People always ask “what’s your favorite music”—a harder question to answer than it might seem. Rather than try to stab in the dark, I resort to data analytics. Obviously.
I recently found this wonderful website called Skiley that you connect to your Spotify account and it spits out all sorts of wonderful data.…
Just so people don’t think I only take pictures of birds, I thought I’d share what I consider some of the best photos I’ve taken.
There are 16 of them and they are all from trips to New Zealand, Hawaii, Costa Rica, and California.
Based on this, the most beautiful place in the world is the South Island of New Zealand.…
At one point recently, I had 23 parrots of 7 different species. How did I get here? I’ll start with an exchange with my Mom over Christmas:
Mom: So how many birds do you have now?
Me: I have 23
Mom: Oh, that’s not many
That should give you some insight into my family.…
Everyone likely has their list of greatest albums. But what I’ve always been obsessed with is the perfect album. We’re all probably familiar with buying the new album from our favourite band and being thrilled. Except for that one song. Or two songs.
I define a perfect album as:
…An album you can listen to from beginning to end, at a medium to high volume, and you never feel like skipping a song.
I’ve had this idea for a long time to start a non-profit to promote bird keeping as a way to raise awareness about the plight of birds in the wild. Here is my business plan. I’m half hoping someone will just take it and run with it as it would be a huge undertaking.…
Photo: David Byrne at Coachella, 2018
I created a playlist of David Byrne songs spanning his career and you can jump to the end if you’re not interested in my ramblings. I could talk endlessly about him.
At the beginning of 1983, I was listening to a steady diet of artists like this:
Not that these bands are terrible or anything, but they have one thing in common: I haven’t intentionally listened to any of them since then.…
For those that follow men’s tennis, you know it’s been dominated by 3 players for more than 15 years. Out of 60 grand slam tournaments that have been player, 85% of them have been won by these three players.
If tennis is not your sport, imagine that a single team or player won 85% of every major event for 15 years.…
When someone asks me this, I can always rattle off a few I’ve always loved, but then everything else is this giant soup and I can’t really rank them. So, I like to take a scientific approach.
I looked at songs I’ve liked in Spotify and found the artists with the most likes and this is the list I came up with for my Top 10:
So, I’ve analyzed a number of TV shows and movies and found 40 common lines of dialogue that I listed below. If we banned all of them, we could spend more time looking at the pretty pictures and listening to the soundtrack.
I’m working on an exam that contractors can take to become licensed. I’m open to suggestions.
To set this up, let’s say the exam is Monday at noon to 2pm. You fail the exam if: