MusicMatch -- ya just gotta love it

I've been a MusicMatch subscriber for three or four years. Their player is pretty good, though for playing MP3s out of my ripped library I prefer WinAmp.

You can download the MusicMatch player (they call it the Music Match Jukebox) for free, which gets you the ability to play MP3s, plus some bennies:

• When you play a song, the MusicMatch Jukebox (MMJB, henceforth) tries to find that song in their database. If it can, it displays the album's song list, artist info and cover art in its "Now Playing" Section. I've always liked this feature. The text usually includes links to other albums by the same artist.


• They have something they call "Super Tagging," which allows you to modify the MP3 tags for a bunch of songs all at the same time. When you Super Tag a set of songs, MMJB looks up the songs in their database and makes a best-guess of what songs you're tagging. It downloads artist, album and other info and allows you to choose from a list of possible candidates. Essentially, you select a bunch of songs, right-click and select Super Tagging and then click checkboxes for each song you want to tag. MMJB does the rest. This is a very cool feature.


• MMJB also interfaces with various portable MP3 players, including my Gen-1 iPod. The super-tagging allows you to send fully-tagged songs to portable player. Very cool.

MusicMatch is not a peer-to-peer site, nor is it a license to download MP3s and rip them to disc. The raison d'etre for MusicMatch (at least from their side of the equation) is for you to buy tracks and albums.

You can buy any of their tracks for $.99, or entire albums (regardless of the number of tracks) for $9.99. Essentially, any track over and above the first ten is free. And they make it very easy to purchase music. Click-click, done! If you like buying your music online, you really should check out MusicMatch.

Even though they make it very easy to buy their music, during the entire time that I've subscribed, I've only bought two tracks from MusicMatch; I've never bought an entire album, though I've been tempted.

I find that I have this enduring distaste for buying music MP3s online. I'm not even much of an MP3 downloader. Hell, I don't even have Napster, a Bit Torrent client, or any of the other peer-to-peer "sharing" applications. I think the RIAA is heavy handed, but essentially I agree with them -- sort of. Artists should be compensated for their work. Just like software developers should (fodder for another rant at another time).

A couple of years ago, I was a member of a peer-to-peer site (something with "satellite" in the name) where I paid a monthly fee and could download MP3s at will. While I was online, I had to share out my own collection of MP3s to other members. That's the part I didn't like and I still don't. While I was a member, I stocked up pretty good, downloading quite a number of files for a pretty varied selection of artists (I have eclectic taste in music. Only bad Opera is off-limits). The RIAA shut down the site. I guess the fees they were charging weren't enough to pay the licensing fees. Plus, there was that whole peer-to-peer sharing thing. That's probably what got them into trouble. During that time, however, I got hooked on online music.

I found that I liked being able to download "tastes" of artists' music. I've never liked buying albums online because you don't get the stuff you get with a CD: liner notes, lyrics, artist and collaborator recognition, artists' thank you's, etc. I like that stuff (but then again, I read movie credits, too). Still, on-line music allows me to try new artists and to decide if I like them enough to buy their albums. If I like the artist enough, I run to Amazon.com or Best-Buy and plop down $15 for a CD.

Soon after I started my MusicMatch subscription, I upgraded my subscription to include access to their online radio feature. It's nice, but nothing to write home about. It allows you to stream "stations" to your PC. The stations are mostly genre-based, though some focus on specific artists. The quality is good -- if you have broadband (DSL or cable modem). Not recommended for dial-up.

Late last month I got an email from MusicMatch saying that they were discontinuing their Premium subscription service (which is what I had, that allowed me access to MusicMatch Radio streams). They said they were converting all their Premium members to their On-Demand service for the same price, at least for the foreseeble future (I'm sure there's a rate hike in my future).

One of the complaints I had about MusicMatch Radio was that you couldn't select specific songs to play. The best you could do was to select artists. Even then, you'd get a few songs by that artist, and then you'd get songs from related artists (usually artists in the same genre with similar styles). Plus, you couldn't replay any song that you'd just heard. It was very frustrating and I only used it when I was going to sit for long periods at my machine and I felt like listening to something other than the ripped library of songs I already have.

Well, all that's changed since my upgrade to MusicMatch On-Demand. Now I can select specific songs, specific artists, genres, etc., and queue them up to play as though they're in my on-disk library. The only requirement is that I have to be online. No biggy, since I have 1.5MB DSL.

I can even add On-Demand songs to my library. They aren't physically downloaded to local storage; they're linked through MMJB to stream from the MM servers when I play them. They don't even show up in WinAmp.

So, I've reached a decision: MusicMatch On-Demand rocks!

Just today I listened to nearly a hundred Richard Elliot songs. I love his music, but after 90+ songs, even Rick got old. After that, I decided that I needed to liven things up a bit, so I selected about 25 of MusicMatch's top electronica/dance tunes. A few of them I even played over. Now, since it's late and I'm trying to wind down, I'm listening to their top New Age artists (a tune from the movie Hero is playing now¹ -- that's a great film. Highly recommended). I queued up a bunch of tunes and went through and deleted the ones I didn't like (for instance every title by Yanni. Ick). There are a bunch of artists I've never heard of, but I'm getting exposure to their music. I'm probably going to buy some of them -- not on-line, of course.

With On-Demand, I can choose specific songs, jump around, replay songs and even add them to my library if I want. Nice. Very nice.

Here's the part that I like best: you can listen to on-demand music as though it's part of your library, but you can't rip the songs to CD or push them to your portable MP3 player. I pay a small fee to gain access to hundreds of thousands of songs. I can play them almost as though I own them, but I can't steal them. Everyone wins.

If you like on-line music, believe in supporting artists and want to listen to lots of different artists (and have a broadband connection), I highly recommend MusicMatch.

-------
Footnote 1: The song is "Love in Distance," played by Itzhak Perlman. Itzhak is a GREAT violinist, but I don't recall ever seeing him credited as playing on any movie soundtracks. As it turns out, he's played in three movies. If you look at his IMDB listing, he's played in Hero, Fantasia 2000 and Schindler's List. A pretty heady list.

Oh. Btw: Happy Valentines day.

Check out the Valentine's Day logo at Google.com. Cute.

The Google Holiday logos are done by Dennis Hwang. He's very creative, don't you think?

Google.com keeps an archive of their previous holiday logos. Check it out.

Oh, Lordy, Lordy, Lordy... I am SO not a cook!

I love caramel. I love chocolate, too, but given the choice between a good caramel dessert or a chocolate dessert, for your own safety, it's best not to get between me and the caramel.

Caramel is great for putting inside of chocolate; that's the best of both worlds, like that Hershey's classic Rolos. Oh! Remember the original Marathon Bars? Caramel is good over, and in, ice cream and cookies, and for coating apples, pears, creme brulee, pies, popcorn and girl friends! wooHOO!

Have you tried Häagen-Dazs' Dulce de Leche ice cream? Oh. My. Divine. It has these lovely ribbons of caramel running through it. Highly recommended.

Well, I've been cooking more and more lately. Tonight, in search of a little comfort food and some mental distraction, I decided to try my hand at caramel-making. How hard could it be? Boil some water with sugar in it, add some butter and milk and presto-change-o! Caramel Candy. Right?

Um. Not so much.

This moment, in my kitchen is a testament to my cooking naivete: a baking dish full of caramel-colored sugar crystals. Tastes like caramel; looks, and feels, a lot like brown sugar. I think I'll use it to sweeten my coffee.

Turns out it is difficult to make candy. Well, not difficult, really. More like delicate or finicky; tricky, mostly. Melted sugar doesn't like to be melted. It wants very much to be a crystal. It likes being crystallized. If you're sugar, crystals = normal, pleasant and stable; melted = a highly agitated, unstable, abnormal, uncomfortable condition. Kind of like the first time you thought about your folks having sex, but worse. Yikes!

Plus, as it turns out, there are any number of fairly innocuous things that you can do during the cooking to speed sugar's return to it's preferred state. While making my "caramel" tonight, I think I did, well, pretty much all of them!

Tonight I learned some interesting things about the chemistry and nature of melted sugar -- after I created my batch of caramel crystals. After the disaster, I went to Google, looking for things like: "making caramel candy not crystals," "how do I prevent crystals while making caramel candy," and "where did I do wrong" (that one didn't find me any good hits about caramel). Eventually, I hit on a couple of sites that were very informative. I love the Internet. It's like caramel for your brain!

As I said, I'm pretty sure that everything you're not supposed to do to prevent the dreaded crystallization, I did. I stirred it after it was boiling - a lot. I bumped the pan. I jostled it. I didn't use a wooded spoon. I overheated it by a degree or so. I didn't use enough "inhibitor". I added cold ingredients into the syrup. I refrigerated it when it was done. I didn't fully dissolve the sugar before it boiled and, last, and probably most heinous, I didn't keep the sugar crystals from forming on the sides of the pan while it was cooking. Oh, did I mention that I stirred it? A lot? That's supposed to be very bad, too.

Oh, I did do one thing right: I used a candy thermometer. Big whoop. Lotta good it did me... ;-)

So, I'll eventually try it again. Maybe this weekend. In the mean time, I just had to talk about this. I was so thrilled at the actual making of the caramel, the process. I was kind of proud of myself. Look at me! I'm COOKING for cryin' out loud!

And then result was so so disappointing, and so very much not caramel as I know and love it. It was pretty funny, really. Kind of a caramel roller coaster that careened out of control, crashing crazily into candy sand! (how much did that suck???)

Stay tuned. I'll let you know how the next batch turns out.

Btw, if you want me to send you links to the sites that I found for making candy and caramel and such, drop me a comment (below). I'll send them along.

Actually, I just want to see if anyone's reading this thing ;-).

Recently seen in email

In an effort to keep content here "fresh," I'm resorting to putting interesting email posts in the blog.

These come from me Mum:

Cows
Is it just me, or does anyone else find it amazing that our government can track a cow born in Canada almost three years ago, right to the stall where she sleeps in the state of Washington. And they tracked her calves to their stalls. But they are unable to locate 11 million illegal aliens wandering around our country. Maybe we should give them all a cow.

DHR, are you listening?

Constitution
They keep talking about drafting a constitution for Iraq. Why don't we just give them ours? It was written by a lot of really smart guys, it's worked for over 200 years, and we're not using it anymore.

OUCH! Mr. Bush, are you listening?

Ten Commandments
The real reason that we can't have the Ten Commandments in a Courthouse: you can't post "Thou Shalt Not Steal," "Thou Shalt Not Commit Adultery," and "Thou Shall Not Lie" in a building full of lawyers, judges, and politicians! It creates a hostile work environment!

Interesting. Speaking of Constitutions...

I just read an article about a recent Pennsylvania Western Federal District Court decision (this is a PDF file) where Extreme Associates, Inc. (a company that sells adult videos and toys) was given protection under the First Amendment for their actions.

I don't necessarily support the company (notice I've not linked to them -- though pornography, the adult film industry, adult toys and videos, and the like don't cause me any angst), but I do support the decision as it furthers the idea that what two consenting adults do in the privacy of their own home is their business and not the business of the Law.

However, at the same time, religious icons (statues, images, etc.) are being challenged because of the overzealous application of the High Court decision Lemon vs. Kurtzman, 403 U.S. 602. This case gave us the Lemon Test, as well as the precedent that Federally funded agencies can't engage in religious activities. This is being interpreted to extend to the display of traditional and historic religious iconography. Statues, paintings, the Pledge of Allegiance, and myriad other traditional and historic "artifacts" are coming under fire from the hard-core secular left (aka the ACLU).

In a Brief Amicus Curiae ("Friend of the Court Brief") submitted to the High Court by the American Family Association, Center for Law & Policy, the AFA makes a case (another PDF) to overturn, or at least to modify the application of, Lemon v Kurtzman.

Simply put: I agree.

Though I'm hardly a religious man (I'm passionately disinterested in the subject, in fact), I do believe that this country was, in part, founded on religious grounds - or at least the free participation and expression of religion. There are many historical religious artifacts that come to use from the past. Today, they have more historical significance than they have religious significance. I don't understand why the secular left believes it must attack such artifacts.

Get a life.

The Little Black Cloud strikes again

Some of you who know me well know there's a Little Black Cloud that follows me around raining annoying bad luck down upon my life. It's usually highly annoying things, sometimes catastrophic things, and these things don't seem to happen to other people. And they usually come in groups. Many of them are of my own doing, though certainly not consciously.

Like the time that I "struck down, with fierce vengeance," a pair of hapless and unwitting sunglasses.

While heading to Philly to do some work, I threw my bags into the back of an SUV, closed the tailgate and climbed into the front passenger seat. The "tailgate is a jar" light was on (and I always thought it was just a door ;-), so I hopped out to make sure that I'd closed the door tightly enough.

I opened and closed it again and still the light burned. I opened and slammed it a good one. The light shown challengingly. I realized that there must be something stuck in the door, keeping it open.

When I investigated I found the neoprene case of my $150 sunglasses hanging from my bag, right in line with the lip of the door frame. Yikes.

I lost it. I came unglued -- with laughter.

You see, these kinds of things happen to me (or I do them to myself) fairly often, and I just have to laugh them off. I have to. Or I'd go postal.

I detached the glass case from my bag, ignoring for the moment the questions from within the SUV of "What? What's so funny?" and closed the door like a normal person. The light winked out. I think it might have flickered laughingly.

I climbed back into the front seat, still giggling to myself. I told my companions that I'd found what was blocking the door. For comedic effect, I slowly poured the tiny bits of pulverized sunglasses into my hand. More laughter, this time from them.

Then there was the time I was in San Diego to do some work for ARJIS, and my laptop decided to quit. I opened an image from my digital camera and the computer froze. When I turned it off and on, it didn't recognize the hard disk. All from looking at a picture on the PC. Like thst's so dangerous to do. And like nobody else ever looks at their digi-cam shots on their computer. However, only I can trash a hard drive doing it. Only me, baby. Go figure.

Sadly, I needed that laptop to do the work I was in San Diego to do. It was almost a disaster. That time the LBC wasn't funny. I was supposed to be at the customer site the following Tuesday, and, it then being Sunday afternoon, I didn't see any pleasant solutions.

Luckily, on Monday, we found a local PC repair store that allowed us to reinstall XP on the machine (apparently this problem isn't uncommon and the folks at the store knew how to fix it - just reinstall XP. It doesn't even overwrite your previous configuration). Eventually, all was well, though I was certainly worse for the wear and tear on my psyche.

That wasn't all, though. I was staying with family in Murrieta and Monday night I headed to SD. When I got there and got my stuff out of the rental I found that I'd left my business clothes in Murrieta, hanging in my room, an hour and a half away. Time to shop -- at 8:30 in the evening, with the stores close at 9:00. I headed to Nordy's at Horton's Plaza. I knew fro their world-class reputation for services that they wouldn't kick me out promptly at sharp.

I was right. They kicked my out at 9:05, sharp. Not! Kiddking! Actually, they were very kind and very helpful.

So, when I got to the customer site, there was still more from the LBC. We (they) had terrible network problems the whole time I was there. See? There's always more.

Well, the LBC struck again last night. It came again into my life, bringing its calamitous rain and its ill wind.

Last night, the very same laptop that was with me in SD, decided to die permanently and horribly, complete with grinding sounds from the hard disk. It was ugly. Very ugly.

But, as is usually the case, these rain storms are like Ginzu knife commercials: "Wait! There's more!"

At about this same time, I was installing RedHat Linux Fedora Core 3 on my desktop machine. I wanted to be able to dual-boot it into both Linux and Windows XP. Everything seemed to go well, until the moment of truth, when I rebooted the machine: Linux wouldn't boot. Figgers.

Oh well, no big deal. Just a little lost time while I figure out why. So, I rebooted again and selected XP to load. It started out ok, then it, too, died.

So, I says to myself, I says:

"Oh. Dammit (or maybe it was something more colorful). That's not good.

"Well, at least I have Windows 98 SE. I didn't do anything to that installation. I'll boot it and fix the other two from there."

(Fwiw, I wasn't talking to myself. I was talking to Spaz, who was snoozing disinterestedly behind me)

Like I said: "Wait! There's more!" There always is.

I reset the machine, chose Windows 98 to load and it started out OK... Then Windows 98 died.

"SHIT," I says (or maybe it was something more colorful).

Now I'm starting to worry a bit.

While all of this was happening, the laptop, sitting quietly in it's docking station, started being not-so-quiet. So I undocked it and booted it. The screen just said: "No hard disk or optical drives found." Oh-oh.

So, I booted it from a disk of recovery software, which started up just fine. I told the software to fix the disk. This went OK for about five minutes, then the noises got worse and finally, the grinding ground into stillness. Quiet. An ominous hush. No sounds except for the whir of the little fans inside the laptop.

I think I again said, "SHIT!" (or maybe it was something more colorful).

So, there I sat, with no working computers in the house (my original Linux box had died a couple of months ago). I'm starting to feel withdrawal symptoms. No web. No email. No IM. No Python. No Java. No Eclipse. NO C-O-M-P-U-T-E-R-S!!! Aaaaaagh!

I started trying to recover the Windows 98 and Windows XP installations. I also run some diagnostic tests on the laptop.

"Wait! There's more!'

I needed to be able to boot to some utilities on a floppy, so I created a boot disk. I picked up my handy, dandy P-Touch label maker (one of those things that makes the little black-on-white plastic labels), punched in "Windows 98 Boot Disk," clicked Print and...

...the little machine ate the label. It whirred and clicked and made brave little printing sounds, but no label came out.

NOW it was time for the laughter. It finally occurred to me that the LBC was hard at work making fodder for my blog.

But, as I said: "Wait! There's more!"

Oh, yes. There's more. There always is.

This morning I called Dell about the laptop. The technician I spoke with started to complain about her system being slow. Still, we were able to muddle through the process and we almost completed the call. Almost. Just as we were about wrap up the call, she exclaimed:

"Oh, NO! My system just crashed!"

Oh, yes. Crashed. Done. Kapoot. Yeah, baby. The LBC can travel through the phone lines. Das whad I'm talkin' about!

I just laughed. Hard. I think this offended the technician. However, by the time I explained to her about the LBC, the glasses, and my prior evening, she was laughing, too. You just have to laugh.

Or you'd go postal.

The LBC is real. And it can reach through the telephone and destroy other peoples' lives who get embroiled in my embroglios [sic].

So, if I ever call you up to help me out of an unfortunate situation, you may want to think twice before agreeing. You might get rained on. In fact, you should probably just hang up on me. It would be safer for you if you did.

New Wiki Software coming soon

If you look above this entry, to the right of the site logo, you see two links: "wiki" and "obx."

These two link will take you to an installation of FlexWiki that lives on this site.

The version installed now is old and rickety, and I installed it more as a test than anything else.

FlexWiki has been "taken over" by Microsoft as an Open Source project at SourceForge. In the past few weeks there have been updates and fixes and stuff.

I'll be installing that new version soon (I've just downloaded it to install at home for testing). When it's up and running, I'll be notifying those of you in the family who will be interested in the Outer Banks links. I'm going to install a bit of security on some of those pages so we can share emails and what-not. This will keep them safe from EmailHarvesters.

Stay tuned. More to follow soon.

Interesting Site: LearningToLoveYouMore.com

I just found this very interesting site: www.LearningToLoveYouMore.com.

Actually, I didn't find it. I was pointed to it from Ana Voog's Live Journal.

Nonetheless, it's an interesting site.

I'm thinking about doing assignment #44 (Create and submit your own LTLYM assignment). Something to do with photography, email and friends in different cities. Still pondering the particulars.

What's wrong with C|Net?

C|Net (http://www.cnet.com/). It used to be one of my favorites sites for things technological and computorial. Alas, not no mo'.

The last few times I've been there, it's been a horrid mess of broken image links. The site is drain-bamaged without its images. Everything I know about web design says that your site should be usable without images. The reasons are three-fold:

1. Accessibility. Not everyone who uses computers is sighted. Fact of life. A well-designed site takes this into account. And C|Net is big. Very big. Millions of visitors hit that site every year. Statistically, some of them have to be vision-impaired (or maybe they gave up and don't go there anymore).
   
   After looking at the site without images, trying to use ALT tags and TITLE tags to ferret out what the broken image links point to, I've reached a conclusion: cnet.com is, at best rude in this respect. At worst, they're downright disrespectful. I feel for anyone who visits that site who's vision impaired.
   
   Get a social conscience, C|Net. Fix your site. (like my site is the paragon of accessibility. "Let he who is without sin...")



2. Performance. In this day of ever-expanding broadband use, through cable modems, DSL and other options, this is less a problem than it used to be. "Back in the day," when Mosaic ruled the web, people actually turned off images in their browsers to make pages load faster. It was not uncommon, way, way back in the Internet Dark Ages of the mid-90's, to turn off images in your browser. It made for an Improved User Experience Lordy! It took me forever to find a short, lucid description of "User Experience." What does that say about an industry (User Experience Design) that claims to know about enhancing the user experience that can't even clearly define its own business....?
   
   At that time, even though HTML 1.0 didn't have much in the way of gold-plating to bloat up pages like it does now, the 'Net's pipes were all tiny and loading a bunch of images could take some time. Especially when we surfed from home; those pipes were downright miniscule by today's standards. Remember 4800 and 9600 Kb modems?.
   
   Many people still use dial-up (like my Mom, who refuses to move to DSL or Cable modem -- fodder for another rant), but I don't think anyone turns off images anymore. Now they just grouse about how slow the web is (ah-hem... Mom!).
   
   Back In The Day, pages had to be designed for use with images turned off. Obviously, the web designers at cnet.com forgot about this little design guideline.



3. usability. This is actually Reason Numero Uno, at least from the perspective of someone running a website who wants to stay in business. Actually, both reasons 1 and 2 are specific instances of usability. When C|Net's images go away, usability of this site plummets. It's downright sucky, actually. I'll go someplace else before trying to make sense of that mess. Someplace like PC Magazine's site.

So, here' s what you get when you browse C|Net with FireFox, Opera and Internet Explorer (note that these images have been optimized for the web [i.e., lower resolution, etc.] to make them download faster, so the text is a bit smudged):

FireFox




Opera



Internet Explorer (Sorry, no link to IE at Microsoft. I can't actively support IE anymore. FireFox rocks. IE sucks. )



Now, at first I thought it might be FireFox. However you can plainly see that C|Net is an equal opportunity offender.

Now, I suspect the reason this is happening is that the images are downloading from a 3rd-party image server and my browser or firewall software is blocking them. For instance, the big image in the upper left cornet, which I think is their logo, comes from this location: http://i.i.com.com/cnwk.1d/i/hd/fd-redball.gif.

I tried to include an image of this link, but it won't work. At all. The site isn't responding. What's that about? In the first pass over this entry, I'd written some speculations about my browser or my firewall software interfering with the images. I expanded on the paragraph above. However, it appears that the site just flat don't work. Or maybe it does, and there's something going on at my end to prevent it from working.... Whatever. Don't know. Don't care.

Whatever the reason for the broken links, I refuse to go past that home page. I tried it once. Yikes! Give it a shot. Click on any of the links on the home page. Like, say, the Cell Phones link in the left column of links. What a nightmare.

So, C|Net, if you're listening: fix your site. Because I'm not going to stop by to see you until you do.

Anyone else who does web page design take note: this is exactly how visitor to your site react when your site is broken. They go elsewhere. A word to the wise.... (also here and here, though the latter [Bartlett's] attributes Cervantes.)