Still going after all these years.
It’s official, Italy beats France for the 2006 World Cup. And the fans are going nuts. In Berlin, in Rome, in Boston.
In Boston?
Yep. City Hall Plaza is packed with fans watching the final game—and going nuts, as aerial shots on the broadcast have shown repeatedly throughout the game.
Of course, you couldn’t prove it by Boston.com, whose blog includes no local interest information about this global sport.
Lisa and I took today off and we’re heading out in a little while to see the new, improved James Levine leading the Boston Symphony Orchestra in the opening concert at Tanglewood. Should be fun. In his honor, I’m bending the rules a little and doing a shuffle of all-classical tracks—not that they’ll be all-orchestral, given how my collection goes.
WSJ: Free, Legal and Ignored. The subhead says it all: Colleges Offer Music Downloads, But Their Students Just Say No; Too Many Strings Attached. The article is about the unsurprising-to-anyone-except-Napster miserable failure of subscription based music services to take hold in universities. Compared to the complicated barrage of restrictions on the music offered by Napster, the students come across as models of common sense:
- While Cornell’s online music program, through Napster, gave him and other students free, legal downloads, the email introducing the service explained that students could keep their songs only until they graduated. “After I read that, I decided I didn’t want to even try it,” says Mr. Petrigh, who will be a senior in the fall…
- Purdue University officials say that lower-than-expected demand among its students stems in part from all the frustrating restrictions that accompany legal downloading. Students at the West Lafayette, Ind., school can play songs free on their laptops but have to pay to burn songs onto CDs or load them onto a digital music device.
- “People still want to have a music collection. Music listeners like owning their music, not renting,” says Bill Goodwin, 21, who graduated in May from the University of Southern California in Los Angeles. USC decided last year that it was finished with Napster after fewer than 500 students signed up…
There’s also a telling quotation from the director of the Campus Computing Project, who says, “The RIAA’s push to buy into these services strikes me as protection money. Buy in and we’ll protect you from our lawsuits,” which is one of the kinder descriptions of the unfriendliness of the industry that I’ve read lately.
I’m still waiting for someone in the industry to wake up and understand that their path to profitability lies in supporting good music and making their rich back catalogs available, not in fighting the fans of music tooth and nail. Today, three years after the birth of the iTunes Music Store, there are still many albums and tracks that can’t be found anywhere online—some by major artists (just try tracking down any non-album Sting tracks from before the late 90s), some by minor artists on major labels (Annabouboula, anyone?), and some by great cultural figures (I’d gladly pay through the nose for access to e.e. cummings’s Six Nonlectures as digital files, or even on CD). Instead we get American Idol and Rock Star. What, no one ever told these guys that a steady diet of candy can kill you?
BTW, for a good counterexample, check out Verve’s deep catalog—including a bunch of rare Impulse! recordings—though they don’t quite get it right; they support both iTunes and Windows Media, but no DRM-free offerings. But at least they’re opening up their catalog.
It should be a book title, but “The Taking of Sea Clams” is followed by the prosaic “prohibited because of red tide per order Board of Selectmen, Ipswich, MA.” Still, one imagines the agony and the ecstacy of the clam as it is pulled from its sea bed, pried open, and unceremoniously shucked, breaded and fried. Perhaps a sequel, The Taking of Sea Clams One Two Three?
Anyway, the photos are from two trips to beaches around Ipswich on the first and third of July, during which time I was bitten by green headed flies, lightly broiled, cooled in the 58° water, and well sanded, and loved it. Enjoy.
Oops—almost forgot to mention the gull. Those photos aren’t zoomed. We probably could have reached out and touched him.
Years ago, in college, a few Virginia Glee Club colleagues and I sat around in the Glee Club House, drinking beer and watching a recent Aerosmith concert on cable. As the string section behind the band appeared on screen, our director, John Liepold, told us that one of his friends had been tapped as the touring cellist for the band, and said, “Imagine that career. No matter what else happens to her, she’ll be able to say ‘I was in the Aerosmith orchestra.’”
Well, tonight, that sentence can be spoken by everyone in the Boston Pops. What a weird night, with the decay of Steven Tyler’s vocal chords on full display. And Keith Lockhart hitting the gong at the end of an abbreviated “Dream On”?
But no matter how weird, it’s still not as weird as last year. Big and Rich with the Boston Pops? Dream on, I guess.
Update: Waitaminnit. “Walk This Way” with the Boston Pops? Now it’s weirder than anything I’ve ever seen in this town.
In the echo of the Supreme Court’s resounding affirmation last week of the rights of individuals to a fair trial, of the limits of the power of the executive, and of a system of checks and balances—in other words, the principles on which our country was founded, ill-defined war or no—this 230th anniversary of the independence of our country seems especially dear. So I like to turn back to the source of much of that dearness, as well as to look around for some other words of inspiration. As Thomas Jefferson wrote in the last letter of his life, ten days before his death:
May it [the Declaration of Independence] be to the world, what I believe it will be, (to some parts sooner, to others later, but finally to all,) the signal of arousing men to burst the chains under which monkish ignorance and superstition had persuaded them to bind themselves, and to assume the blessings and security of self-government. That form which we have substituted, restores the free right to the unbounded exercise of reason and freedom of opinion. All eyes are opened, or opening, to the rights of man. The general spread of the light of science has already laid open to every view the palpable truth, that the mass of mankind has not been born with saddles on their backs, nor a favored few booted and spurred, ready to ride them legitimately, by the grace of God. These are grounds of hope for others. For ourselves, let the annual return of this day forever refresh our recollections of these rights, and an undiminished devotion to them.
The emphasis, of course, is mine.
…is worth a lot. After the six months or so I’ve had, spending Saturday and this morning at the beach relaxed me enough to more than make up for the lawn mowing, Ikea shopping, and other odds and ends that consumed the rest of the weekend.
I’ll post some photos later, but the other information I thought I’d post today will go up later at some point.
A big day indeed: it’s finally sunny (cause for celebration in and of itself), it’ Friday, it’s the end of the quarter, and we’re about halfway through the year. Our company shipped some major products this week, though for various reasons the press release won’t be out until the second week of July. And I have some other news that will have to wait until Monday, for various reasons.
In the meantime, it’s a good sort of day to sit down and shuffle through the iPod and see what comes up:
I think Last.fm wants to be for music what LibraryThing is for books. Because it’s track and playcount focused, it’s a different experience. But I think if it could give me a similarity list for the contents of my library, it would probably turn up my Seattle friend Tom Harpel, on the basis of his recent Favorite Records list. Thanks for the listening suggestions—I’ll have to check the thirteen albums on the list that aren’t already in my library.
Okay, so I was a little inaccurate in my last post about LibraryThing; it’s not an overnight sensation, having been launched back in August of last year. In fact, Alex Barnett (who was in my home aggregator but not my Bloglines subscriptions; rectified) wrote about them back in January, as he was gentle enough to remind us this week.
Alex’s point bears thinking about. LibraryThing is an online service that makes it possible to get your data back out, in a variety of ways—RSS and blog badges and mobile access, of course, but also plain ol’ tab-delimited or CSV export. And that’s pretty cool.
In the meantime, the rest of my books have finished importing (guess they were pretty backed up!), so I’m off to play with it a little.
A non-spam comment recently arrived on the old Boycott Sony site, which is something of a rarity these days. Reader PJ asks whether there is a known list of sites that are owned by Sony BMG, or Sony generally, so that he can block those sites for showing up in AdSense ads.
I don’t have such a list. Does anyone out there? I suspect that part of the issue may be that Sony Music/Sony BMG registers unique domains for its artists, meaning that blocking ads for them may turn into a game of whack-a-mole. But I’ll throw the question out to LazyWeb anyway.
Via BoingBoing, this spectacular casemod brings memories of my childhood flooding back. My favorite Banana Jr. moment may still be the first strip: as the computer dances around the panel, Oliver Wendell Jones reads from the directions, “And most importantly… it turns off.” And the Banana Jr. collapses backwards, its feet up in the air, cartoon smoke coming from its case.
The Banana Jr. was a nice evenhanded mockery of personal computing in its day. Oliver Wendell Holmes was always hacking into remote systems (my fave: the New York Times headline “Reagan Calls Women ‘America’s Little Dumplins”), a quintessentially IBM PC activity. But the speaking, dancing computer was all Macintosh. I was almost disappointed when I got my SE/30 that the resemblance wasn’t closer. And Breathed was legendary for merchandising his characters everywhere (to the point that Opus made a joke about little plush versions of himself in one strip), but he missed a killer opportunity: stands for original Macs in the form of Banana Jr. legs. They would’ve been beautiful.
Following up my initial LibraryThing report from yesterday, last night I exported my Delicious Library to text (necessary because the underlying XML file was bigger than the 2 MB limit for imports) and uploaded it to the service. In spite of being overloaded by WSJ and BoingBoing traffic, the site was responsive; it reported all the ISBNs that it was going to add to my library, told me how many others were already ahead of mine to look up, and said that it should be done in about 10 hours. It beat that estimate and had my catalog of books live by 8 am this morning—unfortunately, though it was only part of it, since I hit the 200-book limit that comes with free membership.
The UI is a dream. You can view your books as a list or a virtual “shelf” displaying all the covers (fans of Delicious Library will recognize this view). Clicking on a title in shelf view toggles some options—look up the book in Amazon, view your information about it, view the social information (tags, ratings, reviews, weighted recommendations), or edit the information. In addition to the obvious features (tags, etc.), editing the information provides one very useful function, the ability to change cover art to one of a dozen variant editions, to art provided by another user, or to upload your own cover art. Very slick.
Similarity is an interesting feature, as is the ability to browse to see who else has a book in their library. I also like the automated tag clouds, and my personal author cloud is telling (though, again, skewed by the fact that only part of my library is represented). I look forward to exploring some of the additional social networking features over time.
The bottom line is that just a day or two after its launch, LibraryThing is shaping up to be a really interesting way to explore books, authors, and other people’s reading habits. Fun!
The Wall Street Journal pointed me to LibraryThing, a new social networking site based on the contents of your bookshelves. I dug into it and found a very cool feature: you can give it your Delicious Library database and it will import all the books (based on recognizing ISBN numbers) into your online bookshelf.
I haven’t played with it yet but you can bet I will when I get home. This is a near perfect marriage of offline and online functionality: scan a book with your iSight, upload the record in one step, and you’ve published it online. Very cool. Thought this was functionality that should have been in Delicious Library from the beginning.
I find it interesting that one of the wealthiest men in America thinks that the estate tax giveaway currently being debated by Congress is a bad idea. After all, I thought the whole point of the estate tax repeal was to benefit the wealthy. But if the wealthiest Americans think that it’s a bad idea, then who thinks it’s a good idea?
And just how bad an idea does Buffett think the estate tax repeal is? There have been various quotations from him over the past few days that suggest that he thinks it’s a very bad idea indeed: