4 posts tagged “technology”

Not at all happy with eMusic today, as I discovered that starting next month they're going to cut my download allowance in half.  Or double the price, whichever suits you better.  I've been using eMusic off and on since 2003 and a member continuously since early 2005 and I think this is a pretty shitty reward for my loyalty.

I do understand the soundness of this repricing as a business move, as eMusic is finally deploying itself to move out of 3rd place behind iTunes and Amazon.  To this end it's finally doing business with major labels (specifically Sony) and promises that formerly out-of-reach artists like Springsteen and the Clash and Beyonce will soon be available.  Now, Ms. Knowles I give not a fig for and I already have everything I want by The Boss and the Four Horsemen, so I can't say I think I stand to benefit much by this development.  But I'm glad that my scrappy little eMusic is ready to play with the big kids, and they're going to be getting a whole lot of new customers who generally don't give a fig for the Cold War Kids or Six Degrees Records while still appreciating the low impact on their bank account.

I just wish there was some sort of grandfathering plan for long-time members, which would IMO be truly in the indie spirit eMusic's operated under until now.  But no: instead of the 65 downloads/month I've been getting for $15 - cheap! - I'm only to get 37.  (Not even 38 - fuckers wouldn't even eat half a free download!  Argh.)   Which comes out to something like $.43 apiece and compared to the big kids is still cheap, but am I mollified?  Not by this.

Neither by eMusic's version of easement, which is promising a one-time bonus pack of 25 downloads sometime in August.  Almost an insult when I remember it was a no-limit service back when I first signed up.

OTOH, they are instituting album pricing.  Finally.  No album will be charged for more than 12 downloads, no matter how many tracks are involved.  This helps - just a little.

All this aside, I'm sticking with eMusic for the immediate future.  Not just for the price, but because the selection is enormous and as a service it's the best way I've found yet to discover stuff I'd never hear of otherwise.  And even with the changes I still think they've got a better business model than their competitors.

For now, anyway.  Because loyalty is such a fickle thing when it goes unrewarded for too long.

P.S. I know that as news this price increase is almost a month old but I just found out about it two days ago, and rather circuitously at that.  eMusic certainly didn't go out of its way to inform me.  Which is another reason I'm not at all happy with it.

The iBook has gone into the shop for the first time since I got it and even though it hasn’t yet been even 24 hours I miss it very much.  Last week it started making an odd low-pitched whirring sound whenever I picked it up and tilted it and at first I thought Aw, no panic, it’s three years old and due for some hardware complaints and then I thought Oh my god, it’s three years old, when does my Applecare run out?

Saturday, as it turns out.  Apple really screwed up on this one.  The machine is supposed to make noises a couple of weeks after the coverage expires, not before.

Anyway, it’s now at Mactronics just on the other side of the (newly-named) Ann Richards Bridge, a.k.a. site of The Great Pepper Spray Fest of 3/20/03.  The desk person listened to the whirring for a few minutes and said it might be the hard drive and then asked the inevitable and usually much-dreaded question: “Is all your data backed up?”

Well no, not on that one.  That’s my travel machine now and everything of import gets migrated to the desktop sooner or later.  Or at least I devoutly hope that’s the case here.  Nothing to really worry about until I get the diagnosis later today anyway.

It would of course be too much to hope that things inside that little white casing have suddenly gone so wonky that Apple offers to replace it with a brand-new MacBook.  Sigh.  There are times when participating in the reality-based paradigm is such a drag.

Old and dependable though the iBook may be – it’s a 1.33ghz 14” with about 5 months of the original Applecare left so if anything is going to go wrong it better go soon – that doesn’t mean it doesn’t want to dress up pretty.  So I got this handy skin from Decalgirl and put it on over the weekend.  

The few times I’ve already taken it out in public it gets a lot of looks.  I don’t understand this – I mean, why a customized laptop-surface should be such a rarity.  Austin may be the laptop capitol (and Apples seem to comprise half of those on display in the coffeehouses) but I hardly ever see any with serious mods made to the casing.  Sometimes people put stickers on, or a splash or two of paint, but not much even of that and never, ever, a full skin visible.  Here they like them naked and dull.  What is it, something about an anticipated lowered resale value?

Decalgirl, a small company based in Delaware, makes some great skins and is overall good to deal with: excellent customer service, fast order processing and shipping, and reasonable prices.  The only quibble I have is given my experience with their iPod skins, the “easy peel-off” claim may not be 100% accurate.  But with my hardware skins are meant to be kept on anyway so it’s not a deal-breaker.

The skin neatly clings to the raised, glowing Apple logo and no light shines through.  That's some pretty heavy-duty vinyl, I guess.  The outline of the logo is visible in relief from certain angles, but overall it's now well-hidden and I'm glad to feel just that little bit less a corporate shill.  Even if it is my favorite corporate Kool-aid distributor.

Bonus cute-kitty picture today, Malcolm passed out on the couch as a rainy day warrants.  A few minutes after taking this I tossed him outside when I left for work.  Sounds heartless, I know, but I left butter out to soften for a grilled-cheese at dinner, and he's proven to have quite the fondness for raiding the counter and scarfing down whatever part of the stick is available.  He weighed in the other day at 13 lbs.  More exercise and less dairy product is what he needs.

(Props to Adam Rice for turning me on to Decalgirl a couple of years back.)

I don’t believe I’ve outed myself on this site as a total Apple-head, one of those fearsome Kool-aid drinkers you hear about, but I am.  OK, I let the cup pass me by when it comes to the iTunes Music Store and those supremely obnoxious Justin Long TV ads, but otherwise I'm all about the little white fruit logo.  

The first time I used a computer 20 years back it was a Mac, and the interface immediately made perfect sense to me.  A few months later I went to work in a PC-based office, which in 1988 meant DOS, and I hated the character-driven interface from Moment One.  Why, I wondered, would anyone subject themselves to this torture when they could be using a GUI instead?  (Not that I knew then it was called a GUI, but never mind.)  I’ve been one of The Cult from then on.

Given that, you’d think I’d be camping out in front of the Barton Creek Mall store waiting for my new iPhone tonight.  Well… no.  I don’t want any part of it.  In fact, I’m just a little bit nervous about what’s going to happen over the next few weeks once the iPhone becomes available.  I think there’s too much expectation, and chances are the product isn’t going to live up to it, and we’re going to hear a lot of forecasting (again) about how this is a big mis-step on Apple’s part and it’s probably going to kill the company and blah blah blah.  Which would be bullshit, but that doesn’t mean I want to hear it nonetheless.

Problem is, the consumer public with its microdot-size attention span sees the possibility for something new that’s as exciting and devotion-worthy as the iPod, and that’s what it wants.  Wants badly.  We love the iPod, love it to death, love it so much that we want something that’s going to replace it because we also love to believe that our lives can be changed (meaning improved) by a single piece of hardware.  But that’s not going to happen here, or certainly not immediately.  It seems already forgotten that the iPod, ubiquitous though it is now, didn’t really take off for at least two years after its release.  It took that long to get enough of the bugs out that it was mass-appealable.  (Those pastel Mini colors quite possibly made the difference.)  Don’t let all those pretty commercials fool you – the iPhone isn’t as ready for prime time as everyone wants it to be.  It can't be, simply by weight of expectation.  ("The Jesus phone"?)

If I do get one it won’t be for a long while.  It's not so much that I'm broke, or happy with my current wireless provider (though I am, both); it's that I’m pretty low-tech in these matters.  I've only been using a cell phone at all for 3 years and was absurdly happy a year ago just to get one with a color screen.  While it’s my only phone since I ditched the land-line, I don’t talk much on it because I’m essentially not a yakker.  It’s got no camera, no games, no dipshit personalized ringtones, and so far I don’t care to learn to text.  Web-surfing?  Fuhgeddabouddit.  I got a nice, dependable old laptop for mobility.  

It’s an iBook, of course.