Rick's World

I have mixed feelings about iTunes. I like it as a music management application, but I do not like it as a music store. Why don't I like the iTunes Music Store? Read on...

There are several problems with the iTunes Music Store (ITMS). The first is price. Yes, 99 cents a track is cheap. This makes it useful on a 'singles' basis. I firmly believe that buying single tracks from ITMS has become the new 'singles' market. In the old days you would go into the store and buy a single track on either CD or tape. That way you wouldn't have to spent the $10-15 on a CD if you only like one song. Now you just go to ITMS, spend a buck and you have the song. The problem is, what happens if you DO want the entire album? Whenever you buy an album on iTunes, all it does is basically buy all the tracks from that album at 99 cents a piece. Multiply 0.99 times the number of tracks on a CD and you can easily top $12-15 for a single album! The more tracks on the CD, the more expensive it is. This is completely opposite the way it works if you buy the CD in the store. These days, most CDs can be bought for around $10-12 in the stores. That price is no matter how many tracks are on the CD. It could contain 5 tracks. It could contain 500 tracks. It doesn't matter. It's the same price. This is where iTunes is lacking. I can kind of understand the need to charge 99 cents for a track if you are buying a single track. After all, you are buying these tracks with a credit card, and there are per transaction costs for processing credit card transactions. However, if you are buying an entire album, that is still a single credit card transaction. There is no need to build in that extra cost into every track on the CD. This is one reason, I am in favor of switching iTunes to a variable price model. If you are buying a CD, it should be possible to discount the price considerably. This discount should be relative to the number of CDs you are buying at once. If you are buying a single CD album, sell it for $7. If you are buying a 2 CD album, sell it for say $12. If you are buying a 10 CD audio book, sell it for say $30. Apple needs to undercut the music stores for prices of entire CDs. This move would greatly increase the already large number of tracks they sell. If they did this I might even consider buying CDs. As it is now, ITMS is more expensive than buying a CD in the stores. What's the point in spending more to buy something on ITMS when you get less? You don't get a CD (a convenient storage medium for the music if nothing else), you don't get the liner notes, (which often contain the lyrics to all the songs - a nice feature), you don't get a nice CD case. You even get a lower quality recording on ITMS versus the CDs you buy in the store...

This leads me to my other problem with ITMS. The music quality is greatly inferior to the music quality of the same song purchased on a regular music CD. Most ITMS songs are recorded at 128kbps. This is considerably lower than the recording rate of a music CD. I've had long discussions with a musician friend of mine. He doesn't understand why so many people would buy what is clearly inferior music from ITMS. The quality of the music just isn't there. I believe that the reason that ITMS tracks sell so well is that they are 'good enough' for most people. Most people, myself included, would not even be able to tell the difference between an ITMS song and a song directly from a music CD. A musician would. Apple needs to start increasing the recording rate on their tracks to at least 192kbps. I suspect that this would be relatively easy for Apple to do, on a going forward basis. As I understand it, Apple doesn't actually 'rip' all the songs to music files that it sells on it's service. Instead it provides software to all the music companies to do this. This means that all the music company has to do is feed music CDs to this program and it 'rips' the CDs to music files. These music files are then sent to Apple for posting on the site for sale. All Apple has to do is change the default encoding rate on their CD 'ripping' software to a higher bit rate and then ship this out to all the music companies. From this point forward, all new music would be ripped at the new, higher, default bitrate. I imagine something could be arranged to re-rip the old tracks too.

I've had a lot of problems with the Apple products I've bought over the last year or so: A dead iPod, a dead Powermac, a 'flaky' iPod Shuffle. Pretty much every Apple product I've bought over the last year or so has had a problem that required me to bring it in for service. And yet, I still love their products. Why? In a word - service!

Apple's customer service has been, without fail, fantastic. Their employees are always friendly. They don't talk down to you. They don't seem annoyed that you are 'bothering' them with your problems. They are very helpful and they do their best to solve your problem with the minimum of impact to you. When my Powermac broke down, it was in service for a week. When I got it back, it worked perfectly and all the data on my hard drive was intact. I lost nothing. If you sent a computer in for service with most companies, they would just give you a new computer and get rid of you. This would mean that you get a new hard drive and you would lose everything on your hard drive. For most people, this can be a disaster. Apple appears to have a standard policy that if you bring in a computer for repair, they will backup all your data for you in the process. A nice move. Later, after getting my Powermac fixed, I discovered that one of its two processors was not functioning. I was essentially running on half the computer I should have been. Apple's customer service promised to order me a new CPU and let me use my Powermac in the meantime, so I wasn't going to be without it. I may have only had one CPU working instead of two, but the machine was working enough to be useable. The fact that they were considerate of my need to have a working computer in the meantime was another nice sign.

A couple of months ago, my 4th generation 40GB iPod died. I brought it in and they replaced it with another one. The one I gave them was nearly a year old and badly scratched up. The one they gave me in replacement was a refurbished one, but you would never be able to tell. It looked brand new! It didn't have any scratches at all. For all intents and purposes, they gave me a brand new iPod! Yes, I had to restore all my music to the new iPod, but it was all in my iTunes library, so with 5 minutes of effort, everything was back. A couple of days ago, my replacement iPod appeared to die as well. Last night I took it in to the Apple store to get replaced, but oddly enough, it decided to work perfectly when I tried to show it to the Apple tech! The battery was very low when I showed it to him, to the point that it wouldn't even come on for more than a couple of seconds. Strange how it refused to work at all when I had a problem with it. Maybe the battery was just so low that it wouldn't turn on. *shrug* It works now.

I've also been having problems with my iPod Shuffle. Ever since I got it, it's had a weird problem where you plug it into the computer and it will be detected. It comes up in iTunes and works fine. After a few minutes, though, it mysteriously dissapears from iTunes even though it is still connected. The computer seems to lose track of it, even though it is still connected. This has been happening increasingly over the last few months. I never brought it in to get serviced because honestly there was no need. The battery life on that little thing is so good, I could listen to it for weeks or months on end without needing to plug it in. The Shuffle is very much a load it and forget it kind of iPod. I mostly use it as a workout iPod. I put on a collection of songs to listen to at the gym, hop on the treadmill, hit shuffle and off I go. I don't have to load things on it very often, so it was never a big issue. I finally decided to get it fixed because with my other iPod seemingly dead and my new Shuffle acting up, I was without music! I took this down to the Apple store and they replaced it without any fuss at all. I took it home, reloaded it, and charged it and now I'm back to full 'power' with my music! Gotta love that!

Yesterday, I spent most of the day at the South Florida Auto Show. I got there at 11AM, right as they opened, and didn't leave until 4:30PM - 4 1/2 hours of nonstop walking, sitting, standing, etc. Frankly, I wasn't that impressed with the show this year. There didn't seem to be much different from last year. All the cars looked just about the same as last year.

I looked at the 2006 Honda Accord. I have a 2005 Honda Accord and I wanted to see what was different. So far as I could tell, the only difference was that the rear end was different. The entire rest of the car - the interior, the front, etc. where all the same. I had read that the 2006 Accord had support for the iPod, but I was unable to find any information about this feature anywhere at the show. I'm a bit encouraged by the fact that the interior of the 2006 is identical to my 2005. This means that it is possible that whatever accessory you need to get for the 2006 to use the iPod will likely work with my 2005. I guess I'll have to wait and see here.

I also got a chance to look at the 2006 Honda Accord Hybrid. Thankfully, they fixed it so it actually has a spare tire again... The 2005 model did not. This was the biggest factor that stopped me from buying one, back when I was car shopping. I could have got a really good deal on one back then, but the lack of a spare tire was the deal breaker. I'm glad to see they fixed this deficiency.

The 2006 Infiniti G35 was very nice. I'm not sure how much changed over last year, but I'd love to have one of those!

I got a chance to look at the 2006 Corvettes while there. Nice! They also had the new 505HP Corvette Z06 there. Very nice car. I was able to sit in it and 'try it out'. I like how they changed the 2006 Z06 to have a hatchback. The 2005 and before did not. Yeah, I know it's kinda dumb to be worrying about trunk space in a 505HP sports car, but if I were ever to buy one of those things, I'd want to be able to carry *something* in the trunk. Not that I'd ever be able to afford one of those things, but it's fun to dream.

I gotta say that there were an unusually large number of really expensive cars that were open for people to sit in and play with. Normally the really expensive cars are all locked and the best you can do is look at the outside. Not this time. I was able to sit in a $192,000 Mercedes Benz... That's got to be the most expensive car I've ever sat in!

They had some unusual concept cars. One was a $3.5 million dollar, one of a kind Ford sports car concept. It was a nice looking car. The only thing I didn't like about it was the entire exterior was all silver aluminum. It looked like literally the entire car was one giant piece of solid crome. Can you imagine trying to keep the finger marks off of that thing? It would drive anyone nuts!

I've tried a few other organic foods and I gotta say, the more I try this stuff, the more I like it and the more amazed I am by just how much non-organic food was affecting me without me even realizing it...

Organic Orange Juice: Very good. Best OJ I've ever tasted. Regular store brand OJ causes me to get a bad stomach ache. Organic orange juice does not! It has absolutely no bad affect. It just tastes really good!

Organic Apple Juice: Good. Tastes like apple juice. Apple juice used to give me a stomach ache even worse than orange juice. Again, the organic juice doesn't have this problem!

I bought another brand of organic milk, but I haven't tried that yet. (Thanks Joey for the suggestion).

I also bought some organic spaghetti and spaghetti sauce. The next time I cook up some spaghetti, I'll use those. I'll let you know how it goes.

Bellsouth is now offering their new 'FastAccess DSL Xtreme 6.0' service. This is there new 6Mb/sec download DSL service (twice the speed of before). This new service costs $46.95 verses the $42.95 of their 3Mb/sec download service. I know I'm gonna call and upgrade to this!

I've been playing around with podcasting for the last couple of months. I started experimenting with this when iTunes added support for podcasting. What is podcasting you ask? It's a kind of radio program that you download as an MP3 file and listen to on your portable MP3 player. It's called podcasting because it is often used on Apple's iPod music player. It's an interesting concept. Now, pretty much anyone can have their own radio program. You can find some very interesting (and at times crude) stuff on these podcasts - everything from music, religion, porn, you name it. Since these 'radio' programs are not broadcast over the air, there are no laws regarding what you can or cannot say. This means that there is often a lot of swearing in these podcasts. While many of the podcasts I've listened to are quite dull and very amateur, one is quite interesting.

The podcast I like is the imfamous Daily Source Code by Adam Curry. This is probably the most well known podcast out there. You may remember Adam Curry as one of the 'big-hair' VJs on MTV back in the 80s. He's still around, and he's still interested in music. The difference is, now he is interested in 'pod-safe' music. 'Pod-safe' music is music that is safe to play on podcasts, i.e. generally not commerical artists. There is even a web site devoted to pod-safe music. This music is generally music made by unsigned, independent artists. He's always plays some of this type of music on his show and some of it is quite good. He also often plays 'mash-ups'. These are interesting songs where they take the lyrics of one song and mix it with the music of another song. If you like music, take a listen to his podcast. You might find something you like.

Yesterday, I wrote about how it appears that the referer spammers are all using a program called Wget to download my website and hence place their links on my site. I just got finished searching my entire access logs for the last month for this Wget program. It was there for almost 50% of the links on my site (likely the 49% I saw yesterday). I am in the process of banning these IPs now. Below is a complete list of the IPs that sent me spam last month. If you run a blog like I do, I suggest you ban these IPs from your site, as I did:

Damn, these spammers are fast!

Recently, I upgraded my site to the newest version of the blogging software. Unfortunately, in doing so, I lost all my changes that removed the displaying of the Referer links. This means that the referer links are back up on my site. The spammers didn't take long to notice! I just got done deleting over 1,000 referer spam hits from just the last DAY! I also noticed recently that my changes to remove the referer links missed a spot. There was one spot left where the the referer links were still being displayed. It wasn't on the main page, which is why I missed it.

Another interesting thing I noticed is that last month, the top browser used to access my site (49% of all requests) was a browser named 'Wget'. No, it wasn't Internet Explorer or Mozilla/Firefox as you'd expect. What is 'Wget'? It's not really a browser at all. It's actually a very basic command line program, that's very common on Linux that is used to recursively download an entire web site. This means that the spammers are likely using a Linux/Unix computer of some kind to run some kind of script that uses WGet to download the pages of all the different blogs they spam, automatically. This has the side effect of sending their spam refererer links to the website they are downloading, hence their links get automatically added to the site. I wonder if I can ban the WGet browser completely from my site? Does my web host software support this or am I going to have to do some custom hacks to the blog software? Looks like I have some programming to do this weekend.

One of these days I need to write a nice long blog describing some of my referer spam findings and how to fight these guys...

In my continuing quest to improve my health, I'm trying something new. I'm going organic. This means that I am in the process of shifting the types of foods I eat from traditional store-brand foods, to pure, 100% certified organic products. Why am I doing this? What is the benefit of this organic food? Isn't food organic already? Let's get into this.

Why am I doing this? In short - health. What many people don't realize is that most produce and meat products are loaded with toxic substances. Produce is loaded with pesticides. The pesticides are sprayed on the produce as it's growing to protect it from insects. This pesticide gets into the produce itself and then once you eat it, it gets into you! It may be only trace amounts of it, but over the years, those trace amounts add up. Meat products are usually loaded with hormones. Why? To make the animals grow faster, so they can be killed for the meat all the faster. If you can pump up your cows, chickens, etc. with hormones and get them to grow twice as fast, that means you produce the meat twice as fast. That means you can sell twice as much meat in the same amount of time. Thus you make a ton of money. Unfortunately, these hormones have subtle side effects in humans. I believe that this hormones cause children to mature faster. Have you ever noticed how kids seem to hit puberty at much younger ages these days? That's because all those hormones they are unknowning eating with the meat an dairy products are causing them to mature faster than they naturally would. A good friend of mine has been telling me this for a long time. I never believed him. I have given it a lot of thought and a lot of research, and now I think he could very well have been right.

Why is organic food better? In short - no toxic chemicals! Organic food is just the food, nothing else. It has not been sprayed with pesticides. It has not been injected with hormones. It has not been genetically modified. It has not been irradiated. By eating only organic food, you are greatly reducing the toxic chemicals you are unknowningly consuming on a daily basis. These toxic chemicals are the main cause of many diseases. Why do you think we have so much cancer these days? Cancer is being caused by the toxic chemicals in your food. 100 years ago, cancer was practially unheard of. Why? Because 100 years ago, food wasn't irradiated, pumped full of pesticides, injected with hormones, genetically modified, etc.

Isn't food organic already? Technically yes, but in reality no. The term 'organic' simply means that it contains carbon. Most foods contain carbon. Water doesn't, but just about everything else you eat/drink does. While technically it is organic, it is the toxic pesticides, hormones etc. that are significant. By 'organic food,' I am refering to food that is just food with no toxic chemicals in it. If the package doesn't say 'organic,' avoid it!

Here are some of the organic foods I've tried so far and my thoughts on them:

Organic Skim Milk: YUCK! Horrible taste.

Organic Apples: Very tasty. I can't taste much difference between organic and conventional apples though. They tend to have a slightly higher tendency to be dented/bruised than conventional apples, so you need to pick them carefully.

Organic Banannas: Very good. They seem to have a much sweeter taste than conventional banannas. They also tend to bruise very easily, so they need to be handled with care.

Organic Oatmeal: Very good. Oddly enough, it seems to not stick to the bowl as much as conventional oatmeal.

Organic Ground Turkey: VERY VERY good! This is the best meat I've ever tasted. It is very tender and very tasty.

I plan to continue to try other organic foods over time. I've only been doing this for a couple weeks so I'm kinda new to it. I'll let you all know how things go.

A couple of quick things to note:

Apple released version 10.4.3 of OS X yesterday. It's available for download in Software Update. Grab a copy today! It's 'only' 97 MB in size!

I managed to get a copy of Visual Studio 2005 last night but had some problems with it. A couple of files were showing CRC errors during the install, so I think my DVD image might have gotten messed up somehow. I'm going to try again today. I didn't get much chance to play with it. Copying 5GB of data over a wireless connection is SLOW!

I also got the new SQL Server 2005 Developers Edition. I burned the CD but haven't tried that one yet.

Not one stinkin' trick-or-treater last night! Now I have way too much candy left over!