just borrowed my girlfriend’s phone. Still, though, it’s silly to give a phone number to someone without a phone.

The customer service representative I talked to was very nice, and apparently called several (presumably internal) numbers to find out what happened to my order. She said that my ordered had been canceled because it had been entered twice and reentered it on the 23rd. After spending forever on hold, she said she’d call me back when she found out more about what happened. A call back yielded the news that my order had been canceled due to “insufficient funds.” I find this hard to believe; the order was apparently around $320, and I have had far more than that in my account since I placed the order. I wouldn’t have purchased an iPhone if I didn’t have the money to pay for it. If my bank had canceled the purchase because it thought it was suspicious, they would have called me and asked if I’d made it, as they have before when someone tried to buy overseas plane tickets on my account, and when I ordered a flat-screen TV online. Simply, there was no attempted charge by AT&T on my bank account. I verified the number over the phone, and it was correct, so it is unlikely that they charged another account.

My customer service representative transferred me to a billing representative, who proceeded to (supposedly) charge my account again. Both representatives as well as the confirmation order quoted above stated that I should have received an email saying there was a problem with my order, but no such email ever came. After I had already agonized over switching to AT&T for a number of reasons, this experience has already left a bad taste in my mouth, and I haven’t even used their service yet. I didn’t imagine that it would be this difficult to switch carriers and get a new phone, something that must happen on a fairly regular basis.

For my trouble, I thought I might try politely requesting that an activation fee be waived or some other credit be given to me, as this has been a serious hassle, particularly given that I expected to have a new phone by now, and that this has left me in a particular lurch given that my existing phone has completely stopped working. The billing representative seemed surprised that I would even ask about this, and flat out refused to work with me on that matter. The activation fee itself was only $36 and I would settle for even a part of that credited to me for my inconvenience.

I don’t make requests like this to be petty or difficult, but even Comcast (a regular finalist in Consumerist’s “Worst Company in America”) will credit back portions of monthly bills and fees upon request (and sometimes even without a request) when they mess up. And I would certainly consider the cancellation of my order without notice a mess-up, regardless of the company involved. Considering that I am committing to pay AT&T around $2,000 over the next two years, I’d expect that they’d want to make a good impression, at least to start with.

Image from NathanBowers.com.

I’ve tried to categorize it a little bit instead of having fifty embeds in a row. If you particularly enjoy a track, or find this post especially informative, I’d like to know!

Pop/rock/alt

Apparently, these guys have been on Letterman?

This song is in a rather clever Bacardi commercial, I believe.

Electronic/dance/instrumental

This one’s amazingly catchy, IMO.

Folk/Filk/Nerdcore

This is the song that really got me interested in t61.

Included for the lulz.

Remix remix remix

Different versions of the same song:

First and foremost, this is a music website, not unlike mp3.com in days of yore. Playing music on it “just works” and their interface is very slick. The site integrates several clever social dynamics to keep you engaged and the site interesting. Artists on the site are generally independent musicians or groups, although there are certainly some recognizable names such as Daft Punk, Ratatat, Arcade Fire, CSS, etc.

Popularity

The heart of the site is a voting system where users promote music by, yes, hearting it. That was a horrible pun. The most popular music is featured on the front page in the “top songs” and “hot right now” sections. That in itself is not that unusual; it’s only logical that a digg/reddit-style voting will be applied to pretty much every concept ever.

Special sauce

The real charm of TheSixtyOne, though, is its game-based design. As a user, you have a certain amount of “rep” (think experience) that determines your level. As you level up, you unlock site features, a clever way of introducing the various features. In addition, each level confers additional hearts per daily login. Rep is gained primarily by hearting music that is subsequently hearted by other users; this rewards users for picking “good” music, under the assumption that if it’s good, then other people will like it as well.

Rep and hearts are also gained by completing a wide variety of quests, which generally prompt a user to listen to songs in a certain part of a site or perform a certain action (ex: heart a song, subscribe to another user, etc). The combination of these two systems make for a particularly addicting site. Additional hearts and rep can be gained by listening to “the rack,” music that has “gone under the radar” (sometimes for good reason; sometimes, it’s worth your ear).

Bread and butter

That said, good web design is nothing without content. Given the focus on independent artists, you may be concerned that there isn’t anything to draw you in. On the contrary; the site has a significant music library, encompassing a wide variety of genres. I am most interested in electronic, rock, and pop, although I have dabbled in some of their other offerings and found them acceptable. That said, everyone has different music tastes and I can’t guarantee that you’ll find what you’re looking for here.

Try it yourself

Go forth and give it a try yourself; my userpage is thesixtyone.com/disavian and you can subscribe to me or listen to music I’ve hearted (”listen to radio” next to my picture). I’ve found it worth my time in a way that traditional radio could never be.