Streaming less, enjoying it more.

Thursday, June 5th, 2003

A million uses and counting! • No one can be told about PosAtlGa…it must be experienced for itself. • Made of 100% pure green tea extract! • Approved for pet dander and smoke! • Can pinpoint a storm right down to your neighborhood street!

Children we have it right here, it’s the light in my eyes. It’s perfection and grace, it’s the smile on my face. But it’s mostly me getting up early-ish in the morning and making some coffee and listening to Gaucho (in lovely AAC fidelity) on my rehabilitated Sennheiser headphones.

And where yesterday my eyes were burning—a full-fledged allergy attack, today I’m feeling mo’better, thanks.

I’m up and around and messing with Steely Dan stuff on Gordy’s birthday in anticipation of the fine new album from the fiftyish forefathers of precision rock’n’roll. I believe it’s called Everything Must Go, and for those who can’t wait five days, several tracks are on sale now at the iTunes music store.

Yeah, we use that iTunes quite a bit around here, and like many who hold true that more is more and less is less, we were a bit concerned when Apple release iTunes 4.01, which restricted the cool feature that 4.0 offered—where you could stream songs from your home machine to your work machine—or to perfect strangers across the country. It didn’t take long for developer-enthusiasts to hack together ways to actually save those streaming songs, and thus form the architecture (with Apple’s software) of yet another person-to-person sharing system.

This of course would raise the hackles of copyright fanatics like the RIAA, and would probably engender a lawsuit that could do anything from close Apple’s music store to putting the whole damn company finally out of business.

So Apple closed the loophole, and after taking a deep breath, I downloaded and installed the update that incorporated those changes.

So we stream merrily throughout out house (or if you park out in front), but beyond our subnet, it’s no go. And I can live with that. In fact, I think it’s only prudent, because I want reasonable e-commerce to survive and thrive—especially e-commerce that gives artists a goodly share of the profit. I like the 99 cent per song model. I like the fact you can buy songs a la carte. I like that the DRM (Digital Rights Management) system imposed is not draconian—it allows you to have these songs on all the burnt CDs and all the iPods you want—and it allows you to have the music on up to three computers.

Fair enough for 99 cents. And most importantly: it’s yours. it won’t go away if Apple does.

There’s a report that Apple is holding some sort of event today or tomorrow that is likely to announce a deal with a bunch of indie labels—and again, count me in, that’s great.

Whoah!

Okay, in no particular order.

First of all, as one of those geeky people behind the scenes, I’m charmed and pleased that Keanu Reeves has given 50 million pounds (82-ish million dollars) to…no, not charity exactly, but to the effects crew of The Matrix Reloaded! Yes, that’s something like 1.5 million apiece…from an actor who, well yes, was considerably…shall we say augmented?…by this crew’s efforts.

So, wow! It does pay to labor away patiently in the background, carefully arranging row after row of well-behaved pixels. or it pays to work with Keanu. or maybe it pays not to make him look like too much of a goofball when he’s swinging around on a pole, slamming 12,370 Agent Smiths back into each other and various hard surfaces.

I’m beard-free these days, did I mention that? It kinda feels like I have spidey-sense, especially outdoors.

Y’know, when I started this thing eight years ago, it was definitely pre-blog, and I was definitely a proponent of having one ‘article’ on the home page, with previous remarks close at hand. Now, this week I’ve just shoved Tuesday’s entry–a lame effort at best–down. Will I blog-ize this thing? It remains to be seen…I think it come down to convenience and ease-of-use.

Mine, not yours. Sorry…