Well this weekend has been a little hectic. Spent Saturday shopping for some new shelves and a dresser at Ikea. I bought 2 shelves and a Dresser, and then proceeded to spent the afternoon and early evening building them.

Building these things should be easy, provided you have unlimited space to build. I had to build my shelves in my office, where I was going to use them, and have so much junk in there it was difficult to put the things together. The only saving grace was the cordless screwdriver which is a must have for these exact situations. Especially when it involves putting screws directly into wood.

Of course I have to disconnect and move all of my computer equipment too, because I have to move my office desk about 6 inches to the left to be able to put a shelf on each side of my desk.

All said and done, I am glad I did it, as I have been able to move a lot of books from the floor to their proper place in the shelves now.

I still have a ways to go to get my office in order, but I'm getting there.

Also I spent a few hours on Friday swapping hard drives. I bought a Maxtor 160GB drive more than a few weeks ago, and had problems from the day I bought it. I almost lost all of my data twice once from a huge number of bad sectors, and the second from the Partition Table getting corrupted. Fortunately I was able to save the corrupted Partition Table by buying a piece of software off the internet which saved countless hours of grief. I will say that I am happy that Maxtor replace my 160GB drive with a 200GB drive. So that somewhat lessons the pain and agony I had to go though. (Well not really, but I can always use an extra 40GB of space...)

So on top of all of this I have been having problems with my Cable Modem. Services has been very bad since Tuesday. I have not been able to connect to the internet for 3 days. Then it mysteriously started working 30 minutes before the Technician called on Friday. Fortunately he came out anyways, ran some tests, and decided that it was the Cable Companies fault. So connectivity has continued to be spotty throughout the weekend. I sure hope they fix this problem this coming week! I can saw that since I moved to Campbell my broadband connectivity to the internet has be sub-par. I started with Reality Wireless and they were just starting up then, but were not ready to accept customers... I switched to Broadband Now the second they became available in my apartment complex and had no problems until they were bought by Interquest. Since Interquest I have once again been plagued by connectivity problems. I wish I had other choices... I can't get DSL because the CO (Central Office) is too far away. Dunno if they have made any changes since, but might be worth while for me to look again...

Anyways I am packing for my trip back to Minneapolis. I leave tomorrow afternoon.

Well its been over a week since I last left a blog. Unfortunately Burton never replied to me which is somewhat disappointing. I would have that they would have at least sent me an e-mail response.

I just purchased my first few songs from Apple's iTunes music store. I downloaded iTunes for Windows. It actually works pretty nice. I might actually dump my MusicMatch Player for iTunes. The MusicMatch Player in my opinion has become a pretty bloated piece of software. And they are adding their own music web site which will not be compatible with my iPod. Don't get me wrong I have been an avid MusicMatch enthusiast for may years now, back when it was first and foremost a player.

The iTunes user interface is very simple and uncluttered. The buttons are very intuitive looking except maybe the visual effects button. Of course I don't know what I would use for a visual effect button either.

So keeping things short, I will be a new iTunes convert for the time being. I will continue to buy music from the iTunes website, I only hope that the AAC Protected format becomes more prevalent on the PC platform. I can't say that I would personally rip to an AAC format, as I believe that ripping to MP3 at 192K using VBR is a pretty good option, and by far the most widely accepted format for any time in the near future. Hopefully the industry will settle on one or two formats... (probably WMA and AAC??) Guess Microsoft and Apple have to each have their own formats just like operating systems.

The whole idea of purchasing music on the internet is pretty cool. The thought that I may no longer be able to buy a CD with Master quality sound is somewhat disturbing. I like to be able to have the actual CD, Album art and other miscellaneous inserts. The whole Industry that creates album art may be doomed in the future as all imaging goes digital, and album art becomes generic digital images.

I think musicians are in for a reality check as music will likely move toward sales of individual songs. No more creating 1 or 2 good songs on an album full of 12-15 other junkers. Spending $2 on 2 songs vs. $17.99 for 12 is going to really wreak havoc on the music industry. Of course production costs become literally $0 as you only need to distribute the music electronically to a couple of retail outlets which will be responsible for distribution to the masses via the net.

In fact what benefit will there be in the future for artists to even create albums? Why not just release every song as it is mastered in the studio. Why bother with an album, especially if consumers will only buy a couple of the songs.

This may be a benefit to us as consumers as musicians will now need to produce a much higher quality product (e.g. song) in order to make the same profits. If we think in terms of products and an artist only has 2 out of every 10 products being successful would you consider that a good artist? If McDonald's sold 2 out of every 10 cheeseburgers burnt would you continue to buy their products? I don't know maybe that's a bad comparison. Because today we still buy albums even if only one or two songs are good, and maybe that's just optimism that we will learn to like the rest since we made the investment.

So now lets say that the average consumer purchases 5 songs on average per album from an online music store. That would be $5 per album. Ok so why can't we just drop the price of CD's to say $10 in an effort that consumers would rather buy the album rather than a digital download? Should be a bargain in my book... And the musicians still make a fortune on some songs that probably aren't even worth a $1 a piece.

I think music companies will need to think twice about changing their business models to incorporate digital music as a medium for the future. In my opinion it will only cause more erosion of profit than is already being experienced.

In the long run what does this probably mean? Fewer artists who are paid less for fewer songs. And consumers will become more selective, purchasing only the best songs, opting to buy another artists top song over a favorite artists second or third best songs.

Ok maybe this doesn't make a lot of sense, but nobody is reading this anyways, and its my blog, and I have an opinion so there!

Well it's Monday night, and I just arrive back here in Minneapolis around 10:30 Central time. I have my trademark sore neck as I always seem to get when traveling on the plane. Probably from having my neck bent down to read or work on my laptop...

Anyways as winter is getting closer, I can't help but to think about the upcoming Snowboarding season! I have been looking into getting a new board, bindings and boots. So I have been looking around to see what's out there. I have been a die hard Burton fan since '97, and have ridden with nothing but Burton gear since. So, to my dismay I was looking at the latest Boots on the Burton web site and I noticed that they no longer carry my size (15) in boots anymore! I don't know what I am going to do if I have to look elsewhere for boots. So I have written to Burton product support to see what they come back to me with, unfortunately I am not holding my breath as my assumption is that they don't sell enough of the larger sizes to justify producing them. What am I to do... No one else that's a half reputable brand makes them either... Maybe I'll just have to ride the next 20 years with the pair that I got.

Anyways I hope to have a solution to my boot problem, as I do more research on other makers...

(I wonder if anyone actually reads any of this junk I write)

Well today stated off nicely. I had a nice case of allergies when I woke up this morning and had to take some benedryl to get things under control. I haven't had any allergies that bad in a long time. Of course I have never been in Minneapolis this time of year so it is entirely possible that something doesn't agree with me here...

In addition to that I got a notice from my online bill payer that they could no longer find my checking account to withdraw funds from. So I call my credit union up, and they tell me that they know there is a problem, and that it should be fixed tomorrow. Apparently there was a problem with all of their ACH transactions, both debits and credits to the account... Hmm sounds to me like a technology problem. This isn't the first time either. This is the second time this year, I have had a problem with ACH transactions and about the 4th time in 2 years. However, I will not name my financial institution.

So I get to see if this is all fixed tomorrow when I have my ACH transactions re-sent to my financial institution to have them processed again. If it doesn't work, I'm closing my account... Since I'm sick stupid things like this. I think I'll write to the President and CEO and see what he has to say. Being a financial services consultant, I know this isn't completely un-heard of, however the number of times that it has happened to me is a bit much.

Ok off the soap box.

It's Thursday night, I get to back tonight, and get on a plane tomorrow morning to back home to California. Yay!

Well it's Tuesday night. I am back in Minnesota again. I took part in the California recall election as many others did, however by absentee ballot.

The weather here has warmed up, it was about 80 degrees today, a big difference from last week which was in the 40s and 50s.

I haven't left a log in the last coupe of days as I have been up to other things.

On one hand I purchased a new video card, the ATI All-in-wonder Radeon 9800. I've been wanting to get one for a long time, and just haven't gotten around to doing so.

I also purchased a game called HALO for the the PC. It's actually a pretty fun game. However, it's nothing compared to Counter-Strike which is my all time favorite FPS (First Person Shooter). It's more like a big melee. There's no strategy in HALO but it's kinda fun to obliterate other players. The single player game is better I think. You really need to play in the full 1600X1280 resolution to appreciate the detailing in the game. Fortunately the video card I have makes that a possibility. I think it actually plays faster in the highest resolution than in the lower ones... Go figure.

Well after tinkering around with this web site (vonp.com) I came across some scripts which I could load to enable a Guestbook and a Message board. After configuring them and doing a little tweaking they are now ready for public consumption. Unfortunately, the presentation isn't exactly that great, but I haven't figured out how to modify the script so that I can change the look and feel. Eventually with a little more time I will see if I can reformat it.

Well today has been pretty uneventful, so there's not a whole lot to say. I'm just need to do a little bit of packing tonight so that I will be able to go back home tomorrow night.

I'll think of something else to write before the night is up. Until then I am going to tweak my website (riftzone.net) because I just noticed a problem with my Guest Book where some fields might not be long enough to allow for full e-mail addresses...

Well I just spent an hour or so trying to add a blog to my website as the home page, but it seems to screw up my home page template so I added a Riftzone News tab. I'll figure it out later.

So much for packing I'll do it tomorrow.