This is Mingus. He’s my cat. When he was just a few weeks old, he flew onboard a Northwest Airlines cargo flight from Minneapolis to Boston, where my roommate Jawad picked him up at the airport and brought him to me.

He was a tiny baby.

Now he’s a giant. This is normal, since he’s a Ragdoll, one of the largest cat breeds. Although he could probably afford to lose a few pounds.

He’s super friendly, though territorial around other cats. He gets along well with my sister’s chihuahuas, since he could easily swat them down – he’s about twice their size.

Most of the time, he just loafs around the house. He likes to stare out the window, and he likes to play with a laser pointer. When he isn’t eating, he’s probably puking. Again, normal for ragdolls, since they have long hair. For some strange reason, he likes to lick plastic bags before and after puking (which is a nice way to alert me that I’ve got some cleaning to do). He also likes to wake me up at 3am when his food dish needs filling. He does this by punching me in the face. Literally.

I love cats, especially Minguses.

I know it’s a little old now, but I was recently interviewed for an article in the FAA’s Focus newsletter.  The five-part article is called Leaving Earth and the second part focuses on participatory space exploration, and how social media is transforming the landscape of private space.  The article also features my friend Dawn Brooke Owens.

You can read the whole article over at the FAA’s website.

I could spend a lot of time here going over the complete and utter insanity that was South by Southwest Interactive. I could pore over the incredible presentations I saw. I could share all the photos I took. I could spend three paragraphs just talking about what I learned this year, and how I’ll do it all differently next year.

But I’m going to talk about what I didn’t see: music. I realized about halfway through my stay in Austin that I hadn’t seen a single presentation about music, not even about music technology. Of course, the explanation for this is simple – there’s a whole week of that talk directly following SXSWi. But why? Why does music tech warrant an entirely separate conference that also includes a lot of the old dinosaurs ranting about the changing landscape of the music business?

I suppose you can’t have the best of both worlds, but I think there’s an awful lot to be learned by both camps by cross-pollinating these two conferences. The music folks can learn an awful lot be seeing the online entrepreneurs in action, observing the ways that these companies reach out to users and fans in much the same way that any band does. And the entrepreneurs can see how musicians toil and sweat and bleed their music, putting it all on the line for the one thing they love.

It’s just a quick thought I knew I had to put on here. Next year, expect me to be in Austin for both conferences.

It’s no surprise that I’m an Apple fan. Perhaps a fanatic. And I’ve been that way for ages. I’ve been a happy iPod owner for around 8 years now (I owned an iPod before I owned a Mac, and this was in the days before iPods were fully supported on Windows). I’ve been making music on Macs since 2002. But there is still one gigantic sore spot in the Mac and music world: iTunes.

I would hope I don’t have to explain this point, but it turns out many people love iTunes, and I understand why. Apple didn’t force its way to the top of digital music world by accident. They came up with a well engineered, well marketed, and well designed system for distribution and playback, and iTunes lived at the core. But as time rolled on, iTunes became bloated, slow, full of features that I either didn’t need or only used sparingly enough that it didn’t make sense for me to have them. And so I began searching for other options, but found nothing, until recently.

I had tried Songbird before, back in the pre-1.0 days, and thought it had a lot of promise, but couldn’t stand the many bugs that kept me from really enjoying it. So when 1.0 came out a few months back, I couldn’t help but get excited. And I was not disappointed.

Let’s consider speed. iTunes relies entirely on a flat-file database that stores all of the metadata about your music. You’d think this would work well, and in fact it does for small music libraries (average users have numbers in the 100s or 1000s). But for me (I have some 75000 tracks), iTunes was slow and unresponsive. Search – a feature of the utmost importance – was painful, often beachballing. With Songbird, it’s quick and easy. And the shortcut keys are the same as Firefox (more on this later). What’s more, the search bar can be used to see a host of other searches on a variety of websites.

Now let’s talk about Songbird’s most “featured feature,” the ability to play the web. See, Songbird is actually built on Firefox, which means you’ve got a browser built into your music player. If you open a webpage with embedded mp3 files, Songbird automatically detects them and shows them in a separate pane.

The pane functionality also allows you to install a whole bunch of incredible open source plugins to do everything from download cover art, read lyrics, display reviews and images, and even find related YouTube videos. One of my favorite plugins scans your music library, and cross-references with concerts in your city to find out who’s playing. Check out this fully decked out screenshot:

Of course, as with any 1.0 release, there are a lot of things missing from Songbird, or things that don’t work well at all. For starters, iPod support is limited. I’ll probably continue to use iTunes to manage that for a while. Songbird also doesn’t download from the iTunes Music Store (though I don’t care too much, since I hate AAC format). And my biggest gripe is that it doesn’t yet integrate with Quicksilver, though I have faith that some ambitious individual will fix this problem soon.

Give Songbird a try. I did, and I’m glad.

My Twitter Cloud, originally uploaded by revrev.

Wordle cloud of my entire Twitter stream since I started just under a year ago. Usernames (@replies) and links have been removed.