cool music apps

Here are two free apps I recommend, and one I'm trying for the first time today:

Exact Audio Copy is the best audio grabber I have tried. It'll rip your cds to MP3, flac or wav and does a bunch of other stuff I haven't even tried yet.
(PC only, but you aren't a Mac i-tunes slave are you?)
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Songbird is both a web-browser (based on Firefox) and a media player. Cruise the internet to play mp3s, search for the highest quality files, play file formats your ordinary media player chokes on; phooey on i-tunes, try Songbird. (Warning, it is in development mode and still a little buggy, but I have had only limited problems. My tip is to avoid excessive add-ons).
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I haven't tried this one yet, but it looks cool. I'm listening to a user's "Muxtape" while I work, and will make one of my own after business hours. It is a "music sharing site lets you create virtual mix tapes."
My user name will be "elcazador" of course:
link

-R

Tune-ful Tuesday: Johnny Otis!

Here is a good video clip for my dad, who has told me several times over the years how he enjoyed the Johnny Otis Television Show on Los Angeles when he was a rocking lad.
As for me, when I was a young man driving my Honda around, delivering pizza's to the hungry people of Brea, CA, I listened to the Johnny Otis Radio Show on the LA Pacifica radio station. Johnny broadcast his show from the Powerhouse Brewery in Sebastopol, CA and played all kinds of great rhythm and blues music.

Here you go Dad:
The Johnny Otis Band featuring Marie Adams & The Three Tons of Joy (with a brief appearance by Lionel Hampton) performing, Willie and the Hand Jive!

Start doing that crazy hand jive.
-R

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Happy Pi Day

-R

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Mobile Phone Radiation

Some months ago over dinner, the topic of whether or not mobile phones cause cancer came up. My friend Sigrid turned to me and said, "You are in charge of researching this."

Yes ma'am.

Well Sigrid, I don't have an answer for you just yet, but there is some preliminary research that is worth considering.
First we have to remember that cancer is fundamentally a genetic disease; something alters the DNA in the cell nucleus which impacts the cell's protein expression in a highly adverse way. This is not to say that all protein expression alterations lead to cancer, but it is a place to start looking.

So, some Finnish researchers exposed the arm skin of ten volunteers to mobile phone radiation for one hour, took a biopsy from each exposed patch of skin (and one from the other arm for control) and compared protein expression between all of the samples. There was in fact a change in the expression of eight proteins, two of which were present in all ten volunteers. In an earlier test they found similar results using cultured cells.

What these proteins do is still unknown, so there is nothing to link them to cancer or any other disease, but the results do suggest that extended exposure to mobile phone radiation does in fact alter the expression of skin cell proteins.

So don't throw away your cool new I-Phone, but consider whether you want to hold it against your face for an hour. You can read the paper for yourself at the link.
-R
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Garfield sans cat.

My friend the Silent Immigrant turned me on to the brilliant Garfield Minus Garfield website, which erases the indolent cat from the familiar strip, exposing the crippled lonely mind of Jon Arbuckle.

Enjoy the disturbing results.
-R
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BoxTales

I'm excited to have recently joined the Board of Directors of the Santa Barbara's BoxTales Theater Company.

BoxTales is a talented group of actors who bring folk tales and myths to life in performances that manage to be both starkly minimalist and completely captivating. I have been a fan for years and I look forward to helping BoxTales to achieve their mission to " fire imaginations, strengthen cultural pride, foster tolerance, and engage young people in the excitement and immediacy of live performance."

A few years ago they packed the Lobero theater with their effective adaptation of Homer's Odyssey. They managed to tell almost the entire story with only 5 actors and only a few props -- a triumph that is only faintly conveyed in the promotional video posted below.

-R