I had a little rant going on in my head this morning about the music industry, greedy short-sighted bastards that they are.
Specifically, the massive success of the iTunes online music (and its competitors). $0.99 for a song... just about the same price as you would pay for the CD if you bought the ten or fifteen songs on it but without the distribution or physical media costs. Bonus! You would think they could afford to give Apple, the service provider, a decent cut... but no, Apple doesn't make money on the music but on the iPods instead. This is a mistake, I think, an inversion of the razor-blade model.
And then what do they do? Thrilled by this success, they decide they want to raise the price! Online music would cost MORE than CDs! How stupid is that? Stupid stupid stupid... but that's old news anyway.
The weeks fly by in a blur these days. The Haunted Trails stuff is moving along very nicely. I have a stack of molding and casting supplies in my living room that I'm itching to play with.
I have one guy working on an air-powered infrasound generator with me and that's going nicely. Another guy should be exploring the wonders of electrically actuated tuning forks for even more physical audio effects. Fun stuff!
National is going well enough -- I feel slow still, the pace of work is not what I'm used to. But still I think I'm being useful. It takes a long time to get up to speed in such a large environment...
W.Eng. continues to exist, though one of their customers, whom I signed a contract with along with the rest of the officers, came up out of the blue and sent an e-mail pissing in my wheaties. I came unhinged and did the verbal equivalant of kicking him in the nuts -- I don't take well to having my chain jerked and my response is not to make nice but to kick back. I never said I was entirely sane.
Tonight I hope to take a nap before dance lessons... last week didn't go very well, I was really to worn out and I got all frustrated. So much for exercise helping with stress! Ah well, it's my own damn fault for doing too much.
Mostly I just want to work during the day and play at night... of course, the book interferes with that, but just a handful of weeks remain on that project. It will be a joy to be done! I'll get weekends back! Just in time to play with Trails stuff!
Posted by Edwin at May 21, 2004 07:58 AM