i should have said this long ago

it would not have bothered me tremendously if the yankees had signed carl crawford. in fact, i was basically hoping they would.

blackberry unveils genius low-cost marketing plan

research in motion, famed blackberry bakers, have apparently abandoned their comedy central stop-motion poolside hipster ad campaign to grab attention the cheapest way possible: by getting sued.

though most media outlets have interpreted research in motion's recent announcement of the blackberry playbook as a competitor to the ipad. what cracks me up the most is when they start talking about the price. the most important price on the playbook is this one: free.

free? how can a tablet be sold for free? it can't, but if it infringes upon the iconic naming convention of a rich and litigious competitor, it can generate a lot of free publicity. that's right, the playbook is a play for attention. the current news focuses on research in motion's technological challenge to the ipad. soon, though, we'll have steve jobs firing lawyers until apple legal challenges this thing in court. macbook, ibook, powerbook, playbook? tell me which of those doesn't fit. yup, they all fit. so i think apple will see rim in court.

i mean seriously, you thought they named the "first professional tablet" the "play"book because it sent the right brand message? please. still, maybe they're just faking the initial ad campaign to mess with us. everyone knows only consumer-targeted blackberries come with cameras. this one has two.

no, that guy's pool is amazing

over the long weekend, i was fortunate to be able to watch some rebroadcasted television online. it seems that no one, in terms of ratings makers and ad salespeople, really cares about the online audience, but thanks to verizon dsl, comedycentral.com, and the blackberry corporation, i was able to view some intriguing long-form commercials with my programming.

up until recently, online television has apparently taken a realistic view of the problem of serving up advertising: if there's no content from the ad network, you go back to your video without further delay. the worst thing that happens is you stare at a blank screen for the same (limited) amount of time that you would have watched a commercial.

the vzdsl/c...c....com/bb team, however, has brought an entirely new hilarity to the equation. with no one else using our 3mbps (haha) connection, i found myself staring at a sort of wallpaper/splash screen that featured blackberry branding and an aqueous background. at first, i found this amusing, as if i was watching a slideshow. i was soon irritated, however, to discover that the ad was just going to sit and sit until i had been forced to watch it in its entirety.

let me be clear on one thing: it might be annoying to advertisers that their content doesn't always come through as well as the streaming video it's paying for, but that doesn't mean it's time to enrage viewers. if i'm forced to sit and wait and wait for a chance to watch a dude in a grey deep-v t-shirt play with his phone by a pool, i'm probably going to hate that phone, the people who made me watch the phone, and the people who deliver my internet. three-for-one, guys. clap clap.

so i went and watched videos on a different site. yup, c...whatever may have a monopoly on its own content, but it doesn't have a monopoly on stuff that interests me. sorry. i came back later and found comedycentral.com was working, so i watched some more...and was treated to another static first frame of a commercial, joking to myself that it would be fun to see where the hawaiian theme of this intro was going. it was going to the same dude, but without a narrative that coherently connected it to the previous commercial. yup. why am i still watching commercials of this guy? he is almost as pointless as that palm pre ghost woman - and palm went dead dead sold to hp. bad company to be keeping. so blackberry - even more annoyed at y'all. i'm going to bed now and i've gotta plug in my nokia, which has the same features as your phones and fewer awful ad experiences.

somehow that dude seems sexier now though.

it's that time of the year

i am visiting my parents. there's a temptation while here to live a slightly different life than i normally do, and maybe that's the whole point of vacation. i have noticed that i treat my email and phone differently than i would if i were home. i wonder whether that is the secret to enjoying getting away. now, it's not like i have a boss calling me up, but the distance from my social home is probably an okay thing. i don't know if there are people who think i'm ignoring them; i did try to warn folks that i was leaving for a while.

i am also traveling back in time via my own posted writings. not from here, of course. it does strike me as funny that i almost wrote a post tonight mentioning the unusual nature of my old 97s fandom and then i randomly clicked two posts from september 2007, both of which turned out to be about the old 97s. not unthinkable, but an amusing coincidence.

i noticed while writing all of this, however, that i am not going to be able to honestly maintain my strong pro-kathryn calder stance. her new solo material seems fine, but it definitely seems like something i would listen to for a few months and then forget. there's nothing wrong with that; i think it's perfectly all right for an album to make you happy for a short period of time. i just don't think i'll bother obtaining hers, and that makes me slightly sad.

a likely story

i have two reports of the red sox game to deal with, or at least two possible reports:

1. they had scored nine runs or were up nine runs in the first inning or two

2. the score was 7-5

while modern technology makes it almost insane for me not to reconcile these two facts, i am going to assume the second was the score of the previous night's game.

what strikes me as odd is that i cared enough to look up the score of the game even knowing it had started out with a nine run explosion, and yet once i saw this 7-5 thing happening, i gave up. oh, and there was the fact that the newspaper web site it was posted on had annoying ads and popups that tricked our popup blocker.

conclusion: information may be easy to get from a time standpoint, but once that's a fact, there's less incentive to bother retrieving the information once anything goes wrong.

people have no idea who jacoby ellsbury is

no, actually they do. i just wonder if adrian beltre has any idea who jacoby ellsbury is. or that when he's done collecting his huge checks for this second amazing contract year of his career, he'll apologize one more time for running into him like he was a brick wall. technically, fault is not an issue. the fact that someone missed nearly an entire season is an issue, and one that demands repeated apologies.

so i don't blame adrian beltre. i just happen to have been angered that the red sox signed him since the day i heard about it. only the marco scutaro signing angered me more, and scutaro has the benefit of being older, less talented, and the first massively annoying signing of last offseason.

i would like adrian beltre not to be on the red sox next year. is that asking too much? i would like to get rid of mike cameron, bill hall, marco scutaro, and adrian beltre. now maybe that's asking too much. i just want to ask, because what else can i do? and maybe some jacoby ellsbury memorial 2010 t-shirts, with the letters in ellsbury all cracked like his ribs. i heard he stole four bases. that's great. imagine how many bases the guy should have stolen this year, without having to go through ridiculous third baseman collision rib crackery to steal them.

people have no idea who jacoby ellsbury is. or they do, they just don't know how many bases he could have stolen this year. because that is impossible to know. as is the actual value of prolific base stealing as a contribution to a major league baseball team. but i think most people are in favor of unbroken ribs. make healthy choices people. in your diet and your baseball team. say goodbye to adrian beltre. if only he had never run into his teammates.

reasons i want dan haren

Dan Haren's a good fantasy baseball player. I don't mind grabbing him for my keeper league, but I thought I should make sure I've made the case properly. Six of my fantasy pitchers come from just two teams, so if nothing else it would help to spread my risk.

Why I am pretty sure Dan Haren is worth adding off waivers:

He's not a Tigers starter.
He's also not a Blue Jays reliever.
I'm desperate for a reason not to keep Fausto Carmona for $3.
Now I can worry about an elite pitcher other than Cliff Lee, who's not even on my team.
Any time you can add a pitcher with a .350 babip, you do it.
It's like picking a pitcher off the dollar menu.
A pitcher who's striking out a guy an inning.
Unlike Derrick Lee, he actually wants to play for the Angels.
Maybe now I can forgive myself for not grabbing a $3 Carlos Santana when he cleared waivers in April.
At the end of the year, no one remembers who finished with the best waiver priority.

not in miami

i just realized i'm doing something lebron james could probably never do again in his life - i'm wearing cleveland cavaliers shorts and a sport coat.

yes, it matters how you hold the phone

it's interesting to me not that the new iphone has reception issues if you put your fingers in the wrong spot, but that this is receiving attention in the mainstream media. maybe people are used to having flip phones with those little extendable antennas, but every nokia i have owned gets horrid reception if you put your fingers on the top 1/4 or so of the back. that's where the antenna is. this is a known issue, but it's only talked about on sites that exclusively cover cell phones, and relatively speaking, it's a tiny subset of the phone purchasing population that ever visits those.

so this has been clear already with previous iphone-related issues, but the massive level of attention given to apple on the stock market, in the media, etc totally cuts both ways. there are times people get mad because things they feel were not originated by apple are acclaimed as exciting new developments. however, performance problems that are far from new to the mobile phone world often are talked about as if iphones are the first products to suffer from these limitations. the reception issue is the latest example.

i actually was highly impressed to hear that while the antenna runs around the phone, there is apparently only one spot where there's a problem. it's so natural to hold a bar-style phone by the top, but my nokia experiences have taught me not to do this. it sounds like the iphone thing is easier to work around, which would be nice.

why i am not watching the nba playoffs

i walked into the living room, where my roommate and his breakfast burrito had congregated for the celtics-lakers game, and andrew bynum was being introduced. immediately, i announced 'this is just going to make me angry,' and left the room to watch something on the internet.
i am watching the a-team right now instead of the nba finals because the a-team is not going to result in me getting angry.

reckless speculation about the blue jays

when the red sox signed marco scutaro, i was immediately incensed because they guy had been coming off a career year at 35. his performance, especially coupled with aaron hill outhomering his career total and adam lind's power output, made me somewhat curious about whether the toronto clubhouse had some access to undetected performance enhancing drugs of some sort. now this year, alex gonzalez has 10 home runs and vernon wells is significantly better than he has been the past two years. it's a little strange to see all these outlying performances from one team. i haven't compared any of this to other teams, but that's a lot of strange numbers.

the old becomes new again

thanks to the constant repetition of pandora, i am now coming to the point with my spoon station where i'm evicting songs i like lest i get sick of them. spoon's catalog is pretty deep, so thus far i've only been ruling out other acts' fine but overplayed works. still, it's almost refreshing to experience the fresh thrill of seeing a good station go bad. oh...well, i guess that's not such a good thing.

is it cool if i evict steve jobs from my brain?

after grading papers, it's time to relax. i'm enjoying a nice album (she&him's vol 2) and a slice of german chocolate cake. so i start to think why don't i head over and sit on the comfortable couch with my dell laptop. then i realize what i should really do is head over to the couch to eat my cake and browse the web on the ipad i don't own, because my dell is admittedly a sort of terrible computer to use. but really? somehow mentally i already own an ipad?

so thanks, steve jobs. thanks a whole lot for taking over my brain. it's time for you to leave. or at least stick around long enough so i can interview you for my folklore project.

stevie j!

seriously, i can't figure out which apple products to buy. so, mr. jobs, is it cool if i just mail a big check to cupertino and you send me a mystery grab bag? note: no desktop macs allowed in said grab bag. i want a portable technology (magic?) grab bag.

pandora emailed me

i apparently linked my pandora account to an email i never check, but they wrote me several days ago to remind me that i'd run out or nearly run out of listening hours for the month. i suppose i might as well burn through the rest of it tomorrow.

as it turned out, my old stations are still annoying shallow in playlist size. the spoon station may be less annoying; perhaps it's got something to do with the fact that they have so many albums. i wonder though whether all the music on that station will get old too. it was weird going back to the decemberists station and having it play the exact same tarkio song over again. that's been the worst thing about them, and one that seemed to have improved--they play one 'related' song and then nothing else by that artist. this is clearly still a company that's overly in love with their technology.

still a mess

i had my decemberists station fired up on pandora. here are the artists for the last six songs it's played:

decemberists
decemberists
death cab
tarkio
neutral milk hotel
decemberists

see the problem here? tarkio is colin meloy's old band, so four of these six songs featured his admirable voice. that's too much, though, for a service that supposedly provides a radio-like functionality exposing listeners to a variety of artists. pandora's supposed genius comes from paying a bunch of people to minutely examine the musical features of songs. this data is used to create stations with musical similarities to the artist or song you've identified as a favorite. it's ridiculous to do all that work and ignore something as simple as the fact that you're playing songs with the same guy's voice over and over.

still not going back

pandora experiment continues with surprising results, as the station i created based on spoon has seemed to contain more different songs and artists than anything i've seen on the site before. i am pretty sure i'd go crazy quickly if i went back to my shins or vampire weekend stations, but this is promising thus far.

cold

it got warm enough that eating ice cream sounded like a good idea. why is it that there's a huge competitor to coldstone called marble slab? it seems like that should be a joke and yet it is not.

saved?

Pandora's on a little firmer ground these days after I created a new station and surprisingly found it did not simply link back to most of the music from my previous stations. I was even surprised the other day when it played a song from an Om Records compilation, because it's been forever since I've spent a lot of time with that portion of my collection. The strange thing is that the new station is built around Spoon, and they get played all the time on my Vampire Weekend station. The Vampire Weekend station in turn seems to play most of what I used to hear on my Shins station, which is why it got old fast. At least I have a new (still tiny?) playlist to get sick of.

So the race is on again...will I tire of Pandora this month before I run out of free listening time?

it's ending

my vampire weekend station has repeated at least three separate songs since the afternoon. it's not like i've had it on the whole time either; maybe three hours total. this is where i start to check out. i had been thinking the playlists were deeper, but it still looks like the equivalent of loading up a 10-disc changer and hitting random. not that you'd hear the same song from the same album twice if you did that.

while the shallow playlists seem ridiculous in the internet era (cf last.fm, where you will be slowly barraged with new artists and hear multiple alternate versions of familiar songs), what if there was a service that would let you pick any five discs and hit random? a virtual cd-changer. a niche, throwback, but controllable product. it's sad that a company that pays teams of music experts to tear apart tracks in their minute elements is basically giving us the same thing--but where we pick one artist and hope the other five we'll hear endlessly are worth it.

wilco!

it's a proud moment for the vampire weekend station.

too bad they still show up all the time, and that the next song that played after that one turned out to be death cab, which proves that i might have made the wrong list.

so far today:

vampire weekend x4
cake x2
modest mouse x2
ok go x1
wilco x2
the shins x1
the killers x2
the kooks x1
the strokes x2
death cab x2
cwk x1
the eels x1
andrew bird x1
arctic monkeys x1
and suddenly...johnny cash x1

that's 16 of 24 songs from seven artists, with one big surprise - cash - that is impressive but does not fit the mood. the killers popped up twice after initially surprising me with their appearance, so perhaps i just haven't been watching the track logs carefully.

strangers no more

i have to say, in my most recent experience, pandora is doing a better job of playing more than one song by a given artist. however, there is still this problem where my vampire weekend station is really only going to play them, the shins, cake, modest mouse, the strokes, and the eels. every third or fourth song will not be one of those bands. however, scrolling back through the past hour or so of music, there's one stretch where two songs in a row did *not* come from that list. that is insane. i just heard another cake song, and now arctic monkeys...so the next song will turn out to be...

wizards-bulls excitement

i had thought all the interesting players had left the wizards, but no. there was:

mike miller's single-sleeve t-shirt
josh howard, who unfortunately left with a (hopefully short-term) injury
oh boy, oberto coming out of the game immediately after i said i would get angry if they removed him
the blatche vs mcgee question, which i could not answer
t-shirts parachuting from the rafters (i really had not seen that ever)
the punch cam, which confused at least half the people who were on it
earl boykins making pargo fall down trying to defend him
the wizards winning and seeming to demonstrate that the bulls do not have that great of a team right now

i'm a love letter away

pandora just played the best voxtrot song ever. i have a copy of it somewhere, from the 'strangely alluring mysterious band that posted this mp3' days. despite all my efforts to reclaim it from past hard drives, it remains elusive. so i have to give them some credit for playing it, even if last night i was listening to a shins album thinking 'the shins are annoying me. i blame pandora.'

Pandora challenge, Feb edition

First, a moment of thanks for the safe return of my iPod, which spent a week in snow and emerged holding some measure of a charge and fully functional.

Since this is a new month, and the internet is cooperating, I remembered today the great challenge of the moment: can I run out of free Pandora listening time before I get sick of the frequently repeating music?

So far, I have been listening to a Vampire Weekend station. I have heard a lot of songs I have heard on Pandora before. At the moment, I am not sick of them, but I do cringe a little, because Pandora has a knack for ruining my relationship with songs, and I can see that looming moment when I have to give it up yet again.

stone age

thanks to verizon dsl, which disappeared for a solid two weeks and then returned in half-usable form, the pandora experiment is officially on hold until february.

what have i learned so far? i have learned that there's a disconnect between the importance placed on communication in the eyes of those who propose moving data to the cloud and in the decisions of those who provide actual internet service. i've decided that until such time as major internet outages become nightly news - like power outages - the cloud may not have enough lift to keep us afloat. i've learned that having unreliable internet speed may not leave you in the stone age, but it certainly separates you from the things you want to do on a daily basis.

reaching the first limits

well, after a couple hours listening to my vampire weekend station on pandora, i have hit the 'you can't skip more songs' limit for the first time. i've already banished regina spector and the beatles for different reasons, and skipped the arcade fire and phoenix for the same reason the beatles are gone. i suspect nothing much has changed, which means those songs will keep showing up until i tire of them. i tend only to like pandora for music i don't listen to otherwise. so spoon, wilco, and the killers work for me.

as if reading my mind, they are now playing the shins, which i will not banish and hope only to hear again after a good long delay.

0 for 1

my former roommate and i picked the playoff games to see who'd get more right. we were both wrong about the patriots, and he got all the other games right. i had everything wrong but the jets, which makes me 1 for 4 but really 0 for 1, since i was defeated for the week. sadly, i was feeling great about the packers as my chance to tie.

in addition to this nonsense, i have challenged the music site pandora to a bonkers contest. i plan to see whether i will be driven bonkers by the limited size of the playlists that it creates before i run out of monthly free usage. starting in the middle of the month, i will have to rely on there being a counter of some sort.