A belated Happy Christmas, and a Merry New Year.
This has been either the best bad year I've ever had or the worst great year. Lots of positives, but a small number of large negatives. So it goes.
2003 is going to be great, though, I can feel it. I hope yours is the same.
Just got home from a showing of The Two Towers. It kicked much ass. I know you're already going to see it (if you haven't already), but GO SEE IT.
So when I wished for gybe (ok, fine, gy!be) tour dates, I meant IN VANCOUVER. Grr.
Currently listening to: Apocalyptica - Harvester Of Sorrow.
Personally, I think constellation (Godspeed You! Black Emperor's record company) wins this particular battle. (Or should I say "battle"?)
You impute "profit margin" as a motive for godspeed's dealings with record labels. This is defamatory nonsense, and precisely the opposite of the facts. godspeed's "profit margin" will not increase with constellation. Any of our distributors could have informed you that the CD retail price for Yanqui U.X.O. will be lower than godspeed's previous American CDs. That's because we'll be charging less for it. And because we'll be charging less for it, godspeed won't make as much money. As an aside, neither will constellation be making as much as the American label did and goes on doing with their first three godspeed CDs. But how charming to see Exclaim! - "Canada's Music Authority" (sic) - throw out this particular libel. 'Montreal rock group moves from indie American label to indie Canadian label in a blatant cash grab'. You idiots.
Constellation records are generally cheaper in my experience, by at least $5. I will confess that I didn't buy my copy of Yanqui U.X.O., despite the godspeed admonition inside the packaging:
Though godspeed is guilty of profiting from hateful chain store sales, we encourage you to avoid giving money to predatory retailers and superstores.
Which is all part of the gybe dance of trying to make money honorably, or with least amount of dishonor. (I know, boohoo. I respect the effort, personally.)
Now how about some tour dates? I promise to only shop at zulu records and Highlife!
Currently listening to: P.J. Harvey - Happy And Bleeding.
google labs has added a couple new toys:
- Google Viewer: "displays the pages found as a result of your Google search as a continuous scrolling slide show."
- Google WebQuotes: "annotates the results of your Google search with comments from other websites."
Currently listening to: Rage Against the Machine - Born Of A Broken Man.
If you ask me, this duck knows something, and he's a little pissed off about it.
Finally, Canada might have some PVRs on the market that don't require a satellite. (You can get a tivo based model that requires satellite.) The two products in the article are the RCA Scenium Digital Media Recorder and a unit from LG that I can't find on their website.
(A side note to corporate web sites: javascript links suck. Also, why are you popping up windows for pages within your own site? I hate forced new windows at the best of times, but that's just pathologically stupid.)
Anyway, the RCA unit looks ok, but is not an impulse buy at $999 CDN. At least there are no subscription fees.
Currently listening to: Do Make Say Think - Dr. Hooch.
It's looking like Java 1.5 (likely to be released next year) is going to have some major changes and improvements - mostly stuff that make c++ advocates say "oh, finally. Now call me when you have multiple inheritance.":
- generics
- typesafe enumerations
- autoboxing (automatic primitive to object wrapper conversion)
- enhanced for (looping over collections easily)
- static import
Currently listening to: Kyuss - II - 100 Degrees - Space Cadet.
Self-explanatory: Arse or elbow?.
Currently listening to: The White Stripes - The Union Forever.
Reality TV hits bottom, begins digging. I mean really.
Currently listening to: Melvins - Shevil.
Very cool: Over 100 covers for War of the Worlds. (Via bookslut)
Currently listening to: Glenn Gould - 1981 (2002 remaster) - Variation 7.