April 2003 Archives
The MLA entry for how to cite websites in your writing. It might come in quite handy someday. (updated for linkrot 4/3/2004)
Update 5/23/2004: The book is no longer online. Guess I should have written it down. Even though it's aim at laywers, Blogbook is a good place to go for talk about citing weblogs, in legal documents of course.
I'm glad I waiting a while to start in on the Apple Music service because I was blinded at first. But now the shine has started to wear off at the edges and I'm starting to see the whole board, so to speak.
First impressions are important, and my first peek still gives me a very positive outlook on the whole service. The interface is right in iTunes and it doesn't take more than 10 milliseconds to figure out how it works. The more you play with it the more you see features you can exploit as a "power user," as with the new search feature in iTunes 4 and or course keyboard navigation. Then you buy some tracks and then you start to see that it's not gold after all, it's only gold-plated.
First there is the format, AAC (Advanced Audio Coding), which Apple has sold on the promise of better quality to the consumer. What they don't mention in the regular sized type is that AAC is also great for DRM, even though we know that all DRM models are doomed to fail. So you have an audio file that you paid for that you can play in three places: iTunes, your iPod, or on a burned audio CD. Could you burn an audio CD and then rip that to mp3? Yes, but then you are back to degrading quality and we've just been sold on better quality audio. Why would we want to downgrade now? Just keeping honest folks honest, right? Bleah.
Now the catalog. I know that you can't make everybody happy, but even with 200,000 tracks there are huge holes in the inventory. One Moby album, and the "best of" at that. I'm hoping that 200,000 is, literally, just the starting point and they are being busy little bees and encoding everything they can get their hands on. Knowing what I do about copyright, licensing, royalties, and the music industry, which isn't really all that much, I still wouldn't want to be in charge of trying to get the rights to everything. It's not like they can just put up the entire history of music and figure out who gets what later, but I really wish it was like that. cough Kazaa cough I will still maintain my eMusic account to keep up on all the non-major label stuff that they carry.
The price is a bit high. I know that it's the same price as one-off tracks and albums used to be at eMusic, but I have the unlimitted subscription there, so over a month or two the tracks average out to a lot less than that. I also know that it's cheaper than the crap digital tracks at Amazon. Who wants to pay $9 for the "Broken" EP from Nine Inch Nails though? I bought it new on CD for $8.
A friend said that as with all things Apple, consider this version 1.0 and see where it goes from there. Another friend said that this is amazing considering that Apple had to work with likes of the "Big Five" and that it's the lesser evil. I guess the other evils are downloading music for free and getting ripped off by buying it new on CD.
And with all that, I've already had to stop myself from buying lots of tracks. I'm on a budget as Kat and I are house hunting. But that's another entry altogether and I still haven't written all the good stuff about Australia. Oh, and I've been gone from work for a month, they might have a few things for me to do.
Another Zeldman book to buy, or rather pre-order.
Jetlag. I have a whole new sense of respect for the term. Our trip has finally come to an end. At long last, Kat and I are back in Chico. I woke up at 7:45am (Monday) in Sydney and it's 9:26 pm (Monday still, damn that int'l date line) and I'm still up like a complete loser checking my email (and paying bills).
I'm so tired I can't even figure out how many hours I've been up at this point. It certainly doesn't help matters that I didn't get any sleep on the plane.
There are plenty of little stories to fill in between "Day 2" and "We're back" so don't worry your pretty little head about it. All in good time...
There is a great piece about the Daily Show in the NYT. I really do miss seeing the Daily Show. No sign of it in the land down under.
You can't go to Australia without going to see at least one Australian Rules Football match, or so I'm told. Yesterday, Steven hauled us off to the footy, and yes, I got pictures. We had first row seats, so the only thing between us and the field was a little fence. A number of times the action was headed right for us. It was quite impressive, and the home team even won. Go Dockers!
Photos of critters and another National Park are up. Cheers mate.
Even though we tried to get on localtime as quick as we could, we still woke up a wee bit early. I wandered across the street to one of the 8 billion Starbucks in Sydney only to find that it was closed on Sunday. Savages.
Today was first real day of exploring Sydney. To make things easier on ourselves we bought day passes on the Sydney Explorer. The Explorer is really just a big red bus that runs around a small, yet very touristy, part of Sydney. So it's a good way to be able to see a lot of stuff fairly easily.
Later in the evening we took in an IMAX movie, about Australia of course, and had dinner at a nice Italian place in Harbourside.
After we got cleaned up, we knew we had to get used to localtime as quick as we could. So out we headed to find food, and see what was close to our hotel. Our hotel was really close to The Rocks area, which is really nice for tourists. It puts you really close to lots of little shops, pubs, and photo-ops.
Our trip started in San Francisco. Kat came down from Chico with Carol, who was very nice to drive all the way to Chico to get her. We got a ride to SFO from Rebecca, who really just wanted an excuse to get out of the office.
I finally got a full CF card uploaded to the gallery.
Kat and I are currently relaxing in Perth. Photos are being downloaded of the CF card as we speak and will be uploaded as fast as bandwidth will allow.
