Speedkill

I haven’t been paying much attention to Montana’s AG race. I probably should. I missed this, from around a week ago.

One of the Republican candidates runs SETI@home. He’s now being mocked for being an alien hunter.

Seriously? You’re mocking someone for running a program that helps analyze radio signals? This isn’t some guy running around looking for UFOs and touting abduction stories. He’s donating spare computing power to a cause that’s unlikely to succeed, but hardly something to disparage.

Not only that, he’s been doing that since 1999, when the project started. While it hasn’t succeeded in locating an ETI signals, it was a demonstration of a large distributed computing project, the first of its kind. Now we have ones like Folding@home and Einstein@home, which do uncontroversial and useful work using the same or similar architecture as what was developed for SETI@home. They pioneered those kinds of projects, in other words.

I can see thinking SETI is a waste of time, but mocking someone for running SETI@home makes you a moron.

There are quite a few online music sellers these days. I occasionally wonder if I should start using one or the other, but they’re obviously not at the point where I get much out of them. So I get to thinking, what would work for me?

My music comes primarily from downloads right now. I don’t download a ton of music, but it’s a significant amount. I also buy CDs, though I buy fewer CDs than albums I download (I buy more CDs than I would if I didn’t download, however). I also almost exclusively download whole albums. The process generally goes I download an album, I like or don’t like it, if I like it enough I buy the CD at some point in the future. I buy CDs for essentially two reasons: supporting the band and sound quality. I don’t get to go to many shows out here, so buy a band’s CD is the best way I have to support them. As far as sound quality, I like having the option of popping a CD in my home theater setup and listening with my Sennheisers. Burned CDs from MP3s don’t cut it.

So the current online models don’t help me much. I don’t download music to have digital copies of it, I download it because it’s easy access to a lot of music and I don’t have to waste money to hear a new album I may or may not like. So I shy away from actually buying digital copies of songs. I also run Linux, which means DRM essentially ends any compatibility with existing services. Of course, if I weren’t running Linux, I still wouldn’t put up with DRM. The selection on some of these services also sucks. My taste runs from pretty mainstream (Radiohead, The Decemberists), to less popular but widely available (Opeth, Porcupine Tree), to pretty obscure bands (The Pineapple Thief, Do Make Say Think). It’s hard for any online service to span that range.

What would I support, then? A subscription based service might work. A monthly fee and I can download a certain amount of good quality MP3s, DRM-free. On top of that, the option to purchase lossless copies and/or CDs of what I’ve downloaded would be good. It would have to be a pretty significant discount from typical store prices, but it could work. The selection obviously has to be wide enough to make it worth the cost, which is maybe the biggest problem. The store also has to work on my OS, meaning it should probably be web-based and not an application like iTunes.

I’ve bought maybe 7 CDs this year so far. That’s probably $80-$90 in four months. That’s $20-$22 a month. At $8 a CD, that’s $56, leaving $30 or so for a monthly fee, which works out to $7.50 a month. $8 a CD and $7.50 a month? That doesn’t seem implausible to me. If you go less than that, I’m probably saving money by switching to the service.

Maybe it is implausible. I don’t really know. But that’s what it would take.

It’s the tenth anniversary of the mp3 player. Contrary to popular belief, it’s not the Diamond Rio PMP300, but the MPMan F10.

So, I almost have a collectible piece of gadgetry. In high school I got an Eiger Labs F20V, which is the second generation of the MPMan F10. As far as I know, the thing still works, though it’s probably lost somewhere in my parents’ house. Still, second gen of the original isn’t bad, right?

It brings back fond memories, too. Like after a basketball game when a teammate of mine was talking to someone about how he heard about these cool things that you could put songs on from your computer. I got to interrupt the conversation and go “oh, that thing you’re talking about? You mean this.”

Then there was the time I discovered that because our computer speakers sucked and the sound quality on the player was so poor I could encode mp3s at 64 kbps and it sounded fine. That made my early mp3 collection largely useless after a few years, but luckily my tastes had evolved enough that it wasn’t a big deal. I still had some of those 64 kbps mp3s when I started college.

All right, I’m done now. I assume this is what my generation’s nostalgia looks like. I’m sure you old people were drooling over your 8-track and record players in the same manner.

We’re so much cooler than you were.

My inability to post has been fixed. Ironically, the problem was an inability to post.

If you can guess what that means, you’re allowed to add 3% to any future Internet geek test you take.

Oh my god this is going to be awesome. Ninja + wolverine claws = win.

When that game comes out, you probably won’t see me for a couple weeks.

Not a good weekend for my modestly expensive toys. My Xbox 360 has died and must be sent in for repair. That creates a dilemma: do I return the HD-DVD disc of Heroes I have (so I can watch No End in Sight) or not? Next, I tried to adjust the action on my guitar and stripped all the screws controlling that on the bridge, along with the little allen wrench the guitar came with. That’s what I get for buying from Fender’s knock-off line, I guess (I’m just learning, so that’s my excuse). Adjusting those screws with needle nose pliers is not fun, I’ll have you know. It’s sorta playable now, though.

Now I’m just waiting for my computer to break.

That’s my random uninteresting personal comment for the week. I hope you enjoyed it.

The company I work for certainly has its moments. I’ve seen some fairly stupid things. On the other hand, our competition appears to be doing things like this.

Since I haven’t posted anything of substance on here for quite a while, I thought I’d continue the trend.

I was in Hastings yesterday browsing around when some lady came up to an associate (or whatever the hell their employees are called) and asked if they rented VHS tapes. The answer was, of course, no and all they had on VHS was in a bin at the front. I happened to be standing at the HD-DVD/Blu-Ray case, so I found that a little amusing. Partly because I like to feel technologically superior and partly because she was looking for an obsolete format and I was looking for a format that could be obsolete in the near future.

Dr. Kevorkian is back! I vaguely remember his trial. I vaguely remember wondering why exactly what he did was so wrong. Still not entirely sure. What’s wrong with helping someone who choses to forgo the pain and suffering of a terminal disease?

Thinking birth control kills babies is one of the dumbest ideas human beings have ever come up with. In a related matter, I’m not entirely sure why a pharmacy should be required to prescribe it. I’ll just say that being against birth control is morally ridiculous and people should shop elsewhere.

Why would you pay $600 for a phone? Another one of the dumbest ideas human beings have ever come up with.

Crime rates up two years running. What happened in 2005? The Terri Schiavo case. God is punishing us! Repent!

Hey people in the Bozeman area reading this (all three of you). The software company I work for is hiring. A lot. Specifically, Quality Assurance (my department) and Systems Administration. Linux geeks especially for SA. So check it out.

I feel kinda weird saying that. Still, we need people.