HighGeek - thanks for the welcome to pho.
I'm still adjusting to the subscriber base. I was sort of
stunned when my recent email about collaborative filtering
elicited response from both the founder of MediaUnbound
(who I was thinking of when I wrote in) and the guy from
MusicMatch. Seems like everyone who matters in the field
is on that list. It's too bad the S/N ratio has dropped -
there's still a ton to talk about in terms of the next
step. I think everyone is probably still trying to catch
their breath after the big metaphorical punch in the gut of
the last year.
Someone wrote to pho that any "nag" element to online
tipping efforts contaminate the music experience and I
wrote a very well-thought-out reply of how I strongly
disagreed with that. I think part of the problem with
online music distribution is the lack of connection between
Joe Downloader and Jane Artist, and if efforts were made to
increase the emotional connection between the two, inspire
more loyalty, put it on a human level, it would reduce
the "lazy piracy" problem and enrich the "music experience"
as well. Anyway, I wrote it on Mozilla 0.9.3 - while
trying to send it, my outgoing mail server was trying to
validate my From address, which was on a domain whose DNS
server was down, so it was taking forever, destined to
fail. While checking I clicked "Save" and tried to close
the window so I'd have a draft. When all was said and
done, it was just gone. Not sent, no backup, words lost.
That's the tough part of the last mile of a project... the
remaining bugs are just freaky weird.
I got certified at Journeyer faster than I thought. Even
though I haven't yet released a major open source project,
I think my name must be familiar to some from my Music Tech
writings. Very flattering and I'm attempting to return the
favor. I really gotta get on the ball and release that
perl project for MusicBrainz I've been making noise about.
We're close to the 1.0 release. Maybe I'll work on that
this afternoon - it was dependent on my upgrading my Big
Box and I just got mandrake8.0 on it yesterday so I think
I'm ready.
Work... still feeling not very confident. Been there 2.5
months and I don't know if there is a standard I have to
meet at the 90-day mark. We're doing WebObjects, Apple's
Java RAD tool. Supposedly it's supposed to rock once you
master it, but there's so much hidden functionality "to
make things easier" that I'm continually staring at the
next statement thinking, Okay - how did we get HERE from
THERE? I guess that's RAD - rather than spend a day to
write 50 lines of code, you spend a day to write 2 lines of
code. Grumble. Looking forward to feeling more
comfortable so I can come home at the end of the day still
in a good mood.
Home... gf is still in the UK and is thinking of extending
her backpacking trip until APRIL. ack!!!! This was her
post-graduation decompress-from-school trip - she's done
this before, too - long trips to see the world, big central
part of her nature and I've learned to just sort of stay
out of the way. :) But my mom said, "You know, maybe
she's trying to elicit a reaction." And I said, "No,
that's not her, we communicate really well." But it put a
bug in my ear so I thought I'd check. Yesterday on the
phone - "So, all your choices regarding how you're spending
your time, length of stay, etc - even if I came out,
swooped you to Paris, proposed on Eiffel tower or whatever,
you'd still be doing this the same way, right?" (pause,
beat) "Oh, I wouldn't say THAT!"
eek.