Cynthia Lin

Cynthia Lin

Originally uploaded by LarimdaME.

After months of trying, I finally managed to snag a Cynthia Lin concert. Somehow, I thought it’d be like Susan Cagle’s gigs at Rockwood Music Hall, all tight and jampacked. Turned out it was a bit more roomy, audience performer ratio was a stunning (for me) 2:1. But it made for a much more intimate show (and a much more awkward photo shoot, nowhere to be all discreet). But the best part was that I ran into someone I know, which never ever happens to me at all. Good times.
I’d try to catch her all acoustic show on Feb 1 at Columbia’s underground cafe, as I think it’s her strong suit. But sadly, I have a photo gig at that exact same time in deep Brooklyn. Too bad.

OLPC Firefox’d

Due to installing problems, it only took forever to finally install firefox on my little green machine. But now that it’s here, it’s running quite smoothly, with one big exception. It seems slightly slower then the default browser, but that may be due to the fact that I can see the slowness on multiple tabs. And the slowness, apparent or real, is more than made up for by the fact that I now have tabbed browsing. TABBED BROWSING! The typeface is a bit small on some websites, but that was the case with the default browser too, and it is not sugarized, which means you need to go to the terminal activity to start firefox. A minor inconvenience on both counts.

The big problem seems to be that the touchpad is super sensitive in Firefox, so navigating is a bit difficult as the cursor will randomly jumo to the sides, fairly often at that. But again, TABBED BROWSING!

I would recommend doing it, if only because you can. The install is fairly easy once you delete the block on installing firefox. I had to do it four times, however, as there was a package issue with perl for some odd reason. Firefox install instructions can be found on the olpc wiki.

Kindle: Almost Amazon

While being all cool (if cool means being approached by the most unwashed of the nerds) at Starbucks with my little OLPC laptop, I happened upon the neatest little device that got my technolust all a flutter. ‘Twas white and small and had a screen with contrast to envy upon. It was the Amazon Kindle, and it looked amazing. Until I read the specs, that is.

No WiFi, no pdf support, no general purpose web browser, and no real way to use it without ponying up some cash to Amazon somehow. You want to get the NYTimes? $15 a month. You want to read a few popular blogs, that will be $1 please. Want to upload your own text files to the thing to review and edit? Somehow you have to go through an Amazon.com server and pay a $0.10 fee for that too.

Which is too bad, for it is a neat little device. The form function is nice and compact, and yet large enough to handle with ease. The built in keyboard would be perfect for typing up entries on a plane or train. Being all wireless is really killer. And the battery life seems pretty impressive by today’s standards (you sacrifice color for that battery life, tho). If I had a million bucks, i’d design something just like it, only it would actually be useful.

It’s A Family Thing

Thanks to never taking a day off from work, I find myself in the enviable psoition of having too many vacation days. So many that I’m looking for excuses to take a day off and do something, because I am going to lose them. One of those something is go to Boston to visit my three cousins that are not cousins (what does that mean? Well, that’s a topic for a later blog post.)

The important fact to note is that I’ve been calling the Boston cousin to find out a good date to head on up and visit. And she’s being all wishy washy about it all. Until Friday night, when it turns out that they are all having dinner together, witht their respective boyfriends (they’re all girls, I dunno why) this Sunday. Which is great, except for the little fact that it is way too last minute to take a vacation day.

Why, oh why, did I not get the call sooner? Because nobody made the final decision on the thing until the last minute. And because that’ the way we roll in our family. We never know if we’re going to spend Thanksgiving or Christmas Day together until the actual holiday. It’s very VERY frustrating.

Trouble With The Phone

When I was shopping for phones and phone plans, a question I got fairly often was why i was so obsessed with the text message options and no so interested in the underlying voice plans. It seemed very counter-intuitive to many people, some of whom got surprisingly upset over the matter.

The truth is, I’m not a big phone guy. i’m just not a big fan of talking on the phone. Without the visual cues or the multiple interactions of face time, I find telephone talk to be a rather unpleasant experience. It’ hard to say why, perhaps it is because i feel a bit of pressure to be “on” all the time. I tend to be a little rushed in what I say and usually end up saying silly wrong things all the time that I end up regretting. Perhaps it is because I often end up cutting off people in midsentence when I misread a social cue. Or maybe I’m just weird, it doesn’t matter the reason, the result is the same. I try to rush through the conversation, get to the point and then get the hell off.

Text messaging, on the other hand, is something that fits into my personality much more comfortably. It is significantly slower, and by virtue of that much less information rich. It is harder to pickup on social cues, after all, you cannot pick up on an inflection in text that you can through voice. But that also means people have to be more blunt, get to the point in 150 letters or less send another message. And I find I can still be more nuanced in what I’m trying to say, although my text messages tend to read like my blog, long and ponderously overbearing.

The problem, of course, is that people prefer the phone, the comfort of voice, over the cold quick nature of the text message and all it’s kid inspired (kidspired?) acronyms and shortcuts. But then, that’s only fitting, as I am a square peg living a world of round holes.

Merry Micro SD Card to Me!

独创Micro SD? Originally uploaded by YGGG.

I haven’t used one of my credit cards in about a year, it’s my emergency card in case a place doesn’t take my primary card. To entice me to use it, the card company sent me a $10 credit. And, sadly, it worked just like they planned. I used the card and the credit to buy a $19.95 MicroSD card. So now I owe the credit card company $9.95.But wait! I used it on the last day the credit was available (it had an expiration date, Dec 15th), so to further entice me, they gave me ANOTHER $10 credit on the next day (Dec 16th). Which means that I got $20 in credit applied to my $19.95 purchase! Free MicroSD card! Thank you Credit Card company!

Party Like It’s 1999

Apparently the last of the Big 5 music labels has finally thrown in the towel on DRM, which is a good thing. Explaining exactly why is a little difficult, especially to people who kinda missed the tech thing. I mean, DRM sounds like one of those good ideas that makes sense, only it doesn’t. Kinda like donating hair for cancer kids.

Artists make music. You buy music. Artist gets paid. You copy music for free, artist doesn’t get paid. DRM (Digital Rights Management) technology prevents you from playing music without proving you bought it. Sounds good, right?

Leaving aside the little open secret that artists don’t get paid when you buy their music (the labels get paid, but hardly ever the artist), it never made any sense from a consumer standpoint, and since that’s the guy/gal who’s paying the cash, it’s REALLY important to see things from their end. And to do that, let’s take a little trip back to the ancient past: 1950.

You see, in 1950′s they had these things. Your grandparents may have mentioned them on their knitting blog. They were called LPs (or records, or phonographic discs). They were big. And here’s the thing, they were player agnostic. They didn’t care that your record player was made by Victrola, Technics, or Westinghouse, they just played.

And then along came cassettes. And cassettes were cool because you could play cassettes a lot more places then you could LPs. You sacrificed a bit of audio quality, but you could listen to your tunes in the car, while jogging, at your desk, the kitchen counter, mugging people on the subway, etc. And it was all cool because cassettes were player agnostic too. They didn’t care which Japanese manufacturer (or RCA) played you used. They just played.

And then along came CD’s. And they were cooler because you could do everything you could with cassettes (except, at first, make mix CDs; but then CD-Rs came out and moody 16 year olds everywhere rejoiced) only without the hisses and pops and poor audio quality. And they too were player agnostic, they didn’t care which Taiwanese or Korean or Sony player you used, they just played.

And then along came digital music and the mp3 format, and it was the BESTEST. THING . EVER! You could play lots and lots and lots of music on anything (cellphones, iPods, computers, keychains, robots, etc) and you could even send music digitally over the Internets (all the cool kids called it the Information Superhighway back then). For FREE. And it plays on EVERYTHING.

And then things got complicated. Because, you see, that last part about mp3s, it turns out people were not buying them from Music Companies. Not because they didn’t want to, I mean, someone had to buy the CD to make the mp3 after all. Mostly because they were poor college kids that had no money to buy a price fixed $14 CD that cost the music company $0.14 to make, and you couldn’t buy online because the Music Companies had no clue WTF this whole digital revolution thing was (they still don’t, btw, but more on that later). So the market (that’s us) did what the market does, it created a service to fill a huge unmet need.

Napster was the first and best of the filesharing services. It could have been a great cash cow for the Music Labels, but they didn’t understand it. All it was was a directory. People had music files on their machine. People wanted music files. You typed in what you wanted, and Napster connected you to all those people that had it. Nowadays it’s much more complicated, but it’s still the same in a nutshell. Of course, the problem was that the Middle Man had been cut out, and they were REALLY unhappy about it. So they shut it all down.

Of course, that wasn’t the end of it. Morpheus spring up to take its place. Then Grokster, Limewire, Direct Connect, eMule, Bittorrent, etc etc etc. But the Music Labels needed some way to give people a legal way to buy music online.

And thus DRM was born (actually, it was born in 1998 when the DMCA law passed). DRM wraps your music in all sorts of restrictions that prevent you from sharing or copying your purchase, you thieving thief you. Which means it can only play a few places. Like how music bought on itunes can only play on your computer or on an iPod (and not just any iPod, only YOUR iPod). Or how your PlaysForSure can only play on your iRiver player, and not on that new iPod grandma bought you for Christmas, or those 40 Zunes you found in the dumpster behind Gamespot. And, for music that won’t play anywhere, including your own computer if the remote DRM server goes out of business, you get the added bonus of paying MORE then if you had just bought it the old fashioned way. Or you get a free computer virus/Trojan Horse on your machine! And over the past 6 years, the crappy options have grown to the point where Apple’s iTunes (which, btw, is a pretty crappy option. It reorders and moves around all your music, you can only buy at essentially radio quality, and it wraps its music in DRM to boot) has been the best least crappy option and has taken over the market. Apple has established such a dominant market position, that there’s only ONE way left to compete against them and have any chance of success.

And that brings us back to mp3s. Because, you see, mp3s without DRM play on EVERYTHING. So you can buy an mp3 music file on Amazon, and it’ll play on your computer. It’ll also play on your iPod, your Zune, your Clie, your cellphone, and even your robot dog. There’s a reason it is the preferred file format of music sharing sites since Napster. And one by one the Major Music Labels have folded, and started allowing retailers to sell their music in the mp3 format. Sony BMG was the last holdout, because Sony has always felt that your should have crippled music (they sacrificed the portable music player to Apple over it), and they’ve finally folded.

So, where are we today? We’re back at the 7th paragraph of this very long boring blog post. We’re back where we were in 1999. People like music, they like getting music online, and they like it to play on everything. The Major Labels still don’t get it, but for now they’ve been forced to see the same light was all saw back in 1999. People want music, and they’re even willing to pay for it. They don’t want DRM, and they’ll do whatever it takes to avoid it. And it only took 8 years to learn that very simple lesson.