Thanks, Food, etc.
November 25, 2010
I started my first Thanksgiving as a citizen of the USA by reaching inside a turkey. Mercifully for all involved, the turkey wasn’t alive at the time.
I am thankful for many things. Food: I’ll eat a lot today. Family: it’s good to be with my family here, and I’ll call my family back in England. Opportunity to tell yet again the joke that Brits do celebrate Thanksgiving – on the 4th of July.
Back to food. One of the things I cook most often is pasta with what we call b-sauce. We call it that because it’s like bolognese sauce, but isn’t authentic. Today’s Guardian carries the reassuring news that “there is no definitive recipe for a bolognese meat sauce.” It provides several recipes, varying with respect to meat, vegetables, wine, whether there’s a dairy ingredient, etc.
My own recipe comprises, in order of appearance in the saucepan: onions, carrots, ground pork, mushrooms, tomatoes (crushed, canned), wine, salt, pepper, oregano. Talking of wine, I’m surprised that most of the recipes in the Guardian article call for white wine. I prefer to use red, have sometimes used white, but often have to resort to water.
All this reminds me of a recent (well, earlier this month) WordPress.com announcement: FoodPress. The site looks interesting, but could use a more prominent search box.
Wherever you are, I hope you also have much to be thankful for.
Isn’t it a little early for best of the year lists?
November 18, 2010
Best music of 2010? Isn’t it too early too tell, given that there are another 6 weeks of the year, and we could use a little time with music before picking winners? There are already so many lists that the Largehearted Boy list of best of lists is under way, with 9 lists being added today. LHB does a similar list of lists for books.
NPR’s All Songs Considered is in on the best of the year bandwagon. But so far, it’s only gone as far as a nomination-soliciting post on the show’s blog.
My own lists have been qualified with “so far” following “year.” I really can’t pick a front runner from the 9 albums currently on my list. Yes I, like NPR, and old-fashioned enough to think in terms of albums.
It’s a Beatle, Not a Cloud
November 16, 2010
So today’s big Apple announcement was not streaming iTunes, as widely predicted. It was Beatles music being available for purchase at iTunes.
Mashable Adam provides good brisk coverage. Comments on his post tend to be variations on the theme of “I’m younger than Steve Jobs, so I don’t care.”
CrunchGear’s Devin valiantly tries to explain why we care. “Being that the Beatles MP3 holdout is emblematic of the recording industry’s resistance against modern distribution methods, the way in which the Beatles discography will be made available should be telling.”
I’m inclined to think that those who really want Beatles music already have the CDs, while many of those who want the music in digital form without the hassle of a disc also want to avoid the hassle of payment. But the holiday/gift/rampant commerce season is upon us, so a lot of money may change hands.
I’ll be watching to see when and how the other music services announce: Beatles for Sale. As for Beatles music, I care enough to have allowed myself to be talked into a festival of Beatles cover bands (Abbey Road on the River, in DC earlier this year, and that’s Britbeat in the photo), and to be putting together a Beatles playlist/CD.
When it comes to the playlist, I’m surprised at how much Paul there is. When I think of the Beatles songwriters in the abstract, I think of Paul as sentimental, George as having penned a classic or two, and John as the man. When I listen to the music itself, I’m reminded of just how good McCartney’s best is, how annoyingly self-absorbed Lennon often was, and how Harrison doesn’t quite make the cut in that elite company.
My favorite few minutes of the Beatles come on Revolver, on which John’s “And Your Bird Can Sing” is followed by Paul’s “For No One.” The best of John (and a fine band performance) followed by the best of Paul.
Enough about the Beatles, lest I start sounding as old as Steve Jobs.
Music and Months of 2010
November 7, 2010
Elvis Costello’s National Ransom came out this week. If I made a list of the year’s music with as many entries as months so far, NR would make that list.
Yes, NR does sprawl, across styles, and for over an hour, but I don’t object. Neither do I object to the sprawl of The Suburbs (at least not to that of the album with that title) so Arcade Fire join Elvis at the recent end of the list. So does Richard Thompson, with another hour-plus album. I posted about his Dream Attic when it came out, and it’s holding up well after many subsequent plays.
That’s 3 albums to add to the 5 I listed at 2010′s 6-month mark. Add John Grant’s Queen of Denmark, which I missed when it came out in the first half of the year, and my favorites of the year list is up to 9 after 10+ months.
Amie Street is One Way to Amazon
September 8, 2010
Amie Street is a music download site with a business model I thought was brilliant, and Michael Arrington still describes as “awesome.”
Artists upload songs and those songs are free to download to start. As more downloads occur the price goes up. A cent, fifty cents, etc., up to $1… Over time a lot of artists tried out the service, songs were downloaded over 10 million times, and the company raised venture capital from Amazon and others.
As time went on, I developed qualms about the service. If tracks are $1, Amie Street is like lots of other ways to get music. What does it mean if a track is less than $1? That it’s not very good? That I can pay less for it, even though the artist probably needs the money more than those who command the full $1?
Anyway, the Amie Street service is closing down. So what happens to my account? I can’t tell from the site itself, which is currently offline for maintenance. Mashable Stan posts that I have until September 22 to spend my balanced (~$3?). It won’t be transferred to Amazon, which acquired Amie Street. But I will get $5 to spend there.
The Amie Streeters will now focus on the web radio platform Songza. So I don’t see this as a sad story, just as the end of a chapter in the big and growing book about music on the web.
First Swings With Ping
September 2, 2010
Yesterday, Apple announced bushels of stuff, including a music-based social network named Ping. It’s part of iTunes 10. Since iTunes is running on this very machine, I decided to upgrade and to try Ping. This despite the software’s assurance that 8.2.1, which I was running, is the current version of iTunes.
Anyway, I downloaded and installed iTunes 10. It took a while. I tried it. Like Brenna at Mashable, I am unimpressed. Apparently I’d be even more unimpressed if I was a musician trying to get set up on Ping.
I noted that Ping is a corner of the iTunes store, rather than a destination in its own right. So did Sarah at ReadWriteWeb.
I Googled Ping, and saw the golf clubs above the new Apple thing. So did Leena at TechCrunch, who remarks that it seems many seem to have found and signed up at Ping.fm on Apple Ping day.
So far, I find Ping to be a foolishly-named and uninteresting corner of Apple’s empire. But it’s a large and loyal empire…
New Stuff Tuesday
August 31, 2010
Tuesday (here in the USA at least) is new release day. That includes albums, in MP3 form as well as in disc form. It also includes books.
So I just bought the new album by my favorite musician, Richard Thompson. Dream Attic is like a live album in the most obvious way: it was recorded before a live audience. It’s the new RT album in that the songs are new, not having appeared on any previous album. It’s more like a live album in that RT stretches out on guitar more than on any of his studio albums.
Because of the guitar-stretching, the 13-track album comes in at 70+ minutes. For us old folk, that sounds like double (vinyl) album length. Slightly younger folks might note that it’ll almost fill the CD to which you burn it. Respectable folks will note that you should buy it before you burn it. You can do so from all sorts of places: Amazon, eMusic, RT’s own website, etc.
Those who understandably want to listen first can do so at AOL’s listening party – but, strangely, not at Spinner, which is owned by AOL, includes a new releases “listening party” and has a coolish name, as well as some interesting additional content.
Yet others might wonder what an album is, and how anyone could muster the attention span for over an hour or music by some greybeard. So the embed for this post is the 6-minute minimix.
Back in the real/analog world, I just got a package from Amazon including a couple of last Tuesday’s dead tree book releases: Mockingjay (The Final Book of The Hunger Games); and The Second Siege(paperback).
Happy new media day!
What the Nook? Second Thoughts on eReading
August 18, 2010
My e-reader quest started a few posts ago, leaning toward the Nook.Then there was the “reality in the form of DRM” post: so what if Nook uses an open format, if it also uses a DRM wrapper?
Slow learner I sometimes am, I installed Nook for Android. It struck out.
- The Nook app wouldn’t let me just read an EPUB already on the Android. It wanted me to sign on to Nook/Barnes & Noble first. Why? I just wanted to read an EPUB I already have.
- When I tried to sign on using the Barnes & Noble name/password I’d set up, and checked multiple times in Chrome, it rejected the login.
- When I reported this to support, I was sent a standard “Thank you for inquiring about Barnes & Noble’s policy regarding disclosure of customer information” email. Of course, that was irrelevant to my question.
I’m inclined to nix the Nook notion. I’m even relighting my Kindle consideration.
eBooks, Open and Closed
August 16, 2010
Here’s a book I bought decades ago, and thousands of miles away from Washington DC. I’ve read it more than once, my mother read it, and I’m currently reading it to my daughter.
If I buy an ebook today, will I be able to read it at a similar remove of time and distance: in 2040 in Sydney, for example? I doubt it. You may have gathered that I an among those who prefer paper books to eBooks. ReadWriteRichard provides 5 reasons to prefer paper, and comments on his post provide more.
This post is about ebooks. So isn’t just a rehash of the advantages of paper. That said, those decades with paper anchor my expectations about books,and those expectations carry over into the upstart format.
Make that upstart ebook formats, since there are many of them. In my previous post on ebooks, I decided that EPUB was the way to go, since almost everyone except Amazon uses it. The trouble is, almost everyone also uses DRM. So EPUB is an open standard that can be, and usually is, wrapped up in DRM, as Gizmodo explained earlier this year.
This means that I can’t buy an book in EPUB format and read it on my hardware or software EPUB reader of choice. Or rather, I can do so only under limited circumstances. For example, I can read a Sony B&N ebook on a Nook, but I can’t read a B&N ebook on a Sony reader. Or, when I Google anything to do with EPUB and DRM, I get a lot of links that seem to lead to instructions for stripping DRM.
This “Tower of eBabel” problem makes me think that my eBook era doesn’t need to start any time soon, unless I suddenly have to go on a long and bookstoreless trip. The prices of the books themselves aren’t particularly attractive, unless you have a free eReader. The selection has some surprising gaps, as well. For example, there seems to be no e-dition of A Wizard of Earthsea.
Even I Am an eReader Now
August 11, 2010
I love books, always have, and always will. So what about ebooks? I haven’t used them. I don’t like reading large amounts of text on a computer screen, and eReaders are too expensive for my taste: I like gadgets, but not enough to pay early adopter prices.
Now that eReader prices are moving down towards $99, I’m starting to consider which one to get, or at least to request for a present come December. Here are my main criteria.
- EPUB format support.
- Price.
- Easy enough on the eyes to actually read a book. I’m going to rely on reviews for this, since a quick in-store test-read won’t prove much about prolonged use.
The first criterion rules out a Kindle, tempting though the new Kindle Wi-Fi is at $139 on the price criterion. I don’t want my eShelf to rest on a proprietary format.
Almost everything else on the market does support EPUB, according to Wikipedia’s comparison of e-book formats. So it’s time to do some research on Nook and the like, or at least keep my eyes and feed reader open over the next few months.
I’m hoping for “a sub-$100 device with no connectivity other than a USB port”. The quote is from Joe Wickert, even though he has a Kindle in mind.
Since I’m going EPUB, I’ve installed a software eReader on my Android. I went with Aldiko, after reading Matthew Miller’s comparison of apps. That’ll get its own post soon.
In the meantime, any comments on EPUB readers and content stores are most welcome.
