eMusicology

I haven’t written about eMusic for a while, but this week I’m feeling much more charitable about the service. Chuffed, even. Because while for several months I’ve been filling my 40 download a month quota by digging through the Fantasy Records back catalog (not that that’s bad, but honestly it gets monotonous after a while to hear only really good jazz!), this week I checked and was thrilled to see a bunch of releases from Ryko had been added to the service. Including, thank you very much, Mission of Burma’s Vs., some early Replacements, and the entirety of Frank Zappa’s recorded works. Now if they’d just put up the early Elvis Costello releases, which as far as I can tell aren’t on any of the download services yet, my bliss would be complete.

It also looks like K Records, the oddly brilliant Olympia label, has been added, meaning that a bunch of Modest Mouse, Built to Spill, Dub Narcotic Sound System, and Halo Benders albums are available, as well as Beck’s brilliantly lo-fi folky One Foot in the Grave.

The best part, of course, is that 40 tracks for $9.95 a month is about four times cheaper than buying the albums on iTunes (and the downloads are 128 to 192 bit MP3s), and buying a booster pack of downloads is an equivalent bargain. The only challenge will be pacing myself.

The Emperor has no adware

DivisionTwo: Mac Mini: The Emperor’s New Computer. I can’t tell whether the reviewer (Jorge Lopez, MCSE) is for real or not. Some of his complaints seem to be ones that a user would have: “Oh, did I forget to mention that the Mini has no PCI slots either?  … No keyboard or mouse either. Sorry, Kayla, daddy’s got to make another trip to Best Buy before you can play with your new computer.”

But then we get to the rest of the article, which—well, let’s take it point by point:

  • ”its sleek look comes at the expense of the parallel port, serial ports, the PS/2 ports and the drive bays“… Erm, the what, what, and what? With USB and Firewire, who the hell cares? Even on the PC front, I’m pretty sure that all the peripherals in most users’ hands at least speak USB. And drive bays? There’s a very nice combo/Superdrive there. Surely you didn’t have something else in mind, Jorge?
  • “And no floppy disk drive”…Oh no you didn’t (oh snap, etc.). Surely we’ve put this particular canard to bed by now. There are these little things called USB keychains, Jorge. They’re practically giving them away with every Best Buy purchase, and they hold between 32 MB and 512 MB of stuff. You know, between about 30 and 500 floppies. And they fit in your pants pocket. You might want to look into them.
  • ”During normal operation the unit makes no sound whatsoever.  This could make it very difficult for a novice user to know whether or not the computer is on.”… There are some of us who are slowly losing midrange hearing from constantly running fans etc. that actually kind of like a silent computer, Jorge.
  • “It turns out the Mini uses a weird kind of display connector on the back that requires a special adapter if you want to plug it into a PC monitor…” Yes, it does. It uses a weird kind of display connector, called DVI, that’s also available on PCs from most major manufacturers, including Dell, HP, and on cards from ATI and Radeon.
  • “there is no Outlook Express for email, but Apple includes a program called Mail, which is like a stripped-down email client that can’t execute scripts or open attachments without user intervention.” You know, Jorge, I might call that a feature. A security feature. As an MCSE, you might want to look into that too.
  • “Essentials such as a defragmenter or a or registry cleaner are notably absent”. That could be because the Mac doesn’t have a registry that can become polluted over time with excess information, and doesn’t need a defragmenter. (Okay, the jury is still arguing about that last one.)
  • “In today’s climate of non-stop worms, trojans and viruses, releasing a computer with no virus removal software is irresponsible on the part of Apple.” Unless, of course, few to none of those viruses are targeting Apple’s platform. Not saying the Mac is immune from viruses, just pointing out that the chances of any Mac user getting infected are vanishingly small, compared to the estimated 30 seconds till infection that an unprotected Windows PC can expect when you connect it to the Internet. (Oh, and more importantly imho than a virus removal program, the Mac does come with an industrial strength configurable firewall.)
  • Applications are a whole other category, because the issues he calls out are pretty easy to refute:
    • “no Mac version of WeatherBug to check the temperature anywhere in the world”… Well, there’s Weather.com. Or there’s any one of these nifty utilities.
    • “Or any equivalent of the DealHelper software I use to keep track of my password”… It’s called Keychain and it ships with the OS. And has for about seven years.
    • “My Office 2003 CD would not install…” Um, look at Mac Office 2004, from the same company.

Then he hits the point that makes me think he was laughing up his sleeve the whole time, or else is just hopeless: “When I consider that a good deal of my time is spent running applications like Disk Defragmenter, Scandisk, Norton AV, Windows Update and Ad-Aware–none of which are available for the Mac platform”… Huh. That’s funny, Jorge. A good deal of my time is spent running Word, Excel, Mail, and my web browser. You know, actually getting work done.

There are definitely things about the Mac mini that might trip up a novice user coming over from the PC world, but this list isn’t it.

Update: Erm, based on the reaction to the article on MeFi, I might have risen to the bait of a satire post. I guess that will teach me to blog before my sixth cup of coffee of the day.

Side note: repeating posts

Apologies to those of you who are seeing posts twice, or are trying to open posts from my RSS feed and not finding them. There appears to be a problem with my site in which some posts just don’t get saved correctly. I’ll try to look into it.

Ed Harcourt: Strangers

Ed Harcourt wants to be tough but he can’t help it—his heart is right out there on his sleeve. His new album, Strangers, is just now getting its US release after several months of worldwide availability (see an earlier Blogcritics review by one of our Italiian correspondents), and it’s the evidence that our Ed is a softie—it’s an album full of shimmering gentle love songs with an occasional hard rocking ringer thrown in.

That’s not to say that he doesn’t have a sharp edge to his tongue. He gets off some good one-liners to the tenderest of his melodies, “This One’s For You,” including the fine “I’d wear you on my arm like a brand new scar.” (Try that one as a pick up line sometimes.) Sometimes it works, as in “This One’s for You”; sometimes the images get a little thick, as in “Loneliness.”

Harcourt apparently isn’t totally comfortable with the intimacy he offers on songs like “Something to Live For.” The listener is ultimately kept at bay by gestures like the rocking “The Storm is Coming,” which is a fine song but seems out of place here, and the bitter “Only Happy When You’re High,” a US-release only bonus track. Maybe Harcourt’s getting the rocking out of his system on other projects like his new band Wild Boar will lead to a less hedged performance on his next album. I’ll be listening.

This post originally appeared on BlogCritics.

Egosurfing MSN style

Dave goes ego-surfing in new territory: the fresh-out-of-beta MSN Search. I’m the first Tim Jarrett in MSN Search, but not the first Tim—by a long shot. In fact, I first show up on the second page of results for Tim.

Interestingly, I turned up a new Internet doppelgänger on MSN Search. This other Tim Jarrett does web design, web development, and computer repair, is about eight years younger than me, and based in Michigan. Sadly, he was smarter than me and snagged a domain name that has a bit of portability.

That makes two Internet alter egos for me. My Googlegänger is a physics grad student at Oxford, and is from a very different branch of the family (judging from his photo). Weird that there are three “Tim Jarretts” in my generation, whereas I’m unaware of any in my family tree going back to the 18th century before that (not counting my second cousin Tim).

Incidentally, you can also go ego-surfing on Technorati’s tag pages. Occasionally you can hit a point where your posts are front and center, as I did today on the Mac and America tag pages. I think I still show up on the latter. I do like that, with a tag that broad, you get a full spectrum of posts, including a few from my Boston conservative gadfly commenter.

On death, destruction, voting, and hope

A conservative reader just challenged me (in the comments to this post) to respond to a quotation from an anti-war activist that was printed in NewsDay:

“If the election touches off even greater violent conflict, engaging U.S. troops even more,” said Leslie Cagan, national coordinator of the Manhattan-based anti-war group known as United for Peace and Justice, “that could be a kind of shot in the arm for us.

“Even if the election is considered ‘successful,’ but our troops remain on the ground [for a long time], that, too, would call into question the purpose of our presence. Either way …”

First, let me say, as I said in the comments, that you should never assume that one liberal speaks for all of us, just as I’m working on never assuming that all conservatives think alike.

Second, I am glad that any elections at all happened in Iraq that were more open than those under the previous regime, and I hope—with all the purple-fingered voters of Iraq—that the elections are a sign of better things to come.

Third, because I am glad and I hope does not mean that I forfeit my right and duty as a citizen to ask questions. Such as: we have now completed the elections, the last rationale for our presence in Iraq (after WMDs were proved not to exist), but the country is still wracked with unrest. Does the President have a plan for continued US presence after the elections? If so, for how long? If anything, the early reports after the voting suggest that we now have two large groups in Iraq: moderates and radical fundamentalists, where the moderates are willing to give democracy a shot and the radicals reject it out of hand and are willing to use violence to prevent its taking effect. Is our mission now to stamp out radical Islam? Is that an achievable goal? Are our troops ever coming home?

Last, regarding the post on which this comment thread started. For the sake of my gay and lesbian friends, I don’t ever make the mistake of taking lightly people who reject their claims for fair treatment, tolerance, and equal protection. Because I think that in a democracy, the civil rights of the individual citizen are the most precious thing we have and that they must be protected.

Round the block

Once again, I come up with reasonably snappy one liners about the things in my aggregator so you don’t have to:

  • SJ’s Wiki Hut of Horror: Feats of Clay. No, we aren’t slouching towards Bethlehem as software designers; no one knows where perfection is or what it looks like, so we just have to do the best we can. (If there’s a better analogy between agnosticism and software design, I don’t know what it is.)
  • Daily Press: Oysters bring rare bustle. It’s a long way from the James River kepone spill in the 1970s, apparently long enough that they’re opening a new stretch for harvesting.
  • Wired News: Monster Fueled by Caffeine. Well, that’s one way to go for an office for a software startup; just park your butts, and your laptops in a coffeehouse with free WiFi. (Also nice to see they have plans for social networking your Delicious Library data.)
  • New York Times: SBC’s Acquisition of AT&T Is Completed for $16 Billion. Guess AT&T ran out of things to spin off.
  • Adam Curry teases with the description of a new drag and drop podcasting app—but doesn’t make with the link.
  • Jeff Jarvis points out that the scary media complainers have an ally on the FCC commission in Democrat Michael Copps, who seems nostalgic for the days before cable.
  • Finally, Ethan Zuckerman does some cool Technorati math on the dissemination of BBC articles through the blogosophere. Turns out that technology articles are the most likely to be disseminated and African news, UK local news, and entertainment and business stories are among the least likely.

Job hunt as personal philosophy

Wil Wheaton writes compellingly today about the outcome of his latest audition. There are a couple of things here that spoke to me. First: Wil, like me, is in an industry that is playing the hiring game in a very risk averse way. In Wil’s industry, Hollywood, it makes a lot of sense—people literally make the part. In my industry, the software startups are coming off a multi-year venture funding “nuclear winter,” and now more than ever the old rule applies: A companies hire A players; B companies hire C players. That leaves people who aren’t picture perfect matches for product management jobs (including competitor experience, or industry experience, or multiple successful product launches, looking for the one position that they are the exact right fit for.

These fiscal realities don’t make managing the inevitable downtimes any easier, though. As Wil writes today: “I still haven’t heard anything about the amazing movie, and it’s getting harder by the day to maintain hope.”

This is the hardest part of the search. Last week I had what I think was a turning point: I was talking to Lisa after one particularly frustrating interview and started listening to myself as she offered some responses and helpful thoughts. I was rejecting everything she said out of hand, speaking very negatively, preemptively shutting her options down before she had a chance to elaborate on them.

And I realized. I wanted to shut down the options because I didn’t want to hope. I was afraid to get hurt again.

I decided two things that day:

  1. I shouldn’t be afraid to fail. There is at this point nothing to lose.
  2. I am going to start writing down when I think negatively about myself, and diving into why.

With any luck, doing both those things will help me catch some of my negative thinking before it paralyzes me again.

Links in odd places

I feel a bit odd just now, as though I’m part of the machine or something. Here’s why:

  1. Go to the Sub Pop home page, which currently offers a link to a site for the new Low recording.
  2. Click on the Low splash page.
  3. Click on the link in the navigation that says “>S>P info page.”
  4. Scroll down the list of reviews for the new album, and click on the one that says “Blogcritics review of ‘The Great Destroyer.’”

And there you’ll find me. Guess I’m really part of the star making machinery now.

On dressing for the occasion

I went into Boston yesterday to audition for a part time gig while I continue looking for my next opportunity. My preparatory instructions said, “Treat this like a job interview, because it is one.” Okay, I said, and put on the suit I normally wear for first interviews. It wasn’t the smartest move, because I ended up having to walk eight slushy blocks when the Red Line slowed to a crawl two stops before Park Street, but when I got into the room I felt like a million bucks—and like I was intimidating the other people who were there. It was kind of cool.

Then there’s our vice president, who decided that the appropriate way to dress to commemorate the liberation of Auschwitz was to dress like he was going to clean the streets I walked down last night in Boston:

Sources: Washington Post, Dick Cheney, Dressing Down; Oliver Willis, Vice President Disgrace; Tin Man; Wonkette, In Defense of Cheney.

Suspicious Cheese Radio

Everyone’s favorite men’s renaissance a cappella group, the Suspicious Cheese Lords, will be on Washington DC classical station WETA on Sunday night, doing the “Millennium of Music” program hosted by Robert Aubry Davis. The station has a streaming audio feed (Real or Windows Media Player only, unfortunately) so you can preview parts of their amazing new disc of previously unrecorded works of Ludwig Senfl. Set your tuners for 10 PM; it should be a really good show.

Sixty years

Today is the sixtieth anniversary of the arrival of Allied (Soviet) forces at Auschwitz and Birkenau.

While I can’t find words to express the mix of sorrow, rage, disgust, and shock that still fills me when I contemplate what happened in that camp and others like it across Nazi Germany, I have to try. Because we’re mistaken if we think it will never happen again.

On a more optimistic note, I was encouraged to read Putin’s remarks at the ceremony to the effect that Russia still has anti-semitism and that he is ashamed to have to acknowledge it.

More Holocaust resources: