Rediscovering Music with iTunes
I’ve been a music junkie for a long time. It started pretty much as soon as my parents started giving me an allowance. I’d save up ten or twenty bucks, and then go to the bowling alley with my friends. Instead of bowling though, I’d go to the record shop next door and buy two or three cassettes. When I was old enough to get a job, a lot of the money I made went into buying music. These days, I’ve got thousands upon thousands of songs on my computer, all organized neatly by iTunes. Between music I’ve ripped and music I’ve bought online, my digital library is quite large.
iTunes makes is really easy to create playlists. When I first bought my Mac in late 2006 and got all my CD’s imported, I went through and put a 5-star rating on whatever songs I felt like listening to, several hundred of them. That’s pretty much how I organize my everyday listening, but it’s a pretty small percentage of my total library. Today, I had an idea. My plan is to spend a week listening to songs that have never been played on this computer - and since I don’t bother dragging out my CD’s anymore, that pretty much means songs I haven’t heard in almost two years or more.
I created a “smart playlist” in iTunes with the condition that the Play Count is less than one. Then, I turned on Shuffle and hit play. So far, I’ve heard some songs I remember, some that are vaguely familiar, and some songs I’ve never heard (because of those fantastic one-hit-wonder artists whose entire CD I bought before online purchasing of one song was available). It’s fantastic. Right now I’m listening to Billy Idol’s “Dancing with Myself”, which I probably haven’t heard since I was in high school. Right before that was “Left of the Middle”, by Natalie Imbruglia, which I’ve never even heard before because I bought that CD specifically for the “Torn” single years ago. One pretty cool aspect of using a smart playlist is that once a song has played through, its play count goes to one, and it’s removed from the list. I’m guaranteed to hear nothing but tracks that haven’t been played on my Mac before.
The list also introduces me to new artists because I imported all of my wife’s CD’s as well. Songs from artists like Authority Zero and Muse are getting a listen for the very first time, because I just never really gave them a shot before. Some of it I like, some of it I don’t - but isn’t that what music exploration is all about? Between this and Pandora.com, I’m having a lot of fun.
This should be a very interesting week.
Changes at CafePress
The following is a word-for-word reprint of what I wrote in the CafePress forums regarding changes to the CafePress volume bonus and the resulting discussion. I’m not saying I’m posting it here in case an over-zealous moderator decides to edit me, but… okay, that’s exactly what I’m saying. I have a great relationship with the majority of the moderators. Here we go.
Good-bye, Woot
Call it sour grapes, but I can’t help the way I feel. A few days ago, Woot.com turned four. Yep, four years of a daily deals, Photoshop contests (one of which I took 1st place in) and Woot-Offs. Four years of the Bag of Crap, or BOC: that elusive “treasure” that a few thousand lucky people can order periodically. Why is the BOC so special? For the low price of $1 (you can order up to three at a time, max), Woot will send you a package (not actually a bag) containing a few random items. By random, I mean really, really random. You might get a calendar, a stuffed monkey, or a 52″ HDTV. It’s the promise of a chance at things like a giant TV that gets people worked up over these things.
On the days that Woot offers a BOC, the servers get slammed. On most days, the BOC just sort of shows up unannounced and the server hit is significant. Can you imagine how the servers would get pounded when all Woot users expect it to show up?
Here’s my problem. On Woot’s birthday, they offered a BOC. I logged into the website shortly before 11pm, which is the time of night (in my timezone) that Woot updates the website with a new daily deal. I refreshed the page after the deal went live, and I actually saw the BOC and the “I want one” button. Usually, I show up after it’s sold out, so I eagerly hit that button. Then I waited… and waited… and waited. The order screen eventually came up, but the quantity selection isn’t a dropdown or text box, it’s a javascript-powered button. I pressed the “I want three” button many, many times before it finally changed the quantity. After twenty one minutes of wrestling with the server, the site finally accepted my order - and then kicked me back to the beginning with an error message saying the item was sold out.
I was furious - furious that the site wasted my time, got my hopes up, and then dashed them against a rock. To make matters worse, in Woot’s message board, long time members were openly hostile and insulting toward anyone who complained about the poor site service.
After four years, Woot couldn’t figure out how to prepare for an event that they must have known was going to be extremely stressful on their servers. After four years, they still don’t have any moderation in their forums that is willing to tell people to keep the personal attacks and insults out of the discussion. After four years, they’ve managed to prove that they’re just not up to the task of running this type of service. It’s a damn shame, too. I’ve been a fan for a long time. From here on out though, Woot will not receive my business or my attention.
I do like my daily deals, though… so what’s a guy to do? I looked around and found Yugster - a Woot competitor since 2006 that not only offers a daily deal, but gives members a preview of the next deal plus a side offer called Yours Til it’s Gone. In the years that I spent checking Woot on a daily basis, I only ever bought a handful of items. In the few days that I’ve been checking Yugster, I’ve already purchased something - a computer screen cleaning kit for $6.95 + $4 shipping. Unlike Woot.com, where refurbished items are the norm, refurbs at Yugster are rare, according to their FAQ list. Yugster even has their own version of a Woot-Off, called a YugDown, where new items are posted as soon as one sells out for a period of time.
I will be keeping an eye on Yugster and will report back my opinions in the coming weeks - but at first look, this might just be a Woot-killer… for me, at least.
Papa Johns Yet Again
It’s been a while since I last updated Modest Opinions, but I’ve been swamped with getting The Big Book of Spam ready for publication (which is a lot more complicated when you throw in the website revamp that it requires and the changes to my core domain). Modest Opinions just isn’t very high-priority for me right now, but I saw something last night that just screamed “POST IT!”
Notice anything… strange? Like, perhaps, that Papa Johns thinks that ordering chicken strips at the regular menu price is somehow special? Seriously. I even clicked through to see if maybe it was just worded poorly, but no - all that button did was add chicken strips to the cart at the regular menu price.
Someone needs to proofread these things.
Site Updates
The site will be up and down pretty frequently over the next few days as I move from one Wordpress theme to another. Normally, it wouldn’t require much work, just tweaking the new theme a bit, but the theme I’m moving away from was… different. Instead of putting page content in the page, the content went in the template files. This allowed for heavy customization on a per-page basis, but it also means that I have to manually get that content back out and put it into the normal Wordpress system. Believe me, that’s the last time I’ll make that mistake.
So, you might notice that some (all, as I write this) of my pages are blank. Please bear with me.
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