Monthly Archive for June, 2007
Jolayne and I headed out on another geocaching trip this afternoon, since the weather was nearly perfect. We were initially going to try to find the Airplane Observation Cache up by the airport, but it turned out that the park it was near was overrun by Little League mania (since it contains several baseball fields) so we opted to pass rather than deal with the traffic and crowds. Instead we went with our backup, a cache named Trio of Fore, which was a multi-part cache. This was only our second cache and our first multi-part one so we didn’t know what to expect. The idea of a multi-part cache is that the initial coordinates will lead you to the first part, which will just be a small cache with only the coordinates of the next cache to find, and so on until you reach the final cache which will be a regular cache. As we got started, we ran into another geocacher on his way out who said that he had been able to find the first one but not the second and wished us luck. We found the first one without too much trouble even though it was cleverly disguised (a plastic tube in a fake tree branch) but sure enough the second one ended up being much trickier. It seemed like we were going to have to admit defeat when Jolayne finally uncovered it. The cache was just half a tennis ball with the coordinates of the final cache written on the inside, nestled in some brush at the base of a tree. (The cache was right behind a tennis court so it didn’t look out of place at all) With that step taken care of it was pretty easy to get the last one, since it was just in a regular ammo box cache.
Not too long ago it seemed like the most unlikely thing, but this week iTunes finally made tracks available without DRM (aka iTunes Plus tracks. Ironic that by removing something from them they’re now better). It’s only for artists on labels under EMI but hey, it’s a start. It seems like a remarkably sensible move a record company, which is precisely why it’s so surprising. Hard to believe that it’s taken so long to grasp the obvious: that DRM only annoys honest consumers who find themselves hampered by the limitations that weren’t present in previous kinds of media and does nothing to slow the efforts of people that want to get it for free. I’ve long thought that selling music without DRM and at reasonable prices and convenience could only increase sales, not hurt them. It looks like that theory is finally going to be put to the test. I’m just a single data point, but I know it’ll increase sales to me at the least. I haven’t bought anything from iTunes except for a couple audiobooks, all due to the DRM. I’m not willing to get locked into one player (especially given how picky I am in that regard) and a limited number of devices. So to show my support in the hopes that this will start to become the norm and not the exception, I bought my first album from iTunes (a little bit of classic Bowie). I don’t think it’ll replace eMusic for a while, not unless the selection of DRM free tracks increases dramatically since they certainly don’t compete on price. Plus, it really bugs me that you can’t get it to save the tracks to anywhere other than the default iTunes folder and can’t control how the files are named. But it’s the principle that matters and hopefully this trend continues. I definitely like having more choice in where I get my music from.
Elsewhere