Posts 883 to 890:

Hawk Mountain Photos

I just posted photos of our Hawk Mountain hike from the other weekend.

Posted by Anthony on reply

Experimenting with AdSense

I just signed up for AdSense, Google’s ad program.  NoDivisions gets about 150-200 unique visitors per day and I’m curious to see if that is at all monetizable.  Right now I’ve placed the ad-box at the bottom of the navigation pane; I plan to leave it there for a few weeks, then move it higher up for a few weeks to see if/how that affects the click-through rate.  But I doubt I’ll be happy with it at the very top of the nav section, before any of the actual navigational elements, so I may switch to a 3-column layout to have a little more flexibility there.

Posted by Anthony on 4 replies

New Music: Patrick Nissley; Snow Patrol

Patrick Nissley is one musician I can’t stop listening to right now.  He’s actually the brother of my friend Andy, which is the only way I ever would have discovered him, and that bothers me because his stuff is so good that he should be extremely well-known.  Unfortunately that’s not how the music industry works, but I digress.

Patrick’s music is largely electronic, but it’s not techno really, and not really electronica, or anything like that.  Trying to describe music in words is always hard, and not really necessary when you can just instantly listen to the music to see for yourself, but I do want to say that while the music itself is good, the vocals are extremely strong and good.

So, on to the music: Andy sent me 2 unfinished recordings that Patrick made a while ago, called October and Prove.  When I contacted Patrick to ask if I could post these on my site, he basically said "sure, but those aren’t finished..."  Trust me, download them right now, because they are probably ten times better than whatever else you might happen to be listening to right now.

Patrick has only 3 songs that are publicly available that I know of: they are all available on MySpace, which sucks, but at least he did enable the "download" option so you don’t have to go back to the MySpace page every time you want to listen to them.  The first song is Everywhere Everything, released under the name Monodramatic, and the other 2 songs are The Waiting Time and The Lovers Dancing, released under the name The Takeover (which is actually a whole band and not just Patrick making all the music 100% himself).

Update: Patrick’s current band is called Inner Party System (or maybe it’s InnerPartySystem with no spaces).

The other band that I’m playing nearly nonstop right now is the pop/rock band Snow Patrol.  Apparently they toured with U2 on the Vertigo tour, and had a song on the TV show Grey’s Anatomy last month, and have a couple singles on the radio, but I had never heard of them until someone uploaded one of their songs onto my FileChucker demo.  I’m hooked on their album Eyes Open, which you can listen to some of on their website.

Posted by Anthony on 1 reply

More New Get-A-Mac Ads

Apple has 3 new Get a Mac ads and they’re even better than the last ones.  My favorite lines are from "Out of the Box":

PC: What’s your big plan?

Mac: I might make a home movie, or maybe create a website, try out my built-in camera; I can do it all right out of the box.  So what about you?

PC: First I gotta download those new drivers, then I gotta erase the trial software that came on my hard drive...

Mac: Sweet.

...

Mac: Let me know when you’re ready to go.

PC: Actually, the rest of me is in some other boxes, so... I’ll meet up with you later.

These played fine under Firefox/Linux, but skipped horribly for me on Firefox/Windows.  In case you have that problem too (or if you just hate inline videos like I do) here are direct links to the ads:

Out of the Box Touche

Work vs. Home

Posted by Anthony on 3 replies

Relocation

I’m thinking of moving this site from nodivisions.com to antio.net.

The nodivisions domain name has served me well, but ever since I purchased the antio.net domain last year, I’ve been wanting to do something more with it than just have it be the address of my home network.  I just think that "antio.net" is so short and so cool, and I feel like I’m letting its full potential go to waste because no one except me ever uses it.

There are quite a few pages on the internet that link to nodivisions.com, so I’d still maintain this name for at least a year, and maybe indefinitely.  It would simply auto-redirect to the corresponding page on antio.net.

Any thoughts?

Posted by Anthony on 4 replies

Apple Throwing Its Weight Around

Apple has been in trouble lately in Europe, because the songs they sell on the iTunes Music Store are locked by a DRM scheme that makes them unplayable on any Digital Audio Player except the iPod.  When the average Joe goes into Best Buy, he can purchase any one of a bewildering array of makes and models of DAPs, of which the iPod is only one; but if he purchases one of those non-iPod devices, then the songs he buys from iTMS won’t play on it.  That’s stupid, and I know at least a couple people who’ve been in exactly that situation, so I can see why governments or trade groups are mad at Apple over it.

But according to a recent article on Ars, Apple may also be in trouble in Norway for a different reason:

Quoting Ars Technica:

Norwegian law provides a "cooling off" period after a purchase, during which the consumer can opt out of a transaction and return the merchandise for a full refund.  Needless to say, there’s no cooling-off period in iTMS’ terms of service.

Now that’s really stupid.

This is 2006.  You can’t just take old laws that applied to physical goods and slap them onto digital transactions without considering the differences between the situations.  In particular, digital goods (like music files, video files, and computer programs) are fundamentally incapable of being returned.  That’s because there’s no way to guarantee full return of a digital product; the merchant has no way to be sure that the consumer has deleted the original file, or that he hasn’t made any copies of it.

In general, I’m a big fan of the whole idea of return policies.  But when the product is instantly available with just a few mouse clicks, when it’s something that you’ve most likely already heard before, and when it costs 99-freakin’-cents, then I think that 1) the consumer needs to show a little restraint and take responsibility for his actions, rather than having a government force companies to give him a "cooling off" period, and 2) anyone who’s pretending that it’s a big deal to not be able to return a 99-cent song needs to just stop pretending.

Posted by Anthony on 3 replies

Giving

Thought for the week from church yesterday: when we give (in tithe, or to charity, or just in general), God doesn’t consider the amount we give as much as the amount that’s left over.

Posted by Anthony on reply

Goodbye Gentoo, Hello Ubuntu

I think I’m officially switching from Gentoo Linux to Ubuntu Linux.  Despite having what can only be described as one of the dumbest names imaginable, Ubuntu (that’s oo-BOON-too) seems to have largely achieved the holy grail of Linux computing: it just works.

I downloaded its single-CD installation file, booted a system with it, and within an hour had a completely up-to-date Linux desktop.  Checking the "sync with time servers" box on the Date/Time dialog actually works, with no need to manually install/configure any NTP nonsense.  It comes with Firefox, Gaim, and OpenOffice right out of the box, and you can install new packages from the GUI with automatic dependency resolution.  It even auto-updates just like Windows and OS X.

I’m sure I’ll be writing more about this, but for now I’m in shock and had to put something up quick.  It’s just so exciting to see a Linux distro that is both simple to install and simple to maintain.

Posted by Anthony on 8 replies

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