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I’ve got thirteen channels of sh*t  on the TV to choose from.

-‘Nobody Home’ by Pink Floyd

The above quote is so archaic at this point in time that you want to tousle its hair and tell it how adorable it is. Have you looked at how many channels you have access to recently? The descriptor is still fairly accurate, though it’s through the eyes of the beholder.

There are just way too many channels that I will never watch, and I’d love to not have to pay for them. Sports would be the first set of channels that go away. There have been two occasions where sports have been on in my house – once for HD testing, and once because a couple of friends came over to watch a World Series game last year because their cable hadn’t been hooked up yet. I’d be glad to be rid of them, on general principle. Don’t even get me started on Spanish channels. I don’t speak Spanish, so I’m paying for channels that I cannot even understand.

So, it’s not wonder that I’ve long been a fan of the idea of paying a la carte  for cable TV.  I would love to see a smaller bill from Charter.

This morning though, I found something that actually moved my irritation from passive to active. I found a chart from last year showing the costs to a cable provider per channel. Click here to see the memo. Seriously, go look at it. I’ll wait.

I know that everyone derives entertainment from different things, but I’m going to say, for me, the idea of paying about $6.45 for the top two sporting channels is outrageous. I didn’t even bother adding up the Spanish Channels, because I’d probably pop a blood vessel. And this is on top of the “Well, you can get HBO by itself, but it’s actually cheaper to bundle every channel we offer" scam. I bet that if I could go out to Charter’s web site and put a checkbox by the channels watched in my house, it would end up with under 10 selected, plus one or two premiums (assuming you give me reasonable prices for them – $5 a channel seems about right.)

There’s also a larger issue here – we’re subsidizing channels that otherwise would have no chance of ever making it. What’s the revenue plan here? Just leech off the subscriber fees forever? Seriously, there’s a Wedding Channel on my lineup. If you can show me how that channel would make it in  a world where cable subscribers aren’t forced to pay for it, I’ll eat their CEO’s business card.

I’m done with iTunes and iPods and iWhatever.

Last night, courtesy of the fine folks at Amazon.com’s shipping department, I received a 16GB microsd card for my Nexus One phone. I’ve been really looking forward to moving the rest of my mobile experience to the Android platform, which has really become an integral part of my life over the past couple of months. I use it for virtually everything now, and I’ve finally discovered what people must mean when they talk about a smart phone. Google has come a long way with Android since I wrote this article.

In addition to becoming my main email/news/web surfing platform, I’ve started using some of the media functions of the phone (which, incidentally, are among the weakest of the Android offerings), migrating them off of the iPod. The first thing I did was load up Google Listen for managing podcasts. Then I started using booksshouldbefree.com to fill up my audio book addiction until Audible get’s their act together and releases an Android client. The only two things remaining? A Bluetooth interface for my car stereo (where I do the majority of my listening), and moving my music over.

I’m currently using a 32GB iPod touch, and prior to that, I was using an 8GB Nano. That’s where it gets tricky. My music library is about 60GB, so I had to find some way to pare it down to the essentials. I am NOT a random music listener, so I finally settled on picking the songs I know I want on my music player, no matter what. I added a comment of kris_ipod to each track, and then made a smart playlist inside of iTunes that sync’d that to the player. Add in audio books, podcasts, and a second smart playlist to add some random filler and that took care of things. As I moved forward into larger iPods, I made larger random lists, and the core list grew as I added music from Amazon’s MP3 store (clean, unencumbered, play-it-anywhere music in high quality, fully tagged MP3 goodness), but I made a habit of making sure that all of my music that I wanted available to me on a mobile player had a comment tag.

Meanwhile, last time I reinstalled iTunes and imported my library off the server, it started an annoying process of “normalizing” my volume – essentially trying to make every track on an album the same volume. It’s a process that takes forever, and no matter how many times I cancel it, it just starts back up when I launch iTunes. At some point, I finally decided to just let it run. Since the setting for “Don’t Do That” didn’t work, I figured I’d just cave in and let it go, just like I did with the equally annoying “Downloading Album Artwork” feature.

To shorten the back-story, let’s say that everything worked fine up to a certain point. I copied the existing card’s content over to the new card, booted up and tested a few key apps to make sure everything looked good. The speed was great, and all of my data was there.

That’s when everything went south.

I still don’t have a good solution in place for syncing my music over to the Nexus, so I decided I’d just do a Windows search against my library for everything with my tag, and copy it. When I did the search, I came up with a number of songs that was about 1200 less than what was on my iPod. After about an hour of trying to pin down the problem, I checked a couple of individual files on the server and realized that while iTunes shows the metadata as being correct and what I anticipate it to be, the actual metadata in the files was overwritten with a volume level code in the comments field, completely overwriting my own comments.

Thanks iTunes. Thanks Apple. Now I have to go back and redo that entire effort so that I can move my music. I am literally talking about hours of work, unless I can pinpoint where you decided to screw up my files and restore them from the backups.

I’d like to point out that my music library is METICULOUSLY maintained. Every single track has album artwork and correct tags. I did that external to iTunes, and I don’t want it dicked with. If you’re going to do that, do it in your own damn data structure, not in the data structure of the physical files. Also worth noting is that fact that all of the music I bought from Amazon has now had the fingerprint comment overwritten.

Why did Apple feel the need to do that? I’m glad you asked.

It’s because Apple firmly believes they know what’s best for you. They want to tell you how you should listen to your music, how you should organize your music, and how you should access your music. They know best, and that’s how you’re going to do it. You won’t move to another platform ever, so why should you care if your files are damaged? Don’t worry your pretty little head about it – we’ve got it handled and we’ll show you what you need to know.

I won’t lie to you, Marge. I love me some Apple hardware. iTunes, on the other hand, is one of the worst-designed pieces of crap on the market. It constantly adds crap that it decides you need (like, you know, a whole new web browser and an auto update mechanism and a new network protocol), whether you want it or not. Don’t worry, we’ll tell you what you need and you’ll be happy.

Apple builds a really beautiful walled garden. Once you’re there though, good luck getting out with your data intact. They cleverly conceal a number of locks on the gate.

Consider this my “Dear Jobs” letter. In a time where we are overwhelmed with choices in mobile media players and the software to manage them, I don’t have to settle for a significant other that never listens to me, tells me “Pipe down sweetie pie, the men are talking. We’ll tell you what to giggle at”, smacks me on the ass and sends me to the kitchen for pie.

Sorry Apple, it’s not you, it’s me.

I thought this was an exceptional post regarding the reaction to James’ death, and how we as a community reacted to it. Also a nice thought about the "new media".

Some have speculated that James Kim’s tech celebrity drew disproportionate attention to his story relative to the thousands of other people who go missing each day. But I had never heard of James, watched his videos or read his articles.

This tragedy engulfed me because over the past 7 days I got to know the Kim family, not “know” as “a missing family” or “some traveling tourists,” but know. I watched James’ videos, toured Kati’s boutiques and trespassed on their lives. I read the comments of c|net colleagues. I watched the rescue efforts in real time, and my hope ebbed and flowed with the discoveries of pants and people. I bonded with the family on my own time and endured their heartbreak with thousands of others. A two-minute television flyover, sandwiched between an Iraq report and a Taco Bell recall, cannot offer that.

Those who argue that the media desensitize us underestimate the human spirit. We care as much as we ever have about our fellow people, but time- and space-constrained media do not give us people to care about. They castrate each story’s humanity to make room for more, and in the end they leave us with caricatures. If the UCLA Tasering weren’t on video, you would have read this on page 3 of your newspaper. Would it have made the same impact? Would anyone still be talking about Michael Richards if his outburst weren’t on tape?

We are no longer sheltered by constraints that squeezed human lives into printed paragraphs and television spots, and now they are unraveling mercilessly before us. The Web brings us closer to the ones we love, but it can also make us love the ones it brings us closer to.

From the comments:

That was masterfully put – castrating the humanity. I was just talking to a friend today about the story. Strip away all the technology, buzzwords, and promotion, and new media is really just us sitting around the campfire, telling stories, sharing moments, and being human beings, the way we did 10,000 years ago.

Apparently, the MPAA has “taken into account” the exact flaw that I described in my earlier post. They specifically asked study respondents how many of the movies they pirated would have been purchased (or viewed in theaters) if they could not have pirated them.

Fear not, though…they’re still a bunch of booger-heads.

According to ArsTechnica, nobody has seen the survey. The press release was merely a collection of talking points, with none of the data revealed.

Ars brings up two good points:

1. You can’t apply the same criteria to domestic and foreign populations. Piracy is a much deeper cultural norm in some societies.
2. They regard copying for personal use, as well as decoding for use on portable video platforms, as piracy. In other words, they consider “Fair Use” to be whatever they think is fair – not what the law says is fair use.

Remember kids – if you own a video iPod or a PSP, and you want to put a DVD that you purchased on it , that’s considered copyright infringement by Big Content*.

Screw you, booger-heads. Nowhere in the law does it say that am I obligated to prop up your failing business model.

Ars Article here

*Actually, it isn’t. It is actually a violation of the DMCA, since you must circumvent the DRM to put the video in another location.

Yesterday, one of the agents of “Big Content” (the MPAA) released the news that they had lost over six billion dollars in 2005, due to piracy worldwide. Yet again, they seem to be failing to take a number of factors into consideration.

Let me say upfront that piracy is a real issue. I do not dispute that. I think Big Content is losing some real money here. But I also believe that they are overstating their case in an effort to make it easy for the politicians they’ve bought to get whatever shenanigan-laden copyright legislation they think up made into law.

I’d like to draw your attention to one paragraph in particular:

“Bootlegging,” which the study defines as buying illegally copied movies, DVDS or Video CDs, accounted for $2.4 billion. “Illegal copying,” making copies for yourself or getting them from friends, made up $1.4 billion. Finally, illegal downloads cost the studios $2.3 billion in lost revenues.

There is a fundamental problem with that line of reasoning, namely that they are assuming that every download/copy/whatever directly translates to a lost sale.

Let’s assume for the sake of argument that the Internet doesn’t exist and there is no easy mechanism for downloading or copying movies. Now, take a pool of one hundred people, chosen at random, and see how many people are going to buy “Cabin Fever” (in my opinion, the worst movie ever made) at $19.95. You might get 2-3 people willing to buy it, for a total gross of $59.85. Come back to reality now, and ask the same group of people who would be willing to make a copy of it. Even if 100% of the group is willing to make a copy of the movie, you’ve only lost $59.85. Big Content, on the other hand, would seem to have you believe that they’ve lost $1995. Big difference.

Truth number one – Just because someone pirates a movie, it does not directly correlate to a lost sale. It’s an opportunity cost, at worst.

More likely, it’s revenue you would never have seen anyway.

Original Link:

Film piracy costs Hollywood $6.1 bln: study – Yahoo! News

Netbank SUCKS. If you are even remotely contemplating opening an account with them – DON’T!!!!!!!!!!

As previously mentioned here, in the past year they’ve managed to lose $4000 in deposits (yes, they managed to find them a few days later, but it cost me 12 hours of my life), and now this:

I put in a wire transfer request yesterday morning at 07:44. At 15:00 yesterday, I called to see why it hadn’t gone through. I was told “Yeah, we haven’t worked on that yet. You need to verify the information.”

From Netbank’s Website:

Note: For security purposes, NetBank practices random telephone verifications for wire requests. Successful verification of these selected requests must be completed prior to processing. Therefore, it is important that your contact information on file with us is correct.

That says “You don’t need to worry about a thing. We’ll handle it. If your number comes up, we’ll call you for security verification”.

So, at 15:00 yesterday I verified the info, and was told “It doesn’t matter what’s on the website. Common sense should tell you to call us.”

The problem with common sense is that it’s just not that common.

If there is a procedure I should follow, then put it on your damn website. I shouldn’t have to be a mind reader.

So, I checked this morning at 07:30. Nope…still nothing. Then I finally got an email from Netbank:

This bank mail serves as confirmation that your wire is being processed and will be sent by 5PM (EST) today. Please note that it is up to the receiving institution to post the credit. If further assistance is required, please contact us via bank mail. We value your business and hope that you will consider NetBank to be the primary provider for all of your financial needs.

WTF?

So, I call back and work my way up the chain. Sure enough, nobody there gives a damn about my business. The last supervisor I spoke with asked me what the wire was for, since they might be able to do something. I flew off the handle at that point and replied “It’s for getting MY money somewhere that it needs to be. What does it matter what it’s for? If I say it’s for little Suzie’s Iron Lung, will it get processed before noon?”

I’ve been a customer for 5 years. That will be ending in less than a month.

The Huffington Post | The Blog

Holy crap, are you kididng me?

Hillary Rosen bitching about lack of interoperability in the iPod?

That is a huge turnaround from what I thought she’d be saying. It would seem to me (as she’s spent a lot of years trying to tell me that digital music piracy is going to rob me of hearing the next Chrisbritneytina AguiJessica Simpspears) that she’d be all about something that locks you into using your own CD’s or music you purchase from iTunes.

Here’s where the whole thing falls apart:

DRM. Hillary, the reason you can’t buy stuff from any other site that sells you MP3’s is that companies like Napster are DRM-ing the crap out of the music so that the RIAA can’t sue them for aiding and abetting pirates. Take the DRM out of the picture, and you can throw MP3’s at the iPod all day long. Sure, you can’t play WMA (or whatever format MS is using this week), but who really wants to? They sound like crap anyway.

/sigh. How many times must I say this?

Sell me the right to use my music in anyway I choose. Once I own a copy of the song, I own it, and I can do whatever I want with it. Make an MP3, copy it to cassette, scribe it in clay, burn it to a CD. Don’t “license” the digital file to me. Don’t make me buy it over and over as formats change. Just send me a letter saying I own “Pretty Hate Machine” and that I can do whatever I want with it.

I’ve been a loyal Netbank customer for about 4 years now. In that time, I’ve done nothing but sing their praises to everyone who had listen. It’s a great setup for me – I use direct deposit about 99% of the time. Essentially, my only beef has been that if you want to deposit cash, you have to buy a money order and mail it in for deposit.

In the past three weeks, however, they’ve gotten precariously close to me shopping my money to a new location.

Issues.

1. Introduction of a new service called QuickPost. This, in theory, should allow you to take a deposit to a UPS store and overnight it, thereby getting your money into your account at the end of the next day. Nice idea, eh? And except for the fact that they’ve lost one deposit, and a second one hasn’t shown up, it is a nice service. It took me a week to get a deposit in, and only then after I went up one side of them and down the other.
2. Failure to fix their systems to operate with Quicken for Mac. I can’t pay bills through Quicken. That REALLY pisses me off, since it’s one of the two applications remaining that I have to use a PC for.

C’mon Netbank…get your act together. And my deposit better show up today. You’ve never seen a customer as pissed off as I can be.

Editors note: It showed up. More importantly, when I finally spoke with them, I had a provisional credit in my acount an hour later.

Just got my shiny new HD box from Charter.

I get about 6 channels, including HBO, Showtime and Fox. The sound is phenom and the picture is awesome. Wish they had more channels, and wish my TV would actually take a 1080i signal. As it is, I’m having to use SVid instead of Component Vid.

Oh, and Charter…please tell your techs that if they’re not knowledgeable about a subject, they should shut the hell up when they’re being taught by someone who is.

Svid >> Component…my ass.

Still trying to rig a way for Tivo to work with it. I know I’m not gonna get HDTV through the Tivo, but I’m going to at least try to have 2 feeds from the cable box to the system. We’ll see. I’m going to spend about 15 minutes on the problem before I go back to the old box.

Just wanted to let you know what I think of the progress of your crusade to bring music to the masses in digital format. I know you’re dying to get it done, since you have so much music that you think we should hear.

So, I tried out MusicMatch Jukebox’s Download service. Pretty nifty, actually. The catalog looks pretty huge, and I was even able to find an album that Tower couldn’t get for me. That is pretty cool. And, it only cost $9.99. Bravo, boys. That’s the price point I’m looking for.

BUT…here’s where your grade drops from an A to a D-.

Now I’ve got 9 Windows Media tracks on my computer. They’re useless to me. Why useless?

1. I don’t use Windows Media Player. I’d use it if I could plug Lame into it and rip CD’s into MP3 format. But I can’t. I’d use it with an encoder workaround, if it could burn a CD in a realistic time frame on a freakin’ 40x burner. Again, it doesn’t. So, WMP receives a “You really Suck” score. This has nothing to do with why those 9 tracks are useless. I just wanted to get it off my chest.
2. WMA sucks for fidelity. Yes, I know. MP3 sucks, as does any lossy compression. But I’ll stick with the devil I know.
3. What do you mean I have to use Musicmatch? What if I wanna play something with WinAmp? I just checked it out. You can’t. That sucks.
4. I don’t have the jack to spend on one of those fancy new mp3 players. I’m quite content with my Rio 500. Despite everyone’s best effort at killing those off, there’s some homebrew drivers and a couple of apps that let me use it. Well, can’t use my new 9 tracks on it. No WMA support.
5. What is this crap about only being able to listen to a track on 3 computers. Sorry fellas, I bought it. It’s mine. I get to do with it as I please. Wherever, whenever, however. (Just like your add says, before you get to the fine print)
6. What is this crap about only being able to burn a cd 5 times? See above.

So, while I’d love to use the service, and would probably spend money there, I’m afraid I can’t give you my business.

Said it before, say it again.

1. Make it cheap (you did)
2. Make it universal (Ogg would be great, MP3 is acceptable)
3. I can use it however, whenever, wherever.

You’re SO close to making more money than you can imagine. Get with it guys.

Until then, I’m enjoying the 9 tracks that I burned to a CD, and then ripped with LAME. They’re in a format that I can use wherever, whenever, however.