iTunes Music Store
It continues to taunt me, its so well executed, easy to navigate, powerful and just a cool place to play around in if you have the connection for it. But it needs US credit cards to buy songs!!! arrrgh! I want my Michelle Branch / Sugar Ray prerelease and stuff! I mean it even introduced me to a superb band under the "up and coming" artists section - Trapt. I downloaded the whole album for a listen and it is seriously good. A mix of the heavy rock which can be satisfying at times but with melody and soul. Good lyrical content and stuff you can listen to.
I have an odd relationship with hard rock/metal. I love System of a Down. Their work is intelligent musically varied and it is actually thought provoking with lots of political/social commentary. However the friend who introduced me to them also thinks highly of a band called "il nino" who are incorrigibly shit. They are a metal band who are loud and try to write interesting lyrics which just sound like trite and simplistic anti-consumerism. Its angst for the sake of angst and 2 dimensional. In fact I've listened to loads of metal thanks to Ben but only SOAD is any good.
So when I heard hard rock done well again in Trapt's self-titled album I was really drawn in. This album is definitely next on the buy list and would be mine but for its lack of UK release and my acute lack of funds.
I've also ran out of room on my iPod. I've had to delete crappy songs which really weren't supposed to be on my mac but I had forgotten to delete after I had used them. Anyhow I'm back onto the 159 megs free-zone so I'm alright for the moment but I could sure use one of the new iPods.. Mmm.. New iPod :) Maybe if I win the lottery I'll treat myself.
Anyhow - Check them out! Superb Band and a brilliant album www.trapt.com
Stupidity Strikes
I managed to leave the one file I needed for my day of sitting on my ass at home studying at university! Argh! What's worse is that I had actually photocopied the paper I needed in case of just such a situation but I had both in the file haha!
So I had to go into Uni just to pick up the file, still I would have had to anyway as I got the details for my moot but I would have done it tomorrow and slept some more this morning :)
By far one of the coolest ideas I've ever seen
I just found this thing called "torrent" which has been around for over a year now and it is so brilliant I can hardly believe.
Basically BitTorrent is a way to relieve server stress by getting users to be servers themselves. What happens is that when you connect to a torrent download Torrent sends you 1 'chunk'. It sends chunks of files to all the downloading users. Then the users upload the chunks from each other. So what you get is at first a slow download and then a massive flood as you grab the chunks you need from different sources whilst the server load is dramatically decreased. Its an incredible idea and the sheer implementation of it is a mindbogling affair but it works!
Just think about what went through this guys head! I mean he must have sat there seeing about 50 people downloading a file from a server and thought "Damn, think of all that upload bandwidth that is going unused" and then he must have spent ages thinking about how to harness it and -bam- idea of the year :)
Of course the massive irony is that the more users who are ON torrent the faster the download is!!
Right time for some more research and listening to Trapt.
Later
John
Posted by John Swaine at May 13, 2003 08:03 PM