In November 2001 I had just migrated from BeOS to OS X and was sorely missing the ability of my MP3 player to broadcast my home collection to work (see iTunes Needs Streaming). All the hubbub surrounding the new iTunes music store has eclipsed the news that it’s finally possible to do exactly that. I’m sitting at work right now listening to my home MP3s, and haven’t dropped a frame in two hours. All 16,000 tracks are immediately available, with all the usual search functionality. All my playlists (both standard and “smart”) are available. I’m in hog heaven.

If you set sharing on in the prefs, you can also provide a direct link into any point in your collection — Cmd-Click and select Copy URL. philm points out that it’s also possible to link to specific items in the iTunes store. Check these examples.

Day before yesterday woke up with a tearing, stabbing sensation in my lower left abdomen. Decided to ride it out and see if it went away. Very low energy yesterday and then this morning it was still there but accompanied by dry heaves (urrrggghhh) and other nasties. We read online that appendicitis usually shows the cramp first, nausea later. Even though the appendix is on the right, Amy insisted that I go to the ER this morning. Spent half the day in a hospital bed on an IV drip. No clear diagnosis. Possibly a torn muscle from an intensive sit-up workout two days ago (but why would that only be on one side?), possibly diverticulitis (distention or displacement of a hunk of intestine, possibly infection). My labs came back clean though, which pretty much rules out infection. Sent home with Vics and slept the day away. Now the nausea is mostly gone, but the pain mostly remains. Weird to have the day blow up like this, so out of the blue.

A few follow-up thoughts on the iTunes integrated store:

- Some comments on last night’s post led me to check out eMusic and yup, it’s very cool. Great service. But for me (and I suspect many others) the integration of the store into iTunes just makes sense and is going to result in me buying more music. Possibly a lot more. I don’t know how or why — it just feels much natural to use that little iTunes search window I use all the time to search on music I don’t already have than it is to go to an external web site. Also, the flat rate at eMusic means I would feel compelled to spend time surfing for music whether I need music this month or not. Don’t have much time for that these days and prefer not to feel compelled to shop.

- There are a dozen arguments we can level against the first incarnation of the service (not available internationally, only offers Big Popular music), but the fact is that the war between The Labels and The People over digital music downloads has been going on for several years now, with no signs of abating. What we need are major steps toward compromise, so the labels, the artists, and consumers all get what they want. This is what that compromise looks like. Not perfect from every angle, but also better than what we have now, ie bidirectional animosity and ongoing war. The service will improve over time. It just launched.

- Several complaints about albums costing too much to purchase digitally. Yup, that’s true, I’d agree with that but add that half the point here is that you don’t have to buy the album - you buy the tracks you like. If you want the whole album, why not just buy the CD? On the other hand, if they can offer substantive discounts on whole albums, I would be more inclined. Just saying that my approach has always been to purchase the whole album if I want the whole album and download songs if I just want songs. Nothing about this store changes that.

Anyway. Despite its imperfections, I still think this service is going to make huge inroads towards cracking the great nut of electronic music sales. Done right, everyone wins.

Just spent half an hour surfing through the music store built into iTunes 4, and gotta say, it’s an intoxicating experience — like hanging out at the headphone station at the record store listening to sample tracks, except that the UI responds faster and there are way more albums. Around 200,000 tracks from the Big 5 labels to start with. Initial observations:

A) This changes everything. Someone had to “go big” and make a play for the paid music download proposition, and do it right. That someone may as well be Apple, and sure enough, they’ve done it right. The associative power between artists, genres, tracks, and databases of “what other people bought” is incredibly powerful. Throw in the ability to sample the first 30 seconds of any track and you get a very addictive, shopper-friendly experience (.99/track). In 10 minutes, I decided to purchase the music of Jack Johnson and Diana Krall — two artists I had thought of idly in the past without tasting.

B) Decided to, but couldn’t — a bug in confirmation of billing details for existing .Mac customers made damn sure of that.

C) 200,000 tracks is not really that many, and naturally, my favorite artists are not represented by the Big 5. “Beefheart” turns up nothing. Even artists as significant as Air are nowhere to be found. Similarly, only Radiohead’s lamest album (”OK Computer”) is present. Somehow, it’s more exciting to browse and be excited by the possibilities than it is to search for what you really like. But as a commenter at MacSlash put it:

Are you all retarded? The reason they used the top 5 lables is because they are THE TOP 5 LABELS. This is an opportunity to make money, not appease emo-pop indie geeks.

Exactly. And it’s probably a no-brainer that Apple will at some point offer a submission mechanism for “indie” artists. Meanwhile, it’s about time someone created a simple mechanism for people to get off on quick-n-easy music downloads without simultaneously reaming the very artists they allegedly respect and support. Turn that beat around… got to hear per-CUSSION!

I’ll test the new AAC codec support later.

Rick Santorum (R-Pa) has no problem with homosexuals — it’s homosexual acts that get his knickers in a knot.

And I have no problem with someone who has other orientations. The question is, do you act upon those orientations? So it’s not the person, it’s the person’s actions. And you have to separate the person from their actions. We have laws in states, like the one at the Supreme Court right now, that has sodomy laws and they were there for a purpose.

So it’s fine to be gay, just don’t be having sex! He goes on to discuss “man on dog” acts and more with the AP reporter. Hey, you elected him (well, not YOU you, but you know, “you”).

Just plugged my server, monitor, modem and router into a Watts Up watt meter borrowed from Berkeley’s Sun Light And Power. The goal is to see how much power this machine chews in a month, then purchase solar cells, inverter, and battery backup to match or exceed. Going by initial conversations, should be able do this relatively affordably, even without feeding power back to the grid (if you want to see your electric meter turn backwards, the investment swells considerably — we’ll start small).

“What’s this weird connection between fans of Star Trek, S&M, and the Renaissance Faire?”

This is Margaret Cho, apparently describing my next-door neighbors. Had never seen her before; rented both of her shows and watched with Amy this weekend. “I’m the One That I Want” by far the funnier, more cohesive, more involving. “Notorious C.H.O.” more like straight stand-up, less funny. But she is so honest, so gregarious, just so … willing to mock her family, it’s mesmerizing.

History as though seen through the eyes of Fox News. Bril.

Speaking of Fox, there was hardly any mention of the fact that Bill O’Reilly was pre-empted throughout the entirety of the Iraq war. Lord, sweet respite. Did Fox feel he was just too inflammatory to be set loose on such a sensitive subject? He’s the network’s biggest draw, and it was as if they just decided to put a lid on the garbage can for a few weeks.

Jon Lebkowsky has been blogging highly detailed notes from O’Reilly’s Emerging Tech conference all week. Not so much futurist stuff but very smart people pulling the big picture of the new social computing into focus - RSS, Wikis, FOAF, hive mind, open spectrum, mesh…

Clay Shirky on social structure in social software:

Why do we have weblogs now? Why did we have geocities instead? We didn’t know what we were doing - it took a while to realize that conversation was better than pictures of cats. We’ve internalized, now people are building, and what they’re building is web native. A weblog and a wiki is web all the way in… lightweight, loosely coupled, easy to break down and extend.

Andrew Orlowski slams the conference, then Tim O’Reilly rebuts the slam. Boys, boys.

In SF last night on the way to see Hedwig again with friends (show closes May 11 and is tremendously entertaining — GO!) and passed a guy with random wares spread out on the sidewalk in one of those makeshift yard sales. Amongst the usual raft of items: twine, coverless book, rabbit’s foot, pen stolen from the bank with chain still attached, was a shiny new… AOL 7.0 CD. Yup, for sale. The entrepreneurial spirit runs high. I wondered how much he got for it.

Put iPhoto’s slideshow feature to the public test last night. Mimi Chakarova came back from India with hundreds of incredible images (not yet online). Arranged them in iPhoto 3 and added another hundred slides of text blocks - captions, poems, etc. Set the interval and timed the segments, then ripped chunks of audio tracks in iTunes and stitched them together in QuickTime Pro. Told iPhoto to use the resulting audio track as the sound track for her album. The result was an absolutely breathtaking 25 minute presentation, which we output through a high-quality projector and very good speakers to a room of around 100 people. Went off without a hitch. Nobody was more amazed than her - she had never done anything remotely multimedia before, but pulled this off in two days with about 30 minutes training.

Listening tonight to the alternatingly sweet / heavy, intense / broadway, pastoral / political voice of Nina Simone, who passed on yesterday at age 70. Saddened not just at her death as I am always to see the great masters peeling away, one by one. Great music still rises up to take its place, it’s true, and I don’t want to come off like I romance only the past, blind to the present, but I always want to ask, who will be this generation’s Nina Simone / Sun Ra / Django Reinhardt? History is one-way and I don’t hear world-changing music anywhere around me.

Yahoo! has more.

What the… ?

Why has iSync got its fingers in Safari’s bookmarks? Don’t see any evidence of them on my iDisk, iPod, or in iCal. Theories?

A year ago, posted about baald and his chicken head motorcycle helmet. Then recently, doing research, stumbled entirely by accident on a blog entry by a guy I knew back in Boston — Tim Anderson lived in a cramped hollow in an MIT building and built robots and 3D scanners and held amazing show and tell nights… and now apparently has turned his genius toward kiteboarding — here he is with chickenfoot foot pads and a hand-crafted chickenhead hood. That’s two chickenheads in my life, neither edible.

One of the take-home lessons of this war (for me) has been that it hammered home the gulf of coverage between television and the internet. With two 24-hour news channels and all the hundreds of embedded journalists at work, one might hope to have heard hundreds of meaningful perspectives. And the funny thing is, if TV was your only source of news through the course of the war, you probably felt that you were hearing lots of meaningful perspectives, that you were, on the whole, getting fair and balanced coverage.
(more…)

On the heels of the death of diet guru Robert Atkins, let us bow our heads a moment in respect of other bizarre things dietetic.

Though I was too young to appreciate them for what they were at the time, I very clearly remember that my grandmother had the complete set of Mid-70s Weight Watchers Cards. My brother and I used to paw through the collection when bored while visiting her house. I think that in my mind, this was her parallel of our collecting baseball or Star Wars cards. From the site:

These cards mystify me. None of them have calorie or nutrition information of any kind, and in some instances it’s hard to tell what’s dietetic about the recipes at all, except that they’re unspeakably grim. And yet also, completely insane. They appear to be from a much kookier era of Weight Watchers.

While you’re in the mode, don’t miss James’ Gallery of Regrettable Food. Oh, and these reviews of 20 cheap beers is, um, mouth watering.

Great parody of the original anti-drug site. In this version, cars and driving are cast as dangerous drugs threatening the emotional and physical health of modern teens.

I’ve been driving for 20 years. I wish I never started. It destroys your body little by little. If you’re a kid and reading this, start learning how to live car-free now, you’ll thank me later.

I work with some very pro-car people, which makes for some… interesting lunch conversations. One of my coworkers is so adamantly anti-bike that he feels they should be confined to sidewalks. I feel society should bend over backwards at every opportunity to accommodate bicycles. You can imagine how that discussion went. Let’s find out who’s right for once and for all by conducting a rigorous scientific poll, shall we?

Responding to suggestions that Dubya’s administration is more an extension of the Reagan cabinet than of his own daddy’s admin, Reagan’s son Ron Jr. says “My father crapped bigger ones than George Bush.” Such eloquence, such a lovely homage to history and family pride.

…

What I hate about the thought of war being a permanent human condition is that it forces me to think of it as normal, and I don’t want to.

…

A bit after the fact now, but the Iraqi Information Minister’s spinning made Bill O’Reilly’s look like child’s play, and put Steve Jobs’ reality distortion field to shame.

How many of these pictures did you see on Fox or CNN?.

Was it worth it?

I have been trying to imagine what an embarrassment this whole thing would be for the administration if the bulk of Iraqis did not welcome their new freedom (even if it has been expressed primarily as chaos up till now). What would we have? ~1,700 dead innocents, no weapons of mass destruction, broken trust worldwide, and a $20 billion bill (+ $2 billion / month ongoing)…. Does the administration appreciate just how lucky it is they had the liberation card to play at the last minute? Without it, this would be the most unmitigated of disasters, on all fronts. With it, they are apparently emboldened.

Check out megnut’s Iraq War Justification flowchart.

I run an intranet and a staging server on non-standard ports (8000 and 8080). This works great for our internal purposes, but every now and then a student will want to show a work-in-progress to an external organization. And every now and then, that organization lives behind one of those Stalinist corporate firewalls that blocks everything but port 80, which means they can’t access the content, which means the student comes to me baffled, I explain the situation, and no one understands what I’m talking about. Somehow it always comes off as if I’m the one blocking the traffic. Ports are hard to explain to non-tech people. If I ask them to ask their sysadmins to back off a bit and open up traffic on these ports, I always get the same “we don’t do that for security reasons.” Well, duh.

Does it really make security sense for organizations to blindly block everything but port 80? The internet runs on ports. It’s all about ports. There’s got to be a more sensible way to accomplish your security goals than to slam the door in the face of other services. Are they being paranoid or am I expecting too much?

Chris points out that 8x more Americans are killed by something called Septicemia every year than have been killed by terrorists since 1972, and rightly wonders why we are at war. Hmmm…

New Safari beta out yesterday… maybe this will quiet all the tab freaks. I started using Safari as default browser with the first beta, so I’m not in the “is this good enough to switch for?” camp. Of course it is. One complaint about the tabs implementation though: Having trouble getting used to the fact that Cmd-click opens the link in a new tab but doesn’t bring the new tab to the front — Cmd-Shift-click does that. Cmd-click has always opened a link in a new window in IE, Chimera, Safari… so this seems like a departure, an unwelcome extra step. Is there a UI reason for this? Anyone else have trouble with it?

Update: Aha — in the prefs, turn on “Select new tabs as they are created.” Enabling this option changes both the behavior and the hotkey mapping, so all stays copacetic. Bril.

Last time we were in Arcata it was to meet Peter Palmquist, the patron who offered to publish Amy’s book just because he felt her work deserved to be seen. This time it was to attend the memorial service following his passing. An amazing afternoon - around 300 people gathered in a 1930’s theater in Northern California to discuss and herald and joke about and commemorate an obsessive life spent collecting and cataloguing early California photographers and women in photography. An incredible cat. We can all hope to leave such an impression on the world.

Rained almost the whole trip, but it felt appropriate and it felt great. Hiked in the glorious giant redwoods with Amy and Miles, ate sushi from Tomo, walked along the beach in the dense mist, splashed everywhere we went. After the insanity of the past six weeks (both in our personal lives and in the world) this was exactly the washing we needed.

You know Spring has arrived with vigour when ivy crawling the outside of the house becomes overzealous and finds it way into your office. Don’t tell our landlord. This wouldn’t have happened if we had prevented the ivy from becoming enmeshed in the shingles to begin with. But we’re suckers for inflourescence. Amy found the creeper and truncated it outside the house. Life support pulled out from under it, the indoor tendril collapsed a few hours later.

I know, the J-School should be all paneled out by now, not to mention weblogged out, but lo, another good webcast tonight:

Weblogs are mainstream, and they are changing the way we manage knowledge, work and communicate. On Thursday, April 10, join panelists Dan Gillmor, Scott Rosenberg, Donna Wentworth and others at the J-School in exploring how this change continues to affect academia, journalism, business, and society.

Just upgraded QuickTime Streaming Server to v4.1.3, and the initial load latency has been drastically reduced — no more 5-7 seconds of buffering before stream starts. Not quite sure how they accomplished that, but it’s impressive.