I’m addicted to SketchUp. It’s so much fun to play with, and I plan on actually putting it to some use. Phase one is to model the house’s first floor interior. Each room is a project waiting to happen, and this will make furniture purchase and layout much easier. I think it might help when we choose the color scheme for different rooms as well.
I’ve mentioned it before, but if you haven’t tried SketchUp, get on it. It’s free and incredibly “neat-o.”
Props to my cousin Matt “Fuzz” Letnes!
Wait, Fuzz?
Anyway… He and his friends write a Vikings blog for the USA Today, and today they are the featured blog on SportsScope.
It’s actually pretty funny, “Anytime the head coach has a moustache that is a dead ringer for Burt Reynolds’s ‘stache, you have to go with that team.” And wise, apparently.
Superbowl, Homeboy!
And I’m already done moving my blog. That was easy.
I’m moving TCOB to Dreamhost after experimenting with GoDaddy for several months. GoDaddy was fine, but it didn’t allow for as much technical experimentation. Furthermore, several of their processes seemed convoluted. I’m looking forward to trying out Subversion on Dreamhost as well. I’ll post again to this blog when everything seems moved.
Today’s post on Scott Adams’s blog is hilarious. It refers to this article in The Telegraph about a man caught and prosecuted for fornicating with a bicycle.
Yeah, that’s right.
What kills me about the article is the photo of the culprit. You’d expect a mug shot or a frantic paparazzi capture of a shamed man hiding from the press, right? Wrong. It almost looks like he hired a publicist and scheduled a photo shoot. He’s not hiding anything. I’m looking forward to showing my support for him at the one-man Bike Pride parade, certainly just around the corner.
Being such a big fan of his bands Superchunk and Portastatic, it’s great to see Mac McCaughan telling the man what’s up about important issues like non-commercial radio and net neutrality. Tell it like it is, Mac!
The latest “discovery” in my continuing search for MP3s I can pay for is eMusic. While I really like it, eMusic is sort of a mixed bag in the online music world - half subscription service, half store, providing a strange experience at first.
Most subscription services give you unlimited access to a large library of DRM-ed tracks which all expire when you close your account. eMusic, on the other hand, is a subscription service that lets you download a limited number of non-DRM, totally standard MP3 files that are yours to keep even after the your subscription ends. You pick a service level, like $10/month for 20 songs or $25/month for 100 songs. That’s about $0.25 song - pretty amazing considering that other services tend to charge around $1.00 per song.
eMusic’s catalog tends toward the indie, which while great for me might not suit everyone (I’ve certainly found tons of music I like.). The quality also might not please audiophiles - VBR targeting an average of 192k. My only gripe is this: if I have 9 songs left on my account and I grab a whole album of 10 songs, I’d like to be able to complete the album at my currently monthly song rate of $0.25. It’d be great if the library were more vast, but that will come with time.
All in all, I love eMusic, and I’m sure I’ll be a long-term subscriber. I love buying music, I love doing it cheaply, I love generating no plastic waste or needless shipping, and I love getting standard files that will play forever.
Moreover, and my real reason for writing: if you think you might like it too, let me know. If I refer you and you join for at least a month, we’ll each get 50 free songs! That’s like four free albums. What more could you ask for? :D
Congratulations to my sweet Sugar Pop for finishing her first marathon and nailing her goal!
There she is on the right sprinting towards the finish line. She also spent time dancing like Elaine and experimenting with sweaty body art. In any event, she was always happy to see her fans on the path.
It’s also imperative that you see Julie’s Photoshop skills up close. No, you’re not imagining things. That is Amy’s head on Vanilla Ice’s body. Her dream finally come true, at least in pictures.
I’ve said it before, but bottled water is evil. Kari sent me this link to the Carbon Concious Consumer, an organization working to reduce the usage of bottled water. Click on it and sign up!
Whether you’re a fan or not, go and buy or download the new Radiohead album immediately. Why? Because doing so will help decide the future of how you get your music. Do you want to continue to pay needlessly inflated prices to unnecessary corporations? Do you want to collect more useless plastic boxes? Do you want to marry one company’s devices via their locked-down file format?
Or would you rather pay a reasonable price directly to the artist for a simple, open file that you’ll be able to play on any device, forever? That’s exactly what Radiohead is offering. The album they released today, In Rainbows, is offered directly from their website as a zip file of standard MP3s. The price is definitely reasonable… whatever you decide to pay. Pay nothing, pay $1000, pay anything in between. I “voted” with about $7, because I know that’s way more than they’d by selling me a CD through a label, and it’s way less than I’d pay in the same situation. You can also pay nothing and try the album out. If you like it, pay later. Or don’t.
As far as the music itself is concerned, I’m far from disappointed. I’m a fair-weather Radiohead fan. While The Bends and OK Computer are among my favorite albums and belong in some epic rock hall of fame, the rest of their library varies from really good (Pablo Honey) to intolerable (Amnesiac). This is largely a result from their tendency to vary style and experiment. Each albums tends to have its sound, from poppy rock to noisy techno art school nonsense. In Rainbows is a nice blend of all those soundscapes, and it’s already my third favorite album of theirs after one listen. They had certainly earned my £3.48 by about track 4.
I hope Radiohead’s experiment is hugely successful. The big labels have ignored consumer demands for way too long, and their preference for litigation and prosecution over innovation is disturbing. They’ve had plenty of opportunity to lead the way with non-DRM music. If In Rainbows is successful, they’ll be forced to change their ways or ride them in to the ground.
