Stop. Go. Nutty.
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-Keith Pelczarski

Random Nuttiness
London CallingWhy go nutty?
Recalling London
Drink me
RageBoy Speaks!
More equal
Wonder Woman
Raging King, Fear Driver
31 Flavors
Refreshing?
On the edge?
Good Morning, Sunshine

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Google
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Interesting Voices
Randy Cassingham
Jonathan Coulton
Kevin Fox
Vince Hanks
Mark Hurst
Jason Kottke
Jeffrey Martian
Kerah Pelczarski
Max Pelczarski
Dave Pell
RageBoy
ResearchBuzz
Doc Searls
Tracy Sigler
Oliver Thylmann

Sites of Note
All Music Guide
Boing Boing
Financial Engines
The Fray
Google
Google News
How Stuff Works
Internet Movie Database
Memepool
Metacritic
The Motley Fool
Netflix
The Onion
Slashdot (/.)

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:: Monday, April 28, 2003 ::
Rock and roll

Apple dragged the music industry another step toward the future today, announcing the new iTunes Music Store and a new slimmer, swankier line of iPod portable music players.

The new iTunes Music Store offers downloads for 99 cents a track, or $9.99 for full albums. Definitely attractive price points for me, especially considering that I spend the most time listening to music on my powerbook. The savings might be enough to make me forego the liner notes and such. The selection of songs isn't bad, though there are clearly a lot of bands that aren't represented. This manifests itself on both ends of the spectrum, with no tracks from big acts like Led Zeppelin and Jethro Tull as well as no tracks from smaller label acts like Flogging Molly and NOFX -- not that NOFX is a new band or anything. (I was pleasantly surprised to see that Bran Van 3000 had one track listed, though.)

The iTunes site stores your credit card information, so ordering is devilishly easy... when you click "buy it" the music quickly downloads right into the iTunes player. Unfortunately for most folks (Apple included), the service is mac-only at this point. Another bummer is that the files sold are AAC, which is basically MP4. This isn't a bad thing if you play all your music on your mac or iPod, or even if you burn CDs for listening on other devices. It does make it somewhat difficult to use some older portable MP3 players, though. All this might get more people to buy macs and iPods, but probably just means a smaller audience for Apple. In the end, they'll do what they've always done -- blaze the trail so others can get fat off the new territory.

Even with some shortcomings, I'm sure that I'll be purchasing more music from the iTunes store in the future. That's right, I said "more." Tonight I picked up some Eminem for me and some Tori Amos for the missus. (And I wonder why our TiVo is confused.)

ROCK!

:: Keith 23:01 [link] :: ::

Born in the U.S.A.

Bruce Springsteen has come out in defense of the Dixie Chicks:
"The pressure coming from the government and big business to enforce conformity of thought concerning the war and politics goes against everything that this country is about - namely freedom. Right now, we are supposedly fighting to create freedom in Iraq, at the same time that some are trying to intimidate and punish people for using that same freedom here at home."
In this case, it's not the government doing the blacklisting, but the type of intolerance and generally jingoistic flag-waving that's been going around is rather unnerving.

Can't we all just get along?

:: Keith 22:01 [link] :: ::

:: Sunday, April 27, 2003 ::
mmmm.... brunch

Going to Buck's for brunch with Kerah and Mark. (Like you care.)

:: Keith 10:22 [link] :: ::

:: Thursday, April 24, 2003 ::
Baby blues

Babycenter.com says, "Most Caucasian babies are born with dark blue eyes and their true eye color -- be it hazel, green, or blue -- may not reveal itself for weeks or months." Astute readers will note that we're up to 38 weeks. In the immortal words of H.I. McDonnough in Raising Arizona, "We're set to pop here, honey." Man, I cannot wait to be a Dad!

:: Keith 00:07 [link] :: ::

:: Tuesday, April 22, 2003 ::
Another blockhead post

In the past, I've made a number of posts about Lego oddities. Here's another: Escher's "Relativity" in LEGOŽ.

(Thanks to Kerah for the link.)

:: Keith 20:56 [link] :: ::

:: Sunday, April 20, 2003 ::
Word.
"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it."
- attributed to Voltaire
In that First Amendment-esque spirit, I give you Tim Robbins at the National Press Club.

Even if you're paranoid, that doesn't mean they aren't out to get you. ;-)

:: Keith 23:51 [link] :: ::

:: Wednesday, April 02, 2003 ::
All the news that's fit to blog

Technorati.com has a cool feature for newshounds that lists stories that are most linked from recent blog postings, with snippets of the blog commentary. They use an interesting ranking algorithm that only looks at posts from the past two hours, so there's a good amount of churn on the stories listed. If you're interested in longer-term indexes of popular blog links, check out Blogdex or Daypop.

:: Keith 22:54 [link] :: ::

Think small

(Apologies to Bill Bernbach.)

:: Keith 22:28 [link] :: ::

The war in pictures

The L.A. Times has some pretty sweet infographics on the war. As illustrations go, they're much better than these.

:: Keith 22:10 [link] :: ::

I Should Not Be Allowed To Say The Following Things About America

I couldn't have said it more sarcastically myself... how can The Onion be so funny and so patriotic at the same time?

:: Keith 21:40 [link] :: ::