10:06 AM EDT Saturday, September 15 2007
XM and Sirius are trying to merge, but running into anticompetitive claims. Personally, I don't drive that much, and when I do I listen to music on an iPod or MP3 CD. I rarely listen to the radio, unless I'm trying to pick up local coverage of a baseball or football game while on a long trip. If I could get satellite radio for $10 a month that would give me every NFL, every MLB game, and Jam On, I would be sold. Until then, I will stick to their competitors, the iPod and FM radio.
Posted in
Technology, Sports, Music |
Tags
MLB, NFL |
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6:43 AM EST Wednesday, February 14 2007
If you're a fan of music, you have to read this interview with Stewart Copeland, drummer of The Police and Oysterhead. Here's a couple of great quotes:
Miles [Davis], mostly crap... He was out of tune and he was a fucking junky and it sounded like shit. It was utterly preposterous. The king just wasn't wearing any clothes. Coltrane, same thing.
This quote sums up what jam band music is all about:
Oysterhead has no songs, it's all about improvisation, it's all about chops and playing and creating excitement that comes from improvisation. The spontaneity of it, the creating here and now is what the buzz of it is. When I'm on stage with Oysterhead and we're completely way out on a tangent - who knows what song we even stared out with, we're way out there - I'm dying thinking this is a horrendous crime against stage craft and I look at the front row and this is their favorite part. They're watching us think. They're watching something that has never happened before and will never happen again. They're in it with us, they're on the journey and you gotta take the rough with the smooth.
Posted in
Music |
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6:18 PM EST Tuesday, February 13 2007
The artist lineup for Bonnaroo 2007 was leaked. As I said last year, Bonnaroo is a completely different festival then what it started out as. Tool? Are you serious. I won't even get started on that, but the funny thing is how this guy got access to the information early. Apparently he was doing some sniffing around on different urls and whammy:
Last night when the bonnaroo website started acting up I knew they must be in the process of updating the website for the artist announcement, so I tried a few different URLs to see if anything worked . . . when I typed in www.bonnaroo.com/artists, a clearly unfinished website came up. I've been checking it every hour waiting for an update and about twenty minutes ago it came . . .
http://www.bonnaroo.com/festivals/2007;lineup
The funny thing is that you can right away that it's a rails site, because that semi-colon in the URL is a dead give away of a RESTful URL. For further evidence, the page the above URL redirects to is:
http://www.bonnaroo.com/sessions/new
Again, a very rails looking URL. If you look at the source of that page, you see the ?1171436393 appended to the JS and CSS files, another railism. So I guess the moral of the story is that you can use the best framework in the world, but if you don't know how to deploy it right, you can have "security" issues. I use that term lightly because it's not like they put people DOBs and SSNs online, but it's still clearly information that they didn't want to have publicly available yet.
Posted in
Technology, Music |
Tags
Rails, Ruby |
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8:16 AM EDT Saturday, October 14 2006
I know, I know, it sounds like the subject of some ridiculous spam message, but it's true. If you haven't heard of it yet, you have to head over to lala.com and sign up today. Their marketing is a scam, each CD is $1.75, not $1, it's a $1 trading fee per CD and $0.75 for shipping, but it's still a great deal. There are no monthly fees or limits on the number of CDs that you trade.
How it works is that you sign up on the site, confirm your email address and log in. Once you're in, it looks like an online music store. They have almost every CD in the world in there, with albums covers, track titles, user reviews, and an ajaxy way to search through them all.
So next to each CD there are two buttons, want and have. If you see a CD that you have, you click the have button. That adds it to your "Have List", again in a ajaxy way without leaving the page you are looking at. Same goes for want, you click that, it gets added to your have list.
Once nice thing about lala is that you don't have to have CD covers or cases. This is great for me, because I have many CDs that I lost the cases to years ago. When you first sign up at lala, they will mail you a package of envelopes and CD cases for shipping. So, when someone else on lala says that they want a CD that you have, you get a notification that you have a CD has been requested. You click "Ship It" next to the CD in your requested list and then it gives you the name and address to put on the shipping envelope. You put the CD in the envelope and ship it off.
Now you aren't actually trading the CD with the person that you are shipping to. Once you ship a CD, lala finds a CD on your have list, finds somebody else in lala who has that CD, and notifies that other lala user that they have a requested CD. Lala keeps track of how many CDs you have shipped and only lets you ship a few more than you have received. Once someone receives a CD that you shipped and confirms that they got it, it is in good condition and it is the correct CD, lala will have someone send you another CD.
This all sounds more complicated than it is. Lala has a great idea and has done a great job of implementing it. You get the CD from lala, rip it to MP3 (don't give me any crap about lossy encoding and sound quality, I just want to listen to music on my iPod) and send it on. And it's all legal, because it works just like a used CD store. You are essentially selling the CD to lala, and buying another one for $1.75.
Obviously buying a CD from lala, listening to it, and then selling it back and getting another CD is legal. But on the other hand, it probably isn't legal to buy the CD, copy it (either by copying the CD to a Blank CD-R or ripping it to MP3) and then sell it back and get another CD. Legally, do I have to delete any copies of the CD once I sell it, since I no longer own the rights? Once lala grows, starts doing TV commercials, getting articles in newspapers written about it, etc., it will be interesting to see if the RIAA wants to go after them they way they have will Napster. Lala says they are giving 20% of each trade to the artists, so maybe that will covers them. The artists make money and the fans get music for cheap, so everybody wins, right?
Lala is a great way to get new music for cheap. Lala.com even functions as a way to discover new CDs and as a social networking site. I'm not going to explain all the details on how that works, just sign up for lala and you'll see it for yourself.
Posted in
Music |
Tags
lala |
0 Comments
9:14 PM EDT Thursday, September 14 2006
moe. down 7 is in the books and here are the photos. Rain was definately the story for the weekend, but we managed to survive and have a good time despite hurricane Ernesto. Page's band was definately my favorite non-moe. performance of the weekend. Umphrey's McGee was a close second. moe. was typical moe. Awesome from start to finish, despite the rain. Kevin and I defended our title as moe. down horseballs champs (against Jesse and somebody else?). Moe's tavern was the hang out for the weekend as a place to get out of the rain, stay warm and catch a bit of the Irish. See you at moe. down 8.
Download the tunes:
Page
moe. Friday
Umphrey's McGee
moe. Saturday
moe. Sunday
Posted in
Music |
Tags
moe. down, moe |
7 Comments
