Monthly Archives: November 2010

done with emusic – or trying to be

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I knew that nothing good would come of emusic’s plan changes. I mean, dumping all your favourite indie labels and replacing them with mainstream crud; how’s that working out for you, yeah?

Just to show you how things have changed, here’s a list of the most recent artists I’d downloaded pre-plan changes. The ones in red are ones you can’t get any more:

  • Barry Louis Polisar
  • Belle and Sebastian
  • Boards Of Canada — only one album available
  • Dum Dum Girls
  • Eels
  • Elizabeth Cotten
  • Elsinore
  • Euros Childs
  • Forest City Lovers
  • Frontier Ruckus
  • Gonja Sufi
  • Gorky’s Zygotic Mynci
  • Hold Your Horses!
  • Macy Gray
  • Michael Hurley
  • Mount Eerie
  • Pocahaunted
  • Someone Still Loves You Boris Yeltsin
  • Sun Kil Moon
  • The Delgados
  • The Moldy Peaches
  • The Tallest Man On Earth
  • The Turtles
  • The Whitlams
  • Will Powers

And here was me on a major Delgados kick, and they’re gone.

So cancelled my plan on the weekend, and got this:

Yep, if you’re on an annual plan, you’ve got to sit it out. They don’t offer refunds. So now I have to remember to go in every thirty days for the next nine months to find something – anything! – to download. It’s extremely shabby that emusic are holding over $100 of my balance to ransom. I guess they’re just trying to fit in with the mainstream music industry …

aah! my eyes!

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Seems that Shangri-La Toronto wants to surround their building with a bright magenta billboard. This is the view from my office:

It’s so bright everything vaguely reflective on my desk appears to be pink. I’ve made a couple of calls to the City of Toronto – Sign By-law Unit and Toronto 311 and await developments.

For St Andrew’s Day: Flower of Scotland

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Arduino and the Irn-Bru Can Choir present Roy Williamson’s epic anthem:

Like O Canada and The Star Spangled Banner before it, it’s a random midi file (grabbed from Midi files of bagpipe tunes: mercifully, does not autoplay) converted to RTTTL and played through a glued-on piezo.

Walking in the Parlour

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My timing’s a bit off, but here’s my version:

Stewart C. Russell - Walking in the Parlour

Played on the G C Dobson, tuned gCGCD.

restored to life!

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Got the banjo restoration project back from Hugh Hunter. I have to say, he did an excellent job:

This must be around 120 years old, but it’s held up well to some hideous misuse.

Clive’s C5 for the 2010s

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It’s got one fewer wheels than the C5 (which, stap me, appeared a quarter century ago) but it does look like a proper recumbent:

While the Sinclair Research X-1 does look quite nifty, I worry about the “Reserve now for £100, pay the rest on delivery next year” terms. It’ll probably turn up at the end of 2012 with a wobbly RAM expansion, and needing a firmware upgrade before it can turn left.

for perfect hotel sleeping …

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  • ensure that the ventilation system sounds like an idling Morris Minor
  • insist that the alarm clock has a brightly-backlit display that won’t turn off, and is curved, so light will leak out no matter what you block it with
  • smoke alarms must have a flashing LED bright enough to cause retinal POV trails.

Yes, Downers Grove Doubletree Guest Suites, I’m talking about you.

Flattr doesn’t work for me

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So my six month experiment with Flattr has come to an end. In short, my revenue was a measly €0.42 for €2/month payment. Not worth it.

Flattr was just too much hassle. I’d want it to be able to add pages from an RSS feed, but instead, every page had to be added manually. It wouldn’t even spider your sites to index content. You had to go to the site to find new things to read (I’ve never found a Flattr badge in the wild), and it is really difficult to filter by language and keywords. Worst of all, you have to remember to click on at least one thing a month, otherwise your payment would disappear down a black hole.

Here’s my payment/revenue breakdown:

Means -> Monthly Flattr amount
2010-10-31		 €-1.70
Flattr earnings -> revenue
2010-10-10		 €0.09
Means -> Monthly Flattr amount
2010-09-30		 €-2.00
Means -> Monthly Flattr amount
2010-08-31		 €-2.00
Means -> Monthly Flattr amount
2010-07-31		 €-2.00
Means -> Monthly Flattr amount
2010-06-30		 €-2.00
Flattr earnings -> revenue
2010-06-10		 €0.33
Means -> Monthly Flattr amount
2010-05-31		 €-2.00
Flattr earnings -> revenue
2010-05-10
Means -> Monthly Flattr amount
2010-05-04		 €-0.44
PayPal -> means
2010-05-02		 €12.14

And here’s what was actually clicked:

Period Thing Clicks Revenue
2010-05 We Saw a Chicken … 1 €0.20
2010-05 Numpty’s Progress 1 €0.13
2010-09 Numpty’s Progress 1 €0.09

My blogs might be a bit, um, niche, but I’d expected to have at least broken even.

Why I didn’t vote for George Smitherman

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I didn’t vote for George Smitherman because I fundamentally disagree with the secret deal he initiated with the Korean consortium (including Samsung and Kepco). A feed-in tariff is all about equal access to the right to connect. The consortium, with its guaranteed grid capacity, sidesteps this equal access.

To make things worse, the consortium may have access to a price adder on top of the FiT prices. This is supposed to recognize the consortium’s expertise in the supply chain, and its consequential creation of jobs through local manufacturing.  There are many other companies — some of which actually have supply chain experience in the renewable energy sector — who would bring the same number of jobs for the same number of megawatts.

So, ixnay on the Ithermansmay for that. There’s no way I’d vote for the glistening oaf (a phrase coined by Catherine after seeing this picture), so Joe Pantalone it was.  Joey Pants’ campaign was, well, a bit pants, but he was the most appropriate of the candidates.