I just finished installing IE7 Beta 2 (see this earlier post about IE7) which was released today. Edit: I should say that it’s not officially Beta 2 but rather a “Beta 2 Preview”. Apparently that makes a difference. It’s very similar to Firefox in many respects but differs in others. The menu items no longer exist along the top but rather are graphical pulldowns on the right side of the browser. It has an integrated phishing filter, supports IDN and has numerous fixes and improvements to IE6 and below. There’s also an integrated RSS feed reader that seems pretty nice (at least the styling of the feed looks nice) but I’m going to stick with my current feed reader for now. I’ll keep IE7 running to test it out with work-related sites but Firefox still remains my browser of choice.
You are currently browsing the monthly archive for January 2006.
Tags: feed-readers, Firefox, idn, ie6, ie7, internet-explorer, phishing, rss
I saw these Law & Order: SVU valentines via Boing Boing just now. They’re pretty funny and if they shipped to Canada I might consider purchasing some. They’re $10 plus $5 shipping.
The “I ‘Huang’ to be with you” one is kind of lame-sounding but I like the “Guilty! of being my valentine” and “In the criminal justice system, you’re especially gorgeous.” It’s too bad they use Stephanie March instead of Diane Neal for that last one.
Tags: boing-boing, diane-neal, law-and-order, stephanie-march, svu, svutines, valentines-day
I noticed on Technorati that I’ve been splogged today. This site (my first use of nofollow!) seems to have reproduced my entry from last night about having wireless Internet along with cordless phone use. Stupid sploggers.
Tags: 802.11, cordless-phone, nofollow, spam, splogs, technorati, wifi
I can feel the point where the medicine I took this morning has worn off. The headache and general weariness returns with a vengeance. Today I’m taking Advil Cold & Sinus. I need to take some right now to get through the rest of the workday.
Tags: advil, advil-cold-and-sinus, cold, headache, Health, medicine, sick
So they’ve announced the Academy Awards nominees:
- Best Picture: “Brokeback Mountain”, “Capote”, “Crash”, “Good Night, and Good Luck” and “Munich”
- Best Actor: Philip Seymour Hoffmann, Heath Ledger, Joaquin Phoenix, David Straithairn and Terrence Howard
- Best Actress: Felicity Huffmann, Reese Witherspoon, Charlize Theron, Judi Dench, Keira Knightley
- Best Supporting Actor: Paul Giamatti, George Clooney, Matt Dillon, Jake Gyllenhaal, William Hurt
- Best Supporting Actress: Rachel Weisz, Amy Adams, Catherine Keener, Frances McDormand, Michelle Williams
- Best Director: Paul Haggis, Ang Lee, Bennett Miller, George Clooney, Steven Spielberg
- Best Original Screenplay: “Crash”, “Good Night, and Good Luck”, “Match Point”, “The Squid And The Whale”, “Syriana”
- Best Adapted Screenplay: “Brokeback Mountain”, “Capote”, “The Constant Gardener”, “A History of Violence”, “Munich”
You can see the full list of nominees here. With Jon Stewart hosting it should make for an entertaining evening. It’s strange how generic the page names are on the Oscars site. host.html, list.html. That’s pretty creative. I guess it makes it easy year-to-year to change.
It’s nice to see The Constant Gardener get some nominations; that was a fantastic movie. We’re hoping to go see Capote sometime this week which would mean that we’ve seen all of the Best Picture nominations.
Tags: academy-awards, brokeback-mountain, capote, crash, good-night-and-good-luck, munich, nominations, oscar, the-constant-gardener
I’m feeling a little better today than yesterday. I really do think that this cold is on its way out and that makes me very happy. I know that my immune system will win this round and that within a couple of days this cold will (hopefully) be a distant memory. I wonder what it feels like to know that your immune system can’t fight off a cold. That must be a depressing feeling.
Tags: cold, Health, immune-system, sick
For breakfast this morning I made myself a couple of English muffins. Now I love these types of muffins and I love crumpets even more. There’s just something about them that tastes so good. In any case I made today’s muffins with peanut butter and honey. It’s a delectable combination. I didn’t toast it at home because I didn’t want the filling spreading all over my backpack so I toasted it here with our toaster oven. The one small problem though is that I was setting the timer without setting the temperature so for about 4 iterations the bell went off and the muffins were still cold. Then I realized that the temperature was set to “Off” so I was really not toasting it at all. I rectified the situation and all was good. I had a great set of toasted English muffins.
Tags: english-muffins, honey, It Happened To Me, peanut-butter, The Office, toast, toaster-oven
I saw this on the 69 Stations blog (a neat project):
Today I fiddled with the Google Maps API, and came up with this. Some fine day, I’ll merge it with this project, to the great annoyance of several people who might otherwise have found it useful.
I took a look at the page and it’s pretty neat though it shows just how small our subway system is. It doesn’t cover much of the city at all yet it carries a significant population each day to and from work/school/events. What I’m really looking forward to is getting the TTC/GO/other transit agencies involved in building a Toronto version of Google Transit.
Tags: 69-stations, Commuting, google, google-maps, google-transit, Toronto, ttc
Right now I’m on the Internet (wirelessly) and Marcy’s on the cordless phone. This has never worked before; usually the phone’s frequency interferes with the wireless connection. I’m not sure why this is possible but I’ll use it while it works. I’m going to go back and tag some older posts.
Tags: 802.11, cordless-phone, Internet, wifi, wireless
Jason checks to see what the current state of the Long Bet is. There are some interesting results so far.
I find it odd when there are people on the series of buses that make up my commute that tag along the entire way. It’s not like I just take one bus or even a bus and then a subway. I take three separate buses to get home. It’s hardly a common path. So I was taken aback slightly when a woman took all three of my buses tonight. On top of that she got off of my final bus at the same stop. She even goes to the same movie rental place as us. It was weird.
Tags: Commuting, It Happened To Me, Toronto, ttc
Who needs an iPod or MP3 player when you can just ride the bus in Toronto? There you can get a multitude of radio stations that you can clearly hear without too much trouble. If your ears have the ability to filter out other devices then you could potentially listen to one radio station from the guy sitting at the back of the bus? I use the word “radio station” loosely here to mean personal radio station in that the person is broadcasting what they are listening to for the entire bus to hear. I really enjoy your hip hop or your John Tesh or your pop. Really I do. I wish they could broadcast it on the bus’ PA system so that we could be a moving dance club like some of those alcohol commercials I’ve seen on tv.
Commuting by bus is fun!
Tags: broadcast, Commuting, ipod, mp3, Music, radio-station, Toronto, ttc
People can easily cause frustration and it’s important (very important) to keep your cool, articulate your thoughts, and not get angry. This is true even if you want to throttle someone.
Tags: frustration, Lessons
A coworker just passed me this link about a study that links schizophrenia and cats. I knew about the risk when you’re pregnant and cats but I hadn’t heard about the schizophrenia connection. It’s something to pay attention to.
Tags: Cats, pregnancy, risks, schizophrenia, science
An article by Malcolm Gladwell in The New Yorker – “What pit bulls can teach us about profiling”.
Tags: bull-dogs, malcolm-gladwell, new-yorker, profiling
We have a single-serving coffee maker here at work and we have several varieties of Van Houtte’s coffee available. It’s a good system though there’s one important drawback. It requires people to fill the coffee maker with water so that other people can fill their cup. There’s nothing more annoying than wanting a cup of coffee and walking over to the coffee maker only to find that there’s no water left. It takes a couple of minutes to heat up the water and so there’s not much point waiting around it while it’s doing this. Often times I’ve had to fill it up with water, gone back to my desk, gone back to get a coffee and found that the water is already gone and again no one has filled it up.
It’s just an office pet peeve of mine.
Tags: coffee, coffee-maker, office, pet-peeves, van-houtte, water
I was very temped to stay home this morning. The Nyquil didn’t help me sleep at all last night. In fact I didn’t get much sleep period. Imagine that, Nyquil having no effect. It’s supposed to be the wonder drug. Blah-blah-blah-so-you-can-sleep-better medicine. Well it certainly didn’t do that for me and on top of that even with my BreatheRight strip I was still snoring and kept Marcy up. Stupid cold, why can’t you go away? In any case I almost convinced myself to stay home because I was feeling that crummy.
Sidebar: crummy is such a great word. It presents to me such a vivid image. I imagine graham crackers crumbling away when I think of the word crummy.
In any case I did come to work because I thought that I can’t really afford to stay home twice in a release cycle because as we’re getting to the end of this one there might be a greater need for me to be involved in solving problems so I should be around. We’ll see if that decision is actually worthwhile. I doubt I’ll stay to the end of the day. I’m going to need to come home and take a nap at the very least and I’ll have to make sure that I get plenty of rest tonight because this cold has to go away. I’m sick of having it inside of me.
I read in the Globe and Mail on Saturday (the actual paper!) a story about how this winter has been so mild. It’s supposed to be above 0 Celsius all week with rain most days.
Not that many people are complaining. Given high oil prices, the weather has pleasantly surprised a lot of homeowners.So what exactly is going on?
Laymen may be tempted to attribute the phenomenon to global warming, but if climate change was as rapid as all that, Canadians would be planting citrus groves in five years and living in deserts within a few generations. “This may be a dry run, a dress rehearsal, of what winters might be like in the future,” Mr. Phillips said. “But we can’t say that this is the beginning of the permanent change.”
In recent years, other warm spurts have been attributed to El-Nino-style weather patterns, which result from changes in ocean temperatures. “But this is not El Nino, this is neutral,” Mr. Phillips said. “The water out in the Pacific is near-normal temperatures.”
Rather, the climatologist blames “a total absence of cold air” for the relative warmth. His explanation may seem a no-brainer, but the details are elaborate.
A polar vortex that usually resides around Hudson’s Bay this time of year has decided to linger in Northern Europe instead. That’s good news for people in Canada and bad news for people in Russia, who are freezing. “It’s like a Sumo wrestler: You just can’t kick it out,” Mr. Phillips said.
Usually, the vortex lingers somewhere for a while and then moves around of its own accord, its shifts causing other fluctuations of warm and cold air masses. Yet this year, “day after day, week after week, month after month now, this cold pole is just not coming over to this part of the world,” Mr. Phillips said.
The vortex’s failure to move has allowed warmer air to come into Canada—and stay.
No one can forecast the entirety of the winter, but little is expected to change in the next few days. But “I know one thing,” Mr. Phillips said. “Next January is not going to be nearly as warm as this January.”
I like how they scoff at the “laymen” suggestion that it’s all due to global warming. I’m sure a lot of people muse that that is the reason.
In any case this polar vortex staying over Europe has produced some terrible results there. I’m also afraid of what the agricultural impact of this warm winter will be this spring when the farmers start planting their crops. They need snow to keep the ground capable of supporting crops. Sure it’s nice not to have to bundle up and trudge through the snow but winter plays an important part in our environment. I’d hate for us to face disaster because we were able to enjoy a warm winter.
Tags: agriculture, canada, farming, globe-and-mail, laymen, polar-vortex, vortex, Weather, winter
I’ve been uploading all of my first sets of digital pictures to my Flickr account. Things like Whirly Ball, my trip to Las Vegas, where I lived and where I worked are all detailed in these photos. These were all taken with my first camera, a Canon PowerShot A40 that we still have today though I’ve moved to using my Canon G5. That camera took me to a lot of new places and helped me experience a lot of new things. It’s hard to believe that 3 years ago I was there. I think I’ve matured and become a better person since then. I’ve also become a better photographer.
Tags: 2002, a40, canon, flickr, g5, photos, powershot, seattle
Well as a followup on my cold, it has now moved entirely into my head which let me tell you is a fun experience. Driving home tonight from Belleville (an afternoon visit) was most interesting as I had some occasional sneeze bursts which combined with the rain made for some potentially dangerous driving. I’m trying to find some medecine that works but so far nothing has really given me much relief. The best stuff that I’ve had was the Tylenol Cold & Flu with CoolBurst but we’ve run out of that. If I still have this cold tomorrow night then I’m going to stop by Shoppers Drugmart and pick some up because sleeping and surviving the day will not be very fun otherwise. Tonight I might even take some Nyquil. Hopefully I can get up in the morning because that has made me groggy in the past. My ears keep popping too which is rather annoying. I like being able to hear things. It makes life more enjoyable.
Tags: belleville, cold, coolburst, head-cold, nyquil, shoppers-drugmart, sick, Travel, tylenol
McCain has a new “smoothie” product called Smooth-eez (warning: Flash site). It’s supposed to be ridiculously simple to make. Just take the mix from the freezer, blend it and put it in a glass and you’re done. The commercials make it seem like it’s a good replacement for something broken or hurting. Just give them a glass full of Smooth-eez and they’ll forget that you broke their airplane or model ship.
The thing that makes me uncomfortable though is that the glass that they fill up in the commercial is a little too full. For some reason I don’t like seeing something that is that full. It looks like it’s in danger of spilling over. That would create a mess and that would be a bad thing.
I wonder if it’s a good product. I know if we ever got it, I’d definitely be careful to get a big enough glass so that there would be no chance of it spilling over the side. I like to have more than enough containment room in my glasses.
At least it’s better than those infamous “Catch the Taste” commercials. Man those were bad.
Tags: advertising, catch-the-taste, Food, mccain, smooth-eez
We just finished watching The Life and Death of Peter Sellers starring Geoffrey Rush. It’s a great film though it can be difficult to watch people self-destruct in the way that Peter Sellers seems to have done. I first heard about this movie when we were watching the Emmys this past fall and this movie kept on winning all of the awards for television film. It’s an HBO film and that network impresses me each time I see some of their work. They do some of the finest productions on television, bar none.
Anyway so we’ve been meaning to watch this film and our local videostore had it in tonight so I rented it. It’s easy to see why Geoffrey Rush won the Emmy; he’s superb in the main role and on top of that he plays all of the other roles at some point in the film as well. I found the writing to be really quite good and the attention to detail was extraordinary.
It’s highly recommended by me.
Tags: emmys, film, geoffrey-rush, hbo, life-and-death-of-peter-sellers, Movies, peter-sellers, Television
We had some Chinese food for dinner tonight (celebrating the New Year) and my fortune read as follows:
You will be the next person at your firm to receive a promotion.
Perhaps the ol’ fortunate cookie writers know something that I don’t.
Tags: 4704, Career, Food, fortune, Lessons, lunar, new-year, year-of-the-dog
I’m getting some pretty amazing speed uploading some old photos to my Flickr account. Maybe it only seems faster since they’re with my older camera and thus the file sizes are much smaller.
Another post in the series:
I am told that in Western cultures there is a preoccupation with youth, but that you have not yet discovered the timeless effects of tea. How can it be? A single cup of tea has the power to carry you back to the time before time. Now that’s young.
—The Minister of Leaves
Perhaps not as prosaic as the others but still true to form and true to life. That’s a fine cup of tea.
I just read this great article on how the marketing campaign for Brokeback Mountain (previously discussed here and here) has succeeded in turning it into one of most successful presumed-Oscar contenders this year. They targeted very specific neighbourhoods in New York and Los Angeles to start the momentum going and then broke out from there. They had different posters and different messages for different parts of the country. It’s a great strategy that has certainly paid off for the production companies. It reminds me of The Tipping Point. [via]
Tags: academy-awards, brokeback-mountain, los-angeles, marketing, Movies, new-york, oscar, tipping-point
More Colbert news. He’s claiming victory in Monday’s election. From here [via]:
TORONTO (CP) – Disheartened about the Conservative win in Monday’s election, or delighted? Either way, American comedian Stephen Colbert says he’s behind Canada’s step to the right.“I fixed Canada!” Colbert exclaimed Wednesday night on his show, The Colbert Report (pronounced RAY-pore), which airs Monday to Thursday. Colbert noted that his show debuted in Canada on Nov. 7, and featured a message, replayed on Wednesday’s show, to Canadians: “I am Stephen Colbert. I have balls. If you’re lucky, they might just rub off on you.”
“Well, it looks like my balls rubbed all over Canada,” Colbert noted triumphantly as a photo of Prime Minister-designate Stephen Harper and a Canadian flag appeared behind him. “Because they just elected a new prime minister, Stephen Harper, an American-loving, health-care-dismantling Bush wannabe.”
“I fixed Canada in 77 days!” he exclaimed as balloons fell from above and a band played a jaunty tune.
The Colbert Report, a satire of personality-driven pundit shows like The O’Reilly Factor on Fox News, is a spinoff from the award-winning Daily Show, considered one of the hippest shows on the airwaves.
Colbert portrays a right-wing host prone to fits of utter and hilarious buffoonery on the Colbert Report.
Hilarious buffoonery. That’s one way to put it. The Onion AV Club interview is quite revealing. I’m glad we have people like him on tv. Now the problem is staying up late enough to watch the show.
Tags: canada, colbert-report, daily-show, election, news, satire, stephen-colbert, Television, tv
A consequence of this periodic lesson is that I now have to remember what the code to open the door is. The old code was around for so long that it was part of my hands’ natural motion to enter in the code. I would have to think about what the code is if I had to tell it to someone. Now I have to unlearn that code and teach my hands to use the new code otherwise I won’t be able to get into the office. That’s kind of an important function of being at work.
Tags: combinations, Lessons, office, Work
We’ve had these cubicles that I’m using for well over a year now and since I moved to my current desk last March I’ve had to put up with having no unlocked drawers to use. No one had the key, they couldn’t find the key, they didn’t know how to find the key, etc. Finally last week we got a new lock for the outside door and we were able to unlock my desk. I now have 3 drawers to use as I see fit so I should probably clean up the rest of my desk since it’s a little bit messy.
Anyway I opened the top drawer and found a set of business cards from the last owner of this cubicle. I wonder if Scott Maynard who was (is?) a project manager at Grocery Gateway realizes that his business cards are floating around. He probably doesn’t and even if he did there’s hardly anything to worry about. What could I do? Pretend I was him? That’d be pointless. That’s sort of like this post.
Tags: business-cards, desk, key, office
This weekend is the Lunar New Year which means that it’ll be the year 4704 in the Chinese calendar. There’s a big celebration (largest Lunar New Year festival in Canada apparently) at the Exhibition Centre this weekend. Tickets are $10 or $8.50 if you buy them online. It would be interesting to go.
Tags: 4704, lunar, new-year, Toronto, year-of-the-dog
Picking up on the meme I saw on Jason’s blog, I present my own list of cities for 2005:
- Toronto, ON*
- Belleville, ON*
- Stow, OH*
- Montreal, PQ
- Pembroke, ON
- Grand Falls, NB
- Brackley Beach, PE
- Fredericton, NB
- Woodstock, NB
One or more nights spent in each place. Those cities marked with an * were visited multiple times on non-consecutive days.
Some of those aren’t what I would call “cities” but I did stay there for one or more nights so I’ll count them. The cities on the East Coast are from our trip out there this past summer.
Where did you go last year?
I had a fantastic breakfast this morning. It consisted of two pieces of toast with a generous helping of lemon curd on each. It made my morning. I get to have some more of my birthday cake for lunch. That’ll be tasty too.
Tags: birthday, birthday-cake, Food, lemon-curd, toast
This lesson was applicable once again. Someone was fired and the code to the door has changed. These things happen in a growing company. You just hope that it doesn’t happen to you.
I just read this story and also this one (linked from the first) and I have to say that in my experience overcrowding has became a major problem and part of the reason why 15 minutes of my day (30 if I have to take the bus in the morning) are spent in utter discomfort because the 34 Eglinton bus is too crowded. If there’s a slight deviance from the schedule it exacerbates the problem tremendously. I’ve been on buses that have (or at least seem to have) far more than 52 people. We’ve had to go past several stops because there was no way anyone else could get on.
I’ve also had the feeling that the newer buses (the universal access ones) don’t seem to have as much room as the older ones. This is particularly true in the very back of the bus. If you have people standing in the “balcony section” (as I’ve heard some drivers refer to it as) then anyone wanting to get off the bus has very little room to maneuver at all since the aisle is so narrow. I guess that’s the tradeoff to allowing disabled passengers to be able to ride on the TTC and I totally support that move. The entire system should be accessible. I just know that the day-to-day realities of that system can be painful.
I really wish that there some funding magic that could be worked out that would alleviate these situations but I fear that that is probably not too realistic. Also my transit tax credit won’t do any good for the system and it’s really the system that I care about more than the cost that I have to swallow to use the system. Put money into the system and we’ll all reap the benefits. Push the money into the hands of the individual riders and the system suffers as a result. It’s too bad most politicians don’t realize this.
Edit: This CBC article says that the TTC will not be purposely allowing overcrowding. It features a humourous quotation from Howard Moscoe:
“Tell your listeners to pack away their plans to buy extra deodorant,” Moscoe said. “They don’t have to go on a diet to get on the subway system.”
At least there’s some humour here. He admits that it’s meant to send a message to the new government. Hopefully they listen.
Tags: CBC, Commuting, overcrowding, Toronto, ttc
My hands still smell like garlic. Not exactly a pleasant smell when I’m trying to rub my eyes or blow my nose. When I eat garlic I tend to keep it around for quite a while. My body just really likes to absorb it I guess.
Another tea-inspired piece of poetry:
At this moment, somewhere, the kettle calls.
Somehere, the pot waits.
Somewhere, a person smiles into a cup watching leaves unfurl.
—The Minister of Leaves
It warms the heart. It’s also great tea.
Tags: Lessons, poetry, Republic of Tea, tea
Tags: canada, paul-martin, Politics
Tags: google, html, statistics
What technology will be like in 2001 (from a 1989 article) [via]
Tags: 2001, atari, magazines, predictions
It’s amazing what cats will climb. Our cats tend to like climbing up from the refrigerator onto the little shelf we have on top of the kitchen cupboards. They can then peer down and watch from afar everything that goes on from up there. I’ve tried putting stuff in their way so they can’t get up there but they’re pretty clever and so far have been able to foil my attempts. It’s only Quentin and Eve who go up there; I think Elle and Pumpkin know better. Oftentimes I’ll see things that were knocked off of the top of the fridge and onto the floor. That’s when they know they’ve been caught and will come down when I order them to. When they’re completely silent up there though you won’t even know they’re up there. They probably laugh silently (assuming cats laugh) from up there.
Cats can be crazy.
I made dinner last night. It wasn’t pretty. It looked ok but many things went wrong while I was preparing it. I made stuffed peppers which is a pretty easy recipe to follow. Cut some onions, a couple of cloves of garlic, cook some hamburger, add a little tomato paste, stuff pre-cut green peppers, sprinkle some cheese and put them in the oven. Sounds pretty simple but I made a mistake on 3 of those steps. Firstly, the couple of cloves of garlic. I didn’t mince them enough nor did I cook them enough so I feel right now like I could kill a vampire. Secondly, the hamburger. I didn’t drain the fat off before I put it in the peppers. Thirdly the peppers themselves. I didn’t cook them long enough so it was like eating a green pepper salad. It was hard to digest and my stomach wasn’t happy with me afterwards. I think I’ve learned some important cooking lessons from this. So long as I’m not killing anyone with my cooking (yet) I’m bound to be making some progress and learning some skills.
Tags: cooking, Food, Lessons, stuffed-peppers
Every year around this time I get a bad cold and have to either take time off of school (when I was in University) or time from work (the present). Naturally since I’m writing this post this year is no exception. I hinted at such an event last week and it seems that The Cold took a while longer to mature than usual and today I’m off work. I seriously thought of going in and then coming home around lunchtime because there was some information that I had to pass to my team in person but I suppose it’s for the best and I can pass it to them tomorrow. I don’t want to make other people sick. I hate having a cold. Time to take some medecine and some more rest.
From my canister of tea:
The leaves take the water, the first sip emanating wisdom’s light, where TeaMind is polished.
It shines, pervading the universie, teaching us once again, that a true cup of tea is more than it seems.
And so are we.
—The Minister of Well-Being
There are more introspective comments on other tea canisters from this company. I’ll post some more later.
Tags: blueberry, Lessons, poetry, Republic of Tea, tea
Tags: lifehacks
Music apathy. It’s a subject that I’ve discussed before in this space and it’s definitely something that I’ve felt for quite a while. I can’t even remember the last time that I downloaded music. I’ve gone back to actually purchasing CDs. From here.
The University of Leicster in the UK reports something that I’ve believed for some time now – music downloading creates listener apathy. It can’t be any surprise that the ease with which people can constantly access and download new music without any real effort has devalued, at least for many, music. If something doesn’t cost you anything, be it money or energy, why should you ascribe any real value to it? Combine that with the fact that we’re mainly now talking about something without any tangible, physical form and you’ve got a recipe for who gives a fuck. This isn’t to suggest that the advent of digital music has been a negative thing – no, it’s hard to argue that the great decline of the major labels is anything but a plus, but nothing comes without a price, and in this case that price is thecommoditizationcommodification of music. There’s a generation of kids growing up now who have no concept of ever paying for music, and I have to wonder what it will mean when they become the primary consumer demographic. Will artists still find a way to get paid? One of The Big Takeover’s blog-columnists offers his thoughts.I’ve rounded up a few more links of late that address some facet or consequences of the increasing insubstantiation of music. PopMatters ponders what it means to completists now that pretty much everything – rarities, demos, live shows – is essentially available to everyone, everywhere. I for one have basically stopped caring about live show recordings, unless it’s one that I was actually at. In the distant early days of the internet, I remember hunting down and treasuring every live recording, no matter how poor, as precious and rare. Now I could care less, to be honest. Though I can’t really explain why, even though every live Wilco show is seemingly available on bit torrent 24 hours after the curtains come down, I still felt compelled to buy the live album…
And more – Angry Robot wonders if the increasing popularity of downloads might somehow spark a reaction/revolution in interesting packaging to renew interest in the physical product, while Canada.com wonders the same thing, but in regards to album artwork. Sterophile eulogizes the independent record store (done in by the internet, natch), and you may recall my own personal reaction to today’s download culture – vinyl.
I’ve considered looking for new music but there just isn’t much time to devote to that. It can be a cumbersome process and right now I’d rather spend time doing other things and spending it with other people. The advantages to the digital lifestyle are numerous but it so happens that we don’t always have time to capitalize on them. I’ve just recently moved back into taking more pictures. There was a period of time when I was spending most of my day commuting and the last thing that I would want to do is take more pictures. That has changed somewhat again with my interest in Flickr. Perhaps someday (soon) my interest in digital music will come back again. Maybe I’ll buy some headphones so that I can listen to some music at work. That might move things along.
Tags: Music
Tags: charts, house-size, obesity, usa
I installed Wordpress 2.0 today. Boy is it ever slick! The admin interface I was kind of familiar with since I had setup an account on wordpress.com. I also installed k2 which is optimized for Wordpress 2.0. The WYSIWYG post creation screen is very nice though. Wordpress has really evolved since I first installed it almost 2 years ago. It’s becoming a mature publishing platform.