Concert season has kicked in again. Last night, I saw Iron & Wine at the 9:30 Club. The show was great, and I managed to catch a decent photo or two, which are up at my photo gallery.
Also, here’s a sample of Iron & Wine:
Iron & Wine - Love Song of the Buzzard from The Shepherd’s Dog (2007)
Tomorrow night, I’m catching Devnedra Banhart at The 6th and I Historic Synagogue. It’ll be a pretty interesting show to be sure.
On Thursday, Matthew Dear is playing the Rock ‘n’ Roll Hotel. Here’s a sample:
Matthew Dear - Don and Sherri from Asa Breed (2007)
Amazon has been hard at work with some very cool services lately. I’m a big fan of the Unbox Service that allows you to purchase movies and television shows from Amazon.com and have them download to your TiVo (you can also purchase through the TiVo menus). It seems they consistently run sales on movies for 99 cents on weekends that I’ve taken advantage of this several times for films that I may not otherwise waste time or money on.
This past week however, Amazon has topped itself with their MP3 store. MP3s are digital music files that are almost universally supported in portable players and software for computers. While the MP3 format is not without its issues - there are several companies that claim patents and licensing rights to the mp3 format for research they have contributed - it’s a much better alternative to Apple’s AAC or Windows Media’s WMA format. Until alternatives like the open-source OGG catch on, it’s a great move for Amazon.
One of the features people seem most fond of on Amazon is their recommendations when purchasing products. The recommendations Amazon gave me in the music store were spot on:
The Decemberists - The Crane Wife (I own)
M. Ward - End of Amnesia (one of my favorite artists
Ya La Tengo - I Am Not Afraid of You and I Will Beat Your Ass (I own)
And many more including the bands Stars, The Hold Steady, Thom Yorke, Explosions in the Sky, and so on.
The songs in the Amazon store contain watermarks, which they claim the record companies put in the files so they can track which stores are selling their songs, and that they don’t contain information about the owner of the song. I hope this is the case. At any rate, I hope they’ll be able to gain traction over the iTunes store with their massive library and non-user-friendly Digital Rights Management schemes. I’ve tried to help several people whom had large libraries of iTunes-purchased songs, and I always seem to run into issues getting account authorized for playback.
I posted previously about my annoyance with products starting with a lower-case “i,” but this last week I found evidence that this practice has gone too far.
Dana and I made our regular trip to PETCO to pick up some supplies for our beloved felines, when we bought a new scratching box. I didn’t notice until we got home that the name of the product was the Petlinks System iScratch Refill.
I’ve seen plenty of non-Apple products that use this naming scheme, but this is the first product that is completely un-related to computers that I’ve seen or heard of using the iName-scheme. If you ever plan to create a product, please don’t take this path. Thank you.
I took a few interesting photos tonight that demonstrate how disk storage has evolved in just a few years:
It’s fascinating how much electronic data we can fit into such little physical space, and how quickly we’ve moved along this spectrum. I know this makes me sound like an old man, but just imagine how little physical space we’ll require for 500 TB in 10 years.
Click on the photos for descriptions of the disks contained in them.
The Molly Dooker is one of the most hyped wines in production. Robert Parker falls head over heels for it. So much so that it’s nearly impossible to find a bottle. The best wine store around got their shipments in this week, so I had to pick up a bottle, since I missed out on last year’s.
I won’t be able to drink it for a few months, because it needs to settle following the ride to the States, but here’s to hoping it’ll pay off!
Also, I finally had a chance to listen to the new soundtrack written by Pearl Jam front man Eddie Vedder - Into the Wild. Here’s a slice of my favorite track from the soundtrack thus far:
Eddie Vedder - Hard Sun from the soundtrack Into the Wild
One of my favorite blogs, Compiler writes that the New York Times has finally freed its content from its garbage Times Select service.
The New York Times announced yesterday that it is opening up the premium Times Select portion of the site to the general public. First launched in 2005, Times Select followed the standard, outdated approach to putting print news on the web — it charged viewers a subscription fee.
As part of the announcement, the Times’ archives from the past 20 years, as well as the public domain years of 1851-1922, are also now freely available to the general public. Some of the articles from those gap years between 1923-1986 will also be available for free, though it’s difficult to tell which ones based on the announcement.
Finally, you’ll able able to (again) read articles on the Times without paying exorbitant fees, and when I link to an article, you’ll be able to read it. We all win.
Ted Leo is one of my favorite artists. I’ve seen him live nine times, and am scheduled to see him twice more this year. His roots are very much punk, but his music is much more approachable and this is one of my favorite songs off his latest full-length album.
Devendra Banhart is a newer interest of mine. I’ve always enjoyed his music, but I’ve been listening to it a lot more lately in preparation for my seeing him in a few weeks. He’s playing a Synagogue here in DC, so it should be an interesting show.
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