I downloaded the new Apple iTunes version 7.2 tonight. I wanted to check out iTunes Plus, which is the new area of the iTunes Music Store that has unprotected songs at a higher bitrate available to download. This morning, I had even read something about being able to upgrade the songs in your collection that are available in iTunes Plus. Currently only EMI is offering unprotected downloads.

So I went to the music store, and clicked on the link for iTunes Plus. I came up with a window asking if I’d like to make iTunes Plus my default choice for music when available. I said yes. It then took me to a page where the most popular downloads from iTunes Plus were highlighted. At the top of the screen was a box that said Upgrade Your Collection, and it told me how many songs, albums, and music videos I had available for upgrade. I haven’t downloaded much from iTunes Music Store so it said there were 24 songs, 2 albums, and 1 music video for a total of $5.97. I clicked See Details, and it showed me that Lily Allen’s Alright, Still and Let Love In by Nick Cave & the Bad Seeds were available, plus the video for Daft Punk’s Robot Rock.

I clicked Buy. It asked, “Are you sure you want to Upgrade Your Library to iTunes Plus?” I clicked Buy. It then says, “The item you tried to buy is no longer available.” Strange. All of the items listed appear to still be available.

So I set that task aside for a moment and looked at the various Nick Cave albums available on iTunes Plus. I like The Weeping Song a lot so I decided to download The Good Son. It completed the transaction okay, but when it went to download the album it could only get the Weeping Song. The rest of the songs timed out. It got a few spurts from other songs but then stopped.

I’ve restarted iTunes. I’ve rebooted the computer. You know, the usual stuff to clear things up. But neither will it upgrade my collection to iTunes Plus, nor will it let me download from iTunes Plus. I’ve known other people who have had iTunes problems when new versions come out, but I’ve never had a problem. I suppose I can contact Apple support. I’ll let you know what I find out.

Update: Thursday 31 May. Today the Upgrade Your Collection left off the Daft Punk video, and I was able to complete the transaction, well, from a financial perspective. But the downloads are still giving fits. iTunes 7.2 doesn’t like Nick Cave very much. Off the upgraded Let Love In it was only able to download a couple of tracks. So I’ve got a bunch of Nick Cave tracks partially downloaded from The Good Son and only a couple of full tracks from Let Love In. The strange thing is that Alright, Still by Lily Allen downloaded in its entirety completely normally. It downloaded the tracks three at a time without a hiccup at all. That says to me that Nick Cave is on the bastard child server, which isn’t getting a lot of love right now. Lily Allen on the other hand is on the cool kids server, which is working fine. Apple Support is looking into it, but Nick Cave remains elusive.

Update #2: Friday 1 June. Two days have gone by. I got a few more Nick Cave tracks to download tonight, but there are currently seven still stuck in the download queue. I don’t regret contacting Apple Support; they honestly tried to help. But I did get annoyed that they were trying to pin the problems onto my system when it was clear, to me, that the problem lies with theirs. I don’t normally buy music from the iTunes Music Store (I either get it on CD or download it from eMusic.com), and I probably won’t again for a while.

Update #3: Saturday 2 June. Perhaps the work is now done. iTunes downloaded the remaining tracks within seconds, and all seems to be well. So it appears the heavily load on the Akamai servers has abated. I knew Apple would work it out.

The month of poetry is just two days away. I’m excited for it to start. I’ve written a few poems lately, but it has been a while since I really start down and produced some work. It has been even longer since I’ve kept a poetry notebook. I like to use those stenographer notebooks. They’re just the right size for writing down verse.

So the goal of the 30 Poems in 30 Days is to produce 30 poems of course. If the total comes out to more, then the more the merrier. I will stick to a self-made rule of one poem a day, minimally. If I feel like writing more I can, but I must produce one poem each day. Looking ahead to this project, I’d like to experiment with some different forms of poetry. I would be fun to do. And that’s an important thing to keep in mind on this project: it’s for fun. Hopefully it will spur on creativity, and hopefully it will produce some good poetry. But mostly this is a plan to flex the mind — to get out of the usual routine and produce something new and interesting.

I will probably post the results of my writing over on our podcasts blog, which is linked to from the header. Part of this project is to not only write, but also to share the fruits of my labor. I will let you know how it goes. It all starts Friday.

I am going to undertake an adventure, and I invite you to partake. Starting on this Friday 1 June 2007, it will be a month of poetry. The idea is this: to write 30 poems in 30 days. Writing poetry is a good activity, and hopefully this will stir your creative juices as much as I hope to stir up mine.

You get to decide what kind of poems you want to write. There are certainly many styles of poetry. But most of all, just create.

There are no rules except to start on 1 June and end on 30 June with 30 completed poems, writing ideally one poem a day. I hope you agree that this is a fine way to start the summer: a month of poetry!

Slate has a fun little piece entitled My Favorite Font: Anne Fadiman, Jonathan Lethem, Richard Posner, and others reveal what font they compose in and why. They ask a bunch of authors what their favorite font for composing is and why. Not surprisingly Courier is a popular choice, but by no means is that universal. Apparently some of these choices go deep into the Freudian psyche and our need for parental approval:

Elisa Zuritsky, writer and producer, Sex and the City
I talked to my therapist, and she said my love of Courier stems from my childhood. Back before I knew what deadline, hack, or rewrite meant. When the most fun I could imagine was a trip to my father’s office, where I could be alone with the IBM electric typewriter. Another chance to tickety-tick-tick something that would make me laugh. And then show it to my mom and she’d laugh, too. So, I guess my loyalty to Courier is a way for me to maintain my bond with my mother. In other words, it’s all her fault. That’s what my therapist says, anyway.

Okay, so that one was a little scary, but the rest are fun. I promise!

I was reminded today in the parking lot at work of how nice people are in Wisconsin. I snapped this pic of a car with my cell phone with the license plate “NICE2CU.” It pretty much sums up how people are around here.

Abigail reports from Manhattan that life is well. Fortunately, she brought along her digital camera to record such treats as this devil at the street fair last weekend in Hell’s Kitchen. We know she will enjoy NYC for us while we watch from afar.

We’re groovin’ tonight to the sounds of Meat Beat Manifesto. eMusic recently added a few more MBM albums, and we’re glad for that.

In other news, ABC News is reporting tonight that the U.S. is running covert operations in Iran to destabilize the government. Apparently our efforts to destabilize Iraq have gone so well that, what-the-hell, let’s do another one.

The RSS Advisory Board are the folks issuing forth the official spec of RSS 2.0. I had long been holding Dave Winer’s Harvard Law site as the last word on RSS. But indeed, if you’re looking to get at the latest version of the spec it’s over here:

http://www.rssboard.org/rss-specification

I was messing with our syndication format, and you’ll note a slight change. I added a <comments> tag to each <item>. This will provide a easy link back to the comments for each blog entry.

Thanks to Rogers Cadenhead for the heads up.

Well, if you haven’t heard the news, Microsoft wants to sue Linux and open source software out of existence. In the past, MSFT’s strategies haven’t worked too well. The SCO thing was pretty much a joke from the beginning once SCO couldn’t produce any infringing code. But Microsoft has spent the past few years applying for and gaining thousands of software patents. Now with a treasure chest of supposed intellectual property, they’re taking on Linux and open source software. Microsoft laid out their claims with Fortune magazine.

The Redmond behemoth asserts that one reason free software is of such high quality is that it violates more than 200 of Microsoft’s patents. And as a mature company facing unfavorable market trends and fearsome competitors like Google, Microsoft is pulling no punches: It wants royalties. If the company gets its way, free software won’t be free anymore.

The conflict pits Microsoft and its dogged CEO, Steve Ballmer, against the “free world” - people who believe software is pure knowledge. The leader of that faction is Richard Matthew Stallman, a computer visionary with the look and the intransigence of an Old Testament prophet.

Caught in the middle are big corporate Linux users like Wal-Mart, AIG, and Goldman Sachs. Free-worlders say that if Microsoft prevails, the whole quirky ecosystem that produced Linux and other free and open-source software (FOSS) will be undermined.

Microsoft claims that 235 of its patents are being violated. The question though that remains to be answered: how trivial are these patents? Here’s Glyn Moody writing over at Linux Journal:

Although Microsoft has not declared which of its patents free software supposedly infringes, you can bet a fair number will be on utterly trivial and obvious things – remember that a patent has been granted for the progress bar – that are used by practically every software program. Since they are so ubiquitous and trivial, the question then becomes why they were granted in the first place: patents by definition are supposed to be non-obvious as well as possessing novelty and utility. In other words, Microsoft’s threat of using software patents to attack open source is part of a far larger problem: the granting of software patents at all.

[…]

Once more people understand that software patents are just another kind of monopoly, with all the problems that this implies, they will also begin to appreciate why they should be strictly regulated, kept to an absolute minimum and ultimately abolished.

As Cory Doctorow says:

The Microsoft position is this: even if you don’t use Windows, you still have to pay them as much money as they would have gotten for selling you a copy of it.

And while we’re at it, here’s the link for making a donation to the Free Software Foundation who maintain the GNU Project among other things.

I’ve realized that I’m hopeless when it comes to code. When I’m writing PHP or C or even XHTML, I’ve got an obsessive-compulsive thing going. I like clean code. It makes me happy. To that end, you’ll notice that the Validation links are high on the page on this blog – oh, and they’re on every page. I want my XHTML to validate. It’s a simple thing really. I want the best for my websites, and validating code ensures a consistent experience across browsers (damn you, IE 5.0 for Mac users! it’s time to upgrade!).

A long time ago now, I shifted the coding on this website from XHTML 1.0 Transitional to XHTML 1.0 Strict. To me, it’s a point of distinction. It’s actually not that hard to do, but most people I think don’t have the web chops to get it done. The main difference between Transitional and Strict is cleaner code – it’s a greater separation of content and presentation. XHTML 1.0 Strict has a lot fewer legacy attributes left over from the early days of HTML. It’s a more modern language, and definitely it appeals to that OCD side of my soul that wants code that is screamingly fast and clean.

This blog also still uses static pages. I do a lot of dynamic programming in the real world, but for my personal stuff, I chose to have old school static pages that load quickly. No need to query the database seven or eight times to assemble my pages. Just a quick “text/html” dump to the browsers with a few calls for CSS, images and JavaScript and what not.

And once you’ve made the leap to XHTML 1.0 Strict, it’s just a quick upgrade to XHTML 1.1. I’ve gotten this blog to validate as XHTML 1.1, and it probably still would in its current form. As you may know, the reason for not going high-tech with XHTML 1.1 is that the W3C insists that XHTML 1.1 should be sent as XML and not as our old familiar text/html MIME type. That would be fine if everybody used Firefox or Mozilla, etc., but Internet Explorer (all versions) still does not support the MIME type that XHTML 1.1 is suggested/required to use.

Okay, XHTML 1.0 Strict. I recommend the upgrade as a learning experience. Getting your pages to validate as Strict is a lesson in separating structure from presentation. You’ll learn how to let the CSS do the visual stuff, and the XHTML manage blocks of content. My CSS is probably not up to the specs of the semantic web, but we manage. I dislike CSS enough to not worry about it to much. I can write it fine, but you’ll have to ask Faust for some of the finer points of CSS that are lost on me.

As an aside: Abigail made it to New York yesterday. She’s paying an ungodly sum for a two-bedroom apartment in Manhattan (her half of the rent is $2,000/mo. or so). I was telling her about the Limelight – which was this club in an old gothic Episcopal church at Sixth Ave and West 20th St that I went to in the early ’90s. It got shut down eventually, and later re-opened as the Avalon. Apparently that’s closed now too, and the church is becoming some kind of shopping mini-mall. Strange. Another early ’90s New York memory was a great Halloween-night show at CBGB featuring Cop Shoot Cop. As a Sunday bonus, here is If Tomorrow Ever Comes [removed] off of their album White Noise. Warning: it’s noisy!

Tune to KWLC on Saturdays from 2:00pm–3:30pm (CST) to hear Freeform Faust.

Note

The show started about 10 minutes early due to Luther Softball action.

As an openSUSE Linux user and a budding typographer, I’m always interested in ways to make screen-rendered text more legible. You may have a similar obsession with the clarity of text. Or maybe I’m the only person this side of the Mississippi who cares about this stuff. At any rate, Vichar linked to this great mini-tutorial on how to upgrade your openSUSE system with a subpixel hinted version of the freetype2 packages.

There are a few things you’ll want to have installed on your openSUSE system, such as the basic development groups. With five commands logged in as yourself, and then two more commands entered as root, you’ll be set. The freetype2 packages contain the basic system fonts that you’ll see around the system.

The tutorial also then goes on to illustrate how to enable your window manager — either KDE or Gnome — to display subpixel hinting, if you haven’t already set that up.

The difference is notable and at the same time subtle. It’ll bring a distinct solidity to your screen fonts. It’s a very nice change, and well worth the modest effort. Being a Linux user doesn’t mean you don’t have to care about fonts. I’ll admit I meet a lot of Linux users who are that way, but to have a beautifully optimal system, you’ll want to make this change.

Smashing Magazine has a great post chock full of ideas for improving your CSS code. If you’re a webbie, you’ll get something of use out of this post. It’s called 70 Expert Ideas For Better CSS Coding. The tips are basically a best of, of CSS tips from a variety of other sources around the blogosphere. The sources for the tips are indicated after each tip, and the complete bibliography is at the end.

I personally don’t like CSS that much. I’d rather use a GUI to define the styles. Even though I hand-code my sites, I’d rather use a tool with the layout capabilities of, say, InDesign. Dreamweaver is sort of a bastard child, at least in terms of design.

So if you’re looking to shore up your CSS and glean some handy tips, check out that long post. In the meantime, I’ll pine for an easy CSS editor. Suggestions?

I’ve been using RSS readers since the dawn of time. What amazes me most is that the rest of the world hasn’t, apparently, followed. What, to me, is a killer app, is mostly ho-hum to most people. I’ll admit to being something of a news junkie. I read news sites. I read blogs. And so on.

You may be asking, “If I knew what an RSS reader was, what would I do with it?” That’s fine. I accept that. You’re totally missing out, but I won’t fight it.

For a long time, I used stand-alone applications like SharpReader and there were a couple before that, but I’ve forgotten the names. The problem with the stand-alone apps is that your RSS feeds wouldn’t be synced on multiple computers. So if you had read all the recent entries of news site X, your reader at another computer wouldn’t know that. Hence the rise of web-based RSS readers.

For several years I stuck with Bloglines.com. Bloglines was and still is a fine RSS reader. It’s very lean and works well. I used to keep between 70 and 100 subscriptions in there, and for a long time it was fine.

The downside of Bloglines is that they’ve been a little slow to change things. They hit upon a formula that worked, but they don’t seem to want to tinker much. So it’s good, but these days it’s almost a little too bare-bones.

I had heard about Google Reader and decided to give it a whirl. My first impression was that it was more Web 2.0 than Bloglines. It had better features for sharing and such, and the implementation seemed savvier.

It took a little bit of adjustment, but I’ve been using Google Reader for several months now and really like the service. As a replacement for Bloglines, it does the job, plus it’s got some of the more recent technology such as AJAX.

I also tried a service called Rojo, but I didn’t like the interface. It was very Web 2.0 … too Web2.0 perhaps. It was fussy and mostly got in the way of my blog reading, which is where Bloglines and Google Reader excel.

Actually if you’re looking to keep track of more blogs and RSS feeds, I’d recommend either Google Reader or Bloglines. Both of them work very well.

Tune to KWLC on Saturdays from 2:00pm–3:30pm (CST) to hear Freeform Faust.

Note

The show started about 50 minutes late due to Luther Softball action.

The move to Wisconsin is complete. My belongings were packed up on Saturday 14 April in Iowa, and they were unloaded on Sunday 15 April in Wisconsin. The move went smoothly thanks to help from friends and family. Abigail remains in Iowa but will be in NYC for the summer. I miss her much.

What differences have I noticed between Iowa, the land of my education, and Wisconsin, the land of my birth? Wisconsin has tons and tons of little neighborhood bars. Bars are a primary point of socialization in this state. Also I’ve noticed that none of the coffee shops in Iowa City have drive-thru because everyone sits with their laptops to study. But virtually all the coffee places here have drive-thrus. In fact there are many drive-thru ONLY coffee shops in the Appleton area. They plunk them down in the middle of some parking lot. A popular chain around here is Jo-to-Go. And these places are busy. Nobody sits to enjoy their coffee — it’s something to be had on the way to someplace else.

Surprisingly, I’ve found that the Wisconsin people of this area are amazingly friendly. More so than Iowa definitely (and Iowa people are pretty nice). Wisconsin people strike up conversations with you in the grocery store or wherever you happen to be.

People dress better here in Appleton. Maybe it’s because this city is fairly well off and maybe partly it’s because Iowa City is a college town. At any rate, people wear a higher grade of clothing.

One similar thing between Iowa City and Appleton is that the local people hate it when bars take over downtown. Bars starting taking over the Iowa City downtown after the opening of the Coral Ridge Mall in 1998. Locals here in Appleton feel that the downtown is turning into an entertainment district. Some see this as a necessary part of urbanization. Others see it as Appleton losing the big “small town” appeal. The change in Appleton can probably be traced to the opening five years ago of the Fox Cities Performing Arts Center in the heart of downtown.

I’m sure I’ll notice many more differences and similarities as time goes on. Mostly though I miss my Iowa friends. It seems strange to be in familiar territory but on unfamiliar terms — that is, I know Wisconsin well, but I’ve been away for so long that it’s all new and different.

Well, those are my musings of the moment. I just wanted to get them written down so I didn’t forget. It’s good to move. Scare away the cobwebs, and try something new on for size.

The Wall Street Journal is reporting today that News Corp. has put in an unsolicited bid for Dow Jones & Co., the parent company of the newspaper. News Corp. is run by Australian mogul Rupert Murdoch and has the Fox News Channel among many other media properties.

News Corp’s bid is rich. They’re offering $60 a share for Dow Jones, which has been trading lately around $35. Dow Jones is one of the few last family-owned media companies.

Let me just tell you, this is awful news. The Wall Street Journal is one of the finest newspapers out there. I’ve been reading it since high school. Their editorial page is known for being conservative, but it’s one of the finest journalistic enterprises out there. There is no doubt that the quality of reportage that readers have expected from the WSJ would suffer. Murdoch runs his news operations very lean and very mean.

My subscription to the Wall Street Journal, which includes the WSJ Online, is up for renewal in July. Even after all of these years reading the newspaper, I can easily say that I will let my subscription lapse if the paper falls into Rupert Murdoch’s hands.

Let’s hope the Bancroft family make the right decision. Taking this Murdoch money would line their pockets — the bid is $5 billion in total — but it would destroy one of America’s finest institutions.