August 2009 Archives

We live in a world where there's no need to tolerate mediocre music. Digital music services like Pandora, Last.fm, Lala, Slacker, and others make it easy to find great music and to skip bad music.

One of my latest projects is to get a quality collection of music on my iPhone. Managing music is such a pain, so I've got a new model I'm trying out. I want a solid set of great music that I always will love listening to that will always be there, and a separate collection of new music I'm trying out.

I've started building my great music set by putting all of the music from all of my favorite artists on my iPhone and listening on shuffle. I'm rating each song I listen to. To keep the ratings consistent, I'm using these labels:

1 star - Bad. delete.
2 stars - OK. Reasonable background music, but very skippable.
3 stars - Good. A step above generic, but still skippable.
4 stars - Great. It's got something (e.g. a hook or a rhythm) that resonates with me.
5 stars - Excellent. This song moves me. Always worth a listen.

I'm certainly removing the 1 star songs, and I think when it comes down to it, I'll get rid of the 2 star ones as well. Life's too short and there's plenty of new music to explore that it's not worth the time to listen to merely adequate music.

The NY Times recently published an article showing that digital music is the environmentally friendly way to consume music. Personally, I did it out of convenience. Ripping music and then storing the CD somewhere is a real pain. Once DRM-free music was available, I switched exclusively to buying digital music.

I started using Amazon MP3, and they are still a really good option. But Lala is better. They are cheaper: songs are only 79¢ vs. 89¢ with albums typically $7.49. I had a bad customer experience with Rhapsody, so I won't recommend them. iTunes is OK, but they are more expensive, and I'm frugal.

Once you get the files down to your computer, you need to back them up. That's where SkyDrive comes in. This is the best free online backup service out there (and amazingly it's from Microsoft, not really known for their outstanding web services). Before it came along, I was backing up files by attaching them to draft messages in my Yahoo mailbox. But now with SkyDrive, I have 25GB of space, which is far more that I expect to need for my music purchases. That would be about 250 albums.

If you bought the music off of Lala, you can now listen to it online too from your account. I'm still waiting for the iPhone app so I can listen on the go as well. Until then, I'm still using iTunes to sync my new music purchases with my iPhone. The desktop tether model has to go, though. I really can't wait until we get WiFi sync.

I own a 1999 Honda Civic HX. By all accounts a practical car. But I did get the version with the CVT (continuously variable transmission). This makes it fairly responsive with the accelerator.

But in the 10 years I've had the car, my commute has always been 10 miles or less. In fact I biked to work most days. With my new job, it's a 30-minute drive each way. For someone who's not used to a longer commute, it got pretty old, pretty fast.

I got it into my head that I should upgrade the car. Get something fun, sporty. Maybe a convertible. Maybe a roadster. Maybe both. I test drove a bunch of cars. The Z4, Mini Cooper, Miata, SLK... It was fun. I had even convinced the wife that it wasn't a completely horrible idea.

But ultimately, I was too practical to pull the trigger. I spent $1000 fixing all of the dents and dings in my Civic. I had the car detailed in and out. Got the 120k major tune up. That made it feel a bit more respectable.

Then I started driving to work with the windows down. It's not exactly a convertible, but it's a pretty good way to get a lot of fresh air while you drive. It's also good for drying out your hair when you're running late.

And then I discovered S. It's the "Sport" gear on my transmission. It revvs the engine to higher RPMs when driving, giving more torque and responsiveness. I love it. It's like a whole new car.

Sure, it's not nearly as responsive as a real sports car. But it's a lot more fun to drive. Maybe when this car falls apart, I'll get the sport car (Lexus IS C, I'm looking at you). Until then, I'm good.

My personal domain davecortright.com was up for renewal recently on NameCheap.com. Since I'm using Nombray as my personal domain hosting service, I wanted to transfer it over to them. I logged into NameCheap and kicked off the process of transferring. I got the auth code and gave it to Chris Lunt over at Nombray, and he set everything up. And then NameCheap informed me that it failed. I found out several days after the domain expired. So I no longer owned my domain, and it was now pointing at a stupid parked page.

Of course this isn't a domain that's in high demand. But NameCheap did "thoughtfully" hold onto the registration. (They were the one hosting the parked page.) So if I wanted it back, I'd have to re-register with them. I did. I wasn't too happy about it, but everything worked out ok. I got my domain back, and only had to pay the $10 renewal fee.

Contrast this with GoDaddy. I stupidly didn't renew my rated-best domain before going on an extended vacation. I came back to a similar situation. The domain had expired, but WhoIs showed that GoDaddy still owned the domain. This seems to be standard operating procedure in the domain world. I log into GoDaddy, but I go to renew it they want a $20 "backorder fee". WTF?! But I do want the domain, so I pay the extortion fee thinking it will work like NameCheap.

And I wait for the domain to show up in my account. It doesn't. After a week I contact support. Turns out they already sold the domain to someone else. But they'd be glad to broker a deal where I can buy it back. For a fee. These guys make NameCheap look like heroes.

While I have built up a bit of traffic and inertia behind the old rated-best domain, it's not enough for me to spend any more money trying to get it back. I simply went out and registered rated-best.info. Sure, I need to build up SEO again for the new domain, but it's pretty straightforward to do so. Besides, the old domain only had a Google PageRank of 2.

The funny thing is, the guy who ended up pouncing on my domain also scraped the content and is continuing to host it from his own servers. With all of my Amazon affiliate codes in the links. So I lost the domain, but I continue to get affiliate fees. Cool.

Here is my unabashed promotion of the new domain to help get me some Google juice. Rated Best: the single best product or service in each category.

I ran track and cross country in high school. I wasn't an outstanding athlete, but I was pretty good. I won a cross country race my senior year (I think my time was 17'48"), I ran a 4'52" mile once in a regional meet, and I even ran a 59' quarter mile, barely hanging on for the win as the anchor in the 4×400 relay. Quite dramatic.

All that was over 20 years ago, yet I still find it hard to let that competitive mentality go. When I go out for a run, I subconsciously still think I'm training to win some theoretical race. I remember 10-15 years ago when I would see middle-aged adults struggling through a jog thinking "why do they even bother?" Yes, I was a young, arrogant, judgmental fool.

I am now that middle-aged adult out there struggling. I'm the guy whose mind too often forgets I'm no longer 18 and in the top shape of my life, and runs too far, too fast. I'm the guy who stopped to walk part way through the run becuase I just don't have the endurance I used to.

But of course I don't judge anymore. Anyone who is out there slogging through some exercise regimen--no matter how short, or slow, or both--is nonetheless still out there getting some exercise. Contrast them with those who don't even bother to try. Or like me for so long, had such high expectations of what I should be accomplishing, that it was better not to do any than to try and fall short.

My exercise regimen isn't very impressive. I run maybe 2-3 miles 3 times a week. Alternate days I do some sit-ups and push-ups, maybe 30 or so each. It doesn't compare to what I was doing in high school, but then again, I'm not in high school anymore. The little bit I do, I've concluded, is better than doing nothing at all. As Teddy Roosevelt said so well:

It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.

Music services have gotten significantly better over the years, but I'm still waiting for nirvana. Here's what that would be for me.

• One music collection, stored on my computer and backed up into the cloud
• Auto de-dupe of music and auto fix all meta data on it too (title, artist, and album, but also album art, genre, year, and yes even lyrics).
• Warn me of crappy quality songs that I might want to re-rip or purchase. Skips, <= 128kbps, bad encoder etc. Even better, find updated versions out on the InterWebs and auto-replace it for me.
  
• Have a single rating system that syncs across all access points. Also sync with other services I may have used in the past (Yahoo! Music, Pandora, Last.fm etc.) Make it dead easy to rate a song from anywhere I'm listening to it.
  
• Music discovery. You know my collection. You know what I rated highly. Give me new music that I might like as well. Sure, let me go tweak the parameters if I want, but smart defaults go a long way.
• Same with new music. If there's a new album out of an artist I like, let me know. Play it for me. Encourage me to buy it.
  
• Fill my iPod with random songs every time I sync. Well, you only need to replace the ones I've already heard. Unless I really like it a lot and have been playing it a lot. then you can be smart and keep it around.
• Ideally, everything happens over the net. I shouldn't have to dock and sync in order to get new music on my iPod. It has wifi. Do a trickle update in the background.
• Use text-to-speech and speech-to-text as an interface. This is already an audio medium. Why can't I just say "Next" or "2 stars" or "pause" or "play Barely Breathing"? And also, why can't I hear the artist and title announced? (OK, Apple is starting to do this. Kudos. but it needs to be easier to access.)

I'm sure there are more, but those are the basics off the top of my head. Am I missing things you want to see in a music service? Any pointers to services out there that will do these things for me?