A bit of creative curiosity and a lot of personal guilt have got me thinking about my music acquisition habits. It’s been six months or so since I’ve bought a CD that wasn’t a gift for someone else. These days I get my music online.

I’m part of the demographic of people who are bothered more by the cost of CDs rather than the inconvenience of them. $10.00 per CD (or even $0.99 per song) is just too steep for me when other options are available. I like having CD quality. I like jewel-cases with the track titles and little books full of lyrics, photos, and art. But I also like a lot of other things I could spend that money on. Mmmm…
cheese steaks.

I more often listen to music on my iPod than a CD player. So being able to rip songs off a CD I buy is crucial. CD “protection” which prevents me from moving my music to a perfectly “fluid” format is not acceptable for me, and in this case I could be driven to illegal online downloads for inconvenience purposes rather than economic ones. It seems like this may be the case in the not-to-distant future.

Let’s assume I’m speaking hypothetically from now on to avoid incriminating myself…

If I rip songs off a friend’s CD or download music from allofmp3.com, I’m not only sticking it to RIAA. I’m robbing the artists of the little bit of money they would have received from the sale of a CD I didn’t buy. I’ve been able to ease my conscience so far by believing that the money I have saved shunning CDs has gone earnestly towards more concert trips. I’m sure I’ve spent more on concerts this year than I’ve spent on CDs (and concerts) previous years. I’ve gone to concerts I wouldn’t have gone to if couldn’t have heard the musician’s music for free first. Add to this the fact that artists receive a larger percentage of a concert’s profits than percentage of record sales.

From a high-level perspective, I am giving a larger portion of my disposable income to “the artists” than I would have if I were buying CDs and ignoring cheaper (so called illegal) online distribution channels. And this has kept me content for the past 2 years or so.

Let’s take a more detailed look at things though. I’ve downloaded a Kanye West CD and a Jason Mraz CD. I’ve seen Jason Mraz in concert before and will probably see him again. And while Mraz (and his band) may get as much as 1/3rd of the $100+ I’ll spend on tickets for his shows, how does this help Kanye West? Surely I owe this guy money.

But maybe I can just say, ‘Well, Kanye West just failed to impress me enough to motivate me to see him live.’ However, if I wouldn’t have been able to get his album for free (or really cheap without paying his label), I might have bought his CD. And in that case he would have gotten somewhere between $0.25-$2.00 for that CD.

[side note: I wish I had a good reference for how much artists get paid for CDs and concerts. If you have one, let me know. This page sites $0.0755 per track: Giving Away Music to Make Money. I’m also using the “common knowledge” that artists make more money from concerts than through CD sales.]

What about Mr. West and that $2.00 I owe him? I don’t know what to make of this. It’s very possible for me to say that I wouldn’t have downloaded the music if I had to pay (more) for it. That eases my conscious a bit.

But what about other artists, who I would see in concert if they played a venue closer to me? I’ve downloaded some Taproot. And I would see these guys in a heartbeat next time they show up in the Philadelphia area.

[results of a quick search: Taproot comes to Atlantic City with Stain’d, POD, and Flyleaf December 12th, 2005]

… but I haven’t been able to catch a Taproot concert so far. I have some “mp3 bucks” stored up to spend on that band. I could go out and buy the Taproot CD I guess, but I’d rather send them a check in the mail.

… not a bad idea, eh?

I’ll report-in later to expand on this topic with some ideas I have for “paying the artists”. In the meantime, anyone from the Kanye West, Jason Mraz, or Taproot families can contact me to get that check.

[other reading: Here is a website which explains a lot of thoughts I have on “illegally” downloaded music (with more research and analysis to support it): The Recording Industry is Trying to Kill the Goose That Lays the Golden Egg.]

So what do I do when I’m not posting to the blog?

I read other blogs. Here are some of my favorite I’ve run across recently:

• Matthew Good – Canadian Musician, Artist, and Political Activist
• Michael Bechtel – Accenture Tech Labs Employee
• WebWord – Web Usability and Design Expert
• Mark Cuban – Dallas Mavericks Owner and Businessman

Enjoy!

A while back I made a post about googling for good ideas and used the phony search string “automatic rubber-chicken dance hit studio”. Well, my blog is now the number one hit for that google search!

I also had a link to the search for “best idea ever”. Sadly, my blog does not come up for that search… yet.

If ya’ll are reading this, you have either way too much time on your hands or your life is very boring…

You should visit my site instead: jeremy@strangerstudios.com.

Then again if you’re reading this, me and you are probably day and night.

This is a common scenario for me. Yesterday, I came up with what I think is a great idea. As usual (I get great ideas often), I went to gandi.net to look for domain names appropriate for my idea. I found some great domains which I’m surprised are still available. But before plunking down the $20-$30 to order both the singular and plural version of the domain I wanted, I wandered over to Google to make sure no one else has created a website based on my idea.

This got me thinking. How many other people google for something like automatic rubber-chicken dance hit studio or the best idea ever just to see if anyone else is as genius as they imagine themselves to be? I do it at least once a week. With google these days gathering as much information about our habits as they are, why not steal our great ideas as well?

Here’s a rough algorithm:
(1) Identify “unique” search strings by noticing when a lack of high scoring results return for a search.
(2) Filter the unique strings by some genius logic.
(3) Hire post-docs to browse through the string for that next big thing.

Take note.

I was browsing through a backup CD of mine and came across a bunch of my old poems. I might as well throw them up here.

Here’s one called “conceited monkeys”.

the yellow bellied
underbottom that
moves me
to consume.
fabrics of threads
stranded…
and stranded.
together as many
broken, untwirling
decrepidations
is the
sum of
addictive additives
floating in that
food that we eat;
we consume like
locusts in packs
of packed pack rats
like so many,
so many,
oh so many concieted monkeys.
Damn this human race!

21:43:4:13:99

Oooh, I can be so moody. 

What the hell is up with ATI Technologies (ATYT) stock?

The stuff has been on a steep decline since the beginning of April. It’s gone down about 10% in the last two weeks. What gives?

I bought the stock back in the fall and enjoyed a nice little boost as the price rose from $16.40 to around $20. Since that early peak, I’ve watched the stock price slowly fall in spite of good news item after good news item.

There was one black sheep in the great white flock of ATI news. A slew of former ATI executives are now settling huge insider trader lawsuits. Now we’re not talking Enron or WorldCom huge, but millions of dollars.

So I’ve finally pulled out with the price at $14.80. Still I have my doubts as ATI minus the crooked executives of yesterday is a strong company with great placement to move their product into larger markets. The large majority of their profit comes from the sale of graphics cards for PCs and Laptops. But with Videogame Consoles, TVs, and any number of futuristic graphical devices entering the world of 3d, ATI as a market leader is looking to make a ton of dough. Heck, they’re making a ton of dough right now, undervalued, and outperforming their street numbers.

ATI is a company with good numbers and a great outlook for the future. The one thing they have against them is this insider trading issue. Don’t get me wrong. I’m not saying that insider trader isn’t a big issue or a great reason to distrust a company and dump their stock. However, ATI is now going to be under a lot of scrutiny and I imagine the new breed of execs running things there are going to take corporate ethics really seriously.

I spent a bit of time at a pharmaceutical plant for work. One of the anecdotes told at the plant is about the guy who’s job it is to pour a liquid form of the medicine they are making from 5 liter bottles into 1 liter bottles. The medicine is highly concentrated at this point and each 1 liter bottle has a value of about 50 million dollars. The people pouring out these flasks joke that a drop of the stuff is roughly equal to their annual salary. Anyway, the story is that one time one of these guys dropped an entire bottle of the stuff on the floor. 50 million literally down the drain. When told the story, I joked, “How long did it take to fire that guy?” The response was, “We didn’t fire him. If we fired him we’d just have to hire another guy who might do the same thing. Do you think that guy who dropped the flask once is going to take his job for granted and drop the flask again?”

ATI is like that guy who dropped the flask. We hope that they’ve learned their lesson and can keep their hands clean while taking advantage of all that know how and market position they have. My plan is to wait for the stock to bottom out on this bad news and pick it up when it’s cheaper. Now that I’ve sold my stake, I’m hoping it hasn’t bottomed out just yet.

I wonder if I’ll ever get around to finishing the Making the Blog(MtB) feature. It would be a useful piece of literature, but I’ve been struggling to find the time to work on it. I don’t have any illusions that people are excitedly awaiting the next installment. Once it’s finished though, I assume I may grab some hits off of Google from people running into the same problems that I did. It’s all about helping people, man.

Lately, I’ve been spending my time on some freelance web development work, “real job” work, commuting to my real job (1-1.5 hours both ways, yuck), looking for a dark blue or yellow Mazda Protege5 with a moonroof selling for under $13k, and celebrating my girlfriend’s and my 6th anniversary.

Sometimes I ask myself what more I’d like to be doing with my life. Well, besides finishing up MtB, I’d like to start playing poker again, setup a poker affiliate site, finish decorating the apartment, write some more fiction, and buy myself a widescreen TV. Those last two at least seem mutually exclusive.

Wish me luck. Though I’m glad the biggest problem in my life is finding time to do all this stuff. Maybe I’m not paranoid enough.

It’s been over a month since I moved into my new place, about time for an update. So far 3 of 5 walls are painted and 5 of 7 rugs are in place.

Operation scrub it down is complete. Sofa is go. Crummy TV and cable go. Living room curtins go. Old desktop computer go.

Still needed: 2 of 5 walls, 2 of 7 rugs, cumfy living room chair, living room lighting, a sweet ass TV, new bedding, and a new dining room set. I need to reformat that old desktop of mine, and I really need to get the artwork and pictures up on the walls.

Overall I’m really excited about having my own place to come home to again. I even scored myself a local project at work. I’m still up in the air about which is tougher a 1 hour commute twice a day or a 6 hour commute twice a week. One thing I am certain of is that it’s a lot nicer coming home to my Haverford apartment rather than the St. Louis Residence Inn.

The first MtB post was merely an introduction of the idea for this series. In this, the second installment, I will describe the MySQL schema used to store post information. Future MtB posts will go into the coding behind the various public and tools-oriented pages used to display and update the posts. So let’s get started.

My blog is written in PHP and uses a MySQL database to store and retrieve the posts and other information needed to make the site function. If you haven’t used PHP or MySQL before, you might want to checkout www.PHP.net and www.w3schools.com/SQL to learn more about these great technologies.

If you are already familiar with PHP and MySQL or just want to jump into things “balls-out”, then let me start by describing the schema or structure of my MySQL tables.

Currently, the jason@strangerstudios.com DB has just one table, call it post. The post table has the following fields:

Field	Type	Description
id	int(11)	The Primary Key for each post.
poster	varcar(32)	Who is posting the post. This is usually me, but could theoretically be the Pope or something. This field is also marked as an index.
title	varchar(128)	This is the title of the post, displayed in the colored header.
type	char(1)	This type is a letter referring to which category the post should be entered into. This allows posts to be filtered by type. Currently there are 5 types: News, Games, Writing, Art, and Other.
text	longtext	This is the body of the post.
date	datetime	The date of posting.
keywords	varchar(128)	This is an extra indexed field where I enter various keywords for each post. For instance a keyword for this post could be PHP or MySQL or Fuddy Duddy. These keywords aren’t currently displayed on the post, but I plan on later adding a page to search posts by keyword.

Now how do we setup this table? Well, I used PHP MyAdmin. It should be pretty self explanatary how to create the above table with this tool. If you haven’t already tried, browse around PHP MyAdmin, find the new table button, and take a stab.

If you’d like to (or need to) use SQL to create the table, here is an SQL dump of the table:

CREATE TABLE `jasonposts` (
  `id` int(11) NOT NULL auto_increment,
  `poster` varchar(32) NOT NULL default ‘jason’,
  `title` varchar(128) NOT NULL default ”,
  `type` char(1) NOT NULL default ”,
  `text` longtext NOT NULL,
  `date` datetime NOT NULL default ‘0000-00-00 00:00:00’,
  `keywords` varchar(128) NOT NULL default ”,
  PRIMARY KEY  (`id`),
  KEY `poster` (`poster`,`title`,`type`,`keywords`),
  KEY `keywords` (`keywords`)
) TYPE=MyISAM AUTO_INCREMENT=72 ;

I’ll let you all ruminate on this information. The next installment in this series will cover the front page and how posts are displayed and filtered using PHP and SQL queries of this database.

Look forward.