ShitOuttaLuck

I’m totally hooked on it. I’ve been using Yahoo Music Unlimited since September of 2005 with my Creative Zen mp3 player. That device along with the service saved my relationship with Angela. See, at the time, I was making frequent trips to the local record shop to purchase my music, usually at a rate of 3 or more CDs a trip. For about $15/mo, I can download subscription-based music from YME, which reportedly has 2 million songs in their library (200,000 albums doesn’t sound as impressive).

Like I said, it saved my relationship, but it also saved me a load of cash and I discovered some new music in the process. But I’ve had it. Time to move on. Here’s why.

1. No way to unsubscribe from music. This should be easy. I download something I later decide is total crap. I should be able to delete the song from my library. No good. The next time I connect my device, YME downloads it again. If I cancel the download and connect the device later, YME tries to download it again. If I delete it from the device, YME syncs the music I hate again. I run YME on two machines, and one device. Between the three, there appears to be no way to get out of the infinite download loop of death.

2. Disappearing songs. Because this is a subscription service, I have to re-sync my device at least every couple of weeks so I don’t wind up in my car on a long drive with an mp3 player that can’t play any songs because the subscriptions have expired. Frequently, I’ve connected my device only to discover that the tracks have “gone missing”. It’s probably an issue with Yahoo and the label, but it’s frustrating to me nonetheless.

3. Hanging. Something in the software chokes when completing song downloads. If I have a queue on songs downloading, forget using YME for anything else. Once a song gets to the end of it’s download status bar, the application becomes totally unresponsive for sometimes minutes.

4. Crash of Death. This has happened on several occasions on both of my systems. When I try to launch YME, I get the Runtime Error crash of death. The only fix has been to uninstall YME completely and reinstall. Well, this is the last straw. I spent hours trying to get YME to work again, searching knowledge bases, scouring the internet, completely uninstalling and re-installing the software, deleting my IE cache, and going as far as searching for other yahoo related files and deleting them (apparently when you uninstall YME, Yahoo doesn’t think it’s important enough to clean up all of the crap they put on your computer). No Dice. So forget it. I’ve had it.

I guess I’ll be moving on to Urge now.

…but, you should read this book.

If you know me at all, you know I read a lot of non-fiction, and often when I turn to fiction it’s the stuff of Gore Vidal or James Mitchner, or even James Ellroy where the storyline is deliberately set within an historical context. Rarely do I recommend these books to other people. I understand that my taste in literature is not that of most normal people, and I’d never subject my friends to this stuff. That said, I just finished reading The River of Doubt: Theodore Roosevelt’s Darkest Journey by Candice Millard, and it was excellent. This thing was a page-turner. I couldn’t set it down.

This is the account of Teddy Roosevelt’s poorly planned and nearly fatal expedition to map an uncharted river deep within the Amazon. I’m not very familiar with South America, and this book got me really interested in Brazil and it’s history, especially Candido Rondon, a great explorer and the first director of Brazil’s Indian Protection Agency. Its motto: “Die if necessary, but never kill.”

Millard relates this story using accounts and diaries of the expedition party members, Roosevelt, his son newly engaged son, Kermit, Rondon, naturalist George Cherrie and others, giving you a sense of what each man was thinking and feeling as the expedition continued further down the river. With no way to turn back the men must face dwindling supplies, impassible rapids and waterfalls, an inhospitable jungle, death and even murder. This book also gets into the geography and ecology of the region, explaining why the river was so dangerous and why it was so difficult to survive in the Amazon, a jungle so dense that all the plant and animal life has become so competitive as to make it nearly impossible to find fruit, successfully hunt animals or catch fish, and where disease is a real and deadly threat.

Roosevelt never fully recovered from this journey and died 5 years later. Rondon went on to recieve his nations highest military rank of marshal and lived to see the state Rondonia named after him.

Download link
More videos at the Library of Congress.
Wikipedia entry: Roosevelt-Rondon Scientific Expedition

Ever feel like all the music you listen to is the same?  Turns out it’s all Pachelbel’s Canon in D major.

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This is exactly how I feel right now:

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Odds are it won’t snow in Oakland this year.

It was nice to see some in Colorado last week.

This is a display west of Boulder I saw when I went out by myself to get lost for awhile.  I couldn’t get away from the sprawl and the lights.  That said, these were lights I was happy to see.

I got out of my car and tried to snap off a few pictures with my gorillapod, but just as I was getting started, they all turned off.

Then it was pitch black.

Tom told me to check out The Decemberists a while ago. I did, but I couldn’t get into them. But today, I’ve decided that The Decemberists are really good. I’ve got a Decemberists station running on Pandora right now. Originally, I had a real hard time getting over Colin Meloy’s voice, and the band’s style which smacks of the Moody Blues at first listen. I was listening to the 20-minute ep The Tain, and suddenly, my brain switched – I think I dig them afterall.

If you haven’t tried out Pandora (www.pandora.com), you’ve gotta go over there and check it out. You create stations based on artists or songs you like. Then as it plays music for you, you rate the tracks. As your listening progresses, Pandora gets better at picking out songs that match what you want to listen to, based on the characteristics fo the music. It’s remarkably good at it – plus it’s free.

My grandpa passed away last week. I went to the funeral and spent time with family. That’s the best, really the only thing we can do. Be there, share, remember, think, comfort eachother. We’ve only got so much time here. I only hope to have a life as full as his.

I had been racking my brain trying to remember a joke he told me in September. He had been in the nursing home since June, but for some reason he thought to tell this joke he hadn’t told in years according to my Grandma.

Did you hear about the constipated jitterbug?
He couldn’t jit.

We miss you Grandpa.

I’ve been secretly working on this for awhile and wonder how long it’ll take for folks to notice our new digs.

Tom and Lance and Ted all swear by WordPress, so it’s only reasonable that I follow the crowd.  I actually have done quite a bit with DotNetNuke and while I think it’s an excellent application, especially for building websites, I was stuck with .Text blogs which were outdated – a fact that would only continue to make posting and any future migration plans impossible.  The blogging module for DNN is pretty nice, but it’s not got the hordes of users and developers that WP has.  At the end of the day, both systems have their advantages.  Don’t get me started about Drupal…

So enough nerding out for now.  I’m actually really excited about the prospect of being able to blog regularly once again, now that I have a cool new toy to post on.

Yeah, yeah.  Here come the I told you so’s.  WordPress is pretty cool, but there are some things missing that I sure hope I can find replacements.  Once I get it all together, I’ll be able to ditch the DNN 2 / .Text site we’ve been running for the last two years.