They also announced a deal with Paramount for more movies. Passed their 2 billion songs downloaded mark. Selling 5 million songs a day. Moved up a spot over Amazon as 4th biggest music reseller.

But even better is the iPhone. It’s super thin and all touch screen. Multi-touch gestures to control it. 8 GB iPod built-in. 2 MP camera. Can show wide-screen. Proximity sensor, light sensor, accelerometer (can tell if you are showing portrait or landscape). Visual voicemail. Wifi and EDGE connectivity. Works with Cingular only I guess. I’m drooling – looks amazing. $500 for 4 GB and $600 for 8 GB. Available in June (still needs FCC approval).

I feel very happy with my decision to buy some AAPL stock last week (up 5% on the day right now). Wish I’d bought more…. :)

Pretty good coverage on the Engadget transcript although I’m sure all the Apple store stuff will be up later today as well.

I just ran across a link to a list of death metal bands in a festival (plus logos) that is equally as funny, perhaps more so as these are real actual band names. I think my favorite is probably “Nunwhore Commando 666″. If you scroll down, you’ll see a bigger list of past attendees at the bottom in small print.

And interestingly, there is at least one name on our made-up list that is also on the actual list: Catheter. There might be more too although nothing else I saw at a glance.

Places to buy music:

• emusic – Used to be very heavily indie but covers a lot higher percentage of mainstream stuff now. Lots of live stuff. Music i DRM-free. I like the subscription model – it’s a lot cheaper than something like iTunes if you get a subscription and actually download your tracks every month. Cost is probably around 20 cents / track.
• AllOfMP3 – Russian web site, currently at the center of a lot of copyright pressure. They pay the artists but not record companies, which you may or may not think is right. They operate under Russian law, but it looks like Russia may eventually buckle under pressure. I love the model though – tracks are DRM free, pick your format and compression level, pay per the byte. Cost is usually around 10 cents / track.
• iTunes – great selection, still a great place to find and buy music. 99 cents / track is simply too much though. Downloads also use Apple’s DRM and can only be played on up to 5 authorized computers.

Other things of interest:

• last.fm – Track your listening habits, get recommendations, listen to radio based on artist, recommendations, etc.
• iLike – sidebar for iTunes that suggests similar music to what you’re listening to and points you at free tracks by indie artists on garageband.com.
• G2P – Use Google to search for MP3’s on the net
• LibriVox – Audio books for books in the public domain
• LaLa – like BookMooch for CDs – peer to peer CD trading. Haven’t used it, but heard good things.
• Indy – music recommendation player, based on Pandora I think. I used this for a while about a year ago and thought it was ok.

Some of my favorites:

Gown removed carelessly. Head, less so.
- Joss Whedon

Kirby had never eaten toes before.
- Kevin Smith

The baby’s blood type? Human, mostly.
- Orson Scott Card

Adult
Child

The gnomes on the shirt were made with the awesome South Park Create-a-Character game, captured off the screen with Grab, and resized in GraphicConverter (the swiss army knife of Mac image programs). The titles were done in Gimp, with the ScriptFu Glossy plugin. Everything was put together in GraphicConverter and mirrored. Then we just printed to t-shirt transfers, printed them out, and ironed them on. GraphicConverter and Grab come pre-installed on the Mac. Gimp is a free PhotoShop wanna be (a pretty good wanna be for several hundred dollars less though).

Just for the record, doing this on white t-shirts works pretty well (make sure to trim the transfers down to get minimal white stuff around the shirts). The dark shirt transfers were much poorer and I wouldn’t recommend them. If we had started more than two days before the party, we probably would have just had one of the photo processing places on the web do it as they would probably look a lot better. Maybe next year.

I’ve seen references to this pop up a few times on the web and even watched one of these maybe a month ago. I see why people are hooked by it although I never watched another one. I didn’t realize it had continued to grow into a whole phenomenon. Seems fairly likely that this is a very creative and elaborate marketing campaign for a movie or some other piece of culture. In that sense, I hand it to them for doing something really innovative.

More than anything else, though it reminds me of something virtually identical that was portrayed in William Gibson’s last novel Pattern Recognition”, where the lead character Cayce Pollard is part of a web group tracking a set of related film fragments called “the footage”. That thread is one of the more fascinating parts of the whole story, which itself captures the whole idea of “coolhunting” and other trend spotting that now exists out there in the marketing/advertising world.

Jeff-
C.L.E.E.Z.M.O.: Cybernetic Lifelike Entity Engineered for Zealous Mathematics and Observation

Alex-
G.L.O.A.F.: General Lifeform Optimized for Assassination and Fighting

Scott-
S.H.A.G.: Synthetic Humanoid Assembled for Gratification

Chris-
F.R.E.Y.G.U.Y.: Functional Robotic Entity Yearning for Gratification and Ultimate Yardwork

Tom-
W.H.E.E.L.S.: Wireless Humanoid Engineered for Exploration and Logical Sabotage

My new band of the week is Motion City Soundtrack. Not a great band, but kind of a fun power pop band, in the vein of Panic! at the Disco or Fallout Boy. I gather they did the soundtrack for the recent Superman Returns as well although I haven’t heard that yet.

Probably my favorite track right now is Level by The Raconteurs. I love the rhythms in this tune. You should check out their web site too as it is about the easiest web site I’ve ever used.

One interesting find of the week was The Bed’s Too Big Without You (by the Police) done by a jam/groove band called Skinjer (an offshoot of the Addison Groove Project).

Saw some other interesting covers of Gnarls Barkley’s Crazy on this blog by The Raconteurs and Ray LaMontagne. The Raconteurs version is more of a novelty but Ray’s version is pretty great.

Other miscellaneous bands I’ve been listening to lately but have been too lazy to blog about:

• The Postal Service – low-key electronic stuff, great in small doses
• Breakestra – funky awesomeness
• Imogen Heap – in particular, the song Hide and Seek
• Dandy Warhols – cool band from Portland
• Arctic Monkeys – refreshing pop rock from the UK. My fave is Red Light Indicates Door Are Secured

The album is available from emusic.com. If you register for www.emusic.com, you get 25 free downloads in the first month, after which you can cancel if you want. In other words, this thick slice of funk is available to you, right now, for nothing. What are you waiting for?

PS. You might also be interested to know that emusic just added Funkadelic to their catalog.

Seems like everyone is just trying to use compression to make their CDs sound louder instead of taking advantage of the huge dynamic range offered by digital recording.

Seems to me like the advent of sound normalization on mp3 players, iTunes, etc would make this useless. Even on the radio, they do the same thing to normalize volume, so what’s the point? Record industry people are stupid.

You can also do chat and make groups and other stuff that seems pretty useless to me, but that’s just me. The recommendations and personal streaming radio are great ideas though.

Tags: last.fm, music, itunes

C is for Cookie – Mashup of “V for Vendetta” trailer and Sesame Street

Douglas Adams short story: Private Life of Genghis Khan

No explanation for this – warning: web page has audio

Update: Here’s a story explaining the origin of the video. A marketing stunt I guess.

I’ve switched hosting providers to Yahoo, which was ridiculously easy and a lot cheaper and more functional than my old host. I’ve spent way, way too much time over the last week trying to figure out what the hell I’m doing and perhaps more importantly what I want to do.

But, decisions have been made for now and I am in the process of putting this thing together, primarily with WordPress. So far, WordPress is good. I dig it. Had to look through a few hundred themes before I decided on one, but choice is good. I have to give kudos to Yahoo as well – their web site stuff is better than I would dare to expect from a hosting provider knitting together dozens of programs to provide a reasonable user experience, even for people less knowledgable than I (if such people exist).