Blog

An anonymous donor has given the Library of Congress the original artwork for Amazing Fantasy #15, which is the first appearance of our own Spider-Man.  This is pretty amazing as there had been years gone by when everyone assumed the artwork had been destroyed.

http://www.loc.gov/blog/?p=290

Timeline: A few months ago Nine Inch Nails released news of a new double album including instrumental-only tracks being release.  Out of the 36 tracks, they offered up the first nine as a free preview to download (like a ‘try before you buy’ deal).

This was the second distribution method that Trent Reznor tried which was different than the traditional method.  He first attempted something different with Saul William’s new album where there were two options to get the music: Either download it for free or pay $5 for it.  It was a test to see if we would people would actually support the artists.  As far as I know, the results weren’t that inspiring…I believe only 25% of the downloaders paid for it.

Now, when Nine Inch Nails released their Ghosts album, he hit upon a decent distribution method.  He offered up nine tracks for free and then had a download only option of the entire album, a regular CD version, a deluxe set and then the super all-rare set (2500 copies only!) which had a slew of bonus things attached to it.  Let’s also remind readers that he brought in (2500 * $300) = $750,000 in two days (minus the costs of creating these things).

Fancy that.

The album was subsequently released onto regular CD about a month ago, people bought it, I bought it, it’s an alright album, nothing really special.  But the distribution model really appealed to me.

Not two weeks after the album was released to stores, Nine Inch Nails release two new songs and a message saying “2 weeks.”

Within two weeks, as of today, May 5, Nine Inch Nails has released a new album for free.  An entire album, for free, and from the reviews I’ve read, it is pretty darn good.  That being said, he also said that there would be a physical release available around July sometime in case you want to ‘support the band’ or just have it on a piece of plastic for yourself.

I applaud Trent Reznor’s testing the waters of the distribution method for music nowadays.  I still believe that Nine Inch Nails have such an incredible fan base that he will never lose out in giving away his music for free because his fan base will still buy a physical copy eventually.  I would like to see how new bands can use this distribution model to their advantage.  I think that you won’t see musicians who make millions off of album sales anymore, but they may hit a wider audience with offering free downloads and a physical copy as a supplement if you so choose to purchase.

Download away: http://theslip.nin.com/

If you feel you would like to support a great artist, then pick up the album when it comes out in July.

IMG_3153, originally uploaded by palm0014.

Thanks to Troy who sent this article in about an employee of Home Depot who will now be the new singer for Boston!

http://www.usatoday.com/life/music/news/2008-05-01-boston_N.htm 

My first class of Micro Economics was quite the experience.  Vero met me before class and prepared a lovely picnic which we ate in front of the Rideau Canal (which actually has water in it now!).  She even brought my new found favourite food item…olives!  I can’t get enough of them.  Tuna and olives in a sandwich…surprisingly good!

The class itself was heavy duty on the old school ways of teaching…no PowerPoint presentations, only blackboard.  Chicken scratch all over the place…graphs, math equations!  Yikes!  I spent ten minutes trying to figure out how I can make a graph on my laptop.  No such luck.  I will be kicking it old school this summer term and getting some lined paper and pens so I can accomplish everything I need to do!  It looks like a very reading intensive course considering he covered two chapters of materials which I sort of understand but realized that he won’t be speaking about it much more, hence the need to read.  Sigh.

Here’s to the next six weeks in some random math equations!  I haven’t done any math since I filed my taxes and before that, graphs only appeared in my life when I was plotting the number of men vs. women at work (men topped a whopping 7% in 2004 but that’s about it.  I’m sure you’ve seen the pie charts on the Morning Show).

Freedom comes at a high price and that price is the fact that the things you’ve avoided doing creep up on you all of sudden.  Case in point – checking Vero’s taxes.  Woops!  I’ve been putting that off and I had forgot that they were due today since she owed the Government some money.

After work I headed to her house and we tackled the taxes.  She had already done the run-through and after a few visits to the CRA website for clarification, she owed a cool 7% of what she made last year.  Not too shabby at all.  Thank tuition for that my friends.  She ended up setting up an electronic payment through her bank so it was easy enough to send the money to CRA.

After that was all done, I played around with the guitar as Troy had suggested I lower the key to 705 from E to A.  It was going well until I hit one chord change and the vocals did not line up at all.  I tried a few other times but it was hard to wrap my head around changing a vocal line I loved so much.  So I will keep trying and Troy and I will hook up via phone to hash it out and see what we can come up with.

Vero made this amazing meal – spaghetti squash.  It was some squash cut in half with spaghetti sauce over it and some cheese melted over the top.  It was much like spaghetti in the fact that you just took your fork into it and the squash came out in strands like noodles.  I enjoyed it although it was a little too much as there was a side helping of more spaghetti sauce on the plate.  We both realized it was a little too much for us to eat.

Mel, Vero and I then headed out to Gatineau to have a piece of cake for Marie-Claude’s birthday.  We were also on the lookout for a mountain lion named Boomer which had been reported to have escaped near Maniwaki the night before.  You can never be too careful where there’s a wild cat roaming around.  (Sidenote: The lion was apprehended the morning after.  No one was harmed in the process.)

We had a great piece of chocolate cake that Jean-Francois made and we watched the Canadiens game.  After the heated game, Jean-Francois introduced me to a French called “Les Bougons” which is a show about a family who are on welfare and try and do everything to avoid paying for anything.  It was quite funny and Jean-Francois actually appeared in the show!  There was this scene where the son of the family wants to lose weight so he wraps himself in tin foil and sits in the sun.  He then takes it off and looks into a mirror and Jean-Francois was the reflection!  He did some muscle man poses which mimicked the actor’s mannerisms.  It was quite hilarious.  I love how Vero’s friends (and Mike and I: Soon to Be!!!) are on TV.

My three days of Freedom were great and I couldn’t have asked for a better time.  When my course is over in the middle of June, I plan to make the most of the summer and have something planned every day.  Even if it is just reading a book in the backyard with a beer.  😉

http://www.nme.com/news/pink-floyd/36311

This is an amazing rock story. Roger Waters loses an inflatable pig in the sky last week. Let’s be honest…it will show up on Ebay in the near future!

***update*** The pig has been found.  If I was the one who found it in my driveway, I would have kept it as a piece of rock history.

I had dropped my car off at Mazda for a plethora of things to get done to it (including the free lock reinforcement which will supposedly hinder any attempt to break into it AGAIN) and unfortunately I received a phone call during the day telling me that my rear brakes were shot and the front ones had a few months left in them.

Fortunately, I have never owned a car long enough to need the brakes changed.  Unfortunately, I found out that it would cost upwards of $800 – $900 to change both sets and I coughed into the phone.  I said that my Dad and I would do it ourselves so he would stop asking me if they could do it for us.

Alas, this is the life of being a car-owner and I will have to suck it up and change the brakes.  The good news out of all of this is that I was talking to Eric and he reminded me that he helped Simon change his brakes a few weeks ago and he thought that Simon wouldn’t mind helping out on the task at hand so I am very appreciative that Eric will give Simon a ring and ask him about it.  I’m sure it will save me a few bucks on labour costs.

Speaking about labour costs, (WARNING – RANT!), I brought the car in for the 96,000 KM Service check.  Please note that the car is not under warranty anymore.  So in the end, after giving the car an oil change and giving it the once over, it ended up costing me $260 due to 2.5 hours of labour costs.

I really don’t understand this too much and maybe someone can help me out.  This is the first time I’ve brought the car in for a service appointment after the warranty has expired.  Is this a proactive move on my part?  Should I now become reactive and just wait until something breaks?  They did point out the need for new brakes and they also pointed out that I need my transmission flushed out (another $200).  But here I’m thinking that I could have saved myself $200 if I just didn’t bring it in for the service appointment, and really, what real use is the service appointment anymore if I am not under warranty?  I think I shall leave it to the commenters of this website to let me know what I should be doing now.  I am going to assume that I should stop wasting my money in bringing it in for a service appointment and just be reactive.  Although there are slight proactive things I can do like look into how long it takes for a transmission to need flushing and mark it on the calendar and just get it done, instead of having someone look at it for $200 and then say “Oh yeah, you should get this done.”

Anyhow, so there you have it.  I need new brakes and I await hearing back from Eric/Simon.  I’m quite excited to change the brakes as I feel that if another person can do it, I’m sure I can also (if I have the right tools of course).  I would like to thank my friend Pierre for giving me the idea of doing it myself after he told me of a time he changed the brakes on his Dodge Neon himself by following some instructions he found on the Internet.

God bless the Internet.

Day Two of my Freedom was fine other than that as I got to take a ride on the O-Train (which I love.  I love trains.) to pick up the car and then I headed home where we all had steak and veggies for dinner and I watched an old Spidey episode with Vero and she loved it.

So after a weekend of studying for my Great Philosophers exam, I started to understand a little about what all these philosophers had to say and also realized that they are all on different pages from one another.  In the span of the past three months I have studied the works of Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, Thomas Hobbes and we briefly touched about Nietzsche.  In the end, I really enjoyed what Socrates/Plato and Hobbes had to say and even though a lot of people like what Nietzsche has to say, I really didn’t get enough of an introduction to him (literally on hour of lecture) to form an opinion.  I will keep my philosophy text book with me over the years and perhaps I shall read about him in the future.

Monday morning comes along and I know that I have to make my way to the gym on campus to take the exam.  This is the first time I will have to go to the gym for an exam and I vaguely know where it is.  I give myself enough time in the morning to hunt it out before 9:30.  At 8:30 I arrive on campus and head towards the Moriset building.  I see a bunch of students studying, gabbing, drinking coffee, taking notes so I know I’m in the right place.  Vero told me it was in the basement so I head there and don’t really see an entrance to the gym.  Only an office called Sports Services.  So I head back upstairs and up another flight and I realize that I can literally see the gym from up above…I see the desks all lined up nice and pretty beckoning for my ass to sit down and divulge my knowledge for three hours.  Alas, I cannot find the doorway.  Using my higher intellect, I realize that perhaps the entrance is outside the building so I head outside and tour the perimiter but there are only emergency exits.  Finally, with 30 minutes to go, I break down and call up Vero and wake her up.  “Vero, I can see the gym but I can’t get to it!”  It takes her a few moments to collect her thoughts and try to realize where I am in the building but then she hears me mention the office of Sports Services and she says “You dummy!  That’s where the gym is!  You have to go through the turnstiles and walk down the hall!”

That made me feel better in the sense that I now knew how to get to it, but at the same time I felt like a dummy as my higher intellect must have been fried from all that studying and I should have made the connection.  Either way, I made it to the exam with plenty of time to spare and wrote my heart out for the next 2.5 hours.  I would say that out of four essays, I did well on two of them, so-so on the third, and not so well on the one about Nietzsche.  My only saving grace on the one about Nietzsche is the fact that she knows she only touched upon him so she didn’t expect mastery of the material.

Winter Term ’08…done!  I felt like a free man.  There was a skip in my step!

As a free man, I tagged along with Mike and Vero to a photography exhibition at Cube Gallery down near Parkdale (my old hood!  I love that area of the city!).  Mike’s friends had a few exhibits going on as it was the Algonquin College photography graduation exhibition.  Essentially every year, the first and second year students get to post a few examples of their photography (as well as have their portfolio on hand) for everyone to peruse.  They also have awards given out during the night (in which one of Mike’s friends one both a $500 gift certificate as well as an iPod Touch.  Luckeeeee.).  Krista and Julie also showed up to the madhouse which was the event.  It was packed to the gills.  I felt like I was in the Great Canadian Cabin on a Saturday night around 2AM circa ’99.  They had beer on hand though which put a smile on my face (as it was also very cheap…$3 a cup!  I love student living) and some of the photography was pretty impressive.  It made me want to dabble in the art.  Mike dabbles and comes up with some really great stuff.

We then headed towards Chinatown to get some CamKong food inside us (CamKong, only the greatest Vietnamese in town!) and were distraught to find out that it closed up shop!  I was devastated as it truly was amazing place for food.  I know that Holly is crying as she reads this as it was also a favourite joint of hers…in fact she told me that a long time ago, whenever she would go out on a date, she would ask to go there…even upwards of seven times a week (I jest, I jest.)

So Julie recommended this Pho joint on the corner and I had my first taste of pho and it wasn’t too bad at all although I did have to bite into the hot pepper which nearly killed me.  I even started hiccuping and I was wondering if my heart was going to stop!

All in all, Day One of My Freedom wasn’t too shabby at all.