Oh my god! I was just randomly searching on the iTunes Music Store, and wanted to make sure my Hootie & The Blowfish collection was complete when I saw that they’d just released a new CD! Why didn’t anyone tell me Looking for Lucky was released on August 9th?!
Kiss Ass Bookmarklet Power!
Thanks to Jordan over at DownloadSquad in this post, I found Square Free’s Bookmarklets. These are some absolutely amazing JavaScript hacks and tools. Things like the JavaScript shell and environment might actually help me hate JS a little less the next time I’m forced to use it on a page!
I’d highly recommend you check out this amazing collection, even if you’re not a web developer. There are also several that will come in handy, just during normal web browsing…
The First Step in the Right Direction by… Microsoft?
It was on Slashdot earlier, so I’m sure most of you have probably heard about it already, but apparently Microsoft has broken off talks with several major record labels over the insanely large royalties they sought in a subscription-based music service offering by the Redmond giant.
The article says sources close to the talks referenced $6 to $8 royalties per user per month. Oh come the F on! How many songs is the average user going to download in a month? I’d be willing to bet they’d snag a considerable back-log of music during their first few months, then settle down to about a CD a month starting somewhere around their 3rd subscription-paying month.
That’s about 15 new songs a month, and they want $8 for the possibility that the user might download those 15 songs from a CD that was published by their label? We have a word for this where I come from: extortion.
I’ve been catching up on the back seasons of the Sopranos lately, and I swear I can see Pauly or Silvio saying something like this to a store owner. Look, you’re in our neighborhood… You give us our $6 to $8 a month, or we’ll make sure no one steps a foot inside your store.
I don’t know about the rest of you, but I think this could be a very good sign. The recording industry has gotten WAY out of hand lately, and it’s about time someone stood up to them and told them no more. Individual citizens refusing to give in to their extortion demands by taking the RIAA to court isn’t going to cut it… Microsoft, whose founder (and CEO?) is the richest man in the world, refusing to give in just might.
Here here Microsoft! Keep calling shots like this and employing cool people like Robert Scoble to spread the word about all the cool shit going on in your company (not to mention the better user-friendly and user-focused sides) and you might just win my laptop back when you release Vista! Isn’t it just amazing how, just when you started to count a company out, they come back and slap you in the face and get your attention; sometimes in the smallest of ways?
Back to Columbia Tomorrow (Uhh, Again…)
Yeah, once really wasn’t enough. On the 2 hour car ride down Thursday, Jeff and I were talking. At one point, we both just glance at each other and exchange one of those “I have a bad feeling about this” moments. Everything was planned out to the letter, we’d tested everything on our end, and we predicted smooth sailing. In and out by lunch.
WRONG!
We walk into the HR department, and are told everyone is in their conference room. As we walk down the hall, they shout out at us “You’re not going to be happy!”… We walk in and sit down to meet everyone and go over our game plan, only to find out that the entire campus (this is a hospital BTW) was down this morning with networking problems.
We groan and I trudge off to find an office to occupy for the morning, and check to see that the internet is up at the moment, so everything I need should be good to go. After reading their helpful company intranet page, I find out that they’re still having some issues at their remote data center, and are trying to get some of their servers back up, which are still having problems after the outages. No biggy, all I need is a ‘net connection anyway.
Welp, I spend my time from 10:15 to about 11:30 trying to get our VPN client to connect properly. I even go as far as pulling out my laptop and jumping on their ever-ready visitor wireless connection to make sure everything’s A-OK at home. Next we call up their helpdesk and get in touch with the desktop person that logged me in as an administrator so I could install the software in the first place. I start blabbering out stuff about my suspicions that it was their firewall blocking access, since I was able to connect just fine using my laptop over wireless. It doesn’t take me long to realize that she doesn’t have a clue what the hell I’m talking about. She does desktops, and I’m sure she does them very well, but firewalls and routing just aren’t her area. In our small company, we all have at least a vague idea of what’s going on, but it’s not fair to expect that from people at a company employing thousands across the state.
After about 15 minutes and no return phone call, we call the desktop girl again. She says she checked, and that she doesn’t think there should be any firewall issues preventing us from connecting, but says she can’t get anyone to help us right now, because they’re all still going ape-shit over network problems at the data center that have services down for multiple hospital campuses.
To be continued…
Weblogs, Inc. Now Owned by AOL?
Well, I certainly didn’t see THIS coming…
Jason seemed to be doing so well on his own with his massive blogging network, that I didn’t see them being bought out / sold to anyone, much less AOL. Hadn’t we all counted AOL (and parent company Time Warner) out of the ‘net revolution?
Jason briefly mentions being at AOL, but not why on his blog.
Thanks to Weblogs Tools Collection for letting us know what the hell’s going on…
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