| Year in review.... |
[Dec. 31st, 2005|06:03 am] |
Yeah, right. That's so fucking lame.
"Music Nirvana"
That's the real title. But being that its the wee hours of New Years Eve, I figured its my last chance to be cheeseball this year. Oh yeah.
I read an article byt the CEO of eMusic that really clicked with me.
I'm a good person. I don't steal stuff. But for the last 6 years I have bought very, very few CDs. It not because I've been downloading music online. Its because I've been doing my best to boycott the whole fucking industry (but damn if 50 Cent doesn't make some good music).
I have plenty of CDs. It took me 2 weeks to rip them all into my computer so we could put all the "archival media" in storage. And no matter how hard I "boycott," my wife gets plenty of little boxes from Amazon. We're good consumers; we spend our money.
At $15... $12.99.. even $9.99 a "CD" on iTunes, I've been burned too many times by One-hit-wonders in disguise. I simply can't afford to experiment with music anymore. At least not by the rules the RIAA wants.
Check out www.allofmp3.com.
That's how a music site should be.
Yeah maybe my rubles, or whatever, aren't as good as Yaakov's over there, but I'm enjoying music again. I want to buy more.
To put it in terms that the suits might understand: allofmp3.com has $50 from me this year, and I've only gotten like 3 albums from them yet. I *might* have purchased 3 CDs this year (excluding my wife).
AND I HAVEN'T DOWNLOADED JACK SHIT!
Stick that in your CD player and shove it right up your big fat money-grubbing ass!
I like allofmp3.com. Its my good-faith effort of showing that I WANT TO PURCHASE MUSC. But I don't want to get ripped off. (I bought Train's "Drops of Jupiter"... It even had a guarantee that "if this album sucks, send it back and we'll refund you $12.99"... like I'm gonna do that..., but I still bought it. And it sucked. They were right. The PUBLISHER was right; i shouldn't have bought it, but I did... and that was the straw that broke the camel's back).
Well, actually Napster was that straw. When they shut down Napster, that did it for me. That was the Best Thing Evar (TM) for music, and THE MUSIC INDUSTRY FUCKED IT UP!!!! But I digress.
The eMusic guy disguised his Press Release well. Sure he hides behind "They" and "their" to make himself look all Altruistic, but Ayn Rand (for all her crap) put that one to rest. He's selling his company, but more power to him, he's awful damn close.
Why do I like allofmp3.com? Because it gives me unhindered music files in whatever format I want (MP3, WMA, OGG, some others I forget, in all sorts of bitrates) so I can use them how I want. The iTunes store is great and all, but my car doesn't have an iPod built-in, and I don't need another $100 in iPod accessories. Yeah Apple, I know your game...
The first time I reinstalled the OS on my G5 it informed me that "some ID of some prior instance of this computer that is totally inaccessible anymore since i deleted it" has to be de-authorized before I can listen to the music i FUCKING BOUGHT! Oh really... Let met un-overwrite that hard drive and go undo that for me...
That's what ended the iTunes store for me. And before you jokers pull that "yeah, but how many times do you reinstall your OS?" crap... I've done it, on that machine, 4 times in the 2 years I've had it. Most recently YESTERDAY. I haven't even gotten around to reinstalling my files yet. And its already crashed twice (but being 64-bit and dual-processor, it crashes 4 times as fast as any other Mac).
And i've been drinking. But I digress.
So yeah. Music Industry: quit alienating your customers. Greed isn't appealing. Take a cue from the Russians, since they seem to be the only ones who knows what's cool and really American anymore.
Offer a good product at a fair price and people will buy it. Its just good business. |
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| Taking a break |
[Mar. 2nd, 2005|11:31 pm] |
...like Snoop did.
should be interesting. |
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| Real morons |
[Jul. 29th, 2004|12:02 am] |
http://www.macnn.com/news/25644
Real Networks is apparently looking to license their "technology" that enables their downloads to play on an iPod.
I've done something like that before. Its called ripping a CD to mp3 and copying it to my iPod. I didn't have to license anything. I didn't have to pay extra for a restricted audio format. I can put my music on an iPod, or pretty much any other media player with no limits.
Open formats are neat that way. |
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| Ignorance, apparently, really is bliss! |
[Jun. 23rd, 2004|12:54 am] |
For a while now I've read all of my mail through a web-based rss aggregator ("Feed on feeds") that is open source, so I could tweak it to suit my needs. In order to test things I needed a high traffic rss feed, so I added a Yahoo! "Most Popular News" feed which generated hundreds of items a day. I left it in and up until a couple of weeks ago I'd spend all day trying to get through the days news so I could get to any of the sites I was actually interested in.
I tried adding a Bayesian filter system to rank articles as I clicked through. Then I added a single click to mark all 5 articles as "uninterested" and go to the next 5 (I call it "tag-n-bag", because I was watching CSI when I made it). I'd click that like it was a slot machine, waiting for a jackpot, or at least some nugget that I might want to click through to read.
Plus it was REALLY depressing. I'd see headline after headline about whatever Our Idiot President had done to piss off the rest of the world that day. Its really insane what he's doing to our country every day. And reading it over and over, watching it spin cartwheels as the day went on.
So finally I removed the Yahoo! feed.
Now everything is just the feeds I subscribed to out of interest. I hardly ever tag-n-bag, because 1 out of 5 is pretty good odds that something is good. And I feel much happier.
And that sounds so fucking lame. |
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| Here's an idea... |
[Jun. 9th, 2004|01:15 am] |
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Make a miniItx computer with a controller sufficient to run MAME. print one of these cut, fold, and glue models, and have a desktop mini arcade. |
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| I just reprogrammed my house! |
[Apr. 9th, 2004|05:12 pm] |
The lights anyway. I have a programmable lighting system for the whole house. We only have the multi-button keypads in a few rooms since most of the switches were retro-fits, but its all pretty cool. One button lights up a path from the bedroom to the kitchen. Another turns off all the lights downstairs, in case I forget one before going to bed. Most of the buttons can be double-clicked to turn the light on at a brighter level than the single click (I don't like bright lighting, so I set lights to turn on at 50% or lower).
Its kind of a fun user-interface problem, trying to balance simple obvious functions (like the top button always toggles lights on and the bottom button always turns the lights off since those seemed the most likely things people would try) with more complex path controls and some safety; when turning off paths there is an added delay and slow fade on any lights near stairways, so if someone is on the stairs they have time to get to the end (and a lightswitch) before they're in the dark.
Next I want to hook it up to my computer through a serial port. Then I can control the lights from anywhere, and integrate X-10 modules (by proxying commands through the computer) for controlling floor lamps and such. |
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| GW Bush has got to go |
[Apr. 6th, 2004|07:58 pm] |
Colin Powell defended our idiot president against Ted Kennedy's remarks. Well, actually he only said that Ted should be more restrained. Rallying "behind the challenge...in Iraq and Afghanistan and other places in the world" is all well and good when everyone is on the same page.
But we're not on the same page. The president isn't even in the same book. He's making it up as he goes along!
And I don't really know that I'd lump Iraq or Afghanistan with "other places in the world". What does that mean? That any "other places in the world" that we don't like are up for grabs? Yeah, that's what the rest of the world thinks we think. And that's what our President seems to think. But not all of us think that way. Anyway...
We invaded Iraq on false pretenses, whether or not they can find someone further down the line to take the blame. We invaded even though most of the rest of the world was against it. It cost a lot of money (more to be announced in 2005!) and a lot of lives, but now we have it. And we don't really know what to do with it. And the rest of the world doesn't feel like helping out under the "Get Your Foreign Asses Over Here And Do What We Told Ya" initiative.
So maybe we do need a new president. I think that's all Ted Kennedy was saying. |
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| Starting my robot |
[Mar. 5th, 2004|10:50 am] |
I've decided to build a robot for Burningman. I think it will be pretty cool. It will probably be linux based, just because I can't see spending the money to get an Apple trashed by the playa.
I got linux mostly running on an old laptop. It took much longer than it should have. I need to get distcc going. |
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