davidb dives in

I’m not saying I don’t like spring. I do. But every year (seemingly) around this time of year, I’m hit with your typical spring allergies. I cough, my nose runs, I feel somewhat miserable. Familiar story, I’m sure.

Except, in my case, every year it turns out that it isn’t allergies after all. I don’t have allergies (well, not to airborne stuff). Instead, I have a cold. This is some kind of stealth cold that doesn’t seem like a cold until I’m four days into it. The cold sneakily convinces me every year that, of course, I’ve developed seasonal allergies.

Now, time for some soup. *snif*

In other news: I retired my sister’s blog today. Last post was in February, three posts total.

The other day I was reading about Yahoo!’s new music service, which sounds to me like a cheaper version of Napster-To-Go. Or, in other words, a music subscription service. And, of course, once again I was reading about the imminent death of the iTunes music store, the iPod, and Apple.

Now, while I recognize that some folks would certainly find a subscription service useful, most analysis on this subject always seems to forget one thing: people consume music differently than most other media.

This was highlighted in a comment:

If you stop thinking of music as something you own and start thinking of it as something transient you enjoy and discard, [the subscription service is] much easier to accept.

I mean, we’re all ga-ga for netflix, right?

I subscribe to NetFlix, and, indeed, it is quite nice. But here is the thing: when I watch a movie once, I’m usually done with it. When I watch a movie more than once, I top out at about 10 viewings, with very very rare exceptions. When I buy a CD, I will listen to it hundreds of times (unless it sucks). I’m not unusual in this way.

Music we consume over and over again. Renting music that you love is a bad idea.

The music subscription service has its place among a segment of the market: it is a controllable, nice way to explore new music. I, however, have another, older technique for doing that. I call it “radio”.

[UPDATE]: I forgot that in my area, local broadcast radio actually sucks for this. I would more accurately say “Internet radio”, or “satellite radio”, or, an even more low-tech method: friends.

As an experiment, I asked my more politically-aware buddy Grumpy for the names of some political blogs that would represent both the left and the right. As I consider myself pretty centrist (or as Grumpy says, “moderate”), I was curious as to how I would react to these (differing, extreme) points of view.

Well, the experiment is over.

After reading them for a few weeks, I found myself unable to read them any more. “I ran out of time,” I thought to myself. This was really an excuse. The truth is that my curiosity over what makes the left the left and the right the right wasn’t anywhere near enough to overcome the feelings of tedium and disgust that I eventually felt while reading these things.

The executive summary of my experiment is this: the left- and right- wing blogs have a lot in common. They both scour the news for stories–however thin–with which to beat the other side with. They both focus not on the meat of the story (which would lead to useful debate), but the surrounding details, with which they harangue. Rarely to the left-wing and right-wing blogs talk about the same thing.

In any case, I removed those feeds from my RSS reader today, after not reading them for at least 2 weeks.