Cornelius – Sensuous

Some nifty videos from the new Cornelius album can be found here. I really enjoyed Point, and this stuff sounds pretty good too. Point came out in the US on Matador, but I don’t see any indication that Sensuous will be coming out in the US any time soon. I do see it available as an import on Amazon.com, at a variety of price points, the cheapest being a little over $20, available in early January.

The Small Street Journal

BusinessWeek has an article about the changes coming to the Wall Street Journal in 2007. I had a suspicion that something was changing, since I got a letter in the mail today offering a year’s print *and* online subscription for only $99. Usually, the online subscription alone is $99. I’ve had an online subscription for a few years, but I let it lapse a couple of months ago. I may sign up for the new deal. It’s been a while since I subscribed to an old-fashioned daily paper. Not that I’ll have time to read it.

ACM

I’ve been playing around today with the online book access I can get through ACM. You can get access to about 500 books from Safari and 400 from Books 24×7. Mind you, there are thousands of books on the main Safari site, and thousands more on the main Books 24×7 site. A regular Safari subscription is $20 per month, and Books 24×7 is about $450 per year, so both those options are a bit expensive. There are some useful titles among the limited library of books available through ACM, but not too many recent ones. For instance, there’s a good bit of stuff on .Net 1.1, but very little on .Net 2.0. I don’t think I could just stop buying computer books, based on the selection available through ACM, but there is some good reference stuff there. There’s also not much you can do in the way of printing from either service, within the ACM section. Still, I’m going to try to keep this stuff in mind before running out and buying any more computer books, and I’m going to try to remember to seach these services the next time I’m trying to solve a programming problem.

more Christmas music

And just to get carried away with the whole Christmas music thing, I also just downloaded the bonus tracks from A Charlie Brown Christmas that are available on eMusic. (I downloaded the original album from them a couple of years ago.) And A Bing Crosby Christmas, just to use up my remaining credits for the month. Boy howdy, I’m in a Christmas mood now!

yet more Wii stuff

I feel a little silly for posting so much Wii-related stuff over the last couple of weeks, but not silly enough to stop doing it, apparently.

  • It looks like getting a GameCube WaveBird controller is probably a better idea than buying the Wii Classic Controller. It’s wireless, and it should work with all GameCube games and (I think) all Virtual Console games. (And it’s not impossible to find.)
  • I started messing around with the Wii’s ability to send and receive e-mail today. It’s not a tremendously useful ability — I’ve already got at least a half-dozen e-mail addresses, and it’s really not a problem to check any of them from my living room. But it’s kind of neat to be able to send & receive e-mail on a game console.
  • Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess was in stock at Best Buy today. They had the strategy guide too, which I must say is the thickest game guide I’ve ever seen. (This may have been the “collector’s edition”, so that may explain the extra thickness.) I managed to resist buying them, by reminding myself that I haven’t finished Final Fantasy VIII, and I still have FF IX and X on the shelf. I just read a very positive review of Zelda, though, so I’m going to just have to keep reminding myself: I have no time for another gigantic fantasy RPG right now!