Category: music

45th birthday

Yesterday was my 45th birthday. It was a pretty low-key birthday. I strayed from my diet and had a couple of slices of pizza for dinner, and I allowed myself a buttered roll in the morning, but I didn’t go overboard with anything. I had the idea today to look back on what I might have been doing on and around my birthday, since I started this blog. So here’s a pretty random list of stuff, assembled by looking back at my Blogger archives.

2003

  • I went to Comic-Con that year. (I was making reservations in March. I’m going again this year, after skipping it for a few years.)
  • I was reading Sinfest, which I haven’t been following lately, but is apparently still around (and still funny).

2004

  • I was reading “His Dark Materials“, and listening to Rum Diary.
  • I had just gotten the 90,000 mile service done on my 97 Civic. (I got my 2008 Accord inspected yesterday. It’s got about 45k miles on it.)

2005

  • Windows XP was giving me grief.
  • I was listening to Warren Ellis’ “Superburst Mixtape” podcast. (That’s long gone. He has a new one named SPEKTRMODULE now, which I’ve been listening to recently, and is quite good.)

2006

  • I was watching Samurai Champloo on Cartoon Network. (I have it on Blu-Ray now, but I haven’t gotten around to re-watching it.)

2007

2008

  • I got my first Kindle. I’ve since traded that in for a new one, but I still haven’t read some of the books I loaded onto that first one (and later transferred to the second).

And that’s about where I feel like I should end this. I’m feeling weirder than usual about my birthday this year, for various reasons. But I can’t complain. I’ve been able to spend time with several really good friends over the last couple of weeks, and I think I’ll likely enjoy this coming weekend too, so that’s all I can really ask for.

goodbye, eMusic

I finally went ahead and canceled my eMusic subscription today. Looking back at 2010, I only managed to get on there and download stuff four times, about 12 albums total. Given that I’m paying the monthly fee whether or not I actually download anything, that’s a bunch of money down the drain. Sometimes, if you don’t download anything for awhile, they credit you with a free month, but that only partially covers you, if you haven’t been on in three months.

Their new fee structure was the last straw. It really seems like I can do just as good downloading MP3s from Amazon, and only paying for stuff I actually want to buy. When I first signed up, back in 2001, eMusic was a pretty good deal — 40 tracks a month for $10. And, back then, I was actually getting on there every month, downloading stuff, and listening to it. At this point, even though I’m not downloading as much, I find that I’m not even listening to a lot of the stuff I do download. Looking at my iTunes library, I see stuff I downloaded in 2008 that I haven’t listened to yet.

There’s some good articles about eMusic up on PaidContent, if you want to look back at some of the changes they’ve made over the last couple of years.

Time to drop eMusic?

As eMusic Embraces Major Labels, Its Indie Core Is Leaving | Techdirt — I’ve been thinking about dropping eMusic. It might be time. I don’t get around to downloading stuff every month, so there are a lot of times where I’m paying the fee and not getting anything for it.

No more lala.com!


No more lala.com!
Originally uploaded by andyhuey

It’s official. Apple is killing lala. I used lala for a while, primarily for trading CDs. They stopped doing that a while ago, but continued to exist as a music streaming thing or something like that. I really never used it for anything other than CD trading.

Scottish people are cool

I just realized that I’ve been paying a lot of attention to Scottish people lately.

I don’t have anything useful or interesting to say about this.  Just, yay for Scottish people.