I’ve been hunting for new black shoes that I can wear with both jeans and suits for years. Years! Molly, my incredibly helpful librarian friend, introduced me to Like.com. Information Aesthetics, a fantastic blog, introduced me to Modista.

Like and Modista allow you to search for shoes, watches, sunglasses, handbags, etc. visually. On Like, you enter some search terms like “black boots” and then get to click on ones you like and see many more that are visually similar. You can filter by color, style, brand, site, all kinds of useful categories. Modista starts with a kind of item, such as “eyewear” and then shows you a variety of styles. Clicking on examples refines the search. Modista uses fancy sliders for limits on price and other continuous variables.

I found black boots at Zappos that I’m keeping; I almost love them. I’ll use visual search again the next time I need shoes or accessories, and I look forward to the improvements coming to Like’s apparel searches. Searching by sight is so much more fun than plowing through those boring text lists!

Cuil says, “No results were found for: mlb package bar redmond”

Bummer. Yes, I tried other keyword combinations on this and other search engines. Yes, I asked the social mailing list at Microsoft. Yes, I asked every person I could find who might care about baseball. No, I still haven’t found a place to watch the Cubs.

Thanks, Natalie Hanson, for the Cuil link.  She and I are on the anthrodesign Yahoo! Group mailing list.  Sometimes it’s good to click through signature links.

Stick to small fish that grow back easily (sardines, anyone?). You can still eat salmon as long as it’s wild caught. Yum!

Because I have some loans serviced by Sallie Mae, I can transfer my Upromise account monies to my loans. I’m pretty sure it works like this:

1. Open an Upromise account
2. Link your credit cards to your Upromise account
3. Shop at stores that contribute to Upromise accounts
4. Small percentages of your purchases get put into your Upromise account
5. Transfer your Upromise account money to your Sallie Mae-serviced loan
6. Repeat steps 3-6

See, free and simple. You can also get your friends and family to sign up so that percentages of their purchases go to your Upromise account too. Thanks, family! Mine came out like gangbusters and signed up right away. Let me know if you have no loans and no one else to support via Upromise; I’d love to get a piece of your shopping too. Upromise is good for people planning to go to school too, but I don’t know all the details there.

Oh, I almost forgot. Upromise partners with restaurants and bars too. That’s right. 4% of what you eat out or drink can go to your savings account. Woot! Ann Arbor restaurants and bars include aut bar, Arbor Brewing Company, Leopold Bros., and Scorekeepers. There are more, but that’s a start. Again, woot!

Those of you who have seen me in person lately know that I’ve been spending a lot of time at the gym. I walk a little funny. I sleep a lot more. My workouts have been pretty intense. I’d like them to stay that way, but first I need better soundtracks. It’s tough to power through the stairmaster or some spinning torture when the beat drops to 90 beats per minute (BPM). Tangerine is a rockin’ bit of software that analyzes the BPM and beat intensity of your iTunes music. Exporting that info to iTunes is as easy and clicking “File” and “Export BPM Values to iTunes” (that feature is available only after you pay the $24.95 license fee).

Tangerine’s playlist generation and display options are killer. First, when you create a playlist, you select a duration, BPM, beat intensity, and pattern. The BPM and beat intensity selections use range bars with sliders, so that’s easy enough. Then, you pick a pattern (these look a lot like the programs on the elliptical trainers at the Ann Arbor YMCA). I do a bunch of interval training when I work out, so I picked the pattern closest to intervals. You can also tell Tangerine not to use duplicate songs and to select songs for a playlist based on their ratings. I haven’t rated many songs in iTunes, so that’s not useful for me, but it’s a nice add-on nonetheless.

I started downloading Tangerine at 7:55pm, and by 7:56pm, it was downloaded, installed, and analyzing songs for BPM and beat intensity. In fact, by the time I opened the Tangerine window it had already analyzed at least 50 songs. That’s crazy fast. Here we are at 8:24pm, and it’s already in the “S’s” (2/3 of 4312 songs). I’ve used DeKstasy, beaTunes, and some tapping thing to get BPM data before, and none of them are near as blazing as Tangerine. I still like DeKstasy for remixing (GarageBand and I are not friends), but I’ll stick with Tangerine for analyzing BPM and probably for making mixes.

I need 2 playlists per week for those non-spinning class sessions at the Y. Hopefully Tangerine delivers after such a great start.

UPDATE: As of 8:47pm, Tangerine done analyzing my whole library. My dad called, so I’m not sure when exactly it finished, but that’s crazy fast.

UPDATE: Making playlists was a easy as it looked. Some of the songs had the wrong BPM, but you can fix it by clicking “Window -> BPM Calculator” (or Apple+D) and clicking the beat. Not ideal, but I’ve had to fix only a few songs so far.