RasterWeb!
iPod? Feh! I’ve got an inon-dash Digital Audio Player. It’s detachable too! It connects to the car stero through a sophisticated wire-connection to a cassette-style adapter interface. It also connect to my Mac using a USB cable and runs on a single AA battery.
The Digital Music Revolution is here!
(Note: In the photo it may look like the mounting device is really just 3 screw and a rubber band, but in reality it is 3 screws and 2 rubberbands.)
Yeah, ok, so I missed Macworld. I mean, I didn’t go, but then again, I never go. So when I say I missed it, I mean something else, like “huh, what happened, did I miss it?”
I know, there are new things, sure. A smaller iPod. Smaller in size, in every way, except price comparatively. Ok, I bought an old Rio 500 a few months back for around $60 bucks, and if they had come out with an iPod around $100, or even $150 I could have considered chucking it into the nearest junk drawer, but $249? Um, ok yeah, sure. Perhaps Apple will lower the price on it and everyone can say “Wow, Apple r00lz!” or something, but I sort of doubt it.
GarageBand actually looks very freaking cool, and this from someone who used to play and record music and even owned a 4-track recorder years ago. I’ve used various music/sound apps on the Mac over the past 10 years or so, but just looking at what GarageBand does, and the price for it (basically $49 plus some other junk along with it) GarageBand kicks the asses of previous efforts in the price range. My music-making friend(s) might be excited.
As for the iLife thingy, ok, I’m pretty much willing to spend $49 to make iPhoto go faster. Really. It’s a very nice application, but man oh man does it crawl. It feels like my G4 is running iPhoto for Windows via Virtual PC it’s so slow… Free would be better but really, from what I hear Apple does have to make some money, and I can trick myself into saying that I’m supporting open-source by buying it since Apple is a good open-source citizen…
Ok, for real now, if you want good coverage of what happened, look elsewhere, perhaps Ars Technica’s A Jade keynote: Macworld Expo 2004:
Twenty years after bringing desktop publishing to the masses, giving everyone the power to create really bad brochures and church bulletins, Apple has done it again. Garage Band makes it possible for even the most computer illiterate and tone deaf individual to make horrible music through drag and drop simplicity and brightly colored icons…
Oh, and one last thing…
The “one last thing” was the guy in front of me farting and then it was over.
Ok, one more last thing. Apple still makes an operating system and hardware that sucks less than anything else out there. How’s that for a compliment?
Oh sure, you fancy people with your iLives and your digital video can try to recreate the magic with PXL Vision, but I’ve got the real thing squirreled away in the basement offices of Rasterboy Enterprises. Yes, we are proud owners of a Pixelator.
Someday you might even see the fine features such as In Search of a Camaro filmed in West Allis, and Destruction of the Wresting Guy (co-starring Sledge) filmed at the Von Bohlen residence in Waukesha.
(In the meantime you can enjoy Get the Pig!)
While I have been using Thunderbird for quite a while on my Windows box and my PowerBook, I’ve finally switched to it on my main work machine. There wasn’t really a reason I didn’t before except for lack of time or laziness, so now we’re converted. I’ve also installed the Calendar extension, though the Mac OS X version is an unsupported build. It seems to be working ok so far, except for importing some other calendars I’ve used in the past. Anyway, onward and upward in 2004, right?
Art is a provocative medium. It always has been, and hopefully it always will be.
So when MoveOn.org recently held a contest called Bush in 30 Seconds, which asked for submissions from the public, there was quite a stir caused by two pieces that compared Adolf Hitler to George W. Bush.
I won’t voice my opinion on either of those guys, but needless to say, this is nothing new in the art world. I’ve seen such depictions of political leaders as [insert something icky here] since the days of Reagan, and I’m sure things go back further, but since my memory doesn’t, that’s all I can speak of. I did do a project in school that looked at how collage art was used as a weapon against propoganda during World War II though, so I’m sure this goes back a long way.
There’s always been subversive and underground art, but it’s pretty much been, well… underground. The internet tends to change those things. If you want it to. I’m fairly sure the folks at MoveOn.org knew what they were doing when they choose the finalists, and put the on the web. It’s called publicity.