eMusic
I’d like to make a bit of noise about the *new* eMusic web site launch.
They have different subscription options ranging from 40 downloads for $9.99 to 90 songs for $19.99 and “booster packs” which are worth looking at. Importantly the downloads are 192k mp3s free from DRM and you are free to copy them to any medium for personal use.
eMusic caters for independent labels, not the huge ones, so you’re not going to Busted or Will Young there, but there are plenty of well known names including The Pixies, Bob Marley, Ray Charles, They Might Be Giants and Van Morrison (and a load of much heavier bands which I don’t know but I’m sure some of my friends will).
It’s not perfect but eMusic is the best legal download service I’ve seen yet working on a big scale (I count half a million tunes as big). They seem to have got a lot of things right. I hear Magnatune is going to be distributing through eMusic soon which gives it bonus points.
Life
So, life in general then. Work is going fine, the work is reasonably fun, the people are great and the free dinners aren’t bad either! Money is still an issue but it looks I’ll be going to Cyprus with lauperr in October half term so I can’t complain! Really looking forward to that.
Now that djkoa has gone off to University I’m really starting to miss djkoa, mchicago and bouncykaz and I feel like I’m missing out on things at the moment. I’m missing lots of other people from school too and it’s weird that it’s all over. Now that things have calmed down and I’m settling into my new job I’m starting to notice things that aren’t there any more as much as things that weren’t there before but are now. If that makes any sense at all!
I feel really bad about Adam’s 21st birthday party being cancelled and wish things could have been different but I guess it was just too far for a lot of people to travel for one night. At the time though, it was all completely overshadowed by onelessmoment‘s personal tragedy. She has my most sincere sympathy and I want her to know that she can get all the support she wants from me and our other friends, emotionally or for practical things. We all love you dearly.
University
For those who don’t yet know I didn’t get into Nottingham and I declined my insurance offer from UEA. This was a very difficult decision to make because the course is so good there and accepting the place would have been the safest (and probably most sensible) thing to do. The problem was a little sentence on the UCAS form I was about to sign which said that if I accepted UEA’s offer I wouldn’t be able to apply through UCAS again the following year if I changed my mind. Being the indecisive person I am I decided that risking not being able to change my mind in a years time just didn’t make me comfortable. Anything can happen in a year and I might not even want to go to Uni by that time so I felt generally uncomfortable with the sitiuation and pulled out.
I’m looking into different options now, ranging from staying in work to courses that will accept me with my maths grade, even re-taking my maths A Level.
lauperr and I visited Birmingham University last weekend and I found out about a great course called “Computer Interactive Systems” At first I have to admit I thought it sounded like a bit of a Mickey Mouse course but after looking into it and sitting through a couple of lectures I was really sucked in! It basically looks like CSE with congnitive psychology and product design thrown in. It’s about Human-Computer Interfaces and designing systems centered around humans, but I’d get to do a lot of geeky stuff too. I have to admit the extent to which the department seemed to be in love with Microsoft did make me feel uncomfortable, but not to the point that I was put off the course. Just another option open to me.
LLUG
The first Real Life (TM) Lincolnshire Linux User Group meeting happened, and it was good! Good turnout and well organised. It was a shame there weren’t as many talks as were originally planned but that did give us more time to chat amongst ourselves which was nice. My talk went suprisingly well considering how unprepared I was, perhaps the Guinness helped 😛 I especially enjoyed MJ Ray’s introduction to Free Software and learnt a lot.
The informative talk on Knoppix from Marc was good, most of Chris’ “Linux from Scratch” talk went right over my head, but I still found it very interesting and I’m still dying to give LFS a go. Jan talked about “Integrating Linux into a Windows and Mac Network” which was also very useful.
Boring stuff that’s left…
I’m currently applying for my passport and new driving license which is boring and expensive and I spent the morning setting up our new all-in-one HP Printer/Scanner/Copier which is suprisingly cool (it takes a lot for a printer to impress me! I spend most of my time fixing them). Hopefully this afternoon I’ll get chance to put the innards of my computer (frell) inside its shiny new case, fix my lamp and clock, finish tidying my room and try and sort my music folder.
Until next time bloggers, goodbye.