General

Andy Sullivan: “While file-sharing services like Kazaa and Morpheus enable anyone with an Internet connection to access a huge library of music for free, experienced file sharers are more likely to actually increase the amount of money they spend on CDs, the report by research firm Jupiter Media Metrix said.”  [Scripting News]

I’ve bought several CDs after first downloading that artist’s songs via Napster. I found out that I like the Cuban group Los Van Van and I’ve discovered several new groups by browsing people’s libraries.

Q&A With Adium’s Adam Iser [MacSlash: A daily dose of Macintosh News and Discussion]

I just went back to Adium (plus the official ICQ & MSN clients), since I keep running into annoying problems with Fire. Proteus also has lots of problems. It would be great of Adium supported all 3 protocols, since it’s a lot more stable than the others.

I just checked an abandoned POP account I haven’t looked at since November of last year. There were 154 emails, all spam.

This is an account that I never gave out to anyone – I once had my email forwarded there from my pobox.com account. The pobox.com account is now forwarded somewhere else and gets very little spam. I have no idea how anyone got that address, since it’s a fairly obscure domain (xtrabox.com) from a provider of POP3 accounts rather than a well-known ISP domain.

Some of the printable subjects were things like “Boost your windows reliability” (I don’t think so… I don’t even use Windows).

I took this picture today. This is the Middle River behind my home. They call Wilton Manors the Island City because it’s completely surrounded by rivers that separate it from the rest of Ft. Lauderdale.

Here’s a cute picture of Cody I took shortly after I moved. He loves to find strange hiding places!

16729 ª April 29 9:43 AM. Buried in debt, wallowing in multiple bankruptcies, with a trail of ill will across three states: this is the state of Anita Bryant twenty five years after her anti-gay campaign in Florida. Perhaps these right-wing Christian groups who have recently been attacking gay and S&M events should take a lesson from this. [MetaFilter]

Aww, let’s all cry for her “;->”

Help bring RealPlayer to OS X. MacCentral points to a RealPlayer survey for future features online. If you would like to see an OS X version of the multimedia software from Real, fill out the survey and let them know that they need to get with the program. [Mac Net Journal]

This is one of the lamest surveys I’ve ever seen. Not only do they misspell Macintosh, they only list Intel, AMD, and Cyrix CPUs – no PowerPC or 68k. They list every version of Windows, but don’t distinguish between MacOS X and classic MacOS. It proves just how little they understand the Mac, and it’s not surprising they don’t have an OS X version.

Gen X-ers especially will love Puzzles for the Avid Consumer. I did pretty well in the tests, which isn’t surprising.

[The Shifted Librarian]

I just found out that Glen Bredon died almost 2 years ago. If you’ve never used an Apple II, that name probably doesn’t mean anything to you, but Glen was probably one of the most influential people in the Apple II world. I remember using his Merlin assembler.

Question: Ursula K. LeGuin thinks of book genres as ghettos, but what about music? Is jazz a ghetto? Classical? Blues? Those seem pretty straightforward. Christian rock? Folk? New age? Still straightforward? [The Shifted Librarian]

“World Beat” is certainly a ghetto. Almost everyone hates that term and nobody has ever been able to define exactly what it is. Only in “world beat” will you find Fela in the same category with Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan.