The Ankle Biter @ Quibbling.net

In the “starting to catch on but hasn’t quite sussed it out yet” department, Mika has gone and gotten himself a shiny new Wordpress blog, but his people haven’t implemented it properly- they’ve got comments and moderation turned on as if they expect comments, but you have to be registered to post one. Which would be fine, except they’ve got user registration disabled…. making the whole thing prettier, but with less functionality, than his Myspace page. But what’s worse, the design suggests features are available which have in fact been turned off.

FAIL, tech people. FAIL. If you’re good enough to convince a Europop sensation to pay you to redo his website, you could at least redo it correctly.

(And really, they’d be better off using Flickr for the photo galleries, but that’s a whole other rant.)

After nearly four years, it’s now time for me to leave DC Metblogs. But you can still catch my musings about life in the capital at We <3 DC. Check it out- we’re really proud of it. Many thanks to John Athayde for the kickass design, and to Paulo for implementing it for us.

We’re still squishing a few bugs here and there, so come kick the tires with us!

Nerds in love

Originally uploaded by tiffany bridge

When Tom and I updated our Macs to Leopard, we decided it was time to get on the ball with regular backups now that Time Machine makes it so easy. So we ordered a couple of backup drives and set them up, complete with surge protection, on an end table in our living room. Of course, we have to be able to tell them apart.

Behold, our “his and hers” matching backup drives. I’m a little embarrassed to admit how excited I got about this.

Things that rock: Watching Serenity on HD-DVD, on your shiny new big-ass-TV.

Things that do not rock: Realizing that HD-DVDs cost two and a half times what a typical DVD costs.

We’ve had a spate of upgrades to our home entertainment gear- a fortuitous combination of good deals on HD gear and a particularly generous birthday present to Tom have combined to a pretty sweet setup. (We’ll probably work on speakers next, but probably not until after Christmas.)  As a result, we’re pretty much at the point where we’d rather watch something at home than see it at a theater.

We bought three HD-DVDs this weekend to try out our new rig: The Departed, The Mummy, and Serenity. Since we hadn’t seen it before, we watched The Departed first, and were sorely disappointed. I can appreciate the technical quality of the direction, but I didn’t enjoy it at all- it was hard to follow, most of the characters were decidedly unsympathetic, and the very end made no sense at all.  We found ourselves saying, “We paid $25 for THAT?”  The other two, on the other hand, are well-known and much-loved in the Bridge household, so we thoroughly enjoyed them in all their HD glory.

As a result, we’re casually implementing the “No buying DVDs unless you know you’ll watch it over and over” policy, ’cause these suckers are expensive, and signed up for Netflix so we can try new stuff.

Netflix allows you to have multiple queues per household so that couples can avoid fighting over what to move to the top of the priority list. So we each have a queue now, which is funny, because our taste in movies overlaps pretty heavily.  But for those movies like Transformers, which Tom wanted to see immediately and I couldn’t care less about, we have our separate queues now.  Yay.

So our place is where to see movies now, it seems.

The fastest way to get pingback-spammed by splogs is to write a post about weddings.  Good to know.  Four pingback spams overnight. Awesome.

Via John’s always entertaining links comes this NYTimes profile of Rick Rubin, the mega-uber-supah-producer Columbia has hired to turn the company around.

It’s worth a read on its own merits, because the idea of a record company hiring someone who likes to help make music, as opposed to someone who likes to sell a product, makes me tingly.  But I found myself contemplating Rubin’s assessment of the future of the music business- he envisions a subscription model, where you can listen to pretty much whatever you want, whenever you want, wherever you want, for a monthly fee, making ownership of music and the iPod obsolete.

Once I got over my knee-jerk negative reaction to the idea of a subscription model, I gave the idea some more thought.  If, as Rubin describes, you’d actually be able to tell your music-playing device that you want to listen to Simon & Garfunkel, and then were actually able to listen to it, and then change your mind and listen to something else… why wouldn’t that be worth money?

And the answer is, OF COURSE it would be worth money… it’s just that the “ifs” are still really big IFs.  But let’s back up a second, and talk about WHY.

All of this subscription vs. ownership talk misses the point.  The reason people like “owning” music, the reason they like putting it on their iPods, isn’t about property rights most of the time.  It’s about portability and convenience.

When I buy a CD and rip it to put on my iPod, or when I buy songs from the iTunes store, I know that no matter when I want to listen to the music, no matter where I happen to be at the time, I can turn my iPod on, and the music is there.  It doesn’t matter if I bought it a year ago or an hour ago; it’s there.  I can buy a really terrific Fiona Apple album, listen to it once or twice, get distracted by Mika for four months straight, and then rediscover the Blues Traveler album I bought in college completely on a whim in the middle of the afternoon at work… because the music is STILL on my iPod.  Current subscription music models haven’t been able to replicate this experience well at all.

Like many music lovers, I not only enjoy listening to new stuff (thank you, XM, for teaching me about Silversun Pickups), but I also love being able to pull out a favorite older album if the whim strikes.  I can and do listen to music this way, because even at only 8GB, my iPhone can still contain a striking variety and quantity of my music collection. Most of the time I can mimic some semblance of the instant gratification my musical tastes require.

On the other hand, like many music lovers, my collection exceeds the size of my portable device, and it’s only going to get larger, now that I’m married to another music lover.  Since music is a natural mood-enhancer, and what I want to listen to at any given moment is largely determined by whim, I still can’t always hear exactly what I want to hear, just when I want to hear it.  I still have to engage in a bit of educated guessing about what I might want to hear in the course of a few days, but since my habits are pretty established, I do okay with that. 

On the other hand, I can go the route of the 160 GB iPod, but to upgrade to bigger and bigger iPod hard drives to house my ever-expanding music collection is really just an arms race that delays the inevitable.

So Rubin’s future, where everyone has some kind of device that can retrieve whatever you want, whenever you want, is not an idea without merit.  The problem, of course, is the technical limitations of “whenever you want.”  If “whenever” happens to be while I’m sitting in a coffee shop with free Wi-Fi, the download might be a little slow, but it’ll work.  If “whenever” happens to be when I’m on a long flight, or at the office where our network use policy forbids music downloading, then the idea kind of falls flat.  If I have to prepare for those situations by downloading a bunch of music I think I might want to listen to in advance… well, I might as well just go back to my iTunes library, where I pay less for the same level of delayed gratification.

But yes, in theory, if this subscription service could have pretty much any music I could possibly want to listen to, even the obscure, the old, the cutting-edge, and the band my friend just called to tell me about, AND I could access it from pretty much anywhere with a reasonable degree of convenience, sure… I’d go subscription.  But that model essentially just turns the service’s servers into my outboard iPod, because again… the iPod isn’t about music ownership, it’s about convenience & portability.

And it’s for that reason that such a system wouldn’t render the iPod “obsolete,” as Rubin predicts.  Does anyone seriously thing that an ecosystem that big, could develop while Apple ignored it?  Hello, my iPhone and the iPod Touch already have Wi-Fi music downloading built in… it could not possibly be that hard to position them to support such a model.

Unlike my husband, I was not especially perturbed about the sudden iPhone price drop.*  Oh sure, it stung a bit to have the price drop so quickly after I bought mine (I had been expecting the usual procedure of “Wait 6 months/a year, introduce a better one, and drop the price on the previous one.”)  After all, no one WANTS to pay more money than they have to for anything.

But I tended to fall more in the John Gruber camp: I paid $600 for an item that was worth $600 to me.  If it wasn’t worth $600 to me, I should not have paid that much for it.  And since I still love my iPhone, I adopted the “viva la capitalism” approach.

But that doesn’t mean I won’t take the $100 store credit offered to early adopters. I think it was a nice “No, we don’t take you for granted” gesture by Apple, and besides, since I’m considering my $600 gone and spent, it’s essentially $100 free from Apple.  Duh.

And as I hoped, the store credit claim process is completely painless- you don’t still need to have your store receipt, or even the box your iPhone came in.  You can complete it with just your phone number and the serial number etched into the back of your iPhone.  The process took me about 3 minutes, including waiting for the claim code to come by SMS and printing out my credit code. You can claim your iPhone credit too.

*Probably contributing to our difference of perspective, Tom’s iPhone was purchased out of our household budget- we decided that the Bridge Family Budget could only responsibly support one iPhone purchase at a time, and agreed that since Tom runs his business essentially off his cell phone and his laptop, those two items have to be the best they can be, and are therefore worthy priorities. Also, he would have to start supporting it for his clients, so we bought his first, with the idea that I would get mine later.  My iPhone, on the other hand, was purchased sooner than anticipated due to an unexpected windfall I received from one of my personal projects that I had never expected to make money from.  So for Tom, the early iPhone purchase affected our shared bank account, while for me, it just meant that my “fun money” didn’t stretch as far as it otherwise could have just a few weeks later.  From that perspective, it’s not hard to see why Tom was bent about it and I wasn’t.

I got a shiny new toy.

But the number is taking a while to transfer from my POS Kickflip, so it might be hard to get hold of me on the phone for a day or two. 

UPDATE:  The transfer is complete.  My iPhone can now be the only phone.

One of the advantages of being an early adopter is that I can almost always get “tiffany” as a username.

The other advantage is that I get beta invites to hand out.

I’ve got a few invites for Pownce, and a couple for Skitch.  Skitch is Mac-only.

I’ve been taking another comedy class- this time it’s “Advanced Joke Writing and Character Development” -and will be doing an Open Mic at Topaz on June 14th.  It starts at 8, and I’ll be doing ten minutes.

It’s been a lot of fun, because we’ve spent a lot of time in class just brainstorming ideas back and forth about each other’s premises, perfecting each other’s punchlines, etc.  One of the important things that we’re doing is developing our jokes to match our personas- sometime the joke you come up with, the way you come up with it, isn’t a joke you can tell.  Sometimes you have to abandon the joke completely or give it to another comedian, but sometimes you can re-work it to make it work for you.

So one of the exercises we’ve done is to write a joke about gas prices, but not a stand-alone joke.  We’d probably all end up writing the same hackneyed joke if we just tried to write a joke about gas prices.  We had to write a joke about gas prices that would fit within a bit we already had.  For example, I do a joke about people who called me at the temp agency to look for work, but then couldn’t write down my email address because they had called while driving.  So my gas prices joke is, “Look, gas is expensive.  When I get in my car, I think I need a new job, too, but that doesn’t mean I start looking RIGHT THAT SECOND.”

It’s not that great of a joke, and I probably won’t keep it, but it flowed well with the bit and fit in neatly with the tone of the jokes surrounding it. 

Last night, we did some really great work on a bit I got the idea for last week when Tom said something funny about the Pottery Barn catalog.  Want to hear the bit?  Come to the open mic.  But I’ve got tons of notes to go through and make a bit out of, and meanwhile the bit about the road trip we took last summer is coming along really well.  I even made a Louisiana Purchase joke in it.  That people LAUGHED AT, mind you.

So it’s going well, and I’m going to try to tape the open mic so I can get it up on YouTube.  In the meantime, I leave you with this bit of amusement from Slate’s Human Nature column:

The Internet is killing the porn industry. For the first time in years, video sales and rentals are down. Old trend: The Web helped the industry by facilitating anonymous purchases and downloads. New trend: It’s drying up demand for paid porn by facilitating uploads of free, cheaply made porn. Old complaint against porn: It’s crudely made trash. New complaints by porn industry: 1) Free porn is crudely made trash, whereas we use sophisticated actors, sets, and lighting. 2) Porn consumers don’t seem to appreciate the difference. 3) When we offer them free samples, they just use us for their pleasure and leave us with nothing. Human Nature’s view: For all you sophisticates in the porn business … it’s called irony.