Edith Macefield is my new hero

Old Ballard’s new hero digs in as retail project envelops her home
Photo from Karen Ducey of the Seattle Post-Intelligencer
Karen Ducey / Seattle Post-Intelligencer

I used to drive by this house every day. Before they were building condos on the site, there was some warehouse that complete surrounded her and was later abandoned. You’d see her out front sweeping the sidewalk as the warehouse fell into decay. Then they tore it down and started building yet another ridiculous Ballard condo building in the middle of a sad industrial zone and I was happy to see her house remain as the construction got started. It’d be cool to have the house marked as a landmark to old Ballard or something.

Dear Radiohead and the rest of the music industry

I applaud you, Radiohead, for doing such a forward-thinking experiment with your distribution for InRainbows. However, you’ve unfortunately made sure that any data you receive from this experiment will be useless. Why? Well, because your website and ordering process are HORRIBLE. I had so many problems getting your website to work that I almost gave up. I’m now concerned that I paid for it at all. I’m scared for the safety of my personal data. Really, it is 2007, get a web designer who knows what they are doing.

Secondly, you also seem to have gone out of your way to make sure that the downloaded tracks themselves are sub-standard. I’d heard that the mp3s you are distributing were at 128 kBps, which would have been ridiculous. I see now that they are at 160 kBps which is just lame. How about 192 kBps or higher? I would have gladly paid $10 for this record at a higher bitrate. Given the bitrate you are distributing it at, I decided only to pay $5. Also, where is the cover art? How about tossing a jpg into the zip file with the album cover? Maybe a text file with some liner notes. Just because you aren’t shipping shiny plastic discs around, it doesn’t mean that all previous ideas with the album were bad.

Hey, here’s an idea. Give the album away for free at 128 kBps, charge a nominal fee ($5-$10) for a 200 kBps or higher bitrate.

How about an optional survey section at the end so that I could have told you this instead of posting it on my blog?

So Trent, and other artists considering following in Radiohead’s footsteps (although they weren’t the first to do this honestly), try downloading the tracks yourself and see how much easier it would be to do something much better for your listeners.

I may just do this with the next Intonarumori album…

Amazon’s new MP3 stores has some onerous restrictions

High quality non-DRMed MP3s cheaper than iTunes! Amazon’s store has really been getting a lot of people excited (including me). While they aren’t DRMing, they have created some pretty crazy legal restrictions in their terms of use. Is this a problem? Not really. Unless they start trying to enforce them.

Amazon’s contract says you “may copy, store, transfer and burn the Digital Content” for personal use. But then it goes further and specifies restrictions, saying you “agree that you will not redistribute, transmit, assign, sell, broadcast, rent, share, lend, modify, adapt, edit, sub-license or otherwise transfer or use the Digital Content.”

Concerned that I was being paranoid, I floated this past Fred von Lohmann, senior staff attorney with the Electronic Frontier Foundation in San Francisco, a public-interest advocacy group.

He was surprised by the language and said it appears to enable record companies to pursue a breach of contract if, for instance, you loaned your mother an iPod containing MP3s bought from Amazon.

“It’s sort of like they’re adding another layer of restrictions potentially above and beyond what copyright law would restrict,” von Lohmann said.

Here’s the article from Brier Dudley of the Seattle Times.

Is Apple in trouble?

I was reading this great post from Scoble: Why doesn’t Microsoft get the love? « Scobleizer which was spot-on, but for some reason it got me thinking about Apple instead of Microsoft.

I think Apple is in serious trouble.

  1. The Amazon digital download store is much better than the iTunes store. Not the design or that dumb downloader, but the fact that they are selling high bitrate MP3s for the same price or less than iTunes sells the DRM’d files. Apple might be paying the price for being the ones who made legal downloading of music a reality. Losing the store isn’t a huge issue for Apple’s profit. The store exists to sell iPods, Apple doesn’t make much money on it. However, once you don’t need the store, you don’t need iTunes or an iPod. Apple’s innovation on the iPods will keep this business strong for them, but without the whole ecosystem, they become vulnerable.
  2. The desktop line is stagnating. I’m assuming that there is a reason that Apple hasn’t really bumped their desktop line in a while and I’m also assuming that we will get news soon. However, the GPUs on their highest-end machines are years old, and due to Apple’s locked-in nature, it isn’t a user-serviceable part. Letting this go so long is a problem. I and at least one friend of mine are waiting on new desktops before we upgrade our PPC-based machines. The GPUs in the laptops are better than what we have at the moment.
  3. The iPhone debacle: I think Apple is handling the iPhone all wrong. The phone is a triumph of technology, but even $400 for a phone is a lot of money for the average consumer. The phone doesn’t have enough features or speed on the network to replace serious smart phone competitors and it is still lacking some fundamental features that free-phone-with-subscription-phones lack like MMS and MP3 ring tones.

I don’t think Apple is dead or anything like that. I’m still an Apple fan-boy (as a user, not as a developer), but I think these signs are troubling and Apple can still snatch defeat from the jaws of victory.

What do you think?

Downtown Dogs (Chicago)

For those who only think I like only hipster, expensive, restaurants. I give to you Downtown Dogs in Chicago at Rush and Chicago Ave. Whenever I’m back in my hometown and I find myself on the north end of Michigan Avenue, I stop in to this little shop-front hot dog place. I order a char dog (or two) with everything (except hot peppers). I’ll grab a Reader off the rack and listen to ‘XRT on the store’s stereo. It makes me feel like a native-born Chicagoan again. While all the tourists are packing in to Giordanos or any of the other tourist joints nearby, I’m enjoying the true Chicago experience.

Downtown Dogs in Chicago

I have seen the future and it is Thermo powered

Holy frijoles was that beautiful.

That was absolutely one of coolest demos I have EVER seen. If I wasn’t wedded to C++, I’d switch over %100 to doing ActionScript development right now so that I could use that tool to make my GUIs. Microsoft should be shaking in it’s boots, because from what I’ve seen of the Silverlight tools, they are (silver)light years behind.

I work for Adobe, so I knew about Thermo. I’d seen slide decks on it, I’d discussed it with people. I’d never seen a demo. This went beyond any expectations I might have had. This combined with FlexBuilder3, AIR, Hydra (you knew I had to make a plug for that) and Astro makes an outstanding tool set for building desktop applications connected or not.

C# has been my go-to for doing up quickie applications or doing app prototypes for my personal development. Not for much longer. Especially because I’m on the mac now and being able to do cross-platform development with such an awesome rapid app development toolset is super exciting.

Liberal Brains work differently than Conservative ones… duh.

Well, of course, this is scientific, but their conclusions aren’t real proof. See, I can say that because my liberal mind is open to more possibilities than the conservative talk show hosts who are guaranteed to rail against these findings if they acknowledge them at all.

In a study likely to raise the hackles of some conservatives, scientists at New York University and the University of California, Los Angeles, found that a specific region of the brain’s cortex is more sensitive in people who consider themselves liberals than in self-declared conservatives.

The brain region in question helps people shift gears when their usual response would be inappropriate, supporting the notion that liberals are more flexible in their thinking.

Brains of liberals, conservatives may work differently, study finds [Seattle Times]

Interesting article on Ruby vs PHP

I’ve been doing PHP for a little while, but I’m always hearing about how much better Ruby on Rails is. Luckily, Derek from CDBaby decided to rewrite his site with Rails and actually decided that PHP was better for some stuff.

7 reasons I switched back to PHP after 2 years on Rails – OReilly Ruby

I spent two years trying to make Rails do something it wasn’t meant to do, then realized my old abandoned language PHP, in my case would do just fine if approached with my new Rails-gained wisdom.