BlakeAtwood.com

I shall attempt to post a weekly NoiseTrade.com album widget for your perusal. I’ll only post ones I’ve actually downloaded. If you haven’t tried NoiseTrade, you should. It has a lot of great music and a great distribution deal - get the album for free if you recommend it to five friends via email or pay what you think it’s worth. They also appear to be adding new artists and albums every few weeks.

I don’t use it as much as I should, but that will change. Tonight’s download was to help ease me out of my bah-hum-bug-ness for the Christmas season (only because I’ve been rehearsing Christmas music for six weeks already!) Click the album cover to hear all the tracks!

Via this article at TVSquad.com, The Daily Show is now free for anyone to view, starting with Jon Stewart’s first show in 1999.

Searchable by correspondent or topic, I plan to peruse Steve Carrell’s clips when time allows. I’m a late-comer to the party on The Daily Show, after just starting to record it earlier this year. However, as for Mr. Carrell, the wife and I have been fans since The Office got it’s own U.S. version.

Plus, the fact that Stephen Colbert is “running” for President is brilliant. Jonathan Swift would be proud.

I talked about Joost in a previous post. I lamented the fact that I had not been offered a beta invite. Today, apparently, was my day. They expanded their beta test and I received my invite. It’s akin to pay-per-view tv via the Internet, except you don’t have to pay for it. The quality’s better than I expected. The content selection is still limited, but there are a few channels of worthwhile viewing (National Geographic Channel and Comedy Central, IMO). I haven’t delved into too much yet, but you can chat with other viewers while you’re all watching the same show. There are other net-centric features like that built into the software as well. If you’d like an invite, leave a comment. I’m not sure how many I have to give out, so first commented, first served. Once again, reading too quickly has caused me to err. There’s an "Invite a Friend" option within Joost, but there’s also a small line with "Number of Invites to Give: 0." My apologies! But if and when I get invites to send, send them I will.

[Do you need a house marker?]

This site has been around for awhile, but I thought I’d share the love for those that hadn’t heard about it. It’s hard to find the free stuff within the iTunes Music Store, but this site finds them for you. How nice. Now that I’ve got my paypal account tied to my iTunes account and I’m hoping for an iPhone or iPod this summer, I’ve all the more reason to download music and videos until my laptop explodes.

I guess I shouldn’t be that descriptive - exploding laptops have happened…although they haven’t been in the news lately, have they? A vast conspiracy? I think so. Then again, Dell’s been having their own problems lately completely unrelated to batteries. Seems like some people forgot about that small calculator app on all Windows machines. On the other hand, they’re going to start offering desktops and laptops loaded with linux instead of Windows, which was a direct result of their IdeaStorm campaign, something I think every major company should start offering. Hearing your customers best ideas is better than giving away free personalized pens.