3 Things I Remember About: 1971

This is the 7th part is a series.

Antique Acres 1971 A-717401

(1) Our neighbors across the street had this huge antique steam engine festival where people from all over came to display steam engines and other old machinery. The festival lasted all weekend and was about the biggest thing that had ever happened in my hometown. We snuck in by wading through the creek and spent all weekend running around, watching the steam engines and whatnot. It sounds mildly boring now, but at the time it was really fun. A year or so ago I saw this newsletter for sale on eBay.

(2) I moved from Robert Smalls Elementary to Cheraw Elementary (I believe that was its name) for the 6th grade. It must have been an uneventful year, because about all I remember from that year is playing marbles at recess. I can’t even remember who my teachers were.

(3) I won some sort of DAR essay contest. We had to write an essay about the revolutionary war. I wrote about the Green Mountain Boys (I have no idea why). I got this little medal that hung in a frame on the wall at my mom’s house along with my Eagle Scout medal and some other approbations until my mom died.

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3 things project

More on MPEG-4

hdsat-716668 HDBeat has a concise summary of the status of DirecTV’s MPEG-4 conversion that will soon turn my $1000 a pop HD TIVOs into restarting, jittering doorstops (they already restart and jitter, but the doorstop thing will be new to them).

Of course we still know next to nothing about when the HD recorders will be available.

I can’t believe I’m about to type this, but I have started thinking about considering the possibility of returning to cable.

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directv

Why the Grateful Dead is Right

gratefuldead I thought the brouhaha about the Grateful Dead’s misguided, not to mention technically impossible, attempt to remove all of their live show recordings from the internet had blown over in light of their change of heart.

Now I read a Thomas Hawk (who based on his jukebox posts listens to almost exactly the same sort of music I do) post where he quotes this post from Cory Doctorow at Boing Boing. Cory argues that the Dead’s change of heart is merely a smokescreen since the superior soundboard recordings will only stream (e.g., play over the web), but cannot be downloaded. Cory writes:

“Now the rightsholders want it both ways: they want to profit from the goodwill that fans retain for the band due to its generosity, but they want to revise that generosity downwards. They want to change the deal so that fans continue to do just as much evangelizing, spend just as much money on shows and shirts, but get less in return.”

I disagree. For one thing, goodwill is great, but is doesn’t pay the bills. The Dead have already given up tons of cash by making so many of their recordings freely available for so long. In addition, they can’t create any new product, since Jerry Garcia has shuffled off this mortal coil. The band has done more than any other organization in history to give its fans free music. Nowhere does it say that being progressive and consumer-centric requires you to give up all of your valuable possessions. If a restaurant feeds people for free for a while, but stops when its paying business slows, is that somehow worse than never giving away food in the first place? I think not.

Cory supports his point by noting that the Dead control the copyright in the non-soundboard recordings every bit as much as they control the soundboard recordings. Perhaps they do (no legal analysis here- that’s not the point), but that just means the band has elected to give away some of its property but not all. If we want to start bashing bands for being mercenary and greedy, there are a lot of other bands we should target first. Moreover, a sense of entitlement will make other bands weary of taking similar progressive positions on audience recording, trading and downloading.

Then of course there’s Total Recorder and its brethren- but that’s also not the point.

I was all over the band when the news first came out. But I think the current plan is a fair compromise. Fair to us and fair to them. Remember, win-win or no deal.

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grateful dead

ScobleFeeds A-Z: The C’s

This is part three of my A-Z review of Scoble’s feeds. The rules and criteria are here.

Here is my choice from the C’s:

Conversations with Dina (RSS Feed)

Conversations with Dina is an interesting mix of tech, blogging, travel, philosophy, etc. Most of it’s interesting, but what put her over the top is her take on Plaxo. Her experience with Plaxo sounds like mine when I stupidly signed up on Classmates for one day, which was a piece of cake compared to when I signed up on Ancestry during the only 10 minutes of my life when I wondered about my ancestors. People from Ancestry called (yes called) me at my office more than my wife until I screamed at them to stop.

Honorable Mention:

Cyberspace People Watcher (RSS Feed) (Very enjoyable social computing, blogging, etc. resource)

Chris Brooks (RSS Feed) (Great game content and a very well designed website)

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scoblefeeds, blogs, rss

Windows Live Mail Update

I received an email invitation to join the beta test of Windows Live Mail (the pending overhaul of Microsoft’s Hotmail service) today. Having poked around a bit, it looks like my outside-looking-in impression may be correct- it looks like the easy winner in the three horse race for online email domination. Of course since, unlike Gmail and Windows Live Mail, I have not wrangled a Yahoo! Mail beta invitation, I can’t really compare all of them. Enough whining- here are my impressions.

1) It looks a lot like Outlook, which I and a zillion other people use for our email. This familiarity will give it a head start in getting people to use it over the other less familiar applications.

2) In addition to the usual email folders along the left side of the window, there are tabs for Calendar, Contact and Today at the top- again similar to Outlook (though in Outlook these tabs are at the bottom left of the window below the email folders). The Calendar tab doesn’t work in my account, but this is a beta version so that’s not unexpected. The Contacts tab works, though I could find no import feature to import my contacts from my desktop Outlook application. That may be a feature reserved for the paid upgrade version (Outlook Live)- I don’t know. The Today tab shows links to a tutorial and a feedback page. In sum, the look and feel is an improvement over Hotmail and more intuitive than Gmail’s conversational structure.

3) You can add topical folders to store mail by clicking a link at the bottom of the standard email folders. I didn’t see a way to create rules to direct email into chosen folders, but that may be coming.

The issue in my mind is how many features will be added to this free version and how many will be held back for the paid upgrade. Clearly, it’s a work in progress, but add some features (RSS functionality, perhaps) and Windows Live Mail will replace Hotmail, its predecessor, as my web based email of choice.

I’m going to use Live Mail and Gmail regularly over the next few weeks and I’ll report my impressions from time to time.

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live mail, yahoo mail

From My Netflix Queue

I watched two horror films this weekend, here’s the report:

theyfilm They: Nothing special film about night terrors that chase some kids into adulthood- until the alternate ending (a special feature), which was pretty cool. 2.5 stars (out of 5). If you really like horror movies and you’ve run through your queue, this one might be work a look.

Night Creatures: Anything by Hammer Studios is going to be at least pretty good. This one stars Peter Cushing. A little slow moving, with a very interesting ending. 3 stars.

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netflix, movie review

My Favorite Records: The Coming Grass – The Coming Grass

This is the tenth part in my series of favorite records.

As a confirmed alternative country music fan, I have to look around a bit to find good new music. While I grew up listening to country music, the stuff that passes for mainstream country today does nothing for me. So I read No Depression Magazine, listen to some off the beaten path internet radio stations and XM-12 on XM Radio. It takes work, but it is worth it when I discover a new band. A few years ago I came across a band called The Coming Grass and their self-titled debut record. It remains one of my favorite alternative country records.

cominggrass The Boston Herald has described the band this way: The result is a sound that recalls the Uncle Tupelo/Wilco/Son Volt axis, the Bay State’s Blood Oranges and alt-country inspirations the Rolling Stones, but that has a grace, unity and intelligence all its own. You heard it here first: The Coming Grass are coming on.

This record begins with the excellent Take Me Over. Every time this song plays Cassidy comments on it. She doesn’t even recognize much of my music, but somehow this song is on her brain. My favorite song on the record is Carry, which has a great guitar intro and a wistful, country sound supported by great backing vocals.

Put Away Your Expectations is a modern Stones-like mid-tempo number. Most of the cuts on the record are wistful, mid-tempo songs with haunting vocals. While the songs are similar in some ways, the forumla works and it sounds really good.

I noticed that they have another CD out- both are available from the band’s web site. I haven’t heard the second one yet, but if their first record is any indication, I expect it is mighty good.

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top 50 albums, new music

November in Pictures

The Big Deal About MP3tunes

Everybody’s writing about MP3tunes, the new online storage service started by MP3.Com founder Michael Robertson. I would love a way to backup my music library. Let’s take a look at this service and see if it might be my answer.

They offer a free version, but for a lot of reasons, including the fact that you can’t actually upload any songs with a free account, the free version is definitely useless. So let’s dive into the paid ($39/year) version. Here’s what jumps out at me.

First of all, the FAQ plays the “safely backed up” card. That’s the only reason I would ever sign up for something like this- the ability to back up my music library. My music library consists of around 25,000 MP3s which take up about 144 gigabytes on a dedicated hard drive. The MP3tunes FAQ says that “currently” there is no limit to the number of files you can “synch to [your] locker.” I find it a little interesting that the FAQ talks about number of files and not amount of storage, but let’s assume for a moment that that’s semantical only. I suspect that if I tried to upload 144 gigabytes worth of music to my locker, the number of files I could synch would suddenly become limited. Why do I say this? Because if not, there’s no way they would ever break even, much less make money. You simply cannot sell 144 gigabytes of storage (or anywhere close to it) for $39 a year. Granted I have a large music collection, but so do a lot of other people and if this deal was for truly unlimited storage all of us would sign up. And it doesn’t take 144 gigabytes to break the pro-forma (i.e., the assumptions that result in profitability). I don’t know what the number is, but I would guess less than 20 gigabytes- and a lot of people have that much music.

Even if they let me upload all my files, it would take me 10 and a half days of constant uploading to do it (the FAQ says you can “synch” 100 songs per hour). It doesn’t look like you upload via FTP, so the reliability of the web interface could add even more time to the process. Either way, I am pretty sure that trying to “synch” (assuming that means upload, and the web site is a little hazy about the details) 25,000 files would be pretty difficult to do.

I believe, much like the original MP3.Com, MP3tunes is intended primarily for people who are storing and collecting free (that is legally downloadable) music. That’s why the web site talks a lot about “sideloading,” which is actually a way to import music that you’ve already bought from another site or, perhaps, a way to add a space saving bookmark to music files stored elsewhere (again, the web site is a little hazy about the details).

Back in the day, MP3.Com was a great way to find independent music. I can see how this service arose from the ashes of the prior one. MP3.Com created an incentive for musicians to upload their material as a way to get some exposure (I uploaded original songs to MP3.Com back then, as did most musicians I know). This service relies on the user to find his or her own content and, it seems to me, adds the “online storage” feature as an added benefit. Of course there will also be opportunities to buy music for your locker. I suppose if you buy a song from mP3tunes, that song only has to be stored once (everybody’s locker could link to the same song file). Perhaps that’s the angle they’re counting on.

Conclusion: unless you have a small music library, the online backup aspect is more smoke than fire. If you have a few files that you need access to from the road, why not just use Microsoft’s free FolderShare? There’s not enough good, free music out there to make “sideloading” worthwhile. The online music sales market is pretty mature, so I don’t see a bunch of people leaving Rhapsody or MusicMatch to sign up here. So this looks like a deal for a niche user who has a small music collection or wants to build one by buying songs from MP3tunes. Those of us with big music libraries should look elsewhere for backup solutions.

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mp3tunes

Technorati Blues – Again

Technorati

It took me about forever to get Technorati to index this site. After much angst, a few emails and the inclusion of bookmark links, indexing began and my tags were picked up. That was months ago.

Now, suddenly, for no reason and after no substantive changes to my template, Technorati simply will not index this page. It just doesn’t happen. Based on my prior experience and the recent experience of others, I doubt emailing tech support will work and I’m not going to bother David Sifry.

My individual post pages will get indexed if I ping Technorati from them, but that’s not the preferred way to do it because it creates bunch of messy links back to Newsome.Org and it messes up my link count.

Granted, there are a lot of markup errors in my template, but, but, but:

1) Most of them are in the sidebars, where I have to rely on third party javascript, etc.

2) I have fixed most of the errors in the actual post template.

3) Most importantly (to the exclusion of everything else, at least in my frustrated mind) this page was being indexed for months without a problem.

I am really frustrated by this. I think Technorati is a great site and I use it as a de-facto category system here. But when it won’t index this page, it really screws me up.

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technorati, technorati problems