I’ve wanted to get a Mac for a really long time now. When they first came out with the iMac in 1998, Mac still had alot of catching up to do with the PC in terms of useability and applications. But OS X has established itself not only as a viable alternative Windows but also as a superior one. I have been holding out to see what Apple would release next for several iterations. For a long time I wasn’t sure what to get. I love the portability and price of the iBook but I loved the horepower of the PowerMac. But when Apple released the new iMac with Front Row and a faster G5 processor, I couldn’t resist. The price was right, the options were right and I couldn’t hold out any longer. I’ve been using my iMac for about a month now and I am completely in love with this machine! I went with the 17 inch model which includes:

• 1.9 GHz Power PC G5 processor
• 512MB of 533MHz DDR2 SDRAM
• 160 GB HDD
• Slot-loading 8x SuperDrive
• 17-inch (viewable) widescreen TFT active-matrix LCD
• Built-in iSight
• ATI Radeon X600 Pro with 128MB DDR SDRAM; PCI-Express

My new iMac is by far the best desktop computer I’ve owned. It has such a small footprint on my desk and the display is absolutely beautiful. It is almost completely silent with only the occassional sound of a fan when I am really pushing its buttons. OS X is extremely stable and has so many great features that will satisfy any user from a novice to a full blown computer geek. I’m not going to go into the features of OS X here because that will be the subject of many future posts. I’m especially excited to start writing software for the Mac using the XCode IDE.

My day job is developing web based software for a Microsoft shop. Its great to come home and work in a different environment. Microsoft still has its competition beat in the server market, but OS X is clearly a better desktop OS than Windows XP. Another reason that I chose to purchase my Mac now is because I’m a little sceptacle about the transition to Intel chips next year. Ultimately this will be great for Apple computers, but there may be some rough spots in the beginning.

The new iMac’s are great machines and I would recommend them to anyone looking for a new desktop. They are beautiful to look at and they perform like a dream. I’ve lost alot of sleep since making the purchase of my new iMac!

There is sad news in Grateful Dead land today. We deadheads have had it very very good for a while now. For some time now, Archive.org has provided free high speed distribution infrastructure for over 2000 Grateful Dead shows. These shows included soundboards, audience recordings and studio outtakes in many formats including shn, flac, mp3 and various quality streams. I know many of us shed a tear this morning when we went to queue up our daily dose of the Dead to find that our listening options and selection have been severely limited. For vague reasons Archive.org has removed all soundboards have been removed and audience recordings are now only available in streaming format. Over 1000 shows have been removed from the archive completely. In Archive.org’s official statement, the only explanation given was:

“Based on discussions with many involved, the Internet Archive has been asked to change how the Grateful Dead concert recordings are being distributed on the Archive site for the time being.”

My first reaction to this was anger and sadness due to my sense of entitlement. After all, Jerry himself on more than one occassion said “Once we play it, its yours.” I wonder how Jerry would feel about that now, knowing that most of the music he played was completely available for anyone to listen to anytime they wanted. This is almost definitely a decision made by Grateful Dead Productions so that they can charge for downloads of shows. They’ve been releasing a new show for download every month for the past eight months via the GDStore.

David Gans, host of the Grateful Dead Hour, had a wonderful post that put things into perspective for me. The fact is that the music doesn’t belong to us and we aren’t entitled to it. We have just been spoiled by the free trading of shows for so long that we have a sense of entitlement. Gans points out that Grateful Dead Productions was forced to lay off many employees last month including people that have been with the organization since its inception.

So I will go back to collecting Grateful Dead music the way we all used to, through trading. I still have my etree archive and I always enjoyed meeting new people and sharing the music. Perhaps this is a good thing, being forced to give a little instead of just take take take as we did with Archive.org. I will continue to use Archive.org to discover new music and listen to the remaining Grateful Dead streams. I will also continue to purchase downloads from the Grateful Dead store. I’d like to thank the folks at Archive.org for making it possible for me to listen to so much great live music from hundreds of bands. I regret that my first post about Archive.org contains such sad news, because I believe that Archive.org is a truly beautiful thing.

The folks at Pandora have released what I consider to be the coolest thing to ever happen to music on the the internet (I know that is a bold statement, but hear me out). They call it the Music Genome Project which is a fancy way of saying that they’ve developed an algorithm to suggest new music to you based on melody, harmony, instrumentation, arrangement, lyrics and many many other properties of songs. The bottom line is that Pandora plays music that you like and then suggests new music based on what it knows about your musical taste.

Pandora is completely free and you can create your own radio stations or listen to popular radio stations that others have created. I’ve created many stations, some based on just one artist and others based on a list of artists. One radio station that I listen to is based on Nirvana and Run DMC which makes for an interesting mix of great music. Pandora also allows me to bookmark a song as a favorite and will occasionally play songs on my favorites list. If I don’t like a particular song, I can just fast forward to the next or tell Pandora not to play the song again. I really like the slick flash based user interface and clutterless appearance of Pandora.

Services like Pandora play a great role in promoting artists and discouraging piracy. I used to subscribe to Rhapsody which also had a suggestive radio station feature, but it would suggest music based on what everybody else is listening to. One of the coolest things about Pandora is it is not a social application so it doesn’t make suggestions based on popularity. Pandora doesn’t take into account the “Coolness” factor which has made me reconsider several bands that I considered to be no good because they are uncool.

So if you like to listen to music and get tired of listening to the same bands over and over again, check out Pandora. I think you’ll be pleasantly suprised with its ability to suggest great music. Lately my ipod has been collecting dust thanks to Pandora!

I’m fascintated with google. Google’s search technology makes it so that average users can find great results easily and advanced web junkies can carry out sophisticated searches using many different search features. They’ve had such a positive effect on the web and the way in which companies market products. I remember surfing the web in 1996 and being frusterated with all the huge banners, popups and marketing drivel I was required to sift through in order to find the sweet content.
Google has made it possible for companies to continue to market products in a way that is less intrusive and more effective. Google’s pay per click adwords have been great for online businesses to achieve great return on investment for their advertising dollars. Adwords also benefit internet users because the ads are non intrusive and well targeted so that they can get to the content they want and easily shop for items they are interested in. Adsense has made it easy for content publishers to recieve sponsorship for their site targeting their visiters with advertising that is tailored to the content of their site. In the future I will be encorporating sponsorship into this site and I apologize if that bothers some readers but I promise to make it as unobtrussive as possible.

Let me first say that I despise the word blog! It feels funny to say and sounds like one of those words that kids used to call eachother in fourth grade. That said, I absolutely love what the word blog stands for. For a while, I didn’t see the true value of blogging. Initially, blogs seemed like something that people did for for a fun leasure activity to communicate with friends and have a soapbox to make their thoughts known. All of that is true, but I underestimated the role that blogging plays in the web. Blogging allows the masses to have voices on the internet. No longer is our online content dictated to us by corporate entities with biassed editorial content. Now the average person with minimal technical resources and skills has the capability to publish content. The internet is the ultimate form of democracy and blogging is a crucial piece of the pie. There are many reasons for the average person to blog, including but not limited to:

• It allows you to formalize your thoughts on subjects
• It allows you to meet new people
• You can make money
• It makes you smarter
• It allows you to make your opinion heard
• It gives friends and family a way to see what you are up to
• It generates traffic to your website

These days, it is common place for buisinesses to keep a blog as well. Blogging allows businesses to easily publish articles which their users can easily access using RSS feeds and News Aggregators.

So here’s my dreaded, obligatory first blog post. I must be the last person in the world to get a blog. Part of the reason I’m starting so late is that I wasn’t sure what blogware i wanted to use. I started out looking at Dotnetnuke because I’ve used it for previous CMS systems, but it didn’t have a blog module with the features I wanted and it didn’t support browsers other than IE. So I finally decided to go with Wordpress and although I’ve only played with it a little I’m thouroughly impressed so far. I love the fact that it’s free and open source and it seems to be a favorite amongst many bloggers.

I will try to keep my posts tech related, but I will also be writing about music and productivity hacks. Some of the techie things I’m into are PHP, MySQL, Web2.0, .NET (thats right, I’m on the fence), Google, Photoshop, Apple, GarageBand, OSX and many many other things that I’m neglecting to mention here. So welcome and enjoy!