…what a weekend…

So, yeah…we were both pretty busy this weekend…again… This time, I played poker on Friday night at Jeremy’s, which was cool, as usual… Then Saturday, Stu and Joel came to St. Louis for some frolf action…there are pictures posted, but I’m sure most of you don’t care…but you should, ’cause frisbee golf rocks tremendously. We played at Watson Trails Park and Jefferson Barracks, neither of which I’d ever played at. Later that night, Stu and I went to a concert at Pop’s featuring Strapping Young Lad and Fear Factory. Who are these bands? They’re death metal bands. Yes, I went to my first death metal concert. In East St. Louis. Next door to the Penthouse club. Needless to say, it was an interesting night…

Arguably the most pertinent part of the weekend, however, came on Sunday… Brooke and I were wanting to get a pet, so we finally did. While I wanted to get a dog, it wasn’t really feasible for our current situation (i.e. I don’t have time to take one out for walks, teach it not to do its thing on my computers, etc…), so we got a cat. We went to the Humane Society on Sunday afternoon and picked out this little fella:

Sam the Cat

He’s 6 mo old and was a stray before being picked up and taken to the Humane Society. He was very well-tempered at the shelter and seems to be pretty friendly, thus far. They named him “Constantine,” but we decided that a 3 syllable name is a bit long for a cat, so we decided to call him “Sam”…seems like a name befitting a kitty cat… There are a few more pictures of him up in the Photos section now, too…

Now, time to get back to reading for this week… I don’t have to start my next rotation until November 14th, so I’ve still got afternoons off for the next 2 weeks…w00t!

Coldplay = Bad

Okay, seriously…Coldplay sucks…they really do…they are absolutely no good and their “music” is heavily overplayed. It makes me not want to listen to radio ever (not that I do often…but since there weren’t any good stations in Kirksville for my five years there, I’ve been trying to listen in St. Louis…).

I don’t really know why I bring this up, honestly…I guess I’m just wondering why people like them? They aren’t original, the guy sings way too high pitched for comprehension…there are various blog postings from people who hate them…some more amusing than others… Here’s even a review by the New York Times (June 5, 2005) that just trashes the album and the band…

The band plays and writes songs for the high school crowd, just like the boy bands did…songs made to make money…to make little high school girls fawn over them with their sappy, uncreative lyrics, most of which have been ripped off other, better songs… Frequently, Coldplay is considered to be a lesser, sappier, Radiohead imitator… They haven’t been innovating like the Smashing Pumpkins, Dave Matthews Band (and the other “jam bands,” like OAR, or even the Grateful Dead), or even U2…so what gives?! Coldplay is just a lighter version of Nickelback…seriously…same music, but slower and more depressing…

So…why the hell do people like them so much? Please. Answer me that. I don’t understand. I mean, I guess I don’t understand why the “boy bands” were so successful a few years back…but I can go with hearing the “Macarena” again rather than another Coldplay song…

The Music Industry

So the new Switchfoot album came out on Tuesday and Brooke and I decided to buy it. Well, I was looking it up online to see how much it cost at various places and I noticed that the CD is copy-protected. This means that Windows users can find it difficult to copy the music on the CD to their computer, let alone to another CD. After discovering this, we decided that it’d be cheaper to just buy the CD through Wal-Mart’s music download service (Brooke had done it before…), getting the CD (plus an extra “promotional song”) for $9.44. This way, it’d not only be cheaper to buy the CD, but it’s also already be in a digital format, making it easy to burn the CD (as we would have done anyway).

…well…we downloaded the album and got all the tracks. Brooke listened to the first one to make sure it worked, and it did. Then she tried to burn them. Wouldn’t work. Kept popping up various copy-protection error messages. Not. Pleased.

I ended up having to call Wal-Mart’s music service to ask what was up. Apparently, to burn the files, you have to download them to your computer, then open up each one in Windows Media Player, thereby prompting the download of a license for EACH SONG. So I had to sit there and open up each song manually in WMP…and then could only burn it using WMP (not Nero, or some other CD burning software). Not. Pleased.

So we jumped through the hoops and got it burned. Now, I’m ripping the album into .mp3 format using a program called CDex, which is a). completely free and b). can get around copy-protected CDs. In order to get around it, you need to make sure that you put the CD in your computer and DON’T run the “autoplay” software…’cause when you do that, it installs some license crap on your system, preventing you from copying or ripping the album. Just open up CDex and rip it into your preferred format…

This crap also comes up at the same time that the music industry is trying to get Steve Jobs to raise the prices of music downloads at iTunes. There’s a full article, but to quote a key part:

“To have only one price point is not fair to our artists, and I dare say not appropriate to consumers. The market should decide, not a single retailer … Some songs should be $0.99 and some songs should be more. I don’t want to give anyone the impression that $0.99 is a thing of the past … We are selling our songs through iPod, but we don’t have a share of iPod’s revenue … We want to share in those revenue streams. We have to get out of the mindset that our content has promotional value only.” — Edgar Bronfman Jr., Warner Music Group CEO

So, Steve Jobs said last week that the music industry is greedy for trying to raise prices on iTunes downloads…and Bronfman gave the reply seen above. I think Jobs was proved right, eh?

Mr. Bronfman, the minute you stop paying talent-less “musicians” millions of dollars a year just so that they can continue living extravagantly, then I’ll consider listening to your comments… The music industry apparently has plenty of money, otherwise “artists” like Britney Spears, P. Diddy, Jennifer Lopez, and Jessica Simpson wouldn’t be raking it in every year. How about you drop their salaries to something reasonable (like…hell…$200,000 in a year…sound good enough?) and use the extra revenue to a). stop complaining so much, and b). find some good artists to promote… Otherwise, you and your company don’t need that kind of cash…it could be better spent feeding a third-world country…or hell…this country…