The Coolest Kids in Town: a blog about Baltimore, DC, and the misadventures of two-city life.

One of the brilliant things about having a brother in computer science is knowing someone who can hook you up with little known sites and services, as well as a Google Voice number, before they come out of beta. (Another nice thing is 24/7 tech support - love you!) And now, dear friends, I'm passing some of my favorites on to you. First up is Amazon's Mechanical Turk (delightfully subtitled 'Artificial Artificial Intelligence'). We all know that we can find just about anything on the internets, and we know that you can buy just about anything on Amazon , but sometimes the best results come from a little human intervention. Mechanical Turk is that human intervention. It was created to do what major corporations can't, by acting as a marketplace where people can either offer their skills or hire people to do the kind of personalized work that computers just aren't very good at doing. For example, you could hire someone to make a list of the top 20 European...

For those of you who are like me and just got terribly depressed when they realized that winter won't be ending any time soon I'm here to offer my solidarity and a healthy dose of distraction; neither of which will involve blackberry wine and orange Fanta. First up: TV. I’ll be honest, I couldn’t be happier about the end of the writer’s strike, and while I count down the seconds until the new Office episodes begin I feed my John Krasinski addiction on Sidereel. Sidereel might have its faults (the wait for a show to load can be longer than some of my classes), but I love it for being one of the final holdouts against those bastards at the RIAA – all the shows on Sidereel are both free of commercials and charge. For those of you who’d like to like to turn your attention in a more musical direction start with Deezer. Deezer lets you stream music from their impressive database, and if you become a member (sign up is free) then you can create and save your own playlists to keep c...

So today will be all about the music. I've got three awesome sites for you: Musicovery is a free in-browser music player that can create playlists for you based on mood and genre. It's a great ay to listen to music when you've got internet access, but not much else. It's got a cool, futuristic layout that's really easy to use, a wide variety of music, and a smooth interface. All in all, it's just some really cool shit. Pandora Internet Radio is the brainchild of the Music Genome Project , a group that seeks to - you guessed it - map the origins, connections, and influences of music and music genres. Here's how this works for you. Pandora plays a song. You like the song? Pandora plays more like it. You no like the song? Pandora tries again. After just a few like/no likes, it gets a pretty good approximation going of the best DJ ever in your life. There's always more work to be done, but the more you play, the more it learns. Give 'er a shot, see wha...