Music
Bad in Plaid
Oct 24th
This just made my day, week, month, maybe even year. The Mighty Mighty Bosstones are reuniting. I’d heard rumblings of this around the net for the last year but figured it was too good to be true. Fortunately, their new website tells all. They’re kicking it off with a five day tour at the end of the year in Boston. I’d love to go, but the tickets sold out in minutes and are now going for $300-1000 and above each. I see they are going to be scheduling another one on New Years Eve and apparently haven’t started selling tickets yet. If I somehow manage to check the ticketmaster website at the right time, I’m gonna get two tickets and figure out how to get there afterwards. I already plan on taking off from work between Christmas and New Year, so there’s no problem there. Even if I don’t go to the concert, the Bosstones are back. That’s enough by itself. Too bad I don’t think I currently own any plaid.
Edit: On second thought, I do own some plaid pajama pants. 
Sour Apple
Sep 14th
Sour Apple? No, not a Blow Pops commercial from the 80’s, this is about Apple Computer Inc., er… Apple Inc.. Yeah it’s been a long time since I’ve posted something. I’ve considered posting here for a while and for some reason an article I saw on Boing Boing compelled me to do so.
The article is about Apple adding a cryptographic block to their new iPods to prevent them from syncing with anything but iTunes. While I understand that they probably want to make it harder for competing online music services to get their music onto the iPod. They’re trying to look out for the iPod/iTunes brand but they somehow completely missed the point. Part of the iPod’s continued success is that it is now so ubiquitous, everything is compatible with it. By doing this, they not only made it so fringe users like me are less likely to buy it because we run a flavor of Linux or BSD or Solaris or whatever and use programs like Amarok or GtkPod to transfer our songs, but it makes a large portion of people who use OS X and Windows less likely to buy it too. There are currently many many alternative solutions for syncing music on Windows like Anapod Explorer and Media Monkey. I’m confident that there’s numerous solutions on OS X too. iTunes really isn’t that good of a program. Those alternative solutions make an iPod a viable choice even for those people who don’t like iTunes, of which there are many. Once Apple makes it absolutely necessary that you use iTunes with their device, a lot of people won’t be happy.
Personally, I switched back to Creative players with my last mp3 player purchase this April and bought a Zen Vision: M 60GB, after owning an iPod Color that finally died after a good 2-3 years of heavy usage and even surviving my car accident. That said, an iPod was always a viable option that I considered. After seeing the new iPod Touch, I even had been thinking that my next mp3 player may be a 3rd generation iPod Touch 2-3 years from now, once the capacity of a flash memory based drive gets up to where hard drive based players are today (60GB+). If Apple continues to cripple their products like they are, an iPod won’t even be something I consider. Sure, there will be hacks to make it work, especially for Linux, but sometimes it’s not worth the hassle and I certainly wouldn’t want to support these types of practices by buying such a product.
With this issue and recently reading about the cable fiasco surrounding the new generation of iPods, maybe PC World is right in suggesting the Apple is becoming the new Microsoft.
Save Internet Radio
Apr 21st
I usually don’t get involved posting these types of things, but because the legislators (as influenced by the RIAA) seem very intent on destroying internet radio, and time to save it is quickly running out. If you haven’t heard about the rulings, Ars Technica and SaveNetRadio.org have the story.
What can be done? Well spreading the word helps. The biggest thing is to petition congress through the easy web form on savenetradio.org. It’s also good to show that there’s a lot of people behind this, so I’d recommend joining the facebook group.
Hopefully these campaigns will be successful because it will be a sad day if almost all internet radio broadcasters (including the excellent Pandora) are put out of business due to these absurd royalty increases.
