iTMS album sales, notes

This post over at forbes.com talks about suggestions for iTunes, mentioning that some people (myself included) enjoy reading the liner notes from CDs - which you can't get from the online store currently. Here's a way to use that to increase album sales: give out the liner notes, but only with the purchase of a full album. You would still get the album cover when you buy a single though. I'm a jean-yus.

Stattoo

Panic's got a new app out today - can you guess the name? It's something I didn't really know I wanted, but it turns out to be pretty cool. It's an app that shows the status of various things on your machine: email, calendars, time, etc, including pie graphs of the remaining space on your hard drives. The best part is that it has all of the "beyond the box" things that make Mac apps great (nice icons, good application layout, nice behaviors, and other bits of attention to detail), which is something you always get from the Panic guys. Steve's got a note about it too.

Also, it turns out that you can have links in the title's of these entries. Huh, something new every day...

TiVo!

I spent my morning with the DirectTV guy hooking things up around the house, so now we have DTV and TiVo! I'm still a novice since I had to come to work instead of playing with it all day (it was a difficult decision), but I'm sure that will change soon. Before too long I will be a full-time TiVo evangelist - just like everyone else I know that owns one :) Just kidding, you guys are great :P

Capital 'V' huh? Weird. I guess I've never typed the word before. I was pleasantly surprised that the installation happened _earlier_ than they promised - my appointment was in the afternoon but they asked if they could move it up to the morning. Since "in about 15 minutes" is a much better time estimate than "between 1pm and 5pm", I gladly took them up on the offer. I can't wait to see what presents the TiVo will have for me when I get home! (ok, I'm mostly kidding about that)(mostly)

House!

Since I was last online (back on Thursday), Lisa and I have moved. We're now busy unpacking and getting used to our new place. It's pretty cool - hardwood floors everywhere, a big carpeted garage for all of my music stuff, nice backyard, etc. Mainly I think we're excited because both of us get to have our stuff and we have lots more room than we did before.

I will probably post pictures at some point, but we have lots of unpacking left to do. Also, our DSL doesn't get hooked up until the 29th, so I'll have to get my fill of the internet at work.

Email news

I'm not a very effective person when it comes to email. A couple of weeks ago I noticed I had 3,300 messages in my work inbox (which is my usual filing place), and I started getting the standard "you are over quota" nag emails. It's not that I don't use folders - I do. I have a couple dozen of them for my work account, and just over a dozen for my .mac account. It gets bad during vacations and other times away from work, where the usual task of going through the recent emails becomes more difficult, and once that starts to build up it can be a difficult thing to stop.

So today I'm happy to report that I have 2 emails in my inbox! I started trying to remove 100 per day a while back, which worked pretty well. Once the number got below 500 (earlier today) I figured I should just go all the way.

As I was logging on to Blogger to write this up, I got a message saying I could sign up for GMail. I had read that other people had gotten it via Blogger, but I figured it wouldn't appear for me since I use Safari, which GMail doesn't support. Anyway, the link did appear, so I clicked on it and got a message that said something like "Your browser is not supported". Nice... launched IE, tried again. "Your browser is not supported". OK, after this I actually looked at the browser requirements - yup, Mac IE isn't supported. So I clicked on one of the links to download Firefox, and got it all working.

It shouldn't be too hard for people to guess my new email, since I got what I wanted. :)
And now I have another place to inefficiently store email - yay!

Drive Different

My brakes have been squeaking for the past six months or so. When I took my car in for service soon after it started, they looked at my brake pads, said they were fine, and told me not to worry about it (thinking about it now, I probably should have pressed them on this issue). The squeaks continued and I got worried, so I had them replace the brake pads last week when my car was in for a regular oil change, just to be safe.

As it turns out, my brakes were NOT fine. Evidently my brakes had worn all the way through and I was doing damage to my rotors, so I ended up paying _a_bit_ more than I would have for a simple oil change.

But now that I think about it, this has happened before. Back when I was driving my parents Ford Explorer the local service shop once told us the same thing - the brake pads were worn through and the rotors had damage. Since I was basically the only person driving the car at that time, it had to be because of my driving.

So it seems that my driving style somehow differs from your average driver. I try to brake as little as possible actually - I let my car coast whenever possible, and I leave enough space that I rarely need to slam on the brakes. I probably spend more time using my brakes at really slow speeds - trying to make the ride as smooth as possible, and I think that causes a different wear pattern than what service centers normally check.

On the up-side, I now know what a rotor is :) ... and I know more about my braking system than I did a few days ago. And I guess I'm helping the economy...

Winter Percussion Wrap-up

Well, the season is all over, and it's good to have some more free time on my hands. The kids did really well the last couple of weeks, and we finished up much better than I thought we would way back when we started.

We got 1st place at Championships for our division, but they also have a "Champion" for the division, so really we got second place. I don't know why they do it that way, but it does allow us to say "we got 1st!" and impress the people that don't know better. Even with my nitpicking on that, they still did a really great job.

I've amassed a large amount of footage from my DV camera, so now I'm working on putting it together for a DVD. I have been running out of hard drive space for quite a while, and this doesn't help - luckily Josh has a drive that he's letting me borrow for storage.

iDVD allows for more creativity (creating menus, etc) than iMovie, so it's taking longer to put things together. Ok, I think I'll stop boring you (and me) with this talk right now. More posts to come...

Lazy

I know I haven't posted in a while, but I'm lazy. Case in point - I could have blogged about recent experiences at Jamba Juice, but Daisie wrote a post that summed it up much better than I could have. So all I have to do is link. 2 cheers for the lazy!