Plans by Death Cab for Cutie

You know how sometimes a song comes along and gets stuck in your head? But in a good way. Not in that “Oh my God, if I don’t get this song out of my head I’ll go freaking insane” way. More in that “I could listen to this song on repeat all day long and not get tired of it” way. I need to find all those songs in my collection and burn a CD of them.

Anyhow, ‘Soul Meets Body’ by Death Cab for Cutie is one of those songs for me right now. I particularly like this bit, which reminds me of blogging, or of writing in general:

In my head there’s a Greyhound station
Where I send my thoughts to far-off destinations
So they may have a chance of finding a place
Where they’re far more suited than here

Yeah. Blogging is like that.

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Stuff I got for my birthday:

• P.O.D.’s new CD, Testify. This album is kicking my ass. It’s got to be P.O.D.’s best effort yet, at least as good as Satellite or Payable On Death. Matisyahu does some guest vocals on a couple of tracks. Awesome. Can you tell that I like this CD?

  If you are a P.O.D. fan, and you haven’t heard of Matisyahu before, you simply have to check out his song “King Without a Crown” (free MP3 download from Amazon.com).

• Fizzing Whizbees candy

• The Princess Bride DVD
• Tickets to a Gwinnett Gladiators hockey game
• An embroidered Gladiators sweatshirt

My thanks go out to my wonderful wife and the rest of my family for such cool gifts!

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• WordPress 2.0 beta (what, you thought it was version 1.6? Ha!)
• Feedlounge alpha 5 (faster, more new features)
• Feedlounge switches from MySQL to PostgreSQL
• American Edit (Dean Gray does mashups of songs from Green Day’s “American Idiot”) [Update Nov. 30: As I feared, American Edit has been taken offline due to legal threats from Warner Brothers. However, keep an eye out for Gray Day, on December 13...]
• Wayfaring
• Best. Christmas lights. Evar.

And of course, there are the big stories that I won’t bother linking to, because you can hardly visit a tech/link site without bumping into them: Google Base, Sony Rootkit DRM, Tivo video on iPod and PSP, etc.

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Mahna mahna!

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Since then, I’ve changed jobs, moved into a new house, switched from Winamp to iTunes, and I generally have had less free time available. So the unfinished PHP code sat on my server’s drive collecting dust for quite a while. Recently, while poking through my files looking for something else, I spotted the old files, and it revived my interest. So, over the last week or so, I tinkered with it some more during short breaks, and finally got it working well enough to throw something up.

You can see the results near the top of the sidebar, under the new “Media” heading (I plan to add books and movies, eventually). It will only show songs for which it can locate an Amazon.com product, so it won’t reflect my full musical selection (though the other songs are still tracked in the database, and I might expose those at some point). If the selection is preceded by “Currently”, then I was listening to that selection at the time you loaded the page. If it says “Recently”, then it’s showing the last song I listened to, and I’ve either shut down iTunes, or it couldn’t locate my current song on Amazon.

The hardest part about getting it working was locating a decent free plugin for iTunes to transmit the song info to my server. I finally settled on AMIP. AMIP is geared more for hooking into an IRC or IM client, but it’s capable of calling out to external programs, and the docs show examples of using cURL to transmit information to a web server. For the Amazon integration, I used the AmazOOP PHP library.

Maybe one day, I’ll clean up the code and make it available. But right now, it’s very messy, full of unused variables and hardcoded HTML markup, and the database isn’t normalized, so I’d be embarassed for anybody else to look at it. I also want to capture some more data in the database (mainly my iTunes rating for each song) before I’m done.

In the interest of full-discosure, if you click on the links to Amazon, and purchase something, I’ll get a small kickback. Obviously, I encourage you to do so

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I have been one of the last independent apologists for a moral kernel, elusive now to perhaps the point of imagination, in your corrupt and desperate retreat, but now even I have given up. I still buy, but now I also steal. You have forfeited your right to my loyalty. And maybe you’re too lost and beaten to care, and even more likely it’s too late to matter, but for a few minutes I’m going to pretend that neither of those things are so. I’m going to pretend that you’re still capable of awareness and reason, and in a spirit of truth that you long ago stopped deserving, while I’ve still taken little enough to list, I’m going to tell you exactly what I have stolen from you, and why.

via: kottke

He goes on to list various albums that he has obtained, and why he didn’t buy legitimate copies. The reasons include: unreasonably priced imports which haven’t been released in the U.S. yet, out-of-print titles, albums that he already owns, but can’t find the physical copy, and titles which are only available in other countries.

He makes excellent points about how the industry brings a lot of this down upon themselves. And in this age of electronic media, the music companies are going to have to evolve their ideas about distribution, pricing models, and control. Their attempts to tighten their grip on content only serves to frustrate the “power users” amongst their customers. And the repeated extensions to copyright lifetimes only seems to stifle artistic growth by budding artists. Patents only last, what, 17 years? Why the heck should copyrights last 100?

More and more independent artists are choosing to self-publish, choosing their own licensing terms, selling directly to the public, and finding ways to expand their fan base without the help of the industry. If the media companies don’t adapt, and find new ways to add value to what they offer this new breed of artists, they very well could become obsolete in a few years. Their best bet will probably be some sort of “embrace and extend” strategy. Do some research to find the best of the independent artists. Sign them up with short-term contracts. Then, rather than trying to do a massive CD sales campaign, do smaller CD runs (less overall capital expense), but heavily promote sales via online methods. Ditch the DRM (because people will defeat it anyways), make the online track/album prices reasonable ($0.99/track is too much, IMHO), and do some targetted tours with the best selling artists. This kind of strategy would probably benefit both artists and fans. And with less money spent on producing a physical product, they could concentrate more on the almost pure-profit sales of MP3s (or Oggs, if they’re really hip).

See also: Copyright Wrongs, via BoingBoing.

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Total volume of music files on my computer:

5.6GB. Yes, that’s miniscule, but a lot of my CDs are still boxed up.

The last CD I bought was:

Song playing right now:

Orestes, by A Perfect Circle, from Mer de Noms

Five songs I listen to a lot, or that mean a lot to me:

• Will You, by P.O.D.
• Love to be Loved, by Peter Gabriel
• Touched, by VAST
• Leaving You a Dowager, by Rooke
• Xanadu, by Rush

FiveSix (when I finish helping my wife get her blog up) people to whom I’m passing the baton:

• Eric
• Jim
• Paul
• Mark
• Shelley
• Susan (soon, I hope)

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Lexar 512MB JumpDrive

Peter Gabriel, Hit/Miss

Yesterday was my birthday. The whole family went out to dinner at The Bitter End for some seafood. I had the “Sesame Crusted Salmon”, which was good, but not as flavorful as I had expected. But they did give me some of their banana bread pudding, which was quite tasty. This was our second time there, it’s definitely one of our favorite local restaurants.

After dinner, we went home and I opened my gifts, which were all quite cool:

• A Lexar 512MB JumpDrive
• Army of Darkness comics, “Ashes to Ashes“, issues 1 - 4
• Peter Gabriel, Hit/Miss (2-CD best-of)
• P.O.D., Brown
• A long-sleeve T-shirt with an embroidered yellowjacket (and Jamie got a matching shirt )

Birthday gift : say “Happy Birthday” with birthday gifts that leave a lasting impression. Flowers, plants & gift baskets from ProFlowers make great gifts.

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I’m really digging it. There’s some great tunes in there. Some of the artists featured on the CD: David Byrne, Beastie Boys, Spoon, Danger Mouse, and
Chuck D. Those are just the performers I had heard of before. But some of my favorite tunes are from the other acts. The even niftier bit for other musicians, is that most of the songs are available under a particular CC license that allows you to use samples of the songs in remixes.

Get yourself a BitTorrent client and download this CD. I’m pretty sure that you’ll find something in there that you like. Unless all you like is country-western and bluegrass music. In which case, you should break out the fiddles and remix the music into a new country-trance-rap mashup that’s sure to sweep the charts!

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Bagpipers on Parade

Susan and I went to the Stone Mountain Highland Games last Saturday. We had been told that it was “huge”, but we thought that it wasn’t that much bigger than the Alabama Highland Games, which we’ve attended the past few years. There were a few more clan and vendor tents, and there were more people attending, but I’d say that the Alabama Highland Games stands up well in comparison.

Drum Major 1

We were a little disappointed at what seemed to be a small turnout at the Clan Campbell Society booth — there were only a few names already on the visitor’s roster when I added our names. I would like to have stopped back by later in the afternoon to see if it had picked up, but we just never made it back over there.

Crusaders

We stopped by most, if not all, of the vendors to peruse their goods. And we bought a fair amount of items. Susan picked up a really nice wool blanket done in the Campbell (Blackwatch) tartan. She also picked up a book called Celtic Knits, which has over 25 knitting patterns for sweaters, scarves, and such. I picked up a book on Celtic Knotwork Designs. I’ve seen some good websites on this subject before, but sometimes you just want hardcopy. Susan also picked up two new pairs of Celtic cross earrings, one in silver, the other in pewter.

Of course, we also had to ignore our eating plan for the day and sample the food. For lunch, Susan had a “Bridie” (a small, spiced meat pastry), and I had a meat pie. We also had some beer (Grolsch was a sponsor). And we picked up an assortment of sweets: oatmeal raisin cookies, shortbread, and other confections, which we brought home to share with the rest of the family.

Caber Toss

After our lunch, we went to the athletic field to watch the caber toss. After several competitors were easily able to turn the first two cabers (I think the announcer said they were just over 100 pounds), they recommended that they switch to the backup caber, which weighed in at about 140 pounds. That made a big difference, as only two or three of the athletes were able to turn that one. However, one fellow did an amazing brute-force turn from a stand-still! Normally, they have to get a running start, to add to the caber’s momentum.

Henri’s Notions

There were several musical groups performing, but the only one we stopped to listen to was Henri’s Notions, who are from Alabama. They sounded really great, and we stopped by their table afterwards to buy a CD. We chatted with lead singer Jil Chambless for a bit, and were surprised to learn that she has family in our old hometown of Enterprise. Ain’t it a small world? Anyhow, all of the musicians were quite talented, and I’m sure we’ll be buying more of their music soon.

We had a nice time there, and the cool weather was definitely a plus. We wore jackets the whole time, though we probably could have gone without them during the warmest parts of the day. We’re looking forward to going back again next year.

Action Games Exzellent collection of free trials, tests and games related files to check out.

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