malvasia bianca

Forget Halo 3, GTA IV, and all that: it’s starting to look like the real reason I’ll get an Xbox 360 this year is that there’s an RPG coming out for it starring Frederic Chopin. Yes, that Chopin. From IGN’s capsule summary: Three hours prior to [his death], Chopin saw a dream of a fairy-tale […]

I’ve finished my somewhat quixotic effort of backing up my CD collection. (Or rather ours: most of them I bought, a few Liesl bought. Miranda’s are, alas, not backed up.) They’re all backed up both on-site and off-site, with the sole exception of Rongchun Zhao: Master of the Erhu. Which last is a pity, since […]

I learned about the band GrooveLily from an episode of Next Big Hit. I wasn’t paying too much attention when the song, “No Room In Your Bag”, started: a patter song over a drum backing. But then some chords on the piano came in, the instrumentation started getting richer (electric violin, yay), and I started […]

As presentations about how the world is changing go, this one is well done.

There had been rumors at the end of last year that, some time this year, EMI would allow non-DRM versions of its music to be sold online, so I wasn’t completely shocked by the recent announcement. But I was still surprised, and surprised it happened so early. Nice to see one record company behaving sanely. […]

The CD database that Max uses lists the artist for Deep Voices as “Various Whales”. Yay.

Liesl is playing through Bust-A-Move ’99. And there’s this one song that’s the most insanely perky, catchy song ever. Dah da. Da da da dah da. Da da da da da da da dah dah dadadadah… Wii version next month!

Elite Beat Agents is a music game for the DS. It takes its mechanics and much of its style from a Japanese game called Osu! Tatakae! Ouendan; apparently, however, Nintendo of America thought that my country’s youth would prefer secret agents to male cheerleaders dressed in black, and American pop to J-pop. (Imagine that.) The […]

I’ve finally finished backing up all my CDs which are filed under the letter B. Of which there turn out to be 176, approximately a third of the collection. The distribution: panini$ ls | cut -f1 -d- | uniq -c | sort -rn 62 bach 29 beethoven 24 britten 14 beatles 10 brubeck 10 berio […]

I might as well comment comment on Jobs’ recent DRM is bad letter. At first, it was really exciting. But there’s a fair amount of intellectual dishonestly there, too: Item: The statistics are bogus. You can’t just divide the number of songs sold on iTunes by the number of iPods sold and get anything meaningful. […]

I didn’t realize it was possible to beatbox while playing the flute. Gyoza stadium sounds awesome. Star Wars in ASCII. I spent a pleasant hour last weekend watching Ben and Fitz’s poisonous people talk. (And then caught myself exhibiting one of those symptoms on a mailing list last week. Sigh…) I suppose you’ve already seen […]

Miranda’s reading rather more comfortably now than she was in the past; at least partly because of this, she’s noticeably expanded the range of her desired sphere of competence. Examples: We’re finally letting her play Animal Crossing, because she’s reading well enough that she won’t constantly be nagging us to help her play. And she […]

Background: Miranda’s school recently changed its chorus time from lunch to after school. This means that Miranda won’t be able to participate in chorus this year, which makes all of us sad. I was going to rant about this on the PACT mailing list, but I’ve gotten chastized recently for complaining there near the start […]

I’ve finally started backing up my CD collection, only half a year after I planned to do this. The goals are: To have lossless backups, including offsite ones, of the entire collection. To do whatever error correction is possible when creating the backups. (The vast majority of the CDs are between 10 and 20 years […]

What are good formats to use for purchasing and storing music and movies? I remember a time in the past where it was possible to pretend that Ogg Vorbis was a reasonable choice for many of your audio needs; that is, unfortunately, no longer the case. Desirable qualities for a format, in no particular order: […]

I just upgraded to iTunes 7; I wish I hadn’t. Downloading fancy album cover is nice (though I wish I hadn’t had to give a credit card number to do so); the reflected images of the album covers are a bit much, but whatever. We’ll see how gapless playback works. Unfortunately, it turns out that […]

Guitar Hero is a music game that comes with a guitar-shaped controller. There are five “fret buttons” on the neck, and a strum button on the body. (It’s somewhat inconsistent on the model it uses – sometimes it pretends to be a guitar with a single string and five frets, and sometimes it pretends to […]

The Cat Returns isn’t one of my favorite movies. I’m happy for Miranda to watch it, and I won’t normally leave the room just because she has it on, but Studio Ghibli has produced much better stuff. The theme song, however, I totally love. (Miranda and Liesl agree with this.) Very catchy in a rather […]

A month and a half ago, I was toying with the idea that maybe signing up for Amazon prime would actually save me money. I still don’t really believe that, but the general idea of not buying books until right before I’m going to actually read them seems sound to me. I’m going on a […]

I had hopes for France, but not much seems to be coming of that. But now Norway is stepping up to the plate, and is demanding action fast. Aside from the DRM issues, I like that they’re complaining that Apple “reserves the right to change unilaterally consumers’ rights to access material already purchased.” Yes, that […]