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A few weeks ago I bought some CDs through an Amazon z-shop. Turns out that one of them, Dismemberment Plan‘s Emergency & I, was misprinted (all the graphics and printed material was of the CD, but the audio of DP’s new album Change – which I already had), and since it would have cost me a few bucks and standing in line in the post office to send it back and get it all dealt with, I e-mailed the label, DeSoto Records, and they ended up sending me a replacement, which was really cool of them to do. Somehow, I doubt that any major label would do that.

The album is very good (as is Change). I’d definitely recommend giving it a spin if you’re of the Indie Rock persuasion (some MP3s on epitonic, and their website for more info).

Just when you thought radio couldn’t suck more, Clear Channel is willing to prove you wrong. Enter… Quick 106.

Muse.Net (feel free to use

as a referer)

has gone public today. Pretty much what I expected. The agent installs on each of your systems w/ MP3s and streams from there. The Muse.Net servers act to collect and centralize the information as well as to organize the songs. There are some interesting possibilities involving roundtripping that infromation… Overall, pretty cool. First month is free, after that it’s $12.95 a years. The price of one CD for a something neat to fiddle with.

Right now the organizing display/metadata is pretty anemic, but it’ll be interesting to see what’s going on under the covers. One thing that is pretty disappointing is that there doesn’t appear to be any method for sharing of music. If you think about fair use, you should be able to ‘lend’ a song to a friend to listen to. Personally, I think that’d be a killer feature, even if you put in locks to approximate physical lending (ie, you can’t stream it while a friend is streaming, only people that you put on your friend’s list can stream, etc. etc.). But yeah, there are enormous pitfalls involved. No need to kill a project before it gets started. As a web service, I’m hoping that the primary feature thing they work on is making this a great music metadata recognition and organization tool. (It’s a great problem to tackle and no one has really done it that well yet.) Once that foundation layer gets done, it makes everything else much easier (whether you’re talking about finding more music that you might like, or people who listen to the same music as you do, or generating mixes that sound good, etc.)

Interesting graphs and charts and twiddly things on video card analog output quality.

Ha, America’s Army is going to be available on the 4th of July.

I’m sure this says something about the gov’t: The government said the phrase “under God” had minimal religious content.

Man, all these people in capital hill up in arms about the Pledge of Allegiance ruling (the “Under God” wasn’t even added in until campaigning by religious groups in 1954, see history). Our sock puppet president chimes in declaring that our country needs “commonsense judges who understand that our rights were derived from God.” While historical revisionists of the Christian right (you know, like those Creationists) like to claim that the United States was founded as a Christian Nation (most accounts say otherwise). Possibly also of interest: Words of our American Founding Fathers, Notes on the Founding Fathers and the Separation of Church and State, The Founding Fathers on Church and State, The Faith of our Founding Fathers, American Masonic History

Aaron Boodman has posted a screenshot of Muse.net (coming Monday apparently). This is a web based mp3 organizind application which is SOAP based and w/ an open API that looks like it does some very cool stuff (very similar to the stuff I’d started working on, but much farther along). The great thing is the open API however. Once of the developers is Ian Rogers, who used to work at Nullsoft.

Here’s Ian’s Music Collection and a link to the Muse.Net PHP SDK. I’m really interested in the project, and would be interested to know if they plan on having different pricing schemes for where your tracks are being stored / streamed from and if you just want to do digs with their API’s?

You know, I’ll take a few minutes off from working and just take some time to mention how incompetent the external design firm we’ve contracted at is. I’ll say that I was actually pleasantly surprised by the quality of the HTML/CSS code delivered to us. It’s pretty good, and one of the few things they’ve delivered that I’ve been happy with. Surprisingly (for such an established firm) it’s been the visual design that’s been supremely lacking. Things like missed deadlines have been pretty bad (we’re talking about several months of slippage with constant promised (and missed) deliveries), but the amount of bad design is just inexcusable. A style guide that was promised has yet to be created, and it’s obvious from what we’ve gotten, both in terms of design comps and even final code, that there has been little thought given to design consistency. As late as 2 weeks ago, new visual elements were being introduced, and there was no stable visual language as far as line widths, font sizes, color, etc. When they delivered two of their ‘final’ templates earlier this month, there were entirely new elements that we had never even seen before, much less approved.

What spurred me to take the time to write though is that while I’ve been working on these things pretty heavily the past few weeks, I just noticed that the colors in the CSS files are completely different shades than in the HTML of the templates. I have no idea what kind of crack they’ve been smoking over there, but I’m sure it’s some good shit.

God Netscape 4 sucks. It turned 21 bytes of static structural markup (thats an h3, p, and hr tag) into about 700 bytes of table and spacer image code (generated from a php function now to avoid nesting problems and (thinking positively) gives us an easy way to dump all this extraneous table code when, one day, in the far future, the administrative bigwigs upgrade browsers…). Damn you browser, why won’t you die already?