Birthday Blahs

What is it with Birthdays? I mean, what are we celebrating? It seems to me that after 29 or 30 it gets kind of silly. When you're a little kid you run around the yard with your little buddies, eat cake and ice cream, and pose for pictures with mom and dad. Those days were great. However nowadays a birthday is just another year closer to....well, you know.

Yep, yesterday was my birthday and much to my annoyance everyone knew....thanks Rhonda :P

Coming to an MP3 player near you

More news from Napster...they are hacking the MP3 format to restrict where and what you can do with MP3's. This includes prohibiting uploading MP3 music to your Rio that you paid for on their new subscription service. This sounds a lot like what the recording and movie industry tried to do in the 70's when recordable audio and video tape came out.

Only in San Francisco...

Every once and awhile a story comes out that make you think "Only in..." Well, this is one of those stories. Da' Mayor has been granted a restraining order against a stalker that dresses like Elvis. Maybe the King really is alive.

Napster as we know it died today

Yes, I admit it. I am shamelessly sucking down files from Napster tonight...getting all those hard to find live bootlegs and those long since out of print albums from the late 70's and early 80's. I have said on numerous occasions that Napster is the one great equalizing force in music today which takes all the power away from the record labels and puts it squarely in the hands of the consumer.

With Napster we the music listening public can sample the odd song, decide we like or don't like it, and if we do can go out and get the album from this new band we like. This doesn't necessarily translate into ripping off Metallica, but instead hooking up with an emerging artist like Roger Gillen, or a new band that has that one hit that is being pushed.

Instead of having the next Spice Girls pushed down our throats by some mindless A&R exec at a major label because trend data says it will sell we get to choose because we can swap files.

Today's decision, along with the earlier BMG deal, has effectively killed Napster.

so, O.K. where are those photos you promised?

I am sorry to say that all those gorgeous images are still sitting on my G4 in siteSatellite's office partially color corrected in PhotoShop. The last 10 days have been absolutely insane, filled with deadlines, and packed with late nite work sessions. I have the template section to support the images built and hope to have them up on the site by the middle of next week.

Photoshoot

Last weekend I was down in Monterey on a landscape photoshoot. I finally offloaded the images from my E-10 camera. This shot was taken in Point Lobos overlooking the Carmel Monestary.

In the next few days I will be posting some of the images from the shoot on the site. However, you'll have to wait for the really cool stuff to be posted to Momentary Shadows. Yep, I have something special in store for that site.

An Ode to Blogger

Blogger, which is used to power this site along with a great number of others out there in the blog nation has run out of money. The company laid off their staff last Friday. The company now consists of an employee roster of one and a bunch of servers. A public wake is now being held at Metafilter.

The service is still running and Ev assures all Blogger users that the service will continue despite the crisis. However, I am now forced to look at the alternatives for this site and may be looking at a fundemental shift of purpose for this here domain. Hopefully this will not come to pass, but a little reflection is good anyway.

In the meantime I will continue to update this site with my wry brand of web insight and occasional rants as long as Blogger holds out.