February 2005

Snow Day Comics!

Due to circumstances beyond my control (Snow on Thursday + Snow on Monday x Marylanders can't handle a little snow on the roads = 5 DAY WEEKEND!) I have a little time on my hands. I could use this time wisely, cleaning the apartment, taking out the garbage, doing school work, etc., but instead I think I'll start off by reading webcomics.

I've already talked about some of my favorites, but I've discovered another one (I dare not say it's "new," as it's been around for years...) by a very talented photographer / illustrator who's also done his time in the trenches of substitute teaching.

Wapsi Square, as it's called, is the story of a woman who works in a museum and her close group of friends. A lot of this 5-days-a-week comic is influenced by real life, although there's just enough fantasy and mythological gods thrown in for good measure.

As I read through the archives I found myself laughing out loud and showing comics to my wife on a regular basis. In my mind, this is an excellent barometer for how funny a comic is. Still, it's not something I would expect to see in a newspaper.

Nor should it be. While there's no nudity, there's still a little swearing and a regular attention to subjects that, while not profane, are more appropriate for an adult audience. Still, if you're a mature, laid back person, this is a great read.

Zug Zug!

With the dawn of Kelli's new computer, she's been going through all her old CDs and installing all kinds of goodies. Language programs, The Sims (although she uses the Macintosh version, of course...), Catz, Dogz, and one of my all time favorites, Warcraft II.

Yes, I know that there are bigger, better games out there, but WC2 creates in me a sense of nostalgia. It brings me back to my college days where I would literally spend hours downloading and playing game demos. Duke Nukem, Quake, Civilization, you name it, it was out there for free.

Well, a teaser version was out there for free at least. The idea was that we would get so hooked that we would just have to buy the full version. With Warcraft, the concept worked. My roommate was as addicted as I was so he even chipped in half the dough. (I knew he loved the game, he was willing to use my MACINTOSH to play it. Trust me, that IS saying something.)

I've put off installing WC2 onto my new computer for a year now, knowing that doing so would suck up much of my free time. Leave it to Kelli to inspire me to give it a whirl again.

Update

Yes, I know I haven't been updating this blog as much as I would like. I've been busy, trust me.

For one thing, I finally took the plunge and bought my wife a really sweet computer. It's not the best or worst on the market, but I pumped it up to 512 meg ram and a 60 gig hard drive so it should be more than she'll need for some time to come. FedEx willing it'll be on our doorstep this week.

I've been spending the rest of my time working towards my graduate degree, getting our taxes done (yes, we got ours done in February - you may hate us for that), and spending lots of time reading educational blogs. I also found a new webcomic that I like, but I'll post about that later.

Another Bandwagon

I'm switching my RSS feed over to Feedburner because I'd like to know how many people subscribe to it and, let's be honest, we all like to jump on bandwagons.

Because of this, I would appreciate it if those of you who are subscribing to my RSS feed would delete the old feed link and repace it with http://feeds.feedburner.com/DivineAesthetics. The old feed won't last much longer.

Thanks.

HyperEngine-AV

iMovie does everything I need it to do, but it still has a new competitor. The good people over at MacMerc.com recently discovered that a company named Arboretum Systems is giving away some Mac video editing software for free.

In their words: "...lets you capture, edit, arrange together and process video, stills, audio and text to create DV-quality movies and slide shows."

Has anyone tried this out? I'd like to know if it's worth a download when I already have iMovie to play with. If not, I'll just have to venture forward in the name of research.

More Napster

Looks like bloggers aren't the only ones who did the math and came out with different numbers than Napster. The Washington Post has a very well written article on the subject.

I didn't intend to revisit the Napster issue again since I buy very little music online to begin with (I get a majority of my tunes from unsigned artists), but this article was too nice to simply ignore.

Remedial Math

John Gruber over at Daring Fireball wrote a biting review of Napster's new subscription service. It's not the first such article to appear on Daring Fireball, either.

Now I won't simply repeat Mr. Gruber (I'm sure you can read his stuff on your own), but he does make some nice points. I'm inclined to agree with him, although he seems to be a lot more hostile towards Napster than I am.

Napster's advertising campaign is centered around the premise that customers will be willing to rent their music rather than buy it. That's right, rent. If you stop paying the subscription service, all the songs become unusable. Want to burn to a CD? That won't work unless you pay an additional 99 cents, which (when you account for the fact that you're already paying subscription fee) makes it more expensive than iTunes.

Don't get me wrong - iTunes isn't the best at everything. I dislike the fact that I can't play songs downloaded from iTunes on my Palm Pilot (my MP3 player of choice). But then, I wouldn't be able to play Napster songs on there either, would I? I would only consider Napster to be worth the subscription rate if I decided to buy more than $15 of music every month. For the rest of my life. Anything less than that would make it literally cheaper to own than it is to rent.

They may have that nifty little chart that has you doing their math, but any decent math teacher could point out that they left out the fact that that chart assumes you WILL be buying 10,000 songs to fill your iPod or MP3 player of choice. Honestly, who does that? Assuming an average song length of 3 minutes it would take you over twenty days (without breaks for sleeping) just to listen to all of that. It's the 1,000 free hours from AOL all over again!

Bottom line? Forget iTunes, forget Napster. Buy the CD so you can make genuine mp3 files or go to places like MP3Tunes.com or IUMA. Better yet, try downloading some podcasts for a change. IUMA and podcasts are both free, and from what I've seen podcasters love having their work freely distributed.

The sequel to MP3.com

Michael Robertson seems like quite an interesting fellow. Remember MP3.com? No, I'm not talking about today's gutted, souless version. I'm talking about what it looked like two years ago - with thousands of free mp3 files recorded by independent artists. I dare say that most of my music came from that wonderful corner of the web.

...and then Cnet bought it and trashed it.

But my point is, that was Mr. Robertson's baby. He also has Linspire, but that's a whole other story.

In any case, I found out that he's starting up a new music site called MP3Tunes.com. On this site he intends to sell mp3s for 88 cents and albums for $8.88. That's a good deal already but here's the best part - you can copy the mp3s as often as you want and play them on anything that can handle mp3 files! Naturally this feature will scare away the big labels, but it wasn't big labels I was after when I surfed the original mp3.com.

I'm looking forward to this site starting up. Until then, You'll catch be browsing over at IUMA

Database Fights Diploma Mills

Online universities can often be a blessing for everyone involved. Students can get degrees faster and cheaper than at a traditional university, colleges save money and resources by not having the classes on campus, and professors can make an extra buck or two by teaching a college course in spite of wherever they may be located. (I myself am a grad student at University of Phoenix, although I almost applied for Penn State's online graduate program.)

Unfortunately, not all online college diplomas are worth the paper they're printed on. By now I'm sure you've seen a spam email or five promising a college diploma on the cheap - so cheap, you wonder how they can afford to teach you anything. They don't have to afford it, because they don't do it!

Lucky for us, the U.S. Department of Education is creating a "White List" of acceptable educational institutions in order to weed out the so-called diploma mills. About time, I say! The more we exclude those institutions hat aren't up to snuff, the more credibility the REAL universities will have.

A.O.T.M. 24 - Not So Bleak

Name: Not So Bleak
Where: Seabrook, Maryland
When: 2004
Print Available?: Yes


They say the camera never lies, but "they" are wrong. With a camera I can tell any number of stories, each of them seeming entirely plausible and each of them being misleading in some way.

This picture, for example, was taken on a dreary, rainy December day. The leaves had long ago fallen off those branches, turned brown, and begun to decompose. When I took this picture I thought I would keep it just as I saw it, but later when I was looking at it on my laptop I decided to play with the colors and saturation to make two extremes.

This photo had it's saturation increased and shifted a bit into orange while it's sister image, "Bleak," had the saturation reduced as much as I dared without making it a grayscale image. The result was an almost cheerful soggy fall photo (even though it was really winter) and a depressing,rainy winter photo (which was more true to life, but over-exaggerated nonetheless.

I don't always play around with them like this, but I thought it was nice to see how a single image could be pushed in two different directions.