*WEDDING.BLOG.LINK*

This boy's got style! I probably would have said yes...
Norwegian dude proposes via iPod engraving - via Engadget

Go here to see the weather: Weather

Since the iPod first came out I have been advocating it's effectiveness as a highly portable (read battery powered and encased in stainless steel) and fair sized hard drive. (I guess this applies to all hard-drive based players)

In fact when I was working for the university's tech department two summer's ago I did some work for the music department, that required shuffling huge disc images (2GB+) around campus. Since I knew that someone else was going to have to live with my solution when after I got it set up I wanted it to be easy to do this as well (which we all know is just plain old NOT fun to do over any network currently available at a Canadian university).

My suggestion was to use some of the budget for the project to buy an iPod to go along with the machines, MIDI keyboards, etc. This allowed them to have a pretty big (20GB 3rd Gen. iPod), highly portable, hot swappable (thanks to the magic of FireWire) hard drive, that could also be leant out to actually use as a portable music player as well, so the kids could take a recording of their performance home to study (or whatever), or they could move their MIDI projects all over campus to give presentations, or work in different labs, etc etc etc. It didn't take me long to convince the man in charge of the money that this could turn out to be a good move. (It did turn out quite well by the way)

Now I know this was only a small example of the somewhat emergent properties iPods have that allow them to be used like gigantic floppy discs, but today there's news of more important uses in the same vein.

Some radiologists in (of course) UCLA, (as well as counterparts in Australia and Europe) are using their iPod photo to bring radiology images around with them while they're on the job.
Think about this for a minute.

• They are using iPods to carry x-ray pictures around, in full colour, full resolution
• They can view the pictures right on the iPod, and show their colleagues to get alternate opinions
• They could have a different album for each patient
• They can carry around textbook images of common ailments around to compare with images they're taking of patients to compare
• They could duck into the staff room to view the images on the TV (or maybe they'll institute special viewing rooms - or better yet maybe they'll just put LCD TVs in the exam rooms)
• Plus they can carry the full-sized image around in full resolution to any computer anywhere in the hospital.

I think this is fantastic. Anyone who knows me knows I'm all about smart convergence like this, and especially the emergent uses that come out of it unintentially. Also, those same people will know that health care is an issue close to my heart - as is the iPod. The combination of the two is like an early Christmas present, that comes with a bonus, prewarmed, super fuzzy blanket. (I wish I had a picture for THAT)

I had a good conversation with some good friends yesterday about how Asians can sometimes seem like complete jerks (maybe they are jerks, I don't know) due to some key cultural differences between us and them.

Here's some Asians out there just beggin' for an ass-whooppin'!

Nothing like a good old fashioned [in an excited and intense little-kid-type anime voice] corporate legal challenge!!!!!

So last night as I'm leaving work I was queueing up a playlist for the drive home on my iPod before I ventured out into the frigid arctic that is "the office parking lot" when I was accosted by a coworker. He politely inquired "So whatcha got there?".
I thought perhaps he was just being coy.
Shaken up, but not yet out of the game I replied "It's my iPod - I'm just queueing up some tunes for the drive home..." (no sense lying about these things)
Here's where things went awry. He then asked me "What does it do?" followed by "Does it come in Men's colours?" (In reference to the slightly peach-y orange (Lava actually) of my case - which is an awesome case, by the way, and not girly at all. Besides which, he became extremely interested in the case after he found out it glows in the dark!)

Now granted he is an HR guy (strike 1), he is kind of an older dude (~40 - strike 2), and he is known to be somewhat of a goof (strike 3 - YOU'RE OUT! (no balls either)). Nonetheless my dream for iPod ubiquity and utter consumer electronics market dominance seems just that much further away...

Everyone please go ahead and check out Magical Trevor. He's the coolest dude on the interweb right now. And dig that crazy red beard man....

Good day everyone, and welcome to Sonic Infusion - a place where predictions are made and proclamations come true.

This past week a very interesting thing happened - to both the world of the internet AND the world of the iPod. And this could turn out to be very big.

A man named George Masters produced a quick video about the iPod mini. Actually it's an advertisement. But George himself has no vested interest in the iPod, or Apple, or anything else so far as anyone can tell. George is what we in the Macintosh community refer to as an "Evangelist", and this advertisement is purely about two things :

• exercising his iMovie/iDVD/FinalCut/general media creation skills
• spreading the iPod love

Now, at first glance this may just look like another Mac zealot getting carried away with his materialistic love for his computing gadgets (something the hippies really hate - though if they understood they wouldn't... I guess that's the point isn't it) or just being generally wonky and, really, kind of annoying.

But I think the important thing here is that George has made an advertisement. Maybe just to show off his skills at multimedia production (which are fantastic by the way - this looks really professional - I especially love the flying minis at the end that fly by the Apple logo and colour it as they go by; genius!) but the important thing here is that HE created it himself. I think his motivations are actually less important than the fact that it happened.

Don't get me wrong, other people have done advertisements of their own volition - but to my knowledge they have mainly been parodies and the like, meant to be funny or damaging. This guy is, as I said before, evangelizing. Spreading the love.

There's a very large amount of writing out there right now about this new form or "news" called "blogging" whereby average citizens of the world can write about whatever's going on and offer their insight into how they think things are going to play out. This was seen as especially important during the most recent rounds of federal elections held here in Canada and in the United States - because politics are something we all like to spout off about once in a while.

First of all, I think this may point to something happening - like what happens if other people start doing similar ads? What if Volkswagen owners start making ads about their cars or their experience or, like this George guy did, just expresses how he thinks ads about the product might be done? Are we moving into an economy where consumers are so upset that mediocre (and sometimes dangerous) products get the press they do because media companies get pushed around by big companies that have use their economic might to muster political strength that they are willing to produce the ads and do the marketing for the products they love BY THEMSELVES? For no compensation? In a time when we don't have enough time to cook supper or walk our poor dogs, will people have the motivation to invest the hours upon hours it takes to produce a piece of work like this?

I think, for one thing, this points to the pitfalls of the sorry imitation of a free-market economy that we have set up here (in 'western' countries). The powers that be continually cite classic sources on the merits of capitalism and the power of the 'invisible hand of the market' that will correct and adjust and keep the world in check and safe etc etc etc... it's a nice thought, and what's really funny is that it might actually work if the governments would let it - but at the same time as they are championing capitalism and the free market they purposefully hold the lower classes down and third world nations that they may be exploited, allow the gigantic corporations that fund their campaigns and private lives to take the drivers seat under the guise of their own epistemology (sickening), and control the media outlets of the world (and allow them to be controlled by their gigantic corporate counterparts) (have you ever seen a major US media firm print anything even remotely negative about Disney? Think about that for a minute). The latter is what we're concerned with here today. If this web-log-marketing (blogeting?) takes off at all, can we consider it a sign that the masses are so disenfranchised with the information they receive from traditional advertising (what I mean by this is advertising driven by an entity with a vested interest - ie: monetary interest - in the results and success of the advertising) that they are willing to produce it themselves? (This is exactly what blogging is really about, by the way, even if you don't personally use your blog this way)

Food for thought anyway.

Second, I think this is dramatic and undeniable proof of the iPod's beloved status (quite a change from the familiar prepend for Apple -beleaguered) and it's true dominance of both the market share and the mind share of the world's buying populous.

For those readers who are caught flat-footed, today is the birthday of a certain Arabian friend of mine, and I'd just like to officially let him know that I'm thinking of him.

In many ways I think this day is almost as important to me as it is to him!
Any and all well-wishes will be passed along to the man himself, of course.

I have a couple things I want to talk to everyone about over the next few days but for right now I only thought it was fair that I give up the ghost about what that plea for help about RDF was about a few weeks ago.

It all started back in the summer of 2003 when I first heard about a new free (as in beer) service called Audioscrobbler that would track what you listened to and keep a log of what you listened to, compare it to other people, offer suggestions on what to pick up next based on what others listened to, keep track of who was the "biggest fan" of this artist and what artist you listened to most often, and on and on and on forever and ever amen. It's wonderful.

Anyone who want to see what I'm listening to should go check out my profile page. It shows the last 10 tracks I listened to and when I did the listening, as well as some other info about who my current most listened to artists and songs are.

What does RDF have to do with any of this? Well, they offer the same info on the profile pages in RDF format, so you can include them in your website, or whatever. (there are a zillion different things you can do with a piece of XML like the RDF from audioscrobbler, so I won't try to explain them all).

I thought I might wedge part of my Audioscrobbler profile into this blog page so that I'd have a dynamic list of what I'm listening to show up in the toolbar on the left, for example, that would be current whenever it was viewed and I wouldn't have to do anything to change it (thus the use of the word 'dynamic')

Turns out though, (any of my web guru readers out there are welcomed in correcting me if I'm wrong - I hope I am wrong about this actually) in order to give some 'style' to XML so it can be displayed by a web browser you have to transform it with an XSL stylesheet. Which is fine, except that said stylesheet has to be a separate file, located somewhere other than IN the page you're trying to display with the XML info in it. What I wanted was to put some type of stylesheet definition inside the HTML for this page that could transform the XML from the RDF URL and display the results as part of this page. Unfourtunately it doesn't seem to be possible with current standards, which is weird. I think I found a way to do it with Javascript and IE's (ie: Microsoft's) DOM object for parsing, but I refuse to bind functionality to IE (or any other browser) especially since I'm NOT using IE.

So there you have it!

There is a marked difference between the music reproducion accuracy (usually we refer to this as "fidelity") of digitally recorded music as compared to analog-aly (?) recorded music. Whether or not humans can tell the difference is a subject of great debate.

Digital music (this includes CDs - even ones you buy in stores - it's digital) records sound by doing something called 'sampling' using a piece of hardware (sometimes software) called an ADC (Analog-To-Digital-Converter). So the recording device 'samples' the source sound a certain number of times a second. You can think of these as a series of points on a graph. If you connect the dots you get something close to the original wave form of the source signal (which is an analog signal inherently). There is a piece of hardware in CD players, (software on your computer can do this too) called a DAC (Digital-To-Analog-Converter - they drop the 'T' for 'To' for some reason) that 'smoothes' the signal out, connecting the dots, so to speak, and making the noise sound closer to the original wave. The CD standard samples at 44.1kHz, so that 44,100 times per second - which is pretty damned fast.

Also, digital music has a defined range, so that it doesn't record frequencies above x or below y. Now, humans can't actually hear all the way up to x or all the way down to y, so the original designers of the CD standard figured that it would be enough to make everyone happy if they recorded a few notches past what humans have the ability to hear.

True analog recordings have neither of these limitations - they record CONTINUOUSLY, and they record ALL FREQUENCIES (every frequency that the recording mechanism can handle, but good recording gear can get more than you might imagine). Audiophiles claim that the 'feeling' of these other frequencies and the fidelity of the continous recording provide a more accurate representation of the original source.

Here's some good info about this: HowStuffWorks

That being said, almost all music being produced now uses digital technology in some way, which defeats the analog benefit. If you're not specifically trying to keep digital equipment out of the process you'll wreck the analog-ness of the signal. One digital guitar pedal or effects processor or compressor or noise gate or anything causes the resulting signal to no longer have the fidelity of an analog signal.

So if there's popular music being released on Vinyl it's because the artists think it's cool, and it makes a very good collector's market. Nirvana released all of their stuff on Vinyl with the original printing of their records and many many singles. They were done in white vinyl or translucent vinyl or whatever and featured huge cover art and were printed in limited quantity. Very good collector's items.

So there you have it. Hope that helps!

Okay, you had to know this blog was going to include some good old fashioned Mac Zealotry.

I just read an article by a writer in the states from a publication called the Herald Tribune. ("Southwest Florida's Information Leader", I'll have you know).

Contrary to what you may believe, and maybe even contrary to your initial interpretation of this commentary, I'm not actually being zealous as much as I am being anti-zealous in this article. People accuse Mac users (such as myself) of being overly zealous about computing platforms, often accusing us of extremism comparable to the FLQ or IRA or some other aggressive faction like that. Truth is, I have found PC zealots to cloak themselves in this accusation, and here to represent is a one Mr. Rich Brooks.

One of the wisest men I ever knew once told me "Saying something is wrong just because it's a Macintosh is just as bad as saying something is right just because it's a Macintosh". And I believe that he was entirely correct.

Fine, the guy's decided that the Wintel world has more to offer him - I don't fault him for that. Quite frankly I don't want him in "the club" so to speak. What I disagree with are his reasons for making said choice, which are not much less ridiculous than they are unfounded.

I want to hereby declare market share numbers to be a wholly inadequate way of measuring the usefulness, or general popularity of non-new products. Now some people are pissed at me already for saying this because market share is one of my principle defenders of iPods (along with the style and beauty we've all come to love) - but I have been careful to qualify my statement about market share.

The iPod is not only a relatively new product itself, the entire market it plays in is pretty new as well. Yes, Walkman's have been around forever (almost as long as computers) but digital portable players are pretty damn new, as is good jukebox software (a la iTunes) as is online music purchasing (a la iTMS) - all THREE of which drive the iPod, and right now, a vote for iPod is essentially a vote for all three. By contrast, a PC is a PC is a PC, and they haven't really changed all that much since about 1985 - they're still essentially the same product, just faster and (some) with nicer cases and (some) with better software. The market share numbers are pretty representative of people using digital music players because so many people are just buying into this market right now. By contrast, (Lindsay and Morgan will attest to this) I still have multiple computers that work fine that are nearly 20 years old, and pretty much everyone has at least one computer these days - they're almost as common as TVs.

Let's spell out the difference - market share numbers for a new product represent the number of people buying in (that's a pretty good measure of popularity - not difinitive but pretty good), whereas market share numbers for OLD products represent the number of people trading up (ie: they are unhappy with their current model for some reason - it's too slow, it's not cool, whatever)

Also, let's not forget that those market share numbers are including sales to grocery store chains, and pharmacies, and Wal-Marts and Zellers and Fed-Ex and restaurants (etc.) for POS systems, libraries for card catalogue systems, university research clusters that have 10,000 PCs all hooked up together to be used as a single machine.... They are not, as he calls them, "home computer market" numbers. The above list contains things that Macs will just not be bought for - they were not intended to be used for these purposes, and they would probably be a bad choice for most of these things. But these numbers only marginally represent what "home computer" buyers are doing with their money.
I think if you went out (I'm not insinuating that this is even possible) and counted up the PCs in people's homes in North America, you'd find that Macintoshes have a lot better than 3% of INSTAL BASE share. I'm not saying it would be mind blowing, but I'd be willing to be it's up around 25% - 30%.

So no, Mr. Brooks, not every office worker in North America has the advantage of working on the same platform at work and at home. I remember reading once that almost all the people who work at Sun have a Macintosh at home. Just because you have a Wintel at home and market share numbers say there's lots more out there doesn't mean that's the way it is for everyone. I will concede though, that Mr. Brooks' setup is probably the way things are in a typical sense.

Moving on, it's useless to contend that Macintosh machines are not "compatible" with Wintel machines, and it only exposes your ignorance of the subject. I don't remember where, but I remember reading that the open source Samba technology used to integrate Macintosh machines (and Linux and BSD machines too) into Windows networks is actually more compatible and reliable than the software Microsoft itself makes for the same purpose. Microsoft makes all of its popular Office suite software available to Macintosh buyers.
(It is, however, much easier to steal Microsoft Office for Windows - that may very well be what he is referring to when he says he expects students to be able to "transfer the projects to a disk and use the disk at his home computer." - without purchasing the application to use said 'projects' it's useless to talk about moving them from machine to machine, and every major application that most people would create projects with is available on Windows and on Macs - I don't see a platform compatability issue here. I do see a platform choice issue though - Mr. Brooks has made his, corporate America has made theirs, teachers and educators keep trying to make theirs but keep getting drowned out by ingnorance such as this)

In conclusion, there are some very good reasons to buy Macintosh machines, and very good reasons to go for a Wintel option. Market share numbers are not one of those reasons, and I hate that people keep this charade going endlessly. I have no problem with people making choices about life, but I do have a problem with them trying to stuff it down the throats of people who could make the decision themselves, and especially with those trying to stuff it into the education system.

Many people have decided that there is no such thing as natural selection or biological evolution - and they try to restrict the education system with their beliefs everyday.
GM has the highest market share of all vehicle manufacturers - does that mean some poeple won't like to use a Ford, or a Toyota? Does that mean GMs are inherently better than Fords or Toyotas? Does it mean that because I can't use last year's winter Volkswagen rims on this year's Kia car, the best recourse is to say "You should have bought another Volkswagen"?

I know these are exaggerated analogies, but I think we've got to be more careful when playing pin the tail on the zealot.

The Canadian iTMS is NOW OPEN!!!!

Mac Rumors is saying:

"The Canadian iTMS store is now available. Songs are available for $.99 Canadian each, making the cost-per-song the lowest of all available localizations of the store."

Man I'm excited!!! I'm going to go sign up right now!

Just read an article by my man John Gruber about the iPod - the success, the current strategy, yada, yada, yada.... seems like we're both in a similar vein on this issue so I thought I'd point everyone over there.


(incidentally he did another great article on another topic that I suggest everyone check out when they have a chance as well)

Just a quick note this morning.

Item #1 on the agenda: Still no iTMS. We can at least browse the US store again now (Actually we've been patched into the international store system so we can now browse ANY store we want to. Cool!) It's now officially late (they promised! I can still hear Steve saying during the webcast: "...and next month in Canada." [sounds of the crowd cheering])
MacDailyNews is reporting the same thing.

Item #2: Morgan just bought Matt Good's new record and kindly lent it to me for a few days. It's amazing. If there's anyone out there labouring over coming up with a gift for a loved one that's reasonably hip this would make a great gift. It takes a few listens, but I think the boy's still got it.