mrghort

I just bought, downloaded, and am now listening to In Rainbows. So far it sounds like a Radiohead album. Not as weird as they usually are.

The album has 10 songs and is 42.5 minutes long.

http://www.inrainbows.com/

The way it works is that you pick how much you pay (I guess zero is an option), put in your credit card info, and they give you a link to download immediately. The whole process took about 4 minutes, including waffling on deciding how much to pay and reading the sparse “Terms & Conditions” document.

Things I wanted to know before I paid, but annoyingly could not find on their website:
– The file format is mp3.
– The bit rate 160 kpbs.
– How long will the download link be active after I buy?
– How many times can I download it?
– What happens if my hard drive crashes in 6 months and I need to download it again? 6 years?
– Does the amount I put down for the download count toward buying the FREAKING 40 BRITISH POUND (!!?) box set if I decide later I want physical media?
– What are the usage restrictions, if any?

I decided to pay 1 British Pound. There was a .45 Pound service fee also. This is about 25-50% what I think albums should cost these days. I decided not to pay more because if I like the music a lot I will have to buy it again on CD.

We’re getting closer to buying the art directly from the artist. I kinda got the feeling I was giving my money to Radiohead itself, even though I’m sure they’re not doing everything themselves. The store itself is hosted at a domain called xurbiaxendless.com. The confirmation page says, “This transaction will appear on your credit card bill as WASTE PRODUCTS LTD.” Heh.

The lack of information prior to the download was annoying. My general rule of thumb about buying digital media is that I want this to be the LAST TIME EVER that I have to pay for this content. I would much rather download an .iso that I can then burn, rip, convert, do whatever I want with, etc. Some people might be annoyed that there is no album art, but I don’t care.

Other Observations:
I get the impression this was as much as marketing gimmick experiment as it was an act of revolution. Which is fair enough; I’m still glad they’re doing it. It may end up being revolutionary anyway. Maybe when other artists see how much freaking money Radiohead is going to make on this, they’ll start putting up their own sites.

I tried the download from another computer, then again from this one, but got this error (yes in all caps):
I’M SORRY, BUT THIS ACTIVATION CODE HAS ALREADY BEEN USED.

IF YOUR DOWNLOAD WAS INTERRUPTED OR YOU HAVE EXPERIENCED ANY PROBLEMS, PLEASE CONTACT OUR CUSTOMER SERVICES:

THUNDERWEAR!

– Only good Laffy Taffy joke I’ve had so far. And it was on a banana one. I’m sure that if Amorphis were here we’d all have a hearty guffaw that would turn into an impromptu jam that would turn into the title track on their next album.

RAAAWRRR

You know what would be a great freaking combo concert? Elton John & Prince.

TinyUrl is awesome for shortening long links but it’s annoying that you don’t know what you’re clicking on sometimes.

Normally I look at the bottom line of my browser (Officially known as the Status Bar in Firefox) before clicking on a link to see what I’m about to get. Often it’s something descriptive like http://www.ibm.com/some/such/marketing/crap which I know that I don’t need to click on. But if it’s just http://tinyurl.com/3dbfym then I have to guess, which can be annoying.

I’m not worried about being goatse’d at work, though some people might be.

It’s good for things where you have to copy and paste a link (like in some documents) or have limited space (like twitter) but it’s usually unnecessary on a regular old web page. Please make sure you provide context so I know what I’m about to click on.

The other day I went to see Knocked Up and there was a guy there wearing an Overkill Under the Influence tshirt. To the girl he was with: you hang on to that one; you got yourself a quality fella.

BTW, Knocked Up is LOLZ, and as Arif said “Any movie that starts with Wu-Tang has to be good.” And it’s got Egon in it.

BBTW, I know that movie probably came out like 9 years 284,012,334 seconds ago the US.

DF postulates that “Clearly, in some way, Apple is beholden to the whims of the music labels with regard to iTunes’s ringtones support.”

I have no idea if that is true, but it cannot be assumed that the limited ringtone support is solely a result of music business pressure.

Don’t bother to RTFA, just know that it’s about apple reaming people for ringtones. If you’re dumb enough to buy ringtones you deserve your fate.

This is only about the millionth time they’ve deliberately left out a very obvious feature that I would consider to be a bare minimum for any reasonable product. Can’t copy your music back off an ipod? All the things that apple CAN charge money for, it will, and it will actively prevent you from going elsewhere. They continue to come down on the side of the “let’s make money and restrict access.” Which is fine I guess but I’m not going to be a customer, and it leaves me with a bad taste in my mouth for other products i might buy (like their computers, which are generally excellent).

rememeber that letter steve sent about removing drm? why the fuck doesn’t your software actively block me from doing it myself then? oh yeah cuz you wanted to charge me a dollar.

this is so much of a nonissue that it speaks yet again to apple’s position about this stuff

jesus fucking christ, just sell me the cd iso for half the price the real cd, stop bugging me about what i’m going to do with it, and i’ll be buying 2 a week.

I don’t understand why this required a huge long article to explain. It’s just foolish to pay for ringtones for songs you already own.

Also, ringtones have to be one of the least important goddamn issues in the tech world. Why the do I even care?

More KAte-FItore-CELine-ANne pics here: http://www.flickr.com/photos/kaficelan/

Why I still use mutt:

I just tried to delete 16,000 messages in thunderbird, and had to wait 5 minutes for it to move them to the trash.

While I was waiting, I opened a shell on the same machine, opened a copy of the same 500-megabyte mailbox in mutt, ran a command to delete all duplicate messages (D, ~=, enter), and quit mutt (which writes out the modified mailbox to disk). This took approximately 20 seconds.

The moules are that good.

The frites are that good. Especially at 5am. Someone seriously needs let the california burrito people know about the frites people.

The beer is that good, and there is that much of it.

They really do have the waffles, except they’re sweeter and gooeyer. More of a dessert than a breakfast snack.

The chocolate is, well, mostly untried. I bought some but have no idea how representational it is. Not as excited as I was the first time I had Reubens or Chuao, but I live where they have kickass chocolate at every grocery store.

They have a sandwich called a mitraillette, which literally means machine gun, and can best be described to my Normal friends as a sandwich from Subconscious but with fries and a fried hamburger INSIDE the sandwich. To my non-Normal friends, it is a huge piece of french bread cut in half with the following inside:

• The aforementioned burger patty & fries.
• An entire head of lettuce, shredded.
• About a pint of your choice of 5 spice-enhanced mayonnaises.
• One Indiana Jones: The Pinball Adventure machine.
• Aux herbes aux spices.
• Unidentified other meat thing(s).
• The blood of the innocent.
• One Croc, the rubber shoe that is taking my feet by storm.

God damn why can’t the University of Zürich be in Belgium?

I make photo here. In unprecedented move of actually paying for something, I have upgrade to pro account. I not know what it does good for other than support service I like, but sheeee.

Does anyone know how to get download all your flickr photos in full size in batch? In other words, can I just upload every photo I have ever had for archival purposes and download them all later if my local copy explodes?

News of AppleWorks nee ClarisWorks being officially dead. Not that it wasn’t already because there hasn’t been an update in forever, but it got me all sniffly for my old G3 powerbook. I had mostly forgotten about AW but it was one of the reasons I switched to mac (before os x even existed). It was the first computer I bought completely with my own money. 2000 bucks–that was a lot a the time–I had to get a loan from the bank.

After about 2 weeks I realized that the user interface of OS 9 was way better than win or linux (though comparing macos to blackbox is a little weird) or solaris, and it’s still superior to the current OS X interface. Back then they didn’t have this crazy idea that everything had to look lickable and/or fucking brushed metal and whatever they call this new thing… brushed dick? Shaded-for-no-reason-porcelin? My itunes is a stylish toilet bowl. OS 9 on my 400mhz powerbook was, for the most part, more responsive and snappy than OS X on my 1.5ghz powerbook. The new intel ones are pretty good but still occasionally laggier than I would like or expect.

Other things that were awesome about that Powerbook:

• First laptop I ever used that seemed like it could be used for a whole day without breaking your hands or eyes (i.e. good screen & good keyboard; pretty rare in those days.
• It was made of plastic and that tough rubbery stuff that thinkpads are covered in. It seemed more solid and durable than current models.
• The hinge was such that the screen is not sunk down as far as on the new ones; creating a more favourable viewing angle which is noticible after a while.
• You could hold it in one hand without risk of dropping (as opposed to the slippery metal ones).
• It had two bays that could be used for batteries, external drives, etc. You could get like 10 hours out of the thing with 2 batteries.
• Two firewire ports! Remember this back when all other computers had maybe 2 USB v1 ports, so data transfer > 2 MB was a pain in the ass.
• Sleep-on-lid-close and wake-on-lid-open worked perfectly even then.
• Networking just worked. I could move to a different network (wired or wireless) and just pick it up, without rebooting. That was truly unprecedented at the time. And after some recent unsolicited XP experience I’d say it’s actually still unprecedented. Combined with the lid thing I had weeks of uptime even though I took it everywhere in my backpack on my bike.

Anyway, I remember Appleworks fondly as a non-autocorrecting, non-clippy, not-menubar-ridden, simple and responsive wordprocessor/spreadsheet/drawing program. Not too fancy but it had everything a young lad needed to get his compute on. When I had to switch to Word for work I was saddened because Word is slow, expensive, and has about 200 features I don’t care about. That’s why I write my journal in vi now. The drawing program was the best; you could quickly make diagrams of anything, which I did ALL THE FREAKING TIME.

—

Excerpt from my journal, written in Appleworks, circa 6 years ago yesterday:

Aside: The guy from the Old Main Record Store just came by and said “It’s
not as fun as operating a turntable” is it? What stupid thing to say. Of
course, it’s the kind of stupid thing *I* would say… I wonder if I’m going to
end up like that guy. Old and still awkward around people. That’s what it
is, just being awkward around people.

—

The next computer I buy with my own money will be Linux Thinkpad, methinks.