Indeed, Smoque is delicious … Oh may go there tonight now . .
I didn’t have much time in town, but I did manage to get a tour of the Tribune building (amazing lobby!) from my pal Kevin who then took me to Wrigleyville for the best BBQ I’ve ever had at a place called Smoque. Also had a nice dinner with Harper from skinnyCorp and his friends.
Go ahead and read about Microsoft’s Live Mesh Inititiative (http://blogs.zdnet.com/microsoft/?p=1355) and tell me how it’ substantially different than .Mac which has been around since 2002.
I don’t want to rain on their parade or or anything and it does seem to have a modern spin on the concept - but it looks like .Mac, basically.
I was a big fan of the Amazon MP3 store when it launched. It has a great selection. It works on any device. There is no DRM. The tracks are high quality. It finally provides competition to iTunes.
So I started talking about it, recommending it to friends and family and bought a few tracks here and there, mostly dropping iTunes Music Store purchases.
Between buying actual CD’s from music stores and from the artists themselves where possible (think Radiohead, NIN, JoCo), I had only made a few purchases from Amazon MP3.
But there are a few problems with the service:
Browsing. Amazon MP3 and other music, kinds of gets lost with the rest of Amazon’s items. If I’m looking for “the Power of 8” by Cloud Cult I don’t want to sift through all items with the terms “Power” and “8” as part of their metadata. In iTunes, the same search gets me exactly what I want in one step.
Download Problems. I have ordered probably 20 or so tracks from the Amazon MP3 store and not had any problems. Today when I was getting ready to order a few things and my first purchase crashed and burned. I never got the AMZ file and the store told me that I had already download it and couldn’t download it again. In contrast, between me, my wife and my son, we’ve probably downloaded around 1,000 tracks in the last few years and never, ever had a single problem. To Amazon’s credit, I called their customer service and they were able to reset my download in less than 3 minutes. Still I had the same problem with one last track I purchased. Instead of calling again, I just found the song out on the Internet.
So, I think I’m done with Amazon. It was a good effort, but not enough. I’ll go back to iTunes for my digital music purchases. ITunes is inferior in many ways to Amazon - but there’s much less friction to its use.
Things I threw away today:
- MS-DOS 6.22
- Windows for Workgroups 3.11
- Borland C++ 4.5
- Borland C++ 5.0
5, Kings Quest 2
6, Kings Quest 3
- Kings Quest 4
- Kings Quest 5
- Space Quest 2
- WordPerfect 5.1
- 3 Computer Cases
- 2 Motherboards
- Misc Peripherals
- Misc Cables
Something I held on to (I don’t know why):
Noted gun nut, Charlton Heston died last week. What I did not realize about him was that he was active in the Civil Rights movement in the sixties, demonstrating along side his colleagues, Sidney Poitier and Harry Belafonte.
So, I’ll choose to remember him in this role. In the grand scheme, I think the world is truly a better place having him in it.
(via: http://undercoverblackman.blogspot.com/2008/04/charlton-heston-1923-2008.html)
By my reckoning, at the end of my second class year, I had marched enough extra duty to take me to Baltimore and back seventeen times — which, if not a record, certainly ranks somewhere very near the top.
—
Yeah - well - I’m not going to vote for the guy - but he is actually more favorable to me and not less because he’s not made of plastic.
John McCain - “Service to America” U.S. Naval Academy
This is interesting. McCain is basically doing a personal history tour—and there seems to be a lot of misspent youth on it. He still has a reputation for angry outbursts and overreaction. There may be still be an ego thing going on.
I don’t know that such a tour is a good idea. When I look at where McCain was when he was near my age, I’m not particularly inspired to vote for him. I like the story of the rough kid who came out alright in the end. It’s a good story for a senator or a lawyer or even a general. But for a President?
(via squashed)
