4-17-03 - 2

4-17-03

Recent ideas that won't make me rich - 1) hair salons should have digital cameras and computers to let you preview various treatments (styles, colors, etc); you could easily rig up software now to do it all automatically so that the non-computer-savvy employees would be able to handle it. 2) a contraption for Julienne-ing. Cutting carrots fine is a damn lot of work, but makes for delicious carrots (Provencal); so, you want this like box with one open side, and a hinge at the bottom of the open side, then there's a big handle coming off the hing with a bunch of blades; imagine kind of like a dumpling maker or a garlic press, you close the handle and blades go into the box and perfectly slice whatever is inside. Then you need to be able to rotate the box 90 degrees and push the blades through again - voila, instant juliene.

4-17-03 - 1

4-17-03

The new Apple adds for applemusic are disgusting. They feel incredibly phoney, first of all, these "real people" adds make me sick, especially when the veneer is so thin I feel like the makers are almost mocking me, insulting me with how poor a job they did. I imagine them in the wings, smoking cigars and getting blow-jobs from whores and saying to each other "those dumb consumer, they'll believe anything! ha ha ha". Anyway, the next problem is this - $0.99 per song? A buck a song? What a rip-off !!! That's about the same price you pay for a real CD, but with a real CD, you get a physical product, you get liner notes, you get nice art, you get a nice carrying case, you're paying for shipping, and you're paying for the real estate of the brick and mortar store, etc. Which reminds me - Amazon's prices are a fucking jip. The idea of online shopping is that they are supposed to be saving on overhead for not maintaining thousands of local stores, and they're supposed to pass the savings on to me, and make it up in volume. But no, they're so incompetent in how they run their operation, that they have to charge me the same rip-off prices as a physical store, and still they can't turn a profit. What's a fair price for applemusic? Something more like $0.25 per song. That's closer to what the IP actually costs when you buy a CD. Of a $14 CD, something like $10 goes to the shipping, merchandiser, manufacturng, packaging, etc. About $4 goes to the publisher, and then something like $0-$1 of that goes to the artist, depending on your fame. So, if artists sold their songs directly online for $0.25, they'd actually be making more than they do with a publisher.

4-09-03 - 1

4-09-03

Just now I was thinking of getting a new computer, and I realized I don't even want one. My current box is a 1 GHz box running Windows ME (god damn ME!). I could easily get a nice new computer, but the pain in the butt of getting it all set up outweighs the benefit. This made me realize two things - 1) computer upgrades really don't matter any more; I used to constantly want the next upgrade, now I really don't care. 2) it's far too hard to copy your config from one machine to another. I want my home and work machine to be almost complete copies of each other and stay in sync.

4-06-03 - 1

4-06-03

I can't write about the war any more. It's surreal to me - I can't believe it's happening. I feel like this is some sort of Kafka story - people are doing just incredible and cruel things, so arbitrary and baffling, but it's all real, and they believe they are acting perfectly reasonably.