Month: August 2007

Song vs. Album Listening

I was listening to Slacker this afternoon and Brain Damage came on. As it ended I was reminded that Dark Side of the Moon is meant to be consumed as a whole. Plucking individual songs for play doesn’t work very well.

Before iTunes, many kids listened to entire albums or cassettes or CDs. Sure, you probably bought the album for the popular radio hit but it wasn’t uncommon to discover songs you liked as much if not more. For example, the radio hit off Dark Side was Money and it’s probably my least favorite song on the album. Had I only had that song to go on, I probably wouldn’t have thought to try out the album.

I wonder if something is lost by not listening to entire albums like I did with Dark Side. Maybe I’m wrong and it doesn’t really matter much. Maybe good music good regardless of what song precedes or follows it.

But I can’t imagine listening to the Beatle’s, “A Day in the Life” without the fantastic lead in from “Sgt. Peppers” anymore than I can imagine listening to “Eclipse” without the lead in from “Brain Damage“. Alan Parsons knew what he was doing.

Dsotm

Windows Vista quote of the Day

From Tom Halfhill from Maximum PC who recently helped his brother purchase a new computer:

Vista Premium was “preinstalled” on the hard drive, but it took nearly an hour to book and configure itself during the first powerup. Heck, I remember when clean-installing Windows from floppy disks took less time. For hours afterward, Vista’s pop-up dialogs nagged us for permission before allowing trivial actions. But when I accidentally bumped the hair-trigger power button on the computer’s front panel, Vista promptly shut down the system without asking for confirmation.

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Slacker Desktop Radio

I wrote about Slacker radio a while back and how much I enjoyed the ability to listen to a number of excellent radio stations at work. Back then my only complaint was that the service was browser based which meant that occasionally I’d close a window and bring the music to a halt.

Well today I noticed that Slacker has released a stand-alone application called the Slacker Desktop Radio. It looks nearly identical to the web version but is able to be minimized. I’ve been using it all day and find it well designed, stable and packed full of great music. I like the options better than those found in iTunes.

I still listen to my favorite playlists of MP3s but Slacker is a great way to find new music or listen to songs that are not in your collection. Highly recommended. You can download it here.

The October issue of Maximum PC names Slacker one of the best 15 web apps – “Forget Last.fm. Never mind Pandora. Don’t even think about iTunes. If you want the ultimate in fully customizable Internet radio, get your slackin’ ass over to Slacker.com…”

Here is the full sized version of Slacker Desktop

slackerapp

Here is the mini version

slackersmall

Donkey Kong and the Classics

I’ve been playing some of my old MAME32 games like Donkey Kong, Donkey Kong Jr. 1943 Battle of Midway, Galaga, Mappy and Xevious. I especially enjoy the Donkey Kong games.

These old games from the early 80’s bring back a lot of good memories. I dropped a lot quarters into Donkey Kong when it first came out. I spent a lot of time attempting to get past the “pie level“.

One thing that makes these games fun today is their accessibility. I can fire them up for 30 minutes and still have a lot of fun. I don’t have to invest hours before getting anywhere. They don’t require any patches or downloads. I don’t need a cheat book to make it past the third level. There’s a simplicity that’s been lost with many games today that cost fifty bucks.

donkeykong_big

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Wii passes 360 in worldwide sales

Take a look at the chart below which represents total lifetime, worldwide sales of the big 3 consoles. (Found at VGChartz)

A few thoughts come to mind:

  1. The 360 has bombed in Japan. Less than 500K sold.
  2. Imagine how much further ahead Wii would be if they were available. They are still hard to find most places.
  3. Sony is barely in the game. Good thing they still have the PS2.
  4. Looking only at Japan sales, the Wii beats the combined sales of Sony and Microsoft.

It’s funny to see Nintendo and Sony swap places going back just a couple of years. Nintendo has shown that innovative games still rock and will sell well. People will pay to be able to play franchise games like Zelda and Mario that aren’t available on the other consoles.

I love seeing Nintendo kick some Sony and Microsoft butt. Nintendo is also the only company to make money selling their console. Both Microsoft and Sony sell theirs at a loss. Nintendo is in a good position to further their lead over the next year. Sony has no momentum and Microsoft is taking a $1 billion hit to replace defective 360’s, effectively scaring away many potential buyers.

Update: Microsoft wireless racing wheel overheats. Someone needs to start a contest to see who can guess the next 360 part to overheat. My money is on the HD-DVD player.

ng_sales

Jumping through hoops at the Horizon Fitness website

Our Horizon treadmill that’s about 16 months old stopped working last week. I went online and found the Horizon website. After looking around for a bit I located the section where one can request service.

Check out the service request page below. I get the feeling that Horizon is making it as difficult and time consuming as possible in hopes that many owners get frustrated and just leave.

The service request form asks for information pertaining to where I bought the treadmill which is fine although why would they think I’d have their phone and fax number let alone the STORE EMAIL??!! How would I know what the store email is and why would Horizon make it a required field? I think I know why.

This is the 2nd time I’ve filled out the form. I filled it out last week and never heard back. I’m going to call them tomorrow. Whatever bucket the service requests are making it into via their website isn’t being checked. It’s a black hole.

Nice work, Horizon. Do you think I’ll ever recommend your products?

horizon

Joel says Office 2007 box has learning curve

Office2007box After watching a coworker spend some time figuring out how to open a box of Office 2007 Pro I understand Joel’s frustrations. I don’t know why Microsoft decided to get all cute with their boxes, but isn’t the idea to make it as quick and painless to get to the product for your customer who just shelled out hundreds of dollars? The Office 2007 box looks like a book with its curved edge. If it looks like a book I’d assume it would open like a book. I guess not. For the most part, I’ve liked using Office 2007. Outlook works quite well and I really like Excel 2007.

Joel also had this to say about Vista. I couldn’t agree more.

I’ve been using Vista on my home laptop since it shipped, and can say with some conviction that nobody should be using it as their primary operating system — it simply has no redeeming merits to overcome the compatibility headaches it causes. Whenever anyone asks, my advice is to stay with Windows XP (and to purchase new systems with XP pre-installed).

Apple clutter vs. PC Clutter

What a great picture showing a major difference between a Mac and a PC.

My PC’s cable management looks a lot worse than the PC in this picture. Kim has the Dell 410 and it doesn’t look this messy because we keep the computer on the floor and drape the cables off the back of the table facing the wall.

But the new iMac does look very elegant as one would expect. But it still seems strange to me that when the iMac become out of date I’d have to toss the whole thing, monitor and all. My experience has been that my monitors usually outlast my computer by at least a generation or two. imackeyboard_4_20070807

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WordPress blog in 5 minutes

I was chatting with my mother-in-law tonight and she was asking questions about my blog and explaining some of the limitations she’s run up against hosting her blog on Blogger. I decided I’d get her up and running on WordPress.

A few years ago it might have taken hours to get a WordPress blog The image “https://i0.wp.com/www.asuperhost.com/asuperhost-pics/fantastico.gif” cannot be displayed, because it contains errors.running from scratch. Tonight it took less than 5 minutes. Here’s how I did it:

  1. Logged into my control panel at Bluehost which runs my website and this blog.
  2. Added  domain to my account and parked it for ten bucks.
  3. Used Fantastico to install WordPress 2.2. This is one slick utility. Creates the MySQL database and user account.
  4. Updated WordPress theme.

It was quick and painless. I spent a little more time adding a few more plugins and importing her posts from Blogger which worked very well. She downloaded Windows Live Writer which would install on her XP machine but when it tried to configure her blog setting would error out (missing some attribute) and close down. Installing it on her Vista laptop took care of the problem, but it was frustrating since it worked fine for me on XP.

But overall it was still easy to get everything up and running.