Musical artist name distribution

I’ve often felt, while scrolling through the lists of artists in my music library, that there seemed to be a disproportionately greater number of artists at the beginning of the alphabet. I’d also have guessed that there must be more artists that begin with the letter S than any other letter. Today I finally took the time to test the accuracy of these hunches. I found the following results:

There is a visible bias toward the earlier letters of the alphabet, and there is the expected cluster at S. I was a little off in my guess about the most frequent letter; D contains just as many artists as S, and A contains a few more. I was surprised to learn how many artists fall under the letter M. The letters A, B, C, D, S, and M contain almost half of all artists in the library:

Looking at this made me next curious about how the distribution of artist names in my music library compares to that of a more complete database. On the left are the data from my music library, and on the right are data scraped from listings of the 50,000 most popular CDs sold by Tower Records:

It’s a remarkably close match; r=0.90.

Creepy, proactive Qwest customer service

A mere two minutes after I criticized Qwest DSL on my Twitter stream, Qwest customer service responded with an offer of assistance.

Creepiness aside, I’m genuinely impressed.

It’s a clear sign of the way in which our use of the internet is changing. More connected, more open, and in some cases privacy thrown out the window – because a lot of us don’t seem to really mind.

Bus hopping

4 transit systems, 5 busses, 100 miles, $4.50, and 4 hours:

1. Whatcom Transportation Authority: 80X Shuttle
2. Whatcom Transportation Authority: 80X Mt. Vernon
3. Skagit Transit: 90X Everett Express
4. Sound Transit: 510 Seattle
5. King County Metro Transit: 120 Burien Transit Center

I’m glad I have reading to do.

Unanticipated mode of failure

The familiar topple, slow and recoverable:

The merciless straight-shot drop onto ice:

Ubuntu Pronunciation Stickers for your laptop

Print yours here.

Sources:

• http://www.ubuntu.com/aboutus/faq
• https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Artwork/Official
• http://packages.ubuntu.com/karmic/ttf-ubuntu-title

How I make automatic backups of everything

My data is automatically backed up according to the following scheme. All data eventually ends up on a 1TB designated backup drive.

Aside from the Dropbox syncs, all transfers are done using rdiff-backup with one month of restore points. Scheduled backup scripts check for the presence of required external media–both source and destination–and generate user notifications to connect them if they’re missing.