Noulakaz
The blog of Avinash, Christina, Anya and Kyan Meetoo.
When I was 19-20 (i.e. more or less the same age as my current students) I started composing music and the result was my first ever album released in 1995 pompously entitled “My Contribution to Art” featuring the following tracks:
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Interestingly (for me at least…), “My Contribution to Art”  is a concept album which tells the story of a boy (let’s call him A. before you ask) who meets a girl (call her A.), falls in love, gets dumped and only finds happiness again when he meets another girl (call her C.)
I have to be frank, some of the songs are crap but, what the heck, they are mine and I spent hours working on them. I composed the tracks using my old Amiga 500 running Bars & Pipes Pro and my trusty Kawai Kawai K4 synthesizer from 1993 to 1995. I was lucky to have saved them in MIDI file format and I managed to easily import them in Logic Express on my MacBook this week-end. I was delighted to be able to record them in pristine 24-bit audio quality directly from my still-living Kawai K4 and apply some mastering polish.
I am now a proud artist with two albums, My Contribution to Art and So Logical (released in 2004), both available as free downloads as well as free streaming on last.fm.
You’ll notice that neither album has a cover yet. Maybe someone can come up with interesting (and appropriate) covers for the two albums? I don’t mind people using my photos on Flickr. I’ll invite the “winner” for lunch in a nice restaurant…
I’ve just discovered Zoomii, the “real” online bookstore, and I can say that I’m fascinated. Zoomii allows you to browse the Amazon book collection like in a real bookstore i.e. “physically” classified by category on different shelves. Clicking on a cover pops up an ajaxified window with detailed information on the book (as provided by Amazon.)
The beauty of Zoomii is that it is just a novel frontend to Amazon. When you click on the “Checkout” button, the actual credit-card transaction takes places on Amazon’s website. According to me, this is the killer feature that will drive the masses to Zoomii.
One issue is that the Zoomii cart is not the same as the Amazon cart. More precisely, adding a book using Zoomii does not populate your normal Amazon cart. Rather, it adds the book to a special Zoomii cart which has to be paid separately. Try clicking on “Checkout” and you’ll understand.
For the more technically oriented, Zoomii uses Linux and Java on the backend and Javascript in the browser. It also uses Amazon S3 (for data storage) and Amazon EC2 (for all image processing I guess.)
Zoomii is in my opinion the kind of web application we’ll all take for granted in 2-3 years. I really need to get into that kind of thing before I’m labelled as being completely outdated. What is positive though is that Zoomii has been built by one person only, Chris Thiessen. There is some hope.
To be complete, I have to say that Zoomii makes its money through the Amazon Associates program. Each time one buys a book through Zoomii, Chris gets some money. Personally, I have no problem whatsoever with this economic model. In fact, this is also something that we all need to become accustomed to because this is how the (financial) world will work in the future.
Try Zoomii! I’m sure you’ll love it. I do.
