I welcome messages from other RYM members and would love to expand my friends list with folks who write intelligent reviews and share my taste in music. The best thing about this site is the very personal reviews, and having some more folks I trust have their reviews pop to the top when I'm browsing would be great.

Note: The site says Rate YOUR Music. I'm rating what I think of my music; you rate what you think of yours. I'm not rating based on the cultural significance of an album. I'm assigning ratings based on how much I'd like to hear that music again now. My ratings change with time. So, we don't agree on an album? No big deal. Anyway, don't complain to me because I didn't give Kind of Blue or OK Computer 5 stars. I'm not a jazz fan and Thom Yorke's voice puts my teeth on edge.

I'm particularly obsessed with my iTunes music collection, rating each individual song, and checking my ratings to see how they match up with my general feelings about an album. My ratings are normalized to a bell curve, so there's a lot more 2.0 - 3.5 ratings than there are on either end. For some reason, I really don't care for metal music or rap, which puts me as a bit of an outlier here on RateYourMusic, but what the hell.

I'm trying to go back through my favorite albums and write reviews to explain just what they mean to me. That's an ongoing project.

I used to read a hell of a lot of books, too. See http://www.librarything.com and http://www.alexlit.com/ for book recommendation services that do for books what this does for music.

I used to make music under the name of MacEdward (http://www.last.fm/music/MacEdward), typically in conjunction with my buddy Matt Cutter.