Mike Cohen

Elections 2008

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Despite most people’s enthusiasm and expectation of a Democratic win next year, I’ve been feeling more pessimistic and bitter about politics than ever.

I would like to see Barack Obama as the next president, but it’s starting to look more likely that Hilary Clinton will be the Democratic nominee. If that’s the case I won’t vote, since I really hate her (due to her support for video game censorship) and there’s no way I’d vote for a Republican. I would consider voting for a Libertarian candidate, though.

links for 2007-08-10

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Victory Records horror stories

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Pixelspread posted this story about how the indie label Victory Labels abused their artists and employees.

Almost all of Victory Records major alternative bands including Hawthorne Heights, Atreyu, Thursday, Taking Back Sunday, and Hatebreed, left them due to disputes. The head of Victory Records, Tony Brummel, is a bully who treats his employees, the label’s artists, and everyone else like shit. Worst of all, he never paid the bands their royalties.

When Hawthorne Heights left Victory Records, they issued the following statement:

“Due to recent events we have decided to leave Victory Records. Our departure is anything but amicable. We have decided to leave Victory in part due to the actions of the man who sits at the head of the label, Tony Brummel. Tony Brummel is a man that cares more about his ego and bank account than the bands themselves…â€?

“Tony is a man whose greed knows no bounds. After selling more than 1.2 million copies of The Silence In Black and White and If Only You Were Lonely, we have never seen a single dollar in artist royalties from Victory Records. Tony will claim that we have not “recouped,â€? a term used by those in the music business which means the label has spent more money in advertising than has been made by CD sales. In fact questionable accounting practices are the culprit and we are in fact owed substantial amounts of money much like audits from Taking Back Sunday, Thursday and Atreyu have uncovered. Despite earning more than $10 million, we’ve yet to see a royalty.â€?

Victory Records loved to sabotage other artists by recruiting street teams to visit record stores and move CDs by Victory artists to more visible spots while burying CDs by other artists. When he couldn’t sign a band, such as Acacia Strain, he signed a band that sounded exactly like them, marketed them the same way, and had their street team put their CDs in front of the other artists’s CDs.

Read the full article at http://thetrc.net/victory.html.

.Mac still sucks

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Even with yesterday’s update, .Mac is still not very useful. The only thing I use my .Mac account for is iSync and as my Apple Store account.

I don’t use my iDisk because it’s too slow. I don’t use .Mac backup; I back up to my Buffalo TeraStation every night using Synk Pro (I formerly used Deja Vu). The server itself is a lot faster than an iDisk.

I don’t use .Mac’s web space since their server doesn’t support PHP or MySQL. I use a Dreamhost account instead, which lets me host multiple domains and gives me a lot more space and bandwidth than even the upgraded .Mac.

I don’t use .Mac email since their lack of good spam filtering makes it useless. I have my .Mac email forwarded to my Dreamhost IMAP mailbox so I can filter it with SpamAssassin & Procmail. I don’t believe in using client-side filtering. Once the spam reaches your mailbox it’s already too late. I’d rather have good server-side filtering that gets rid of the spam before it even reaches my computer. Gmail’s spam filter is much better than .Mac, but I prefer using SpamAssassin on my Dreamhost account, with the rules tweaked to catch almost all spam and whitelists for legitimate mail, and Procmail to trash the detected spam completely. With the high volume of spam, I don’t even bother checking for false positives since I used to get maybe 2-3 a month among several thousand spams.

My2unz Update

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I’ve added a few new features to My2unz and to my iTunes module.

  1. I’ve enabled Events and allow members to create events.
  2. I’ve enabled the favorites module, which lets members add a track, artist, album, or playlist to their favorites, which appears in their profile.
  3. Track detail view now shows the members who own that track.
  4. All columns in list views such as playlists and tracks are now sortable by clicking in the column title.

The only non-standard module I’m using is my iTunes module, which manages track, artist, album, and playlist content. I’ve also created customized views using the Views module for tracks & playlists.

my2unz.com is up!

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My new iTunes playlist sharing site, my2unz.com is up. Registration is by invitation only – contact me for an invitation.

I wrote one custom Drupal module that imports an iTunes playlist or library exported as XML and handles specialized nodes for playlists & tracks. The rest of it is mostly standard Drupal modules. I plan to add more functionality for searching playlists, searching tracks by member, and finding members based on their music.

Besides the iTunes specific functions, it also has more standard features like blogging, forums, and buddy lists.