SAM Soundtrack: Ukulele Zo (YouTube)

Ever since Warren Buffet was outed (as a very good ukulele player...), it seems that YouTube has been flooded with a surprisingly good selection of ukulele videos. Ukulele Zo is one of my favorites and this is her entry for a world competition (Who woudda guessed?) of ukulele music.

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• Interview with Warren Buffet about ukulele (boingboing.net)
• Megan plays "You and I" on ukulele (boingboing.net)

Surreal Saturday: American Blugrass On Chinese Instruments (YouTube via Boing Boing)

Saw this first on Boing Boing. Must be heard to be believed...

SAM Goes Back To School, Part 1: Wake Up!

All this week, I am going to try to put out a series of posts that capture some tips, tools and useful websites for students, particularly intel studies students, returning to college (we are back in classes tomorrow).

To get things started, though, I think I have found the near perfect wake up song for those 8 AM classes: "Volcano Girls" by alt rock band Veruca Salt. Loud enough to get you out of bed but with a chorus that expresses completely and utterly your mood at 7 in the morning.



(By the way, only the chorus really counts here. Nina Gordon's hard rock vocals are pretty incomprehensible anyway and likely impossible to hear over a cell phone alarm...)

If You Like Music, You Are Gonna Love This Search Engine... (Songza.com)

Songza is a new service that advertises itself as a music search engine and internet jukebox. It is very simple to use; just type in the name of a band or song and Songza comes up with a pretty easy to navigate list of options. I could not always find everything I wanted and sometimes I got some pretty strange recordings (like the time the Beastie Boys did "You Have To fight For Your Right To Party" on the Joan Rivers show...click below if you want to hear it for yourself) but in all it was quick and efficient.

Where Songza really shines is when you take the songs to a playlist. Click on the song you want and it asks you if you want to play it immediately or share it or put it on a playlist. When you hit play, it begins immediately. I was able to build a fairly eclectic playlist in about a minute and enjoyed the music for about an hour. Time well spent.

Now if they can just match the simplicity of the search engine with a service that helps you find new music, like iLike, they are set.