the art of writing is discovering what you believe
Sounds like a counterpart to the very serious Joe Lieberman. :
And to paraphrase the horror movie genre, is Craig really gone even now or has he merely entered the shadowy ranks of the unresigned, destined to walk the earth for eternity tormenting his party?
I dropped my RAZR V3c in the lake the other week and was able to get hold a of a replacement, via FreeCycle. I now have a Samsung A670. Getting it activated was one phone call to Verizon and another to do over the air programming: simple as can be, and did much to rehab Verizon’s reputation with me.
As for the phone, I’m unimpressed. Oh, sure, it works as a phone, but the interface is way clunkier than any of the Motorola phones I have had (the past 3, if memory serves). The camera is useless, since you can’t get the pictures off without paying Verizon for the privilege. And the camera can’t be used without using one of a selection of really cartoony shutter sounds. So it’s a great handset for 12 year olds. The ringtones are not much better.
The ability to synchronize my contacts, ie the phones numbers I actually use and no longer remember, would be nice. Samsung and Verizon differ on that, apparently.
Still, can’t complain too much considering it was free, even though that’s the same price I paid for the RAZR, the V265, and whatever I had before that.
I’m going to keep on eye on eBay for a decent used RAZR. Looks like they come in well under the $100 that Verizon wants me to pay for a replacement, and all I need is the phone, not the charger or manual. Any reasonable BlueTooth phone would suit, though.
If I am reading this right, Apple is on the verge of selling one million iPhones. Today they announced new pricing that cuts the price by $200. Looks like Apple made close to $200,000,000 just by exploiting the demand for their latest product. And they’ll still make money at the new price.
Sometimes it’s good not to be first in line.
These look nice, don’t they?
According to this, I’m an iPodClassic kinda guy. So what is it have now? An iPod Prehistoric? I mean, 10 GB, monochrome screen, non-clickwheel? One step removed from coal burning . . . .
And the 80GB model is the same price as my 10GB model was, 4+ years ago.
Rick Rubin – Recording Industry – Rock Music – New York Times:
From Napster to the iPod, the music business has been wrong about how much it can dictate to its audience. “Steve Jobs understood Napster better than the record business did,” David Geffen told me. “IPods made it easy for people to share [listen to — ed] music, and Apple took a big percentage of the business that once belonged to the record companies. The subscription model is the only way to save the music business. If music is easily available at a price of five or six dollars a month, then nobody will steal it.”
For this model to be effective, all the record companies will have to agree. “It’s like getting the heads of the five families together,” said Mark DiDia, referencing “The Godfather.” “It will be very difficult, but what else are we going to do?”
Rubin sees no other solution. “Either all the record companies will get together or the industry will fall apart and someone like Microsoft will come in and buy one of the companies at wholesale and do what needs to be done,” he said. “The future technology companies will either wait for the record companies to smarten up, or they’ll let them sink until they can buy them for 10 cents on the dollar and own the whole thing.”
And when you consider MSFT’s excellent customer-focused history, I don’t know if things will be a lot better.
A great article: I’d like to be Rick Rubin when I grow up.
on the idea of a clothing line to be worn during labor and delivery:
I mean, if a woman still has to worry about her appearance when pushing a bowling ball through her vagina, what hope is there for us to escape an appearance-focused sexualizing and objectifying society?
More on Craig’s (un)resignation:
[Senator] Craig is like a senatorial Wile E. Coyote. He’s fifteen feet out past the edge of the cliff on the criminal procedure front. The only reason he hasn’t fallen yet is that he hasn’t looked down.
In response to my mention of a hankering for a bass, my neighbor hauled the four-string version of this (think: longer and without a whang bar) out of his archives and bestowed it on me.
It plays well enough for me, that’s certain. It’s a tad quiet and I suspect the electrical innards need cleaning up, but it seems to hold a tune just fine. It’s ridiculously light, being a hollowbody, so no risk of putting my legs to sleep while I explore what it can do. I’ll have to run it through an amp and see what it sound like: my cigarbox amp speaker is too cheap to handle those tones and plugged in to Garageband, it doesn’t seem loud enough. Time will tell.
Thanks, Josh.
And this is what it sounds like: