award tour

Looking at feedburner trends over the last few months it looks like there’s about 30 people who read awardtour five days a week. I highly suspect that I personally know every single one of these people. I also suspect that this won’t be news to any of them as it’s been in the works for a very long time…

I’m leaving Amazon in May and Seattle in June. I’ll be driving my 2000 VW Golf across the USofA and should be arriving at my final destination, Toronto, sometime during the second week of June. Soon after that, you’ll be able to find me at the offices of Unspace near Queen & Spadina. I met the guys from Unspace at Railsconf last year and I’m quite honored that they asked me to join their ranks. I suspect this is when I start asking everyone I meet “Hey, do you need a kickass Ruby on Rails consultant for your cool project?” or exclaim “What do you mean you’re not going to RubyFringe? Are you out of your mind?”

“But Tyler, don’t you love Seattle and enjoy working at Amazon? Have you lost your mind?”

‘Tis true. I am quite fond of Seattle and Amazon, excluding my brutal first year, has been great. But as you might also know, I’ve been dating my lovely girlfriend (who’s still in Toronto) for the last 3 years. Three years of phone calls and flights is more than enough for me. That said, I’m so excited to be moving back to Toronto (more so than Jessie Spano on caffeine pills).

Seattle people, I have no idea when the going away party will be. Toronto people, would asking for a parade upon my return be out of line?

That’s all for now.

Oh, I also suspect this is when Ram comments “Fuck ya! Toronto rules! What took you so long?”

I first got on “the internet” back in 1993 when I was 13. I say “the internet” cause all I was doing was dialing into local BBSs with my high-tech 14.4kbs US Robotics Sportster modem. The BBS basically gave you access to newsgroups, play terrible command line games (which I never did), and use email. The main reason I would log on to the BBS was to get cheat codes and guides for video games like Mortal Kombat and Street Fighter II off alt.videogames.

Back then I didn’t know a single other person who was using BBSs and I can distinctly remember thinking at the time “who the hell needs an email account? who would they ever email?” It seems I was short-sighted as a teenage boy as twelve years later the internet had 1 billion people on it and I personally check 4 different email accounts.

As long as it’s still April 1st, go to youtube and check out any of the featured videos.

“html makes it so easy to write forms that look like crap”
- Jamis Buck of 37signals

For some reason I’ve been thinking about that idea a lot this weekend. The 37signals post which made this comment pointed out Wufoo, a site that let’s you create nice looking html forms for collecting all sorts of user information. The site is also a testament to usability and just looks damn nice (see some screenshots here). None the less, it’s still not what I, as a programmer, needs as it’s a hosted solution for non-tech people. I could really use a Wufoo that spits out some rails templates (preferably in haml) which I can just slap into my project. I find myself making html forms far too often, repeating way too much work, and spending too much time on css details. I need something clean, cross browser compliant, and preferably with some client side validation.

Wuhoo actually provides a good start with this. Their templates page (which has some great color palettes) actually gives you a static form with some standard items (like radio items, date boxes, address boxes, etc) along with css and javascript to make it look quite nice. There’s still work to be done if to hook it into your project, but it’s a start. I also came across this post which shows how to use css to do all sorts of horizontal and vertical layouts from a plain html form. I feel like mixing these two things together and adding some jquery form validators (and convert it to haml) could be pretty handy.

Seems the kind of thing I’d do if I was consulting full time (or maybe the kind of thing I’d do starting around June).

I came across this fantastic lecture by Harvard Law Professor Elizabeth Warren from UC Berkley entitled The Coming Collapse of the Middle Class. Warren seems to be the media’s go-to lately when talking about bankruptcy and credit card debt. I’ve seen her in several New York Times articles, on Frontline, and in the documentary Maxed Out.

The lecture talks about the change in the middle class from the mid-70s to today and presents some really interesting data. Warren spends the majority of the lecture talking about the decline in savings rates and asks the question “where is all the money going”. Around the 15-minute mark she starts going into different items and shows how basically all consumer goods (like clothes, food, home appliances, etc) are 20-50% cheaper today (inflation adjusted) than back in the mid-70s. Where the money is going is in mortgage payments (up 75% excluding upkeep costs), owning a second car (50% increase), and health care costs (up 75%). She then spends quite a bit of time talking about why the increase in housing and health care costs create a “living on the edge” situation for dual income families.

The part which I found really interesting was her discussion about education and bankruptcy in the middle class. On education, she mentions how in the mid-70s the majority of Americans believed you could enter “the middle class” with a high school diploma and a strong work ethic. Today, twice as many Americans believe the moon landing was faked than believe you can make it into the middle class on a high school education. She then goes on to discuss how that means, in a generation, getting to the middle class went from 12 years of taxpayer paid education to 2 years of paid pre-school, 12 years of taxpayer paid education, and 4 years of paid post-secondary.

The numbers on bankruptcy filing was genuinely surprising to me. Ninety percent of families file for bankruptcy because of one of three reasons: job loss, medical problem in the family, or family breakup. Nearly half of those who filed had two of those three. “More children live in homes that will file for bankruptcy this year than live in homes that will file for divorce. This has been true since the late 1990s.” Put another way, “you know anyone who got divorced in the last 6 or 7 years? Know any children who come from divorced families in the last 6 or 7 years? Than statistically speaking, assuming you know a random cross sampling of Americans, you know more people whose family has filed for bankruptcy.” She goes on to mention how there is an enormous stigma attached to bankruptcy. Also telling, in some research Warren had done, 85% of people they spoke to who had filed for bankruptcy had kept it a secret from their parents, a best friend, or their children.

Here’s the full video. It’s an hours long so you might want to get in a comfy seat. Also just wanted to give a hat tip to Little Bites of Point for the link. That blog comes across some great youtube content concerning economics.

So I’ve been meaning to write-up some thoughts on hulu.com since I got a beta invite back in December. Hulu is a joint venture between NBC and FOX to create a legal online video hub for their content. The main draw of the site is the content. Every show that’s currently on NBC and FOX is regularly updated on hulu. They also have a solid back catalog which including every episode of Arrested Development and a couple seasons of the A-Team. Their also added new content almost every day. The video quality is quite good (fullscreen on my macbook looks fine) and download speeds have been awesome (I’ve only had buffering issues once or twice since december).

The site is nice and clean and has a couple features that I’ve really grown to like. If you close your browser while watching an episode, when you return to that episode it’ll re-queue it 10 seconds before you left last time. I’ve even got into a few shows via hulu which I wouldn’t have watched otherwise (30 Rock and Burn Notice come to mind). It seems the biggest problem with the site is that it’s only available in the US (which will probably drive me nuts soon enough).

Anyways, hulu is no longer in beta and anyone can use it (that is, anyone in the US). I highly recommend checking it out.

I uploaded a bunch of my photos from my trip on flickr. Hopefully Juan will post his photos somewhere soon as they’re much better than mine. I also shot a bunch of videos with the digital camera and will hopefully have a small compilation video ready soon.

I’m heading down to Argentina for the next 3 weeks on vacation. I’ll be visiting Juan who lives in Buenos Aires and we’ll be touring around the country over the 3 weeks. As you can imagine, don’t expect many (or any) posts on awardtour while I’m in Argentina.

The Secret Diary of Steve Jobs is a great blog. It usually has some really funny stuff. On the weekend it posted the best commentary on the proposed Microsoft/Yahoo deal I’ve seen. The article is well worth reading but here’s some of the choice quotes:

It’s like taking the two guys who finished second and third in a 100-yard dash and tying their legs together and asking for a rematch, believing that now they’ll run faster.

But here’s the really dark part of all this. [Ballmer] knows it won’t work. He has to know this. He’s not stupid. [...] He has a mindset that was formed in Detroit, where he grew up. He’s a Big Three automaker kind of guy. And this is a Big Three move. It’s Ford buying Jaguar and Land Rover and Volvo because they can’t think of anything else to do.

Oh, and synergy. Yeah. They’ll talk a lot about synergy. You know, like when you hook together a bunch of data centers that run on completely different technology stacks.

Scariest to me is that in all the articles I’ve seen the one thing Ballmer keeps bringing up is how he’ll be able to save $1 billion a year in costs. Are you kidding me? Is this Microsoft or Dunder Mifflin? I mean, I don’t doubt he could save a billion a year. But it says a lot about the kind of company Microsoft has become that this is what they’re thinking about.

These two videos are of a speech Robert Kennedy Jr during a panel about the republication of Barry Goldwater’s The Conscience of a Conservative. He talks about the meaning of Goldwater’s conservatism and it’s perversion by the modern day conservative movement. There’s some really choice quotes amongst the whole speech. Here’s the youtube links for both part 1 and part 2.

I had never that crazy about the “+” and date links being intermixed for each post on awardtour. It seemed a little confusing. So when I saw this blog yesterday I thought it a good idea to replace my “+” idea with a similar icon-set. I used the two free icon-sets I linked to yesterday to make a set for the site. I’m still not sure what color to make the icon background color. I keep switching between the standard orange, light gray, and a dark gray.

So some of you might have noticed that the other day I added a comment count icon to the side of every post which had comments. I did this so that you could pick out posts which had garnered comments but had fallen out of the “latest comments” list. I changed the comment icon to fit the new icons and it now doesn’t show the comment count in the icon but a mouse-over will tell you via a tooltip.

I also wanted to try keeping the running date on the page as I liked how it conveyed how much posting I was doing over time. I just couldn’t get it to look nice enough beside the icons. I think I might now cook up an icon set for dates and see how that looks.

Anyways, I posted this just to see if anyone had any comments on the change.

Apple’s new stuff today includes a subnotebook called the MacBook Air which is thin enought to fit in a manilla envelope and weighs 3 pounds. Cool stuff includes a multi-touch mousepad and an optional solid-state hard drive. Bad stuff includes only 1 USB port, no firewire, and no optical drive. Also released Time Capsule, which is just the Airport Extreme 802.11n wireless base with a 500GB or 1TB hard drive. And there’s a new AppleTV with a new UI and the iTunes store now has movie rentals including rentals in HD. I wonder how long those will take to download?

Biggest dumbass release is a software upgrade for the iPod touch which costs $20. No joke. I can’t believe they’d actually do that. It’ll piss way too many people off. Here’s the list of features. The iPhone got the same add-ons plus some cool stuff like auto map-location from cell-tower triangulation and sms to multiple people.

Apple also struck an interesting business deal with Fox which will now ship DVDs with copies of the movies already encoded for use on your iPod and for no extra charge.

Other interesting info, Apple has sold 4 million iPhones to date and 5 million copies of Leopard in 3 months. Considering there’s only 25 million OSX clients in the world, that ain’t bad.

So the other week Zed Shaw wrote a post on his blog calling rails a ghetto. His post has some very valid points but most of that gets lost in the vitriol of one very angry man. Then Dreamhost, a major discount shared hosting company, put up a post somewhat akin to one of Zed’s complaints saying rails is a pain to deploy and should have an equivalent to mod_php such that deployment is just a matter of moving files. This is why wordpress and vbulletin (written in php) are the default blog and message board apps. Installation is just a matter of copying some files onto a shared hosting webspace. DHH, the inventor of rails, then made a post saying that the reason such a thing doesn’t exist is that the most of the people working on rails don’t have a need for it because they don’t use shared hosting environments. As I agree with the “scratch your own itch” philosophy of software development, I think this makes sense. People who use shared hosting are probably best suited to develop a rails solution that works in a shared hosting environment.

That said, I actually am a rails developer but I still use wordpress for my blog because I’ve yet to see a reason to pay slicehost $240/year for a virt that can run a rails-based blogging engine (like Typo, Mephisto, or SimpleLog) when my $50/year shared host running wordpress works just fine. But here’s the thing: if you’re an actual developer who has any familiarity with *nix (and not a webdev hobbyist), setting up rails on a shared host really isn’t that hard. Sure you can make it complicated if you’re trying to setup the latest and greatest bleeding edge stack, but something that “just works” isn’t very hard to setup. Hell, slicehost has tutorials for 5 OS variants which are only a couple of command lines. On top of that, let’s say that I finally did implement one of the 10 web-app ideas I’ve been kicking around for far too long. I’d surely do it in rails (or merb) and the time I would spend on it would easily outstrip the $190/year I could save with shared hosting. Even at minimum wage I would only have to work 30 hours to make out the price difference.

On the topic, a post came up on Ruby Inside asking why a viable mod_ruby doesn’t exist. Though the post doesn’t add much to the debate, the comments are actually quite interesting. Here’s the ones worth looking at:

• #13: topfunky mentions how rack might help as an alternative to mod_ruby
• #25: why ruby’s threading issues cause havoc for any mod_ruby, mod_mongrel, or tomcat like solution
• #50: links on how django does it with mod_python
• #56: Dr. Nic points out that deprec makes slicehost setup a breeze (which gets argued later in the thread)
• #65: more reasons why mod_ruby won’t work because of threads, an argument for a better fcgi solution, and why hosting is moving away from shared hosting
• #72: how ironruby (microsoft’s dlr version of ruby) could make IIS the easiest rails install
• #99: Ezra mentions how the Rubinius Ruby VM currently supports “multiple instances of it’s VM within one process, each VM on it’s own native thread. [...] Each VM has it’s own heap and so each VM could load different apps that wouldn’t interfere with each other.” and they have plans for a “mod_rubinius for apache that takes full advantage of this feature.”

ESPN’s Page 2 has a great article up right now about the top 25 individual seasons of all time across all sports (or sports popular in the US). There’s a couple facts which I find particularly ridiculous because they put everyone else’s career totals to shame or seem to just rub it in…

• Barry Sanders, Oklahoma State Cowboys, 1988 - “Sanders had four 300-plus rushing games that season — more than anyone else has had in a career.”
• Martina Navratilova, 1984 - 74 straight wins, 13 straight singles titles, 3 major championships. “To top it off, Navratilova and doubles partner Pam Shriver won all four majors and did not lose a match all year.”
• Mario Lemieux, Pittsburgh Penguins, 1992-93 - “Lemieux finished the season with 160 points (69 goals, 91 assists) and won the Art Ross Trophy despite missing 24 games” and coming back from cancer!
• Wilt Chamberlain, Philadelphia Warriors, 1961-62 - “Chamberlain averaged 50.4 points and 25.7 rebounds. [...] To put all this in perspective, take Tim Duncan’s best scoring and rebounding season — then double it.” and “He set the NBA record with 4,029 points — Michael Jordan is the only other player in league history to crack even 3,000. Chamberlain scored 50-plus points 45 times. Just how impressive is that? Michael Jordan cracked 50 points 37 times in his entire career.”

I wrote a post one year ago this week called books in 2006 which included brief reviews of all the books I read (or tried to read) in 2006. Here’s the same thing but for 2007 and, again, in the order that I actually read the books.

The Blind Side - Michael Lewis. This is the fourth book by Lewis that I’ve read. The book intertwines two stories. One, about the evolution of football over the last 30 years which led to the left tackle (the guy who protects the quarterback’s blind side) being the second highest paid position. And two, the remarkable story of Michael Oher, an orphaned teen who became a high school All-American left tackle. I absolutely devoured this book and I don’t even like football. Every person I recommended this book to also read it in record time. Lewis is a born storyteller.

Way of the Peaceful Warrior - Dan Millman. This is essentially a primer on Buddhism but told through a fictional tale. I found the book to be very similar to “Ishmael”. It features an old and wise teacher with special powers and a hapless student who asks far too many questions. Unfortunately, also like “Ishmael”, much of the writing is second rate and reads like incredibly forced dialogue. That said, I still enjoyed the book.

Mavericks At Work - William Taylor & Polly Labarre. Includes some really great case studies in how bucking trends and valuing people can lead to business success. The book still struck me as verbose at times and a little too “cheerleader” in others. No real concrete advise.

Thinking with Type - Ellen Lupton. A fantastic primer on typography. It was exactly the overview on fonts that I was looking for. Also a very quick read at 176 graphic filled pages.

Making and Breaking the Grid - Timothy Samara. Cool book on the history and theory of page setting and grid systems. Lots of interesting and inspiring examples. I was hoping for more web-related content but it was still a useful read.

The Seven Day Weekend - Ricardo Semler. Probably the most interesting business book I’ve ever read. Semler is the CEO of the Brazillian conglomerate Semco which has lines of business in industrial machinery, inventory control, HR management, internet ventures, etc, etc, etc. The company has no defined roles or work hours, no planning longer than a few months, no mandatory meetings, and a whole slew of other ideas which fly in the face of accepted thinking. If you’re interested in the topic, I highly recommend checking out this lecture Semler gave about some of his ideas or check out this summary of the video over on the 37 signals blog. Oddly enough, the book doesn’t seem to be in print and Amazon only offers the book through used-book sellers (or on the Kindle if you have on).

Guns, Germs, and Steel - Jared Diamond. This book made my 2006 did-not-finish list and, holy crap, did it take a long time for me to finish in 2007. The book, which attempts to explain why western societies came to become so dominant. Essentially, “those who domesticated plants and animals early got a head start on developing writing, government, technology, weapons of war, and immunity to deadly germs.” The book is very long in some parts which, in retrospect, I wish I had just moved on to the chapter summary. I found the chapter on the development of writing systems to be especially interesting. I’d definitely recommend the book to anyone but would also advice you just skipping sections that you don’t find interesting.

Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed - Jared Diamond. I starting reading this within days of finishing Guns, Germs, and Steel. The book profiles societies which have collapsed and provides a terrifying allegory for where our globalized society could be heading. The single biggest thing I took away from the book was a quote about the fallen society on Easter Island, which used to have lush forests but is now a barren dustbowl: “What were Easter Islanders saying as they cut down the last tree on their island?”

Unconventional Success: A Fundamental Approach to Personal Investment - David Swensen. Great book on long term portfolio management. Talks heavily about the virtues of working with core asset classes & rebalancing and talks very extensively about the failures of the mutual fund industry. I’d recommend just reading the summaries of the last two chapters about the extensive failures of the mutual fund industry. I also just started reading The Four Pillars of Investing which seems to be a better intro to portfolio theory and appears to include real world examples of a portfolio (which I found Swensen’s book lacked).

Books I didn’t finish

War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning - Chris Hedges. One part uber-depressing and one part terrifying. Couldn’t get that into it.

Fooled by Randomness - Nassim Nicholas Taleb. Got through most of it but just couldn’t get it done. Some interesting arguments about our tendencies to under account for the impact of randomness. This is probably the first book I’ve read where the author’s arrogance shown through so clearly that it seemed he was annoyed that you were reading his book. I’m hoping to take a look at Taleb’s latest book, The Black Swan, sometime in 2008.

The Elements of Typographic Style - Robert Bringhurst. More than I cared to read about typography. Might be useful if you were actually going to be designing a typeface.

Maverick - Ricardo Semler. Semler’s first book about what was going on at Semco. Originally published in 1988, it’s more autobiographical and not nearly as interesting as his aforementioned book.

Mid-Course Correction: Toward a Sustainable Enterprise - Ray Anderson. I first heard about this book and Anderson when I watched the The Corporation earlier this year. This is also how I found out about The Ecology of Commerce by Paul Hawken. I didn’t have a chance to really get into either of the books but I’m hoping to in 2008 as I’ve been really interested in the topic since reading my favorite book of 2006, Cradle to Cradle. I’m sure that not a week goes by where I don’t wonder how I might be able to pursue a corporate endeavor which can create a positive environmental impact by design.

Have your own opinion on one of the books mentioned? Read any books in 2007 that you’d highly recommend? Then add your comment below.

So Amazon is currently trying out a grocery delivery business in Seattle. They’ve been operating it for employees for a couple months now with pick-up in the offices and limited delivery in a couple parts of town. I never tried it out because I live 1 block from a grocery store and don’t even do that much grocery shopping. The big problem I have with my local QFC grocery store is that some items are oddly overpriced, especially produce. And since the majority of food I make at home is boring-ass pasta with lots of veggies the overpriced produce seems to add up. Well, after paying $6 for a pound of asparagus the other day I decided I’d give Amazon Fresh a run.

They’ve expanded delivery to lots of Seattle proper and it’s open to the general public. Delivery options are pretty decent. There’s two pick-up locations open to the public and employee-only pick-up at the offices of amazon, google, eddie bauer, and some other local companies (not microsoft at the moment). Pick-up doesn’t have any delivery fees. Delivery to your house has some interesting options. You can get unattended delivery (as in they’ll leave it at your front door) for either pre-dawn (before 6am) or after dinner (post 7pm). If you place an order at night you can get next day pre-dawn delivery, which is pretty cool. The option is only available for houses but there is a program to get your condo/apartment signed up to allow the delivery person access to the building. Unattended delivery is free with orders over $25. Attended delivery is available within an hourly block (like between 5pm and 6pm) from 7am to 10pm on weekdays (until 6pm on weekends). Delivery is free for orders over $50 or a $10 fee if it’s below. I’ve only done office pick-up so I can’t comment on the quality of the delivery service.

The variety of items on Fresh is quite good and the website is easy to use. I’d say that the only glaring omission is that the products really lack further description and you don’t currently have access to ingredient or dietary information that you can find on a product box. But since I’m mostly buying produce and stuff I already use, I didn’t really care. The best thing about the site is the prices. Compared with my local grocery store I was able to find lots of things 30 to 50 percent cheaper on Fresh. Apples, 30%. Bocconcini and Goat cheese, 40%. Red Peppers, 50%. Pesto sauce, 40%. Things like milk and cereal were the same price. You can even buy local artisan bread from both Macrina Bakery and Essential Bakery.

Anyways, I’m very happy with the site. Guess I’ll now have to get my apartment building signed up for pre-dawn drop-off.

Seems Internet Explorer 6 is just out to screw me whenever possible. I just realized that all the posts I did recently which included album covers weren’t aligning properly IE6. So I assumed the images where the problem and after a horrible amount of edit-and-check cycles I realized that the problem was actually related to the italic text in the paragraphs. IE, for some stupid reason, won’t overflow italicized text properly so the width of the containing “p” or “div” is too wide. Luckily a quick search on google turned up a great summary of the IE and italics problem. I tried using the fix they suggested but I couldn’t get it to work. So what did I do? I turned off italics for “em” tags within IE6 or below (using this conditional comment trick) . So, if you like italics you should use firefox (or safari) or upgrade to IE7.

I’ll be back in toronto and ottawa for the next 2 weeks so don’t expect to see much posted here until january 6th.

I went back and forth on whether to put Spoon’s Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga on the best-of list. There’s a couple songs on the album I’m not too crazy about like The Ghost of You Lingers and Eddie’s Ragga but, in the end, I thought this was overshadowed by the fantastic stuff that’s on the album. And by fantastic, I mean the best.

After much much contemplation I decree that You Got Yr. Cherry Bomb is the song of the year. Though several songs on the album grew on me, this one was love within 30 seconds. The song starts off with a great hard driving drum beat and a fucking stellar bass riff, something I find I can rarely ever really distinguish. But the real genius strikes you once the hook kicks in with its big horn section and the tambourine in the drums. It strikes me as an stellar mix of pop-rock (Beatles’ pop-rock, not modern day pop-rock) with the bass, tambourines, and horns that make up the Motown sound. Honestly, we need a Motown sound revival. I don’t think anyone’s really gonna top Stevie Wonder but it’s worth trying.

Two other songs on the album are also worth severely pointing out. First, The Underdog. I think I’m a sucker for a rock song with a horn section (and hand claps, love the hand claps). The best part of the song is the build-ups to the chorus. You know how every great Daft Punk song builds up to the chorus so perfectly that by the time it gets there you’re like “fuck yeah!”. This song has that same kinda feeling. Britt Daniel’s even yells out “Right!” right before the last chorus, signifying exactly what I mean. It’s a very celebratory song and was actually used perfectly this year in an episode of How I Met Your Mother when the gang is at the bar celebrating the fact that Marshall passed the Bar exam.

Second, is Black Like Me. I don’t know how to explain this song so I’ll just steal Pitchfork’s comment as it made their top 100 songs of the year: “Emotionally, Black Like Me is heartland indie rock territory, and Spoon know the tiny details that make songs bleed you a little”.

Feist’s The Reminder is a great album. But first…

Usually when a great song is used in a carpet bomb ad campaign which results in the nuclear fallout of mainstream radio saturation, a music snob, such as I, would write the song off as trash. This is not the case for Feist’s 1-2-3-4. Maybe this is because I’m softening with age. Or maybe it’s because I don’t own a television (so no carpet bombing) or ever have to listen to radio (so no fallout). Don’t get me wrong, this song (like any other) could hit a tipping point which could ruin it. For example, being used in the trailer of a feature film starring Amanda Bynes. On a side note, I once took a flight which played Bynes’ She’s The Man. Although I didn’t watch it, I did catch one scene which probably set a brand new low for slapstick comedy. Luckily, plane seats are equipped with barf bags which prevented me from having to vomit in my own mouth. Now back to the album at hand…

I wasn’t very big on Feist’s previous work but this one is definitely a winner. I don’t know too many artists who pull off the super depressing ultra minimal stuff (like The Park) and also feature a track like Sealion (maybe Sufjan, that’s the only person that comes to mind). Several of the tracks, especially The Limit To Your Love and Brandy Alexandar, remind me quite a bit of the arrangements and vocals of Joni Mitchell’s Blue. Though the meloy stuff on the album is great, the stuff I love are upbeat tracks like 1-2-3-4, Past In Present, and my personal fav I Feel It All.

If for some crazy reason you still haven’t heard this album, you can sample the whole thing here on Amazon and pick it up from the mp3 store for measly 8 bucks.