A couple of notable moments, including a few firsts in my life, occurred at last night’s Rick Springfield concert at the Emerald Queen Casino in Tacoma, WA. Before the concert, we picked up Springfield’s Written in Rock 2-CD set retrospective of his career to date. We paid $18.99 at a local record store, but I see it for $24.98 on Amazon [affiliate].

The 2-CD set includes a full 42 songs with a couple of covers of Beatles songs (”Eleanor Rigby” and “For No One”) and extensive liner notes by Rick himself discussing how each track came to be created. For example, on Jessie’s Girl is that the song was originally written about his friend’s hot girlfriend that Rick knew he would never have, was titled Randy’s Girl, and included a long guitar solo that was shortened to be more pop chart friendly. I like when artists provide this background with CDs. Lots of pictures too.

I think my favorite parts were when Springfield came out into the audience while performing — literally. Of the numerous live concerts I’ve seen over the years, I’ve only seen one other artist do this, Air Supply. The guitarist from Armored Saint did one of those jump into the crowd things and they didn’t catch him. Ouch, that has to hurt. Springfield came out into the crowd during the song, “Don’t talk to Strangers” and then again during “Human Touch” and a cover of The Who’s “My Generation.” He also covered “Red House” in the setlist.

Springfield pointed the microphone to the crowd and had some of them, including one of the security guards, sing the words: “Don’t talk to strangers.” Nice touch!

My fellow rocker friend Matt Wardlaw stopped by yesterday in the comments to tell me that Rick Springfield puts on a good show. With that kind of endorsement, I figured it would be a good time — and it was. A new reader, Mufi, tells me how she got box seats to see Metallica and confirms that marriage does involve sacrifices.

Last night’s show was no sacrifice. I was entertained.

Mufi also points out that Springfield has a new CD of Christmas songs out. He played one of his original Christmas songs. I don’t know about Christmas rock records, although I kind of liked Twisted Sister Twisted Christmas CD.

In 2008 Springfield has a new CD coming out with a song called “Who Killed Rock” that he opened with last night. I was kind of surprised how much Rick’s guitarist wailed. The guy could really play well. Kind of reminded me of David Lee Roth’s guitarist. Springfield is good on the fretboard too, although during his solo he muffed a few notes and the guitar was noticeably out of tune.

As expected, Springfield played his several hits: “Affair of the Heart,” “I’ve Done Everything For You,” “State of the Heart,” and of course his #1 song “Jessie’s Girl” which was the last song before the encore which included two more songs. One, I wasn’t familiar with (”Wasted” ?) and the final song “Love is alright” concluded the performance.

The mix was decent, although at times I had a hard time hearing Springfield’s vocals. My wife pointed out that he seemed to yell a little too much instead of singing. And he forgot the words to a couple songs, saying “shit” into the microphone at one point instead of the actual lyrics. I’d kind of expect this from one of the first few shows, but according to his tour page, he’s put on dozens of shows before this one. Maybe the songs he muffed the words weren’t played at most of these shows? In my experience, it’s not that uncommon for artists to forget words here and there on live shows.

I was surprised how animated Springfield was on stage. He threw his guitar way up in the air and caught it one-handed, he took roses and other flowers from the crowd and strummed his guitar with them, severing the flowers and having petals fly everywhere. Matt was right, Springfield puts on a good show. We had decent seats, sort of near the back, at $35 a ticket (pictured), near the fire exit on the left side of the stage.

No pictures were allowed to be taken at the venue, which I saw being broken by several fans. At one point, Springfield took a cell phone from one of the female fans and called “mom” telling her that he was Rick Springfield and that he had a “condom.” The crowd roared. Now that’s interacting with the fans.

When the concert was over we hung around the casino for 30 minutes or so, letting the crowd dissipate, playing one of the video keno machines. After her and I lost $100, my wife won it back by hitting 4 out of 4. Then something strange happened: we went to cash the EZ Ticket out and were told the computers were “all down.” The workers were milling around in a state of confusion and concern, wondering aloud: “the IT guys better get on this.”

Since we couldn’t put the ticket in any of the machines in the back of the casino, we moved forward to the front half of the casino and came upon this Chain Reaction $1 slot machine along the side of the machine. I stuck the $100 ticket in it and was immediately credited with 100 credits. I planned to only play it a few spins and on the fourth spin came up one Chain Reaction symbol and two red 7’s in the middle: $300! Spun it a couple more times and then hit the cash out button. Now we had a ticket for $394. Took that to the main cage where long lines of people were cashing in tickets. We had no problem waiting to make over $300! Thanks Emerald Queen Casino for paying us to go see Rick Springfield — and then some. First time I can remember ever being paid to go see a concert. Nice.

Summary and grade
Overall, the concert was a solid, satisfying experience. Musically I wasn’t as enthralled as at some other concerts, but that’s a matter of personal taste. I’d probably pay to see Springfield again someday — and would definitely be willing to get paid to go see him thanks to gambling winnings (that likely won’t happen again) — which is a considerable improvement from yesterday’s post where I was reluctant to attend. Glad my wife wanted to go, a lot of fun. Grade: B.

Being a horror movie fan and especially since it’s Halloween I’d just love to encourage readers to get out to the theater this witching time of year and see Saw IV in the theater, but can’t.

The movie [Saw IV official website] has raked in over $30 million already and is #1 in the theaters as I write this. My wife and I went last night.

Saw IV opens with a gruesome autopsy scene and devolves from there. I’m still trying to figure out what happened in the end. Jigsaw puzzle? Indeed.

After seeing Saw III I wondered how they could contract Jigsaw for five movies when his head was almost chopped off at the end of his cancer ravaged body. Jigsaw can only live on in backstory logically — and guess what, that’s what we get in Saw IV. Jigsaw’s ex-wife seems only to be in the story to relate the backstory of what drove Jigsaw into being the brilliant, mad scientist of traps and gadgetry.

By the time the end credits rolled I was even more confused about who was the bad guy? An essential component of horror is understanding who the bad guy is so you can sense FEAR. I sensed more repulsion than fear with Saw IV. More shock about the visuals and what I was seeing than being legitimately fearful. Lionsgate needs to go back to the sawhorse for Saw V because IV lost its edge. The only thing keeping this horrible horror flick from total failure is the inventive, yet sadistic traps. Grade: D+

Wanted to get to the theater to see the well received Transformers movie but it didn’t happen. Went to buy it from Best Buy the other day in HD-DVD format — sorry Blu-ray fans, Paramount is HD-DVD only — but they were sold out. So yesterday afternoon we searched other stores.

Fred Meyer had it for $34.99 which is more than I’d liked to have paid but the 24 hours of special features including enhanced web feature sucked me in. I’m happy with the purchase. We would have spent that $35 in the theater after the tickets, popcorn and drinks. If you can be more patient than me, Amazon has Transformers HD-DVD (affiliate) for $27.99 as of this writing.

So as soon as we got home I fired up the Xbox HD-DVD drive and loaded the first disc. The first load took awhile while as it loaded feature and check out the screenshot — asking for permission to put a cookie on the HD-DVD drive! Something not normally seen with the regular DVD watching experience, huh?

Once it loaded I needed to register at Paramount’s HD web content site with username, password, email, age and whether I wanted to receive future offers from them. Worked flawlessly, although typing with the controller UI is slow. I should have used our USB keyboard instead or go buy that cool looking Xbox 360 Text Input device (affiliate).

Note: you can skip this step if you want to jump in and start watching the movie, but I wanted to watch it the very first time with the web enhanced features. You can’t get that experience anywhere else but the HD-DVD which I was excited about seeing.

Once registered, you’re automatically logged in, so click the ‘play’ button in the Intelligence Center and the Transformers movie loads with a matte around the screen containing information about the health status of each of the Transformers. They are dark until the Transformer(s) appears in the movie.

As each Transformer takes damage, similar to a fighting video game, the health bar goes down from full health (white) to dark red (almost dead) to off the chart black (dead). Along the way little bits and pieces of movie backstory popup in the bottom of the screen. Sometimes humorous snippets like asking why the main character isn’t kissing the girl.

The plot of the movie for those who haven’t seen, no spoilers, revolves around a struggle for a powerful alien cube that crashed to earth. The bad Transformers, known as DECEPTICONS are trying to recover the cube while the good Transformers known as AUTOBOTS are trying to prevent that from happening. Cliched: a covert division of the military knows about it and has frozen the DECEPTICON leader.

The leader of the AUTOBOTS is Optimus Prime who takes the form of a Semi-truck. The guard AUTOBOT is called Bumblebee who doesn’t have a voice and thus uses songs on the car radio to utter phrases (neat idea!). Bumblebee protects the main character, Sam Witwicky, who has a pair of broken glasses with the location of alien cube. How to the Transformers know about Sam possessing the glasses? He’s trying to sell them on eBay, of course.

AUTOBOTS will not hurt humans while DECEPTICONS have no problem wiping out mankind. A classic, albeit fun good vs. evil story.

Sam is a quirky younger guy who looks a little bit like Wil Wheaton (Star Trek Next Generation Wesley Crusher) and has a love interest in a hot girl being played by Megan Fox. And yes, Megan looks terrific at 1080p, start drooling on your remotes now. Also notable in the cast is the guy who plays Danny (Josh Duhamel) in the hit TV show Las Vegas. Duhamel plays a military commander with a squadron sort of caught in the middle of the battle.

The acting overall wasn’t outstanding, but the real fun is the Transformers and various battles which do not disappoint. Great special effects, easily among the best I’ve ever seen which has the bar set pretty high by the ILM (Industrial Light and Magic) team.

The end battle is rewarding and teases sequel. Since Transformers grossed pretty well in the theater (#19 all time per Box Office Mojo) and deserves to sell a ton of HD-DVD and DVDs, we can probably expect a Transformers 2.

As I write this I’m itching to watch it again. If you buy or already own an HD-DVD player, Transformers is a must have for the collection. Finally an HD-DVD movie experience that offers something engaging during the movie experience besides behind the scenes commentary (and yes, it has that too). This is easily my favorite to date animated to big screen adaption and HD-DVD experience. Think I’m going to put the animated Transformers on my wish list. The only thing that prevents Transformers from having a higher grade is the acting. Keep in mind that my grade is for the HD-DVD experience, not the DVD or theater experience. Grade: A-.

Disclaimer: I’m being paid to write this review.

Sproose happily describes itself as:

the search engine of the people, by the people, for the people and NOT corporations. Only a quality site reviewed by real people can move up.

At a time when too many new sites and services — whether it makes sense or not — are promoting some kind of social network complete with voting, mini- and micro-blogging, commenting, tagging and/or some variation of features thereof, what Sproose promotes in their tagline above didn’t seem very original to me. It also seemed awkward and forced coming from a search engine. I’ll get back to other issues with this motto before this post is done.

As someone who once had faith in the human edited Dmoz project — but no worries, not any more — I was mildly intrigued how good Sproose human promoted results would compare against Google (disclaimer #2: I own GOOG stock). After seeing dozens of also ran search engines, my expectations for Sproose weren’t too high, which probably helps their grade for those who want to skip the blow-by-blow specifics to the last section summary.

Not registering doesn’t make much sense
Registering at Sproose allows you to vote up or down search results for other users — guest voting doesn’t impact the search results of others, which sort of misses the point of the site — so I jumped in. I left the checkbox default checked “share vote history” and Sproose kicked me back with an error message over my email.

Hmm readers are probably tiring of me pointing this out with so many registration forms but it’s a great recurring example of how many programmers are using flawed regular expressions. The + symbol is allowed in email addresses. Please fix that, Sproose crew.

After entering another email address that didn’t have the +, I was greeted with a page offering me three options: upload a picture, take a tour and start searching.

Rarely skipping an opportunity to seed the web with pictures of my ugly mug, I went with top green arrow #1. After a familiar web upload option, I was redirected to my profile page.

Although I personally don’t mind receiving adult search results, I decided to leave the default option of filtering these results and go back in the browser to the green arrow options. I dragged the “Sproose it Up!” bookmarklet to my bookmark bar, although shortening to ’sproose’. Hey, space up there is at a premium (wink, wink, nudge, nudge Sproose crew).

Next I chose the tour which graphically showed how to use Sproose. Graphic instructions are easy to follow and look a little comic-like with the bubble text. If you know how to use digg or any of the digg clones the same premise applies with Sproose: if you like it, vote for it. The more votes from Sproose users makes the site appear higher in the search results.

Don’t like something? Click on the trash can graphic. Unsurprisingly, you can leave comments on pages a la stumbleupon and countless other services. If somebody else comments at Sproose you’ll get an email alerting you of their comments. I hope there is a feature to disable these emails because I never saw one. In each mail they do have an unsubscribe message though. This is counter-productive for those to leave comments. I want to get follow-up comments on blogs posts and forum threads where I leave comments, not on Sproose search results.

One glaring problem with services like this is the flawed perception that everybody voting is following the rules: good = good, bad = trash. What about those who go in and trash can a bunch of good results just because they don’t like the webmaster? Or perhaps worse conversely by voting up content that isn’t high quality? This is a very real concern that very few voting systems I’ve seen in my 10+ years on the web have addressed properly.

One last word on the Sproose tour. Would have been nice to see text instructions for the sight-impaired. The images didn’t have descriptive ALT tags rendering the tour page not very accessibility or search engine friendly. If only webmasters had to view their sites with impaired vision …

Egosearch results
As with many other search engines, I start with searching on keywords that I think our sites should rank high. I started with the keyword ‘hmm’ which if you try that in Google this blog is currently ranked #3. In Sproose it was the top result on the second page. I voted for it and the following showed:

Immediately this got me thinking if Sproose disallowed or discouraged voting for your own sites? It appears to be the reverse with Sproose providing webmasters with several ways to add Sproose it up buttons to your site “Your site moves up in Sproose results - attracting more new users for you!”

In the case of this blog ‘readers’ would be a better, more friendly description, but they should probably just change “users” to “visitors” for variety.

Spreading the search result love around
Now does this mean you should race to register for Sproose voting up your sites for keywords for only or even primarily your own site(s)? No, you wouldn’t want to vote up your own posts at digg or thumbs up only your own stuff at Stumbleupon either.

I decided to use it for a series of recent searches I’d made on Google (using Google Web History feature) and vote up the best results in Sproose for the same queries. Earlier today I was wondering what year music CDs were first released. Among others I tried the following queries: year music cd released to market and history of music cd. Neither revealed a simple, quick answer of the year. I ended back up at Google which led me to this New York Times archive article from August 25, 1991: “Available only since 1983, CD’s have taken the music business by storm and now account for 43.6 percent, or 286 million units, of all the music sold annually.”

‘Sproosing’ that listing didn’t give me an option for a specific keyword combination, so guess I’m leaving it on faith for the next searcher to find that result? The ability to assign results to pages part when viewing a page would be a nice addition, or if it’s a feature making it more obvious. Instead, Sproose puts itself in a cliched top position frame that most likely will be blocked on some percentage of websites (although none blocked during my testing successfully). Also the popup window for comments in Firefox has the text getting cut off in the form, another bug needing fixed.

Tried a couple other search results and pumped up good sites like: ’stumbleupon’, ‘download web browser’ (Firefox, Opera, Safari), ‘blog software’ (Wordpress), ‘online auctions’ (eBay), ‘p2p voip’ (Skype), ‘classifieds’ (Craigslist), ‘dictionary’ (Dictionary.com), ‘podsafe music’ (Podshow), ‘dokken’ (official Don Dokken website), ‘van halen’ (official Van Halen website) and more.

I didn’t check in Internet Explorer but logged in and ran a few searches in Safari on the Mac successfully. Good to see the Mac crowd not left out.

Sproose offers a video search powered by Blinkx which I found a search for Hmmcast, a specific query, revealed only two results. Considering the next episode will be #176 (still working through the maze of HD in order to get back to a regular schedule again), that isn’t too impressive for a service pounding on the pipes for 2+ years (Blinx, not Sproose)

Summary and grade
I’ve been saying for awhile that the next evolution of search engine will incorporate some amount of human and machine and I remain interested in what people put together. Comparing Sproose against human assisted results from competitors like ChaCha.com, I’d rather use ChaCha at the present time. And there are no incentives to search like with Winzy or Blingo unless you are a webmaster and promoting your own pages.

Add to the above that the underlying machine search results I tested were merely … ok. Not something I could see using instead of Google. Also found very few common Sproose search results with votes which suggests that the number of people using Sprooce is still small. That’s to be expected for any new service, but to draw people away from the mighty G, they’re going to need some sort of hook beyond digg-style voting on sites. I know, I know, but they are new and we’re supposed to roll up our shirts and donate our time to the social network cause making their search results better something like what the Wikipedia is doing for encyclopedia.

Now back to that pesky Sproose motto. That Sproose is “for the people and NOT corporations.” My follow-up question is: for how long?

Hate to break it to these companies — unless you are a non-profit (did I miss that about Sproose?) — but some of us out here guard our time jealously. I’m not going to burn sand in the hour glass at your site making it better so at some later day you can sell the service to a bigger fish or IPO and make bank to go off and find some other new startup to begin the process anew. Sproose is going to have a tough job gaining traction if people distrust them seconds after they reach the site. They can help things by replacing that motto with something less like a political speech. Maybe something like: “working together we can build a better search.” Not that, but along those lines maybe.

I digress. For those with websites, you might want to dip a toe or two in the Sproose pool, but non-webmasters won’t find much to get excited about here yet. Grade: C

Update 8:12pm PST: Added a missing screenshot, the one showing how once I voted for the site in the egosurf area it moved up in the results. Also, Bob Parks, the CEO of Sproose stopped by to comment below. He said I missed some important features and I’m waiting for clarification back in the comments what exactly those features were/are.

The HP w2408 Vivid Color Widescreen LCD monitor is the most expensive computer monitor I’ve purchased to date weighing in at a wallet bleeding $599 USD. You can see the complete specs on the Best Buy sales page here. I ponied up for the extra $79.99 for the 4 year extended warranty and after tax the whole purchase rang up a little over $730 USD. PriceProtectr, fast becoming my favorite site and best website friend of 2007, emailed me this morning to tell me the price already dropped $30, so I’ll be heading back to Best Buy to get my $30 back. Nice.

I’m not the type of guy who will typically spend more than a couple hundred bones on a monitor, but we’re on a bit of a mission to slowly replace the old CRT monitors with LCDs and am really happy with the HP w2408 so far. Let’s start with words you see when you first open the box:

It’s true, computer’s haven’t felt very “personal” for awhile. The HP w2408 has a very friendly feel from unpacking and setting up to powering on for the first time, complete with a picture with color step-by-step instructions gently taped to the face of the monitor.

The last LCD monitor I bought had me bending and twisting to figure out where to plug in the cords, but with the 90 degree turn of the HP w2408, you can simply twist into portrait mode (1200×1920 max resolution) and plug in the cords on the right with hardly any bending at all. You can use VGA or DVI-D and yes, it does come with the DVI-D cord.

Note: keep enough room so when you twist back and forth between modes, you don’t knock anything over. This prompted me to clean some of the clutter off my glass desk. Thanks HP!

Once you move the monitor back into the traditional landscape mode (1920×1200 max resolution), the cords neatly protrude from the back, snaking their way to the computer. There are 4 USB ports, two on the left side (landscape) and two in the back, which are handy for plugging and unplugging conveniently. There are rear speakers built into the monitor, but they are not very loud or useful; will probably want to stick with your existing speakers.

As I’m getting older, no surprise, my eyes aren’t quite what they used to be. The HP w2408 has an ambient light sensor which adjusts to the light around the room and provides a sharp, but not overly bright display. There are different settings available at the touch of a couple buttons on the bottom or left side (portrait mode): movie, photo, gaming, text and custom.

Here is landscape mode:

Here’s portrait:

You can see both sidebars on the homepage of Hmm at 1920×1200 with the window fully maximized. For convenience, I wish there was a button on the monitor to push to switch between these modes rather than having to right click on the desktop and change the orientation.

So far I’m using the monitor mostly in the portrait mode at full resolution (1200×1920) which is fantastic for reading web pages and longer text documents. I can place two decent-sized Firefox browsers and play the new Reel Deal Ghost Town slots (not real gambling) from Phantom EFX for fun all on the same screen:

Summary and grade
As mentioned at the beginning, this is my most expensive monitor purchase ever, but it’s easily the best quality monitor I’ve ever owned. The colors on the screen are vibrant and crisp. The 40″ Samsung HDTV we purchased in July has DVI-D and VGA input too and could serve as a monitor, but at nearly four times the price as HP w2408, that would make for a really expensive computer monitor.

$500-600 was about as much as I was willing to pay for something that could produce full 1080p attached to a computer, which will definitely come in handy editing the Hmmcast HD videos. For those who can put this in their budget your eyes will thank you. This monitor comes highly recommended with my only gripe thus far being the subpar rear speakers. Grade: A-

The public beta — woohoo, no invites required — of the Amazon MP3 Store (note: all links in this post to Amazon are affiliate links) has been released offering the biggest amount of DRM-free, MP3 encoded (256k) music available online, via their press release:

Amazon MP3 has over 2 million songs from more than 180,000 artists represented by over 20,000 major and independent labels … Most songs are priced from 89 cents to 99 cents, with more than 1 million of the 2 million songs priced at 89 cents. The top 100 best-selling songs are 89 cents, unless marked otherwise. Most albums are priced from $5.99 to $9.99. The top 100 best-selling albums are $8.99 or less, unless marked otherwise.

On the main Amazon MP3 page pictured at the beginning Amazon had recommendations for me. Clicking it, I see the MP3 full album recommended — singular recommendation, not plural — was April Wine’s Nature of the Beast for $8.99 I like that album and have owned it on vinyl and cassette tape in the past; it’s a solid recommendation for me. No other recommendations yet.

Online music achille’s heel: selection
Once you cast aside DRM, the biggest problem with buying music online is selection. Yeah, they have millions of songs, but noticeably absent are artists like The Beatles and ACDC. Amazon MP3 Downloads doesn’t have these artists either — yet.

Although the price offered for April Wine was fair, I decided to pass and look at CDs I’ve bought recently and test the selection there, seeing if I had waited I could have bought and downloaded from them instead . I’ve been listening to Iron Maiden’s CD A Matter of Life and Death which I paid $13.99 at Best Buy. Amazon MP3 has it for $8.99.

Two of my favorite Iron Maiden albums are Piece of Mind and Live after Death. Both are not available yet on Amazon MP3. The only two Iron Maiden albums available are Brave New World and A Matter of Life and Death.

Another CD bought recently was Heaven & Hell live. I tried several different searches — and somebody please tell me why there is no artist search in the dropdown menu? — and couldn’t locate it. Trying Black Sabbath, the only album available via MP3 is a single Karaoke song.

Amazon MP3 was now 1 for 3. Next up, the most recent CD purchase, just last weekend, James Blunt Back To Bedlam Expanded Edition for $14.99 from Wal-mart. It includes the complete original Back To Bedlam album plus the bonus CD: Live in Ireland. There is also the video for the song Goodbye My Lover and a making of Goodbye My Lover. Is this available on Amazon MP3? Nope, make that 1 for 4 (batting average: .250).

My final search was for Kiss Double Platinum. Kiss is everywhere, right? Gene Simmons takes heat (rightfully in many cases) for over marketing Kiss. You’d expect they’d have every, or at least most Kiss albums on Amazon MP3. And you’d be correct, Amazon MP3 has a pretty extensive library of Kiss albums

Clicking to sort from low price to high, I saw Kiss Creatures of the Night on MP3 selling for a very desirable $7.97. Nice. We’re …. creatures of the niiiiiiiight. Cha-ching.

Before using Amazon 1-Click, I noticed they offered a small helper app (Windows XP, Vista or Mac OS X) to download called the Amazon MP3 Downloader.

Noticing the text: “It automatically adds your music downloads to iTunes or Windows Media Player” I decided to pass. I don’t use Windows Media Player, I use Zune. Strange, that the application wouldn’t support adding the tracks automatically to the Zune (or maybe not, if you listen to all the Zune bashers).

But wait — it turns out customers have no choice buying an album — you have to use the download application for albums.

Nice gun to my head, Amazon. Thanks — not.

Then I was remembered that the iTunes Music Store works the same way. The difference I’d learn is the Amazon MP3 Downloader doesn’t try to be some comprehensive music system competing with your favorite music player. Since I didn’t want to piecemeal downloading the tracks and pay 0.80 more, so I downloaded and installed the application. The installation process was flawless and fast relaunching a browser window asking me confirm I wanted to download Kiss Creatures of the Night. I chose to “download” and then was brought to a window that looks like this:

In the lower left corner, blue with white ‘A’ Amazon MP3 Downloader went to work downloading the album. It went impressively fast and smooth, launching Windows Media Player and loading the album art and track list in place.

I was able to click play and start listening quickly. Now back to my earlier gripe: what about Zune? I needed to move the MP3 tracks from the location where the Amazon MP3 Downloader saved them on the hard drive. Right clicking on properties I found the save location:

My Documents -> My Music -> Amazon MP3 -> ARTIST -> SONG.mp3

Next, using Windows Explorer I copied these tracks to my shared music directory. Then I fired up iTunes on the Mac, clicked on the tracks and they were added there. Nice process. Things are getting close to my online music service of dreams.

At this point I was curious what other folks were saying about Amazon MP3 Downloads. Started with Techmeme, skipping a number of shorter, bony posts that didn’t answer what we really need to know about Amazon MP3 Downloads and most important to me: what was their customer experience like? Smooth or rough? Anybody on a Mac give it a try and compare to iTunes? Did someone find more of the type music they actually wanted to buy than me? What did others learn that I missed during my review? If you wrote an in-depth review with your actual Amazon MP3 Downloads please make a comment below and leave a link to your review in your signature space. If you decide to try the service out and write your own customer review after reading mine then trackback over.

External Amazon Mp3 Downloads output
Hypebot lists the cons and pros including: “Not only does it have all of the major label DRM free product that [the other online music stores have] do. It has hundreds of thousands of indie tracks that the others do not.” Ed- Nice, didn’t realize they had indie tracks too.
A.L Friedman, perhaps a little too excited, sees this as a date to remember: “Mark September 25 on your calendar. We may very well may celebrate it as the beginning of the end of our national nightmare under the oppressive bondage of the iTunes Music Store.” Ed- this is the best offensive I’ve seen to date.
Real Tech News: “Though it won’t make a serious dent overall because of the lack of some of the big record labels, it will most likely dent the DRM-free sales at iTunes.”
ARS Technica points out the importance of backups of the MP3 purchased: “There are a few restrictions … there’s no redownloading of tracks; you’d better make a backup, because if you lose a song, you’ll have to purchase it again to get another copy.” Ed- this advice is worth repeating and emphasizing: backup the tracks, there is no do-over.
Marshall at Read/Write Web: “This is definitely a service I’ll use when I want to buy whole albums and can’t make it down to the local, independent record store.” Ed- agreed, and bonus points in the comment area for Michael Trythall who points out the cleaner URL to remember for the service: amazonmp3.com.

Other detailed customer reviews (updated)
Om Malik figures he saved about $8 using Amazon MP3 Downloads instead of iTunes. I think he shows a bias for Apple though with some of the low ratings. 8/10 for 256k MP3 files? What gets 9/10? 320/44?
Scott at TUAW pits Amazon against iTunes screen vs. screen.

Summary and grade
Once you get past the all important selection question of Amazon MP3 Downloads, it’s too easy remembering the existing competition — Apple iTunes — and the fact that they are known patent hounds. And at least in our household they managed to irritate and alienate my wife who does most the online shopping and has sworn off using them any more. Maybe someday she’ll tell that story, but whenever I mention using Amazon, she frowns. Let’s hope they haven’t done that to too many other customers out there.

By creating a DRM-free MP3 online music library that has a better selection than competitor eMusic and iTunes, Amazon MP3 Downloads comes close to the online music service of our dreams. The one day where we won’t have to get into our cars to go get a CD that we can rip as often we like for play anywhere. The people who like having the physical CD, can still order the physical CD which is something iTunes doesn’t offer. I will be checking Amazon MP3 Downloads for the music I’m interested in before hitting the store. Selection, however, still seems to be the major stumbling block for all these services with them only batting .200 (1 for 5) in this review. Grade: B

I had lofty hopes for Dragon Wars which is in theaters everywhere starting today. From the web traffic gravitating toward my original Dragon Wars post, I wasn’t alone. Others were stoked too about the possibility of an old school Godzilla type movie. Something better than Hollywood Godzilla. Something like the Godzilla battles we used to lay on the carpet and watch on TV. Watching bigger than screen monsters tear up cities is juvenile pleasure. The characters and plot don’t have to make too much sense as long as there is plenty of destruction and carnage.

Dragon Wars holds a scattered few minutes to these expectations and the rest is a mess.

My son is writing and reviewing movies for his school paper and needs to turn in two movie theater reviews each month. He has his eyes on Mr. Woodcock and Dragon Wars. After seeing the latter, we should have gone to the former. Or maybe not, stay with me as we ride the dragon’s tale through this review.

The plot, the backstory
The basic plot of Dragon Wars is that every 500 years this woman needs to be sacrificed. A bad dragon, some evil dude who can turn from human form to Skeletor on command and an army that can materialize out of thin air are pursuing this woman. There is a chosen one with some sort of protective medallion that is trying to keep the woman from being sacrificed and some friendly wizard guy who keeps rambling about getting to a cave. Dragon Wars spends way too much time at the start of the film trying to tell a boring backstory only to fast forward 500 years in the future where a young TV reporter is the modern day medallion wearing savior and the wizard pops in and out of scenes inexplicably.

That’s about it for plot — that we can understand. If that doesn’t make sense, relax, you’re in Dragon Wars territory now. It doesn’t have to make sense.

Barely coherent acting, from the human actors, not the CGI ones
The characters are there to either be playthings, appetizers or caught hopelessly in the middle of the bad dragon and the army of skeletor-like dudes marching to defeat the US of A army all over the city. Acting? Achingly bad, including the TV reporter’s sidekick who is a bad Bernie Mac wannabe. About the coolest part of the movie is the real army fighting the dragon army but by then you’re caring more about your popcorn and drink running low. Hey look, it’s the semblance of the movie we wanted to see. About 45 minutes too late!

I found myself wanting the dragon to just gulp down the woman with the mark of the tattoo and burp proudly. Aliens vs. Predator this is not, not, not.

Summary and grade
After seeing this and writing the review I checked out Rotten Tomatoes. The critics are slaying the dragon too (14%), and Mr. Woodcock isn’t faring much better (15%). Maybe we need to wait for something better to come out next weekend or the weekend beyond?

Save your money, friendly readers and movie fans, Dragon Wars is worse than a case of dragon-sized indigestion. It would be a complete failure if not for a scant few cool effects. But you can see those in the trailer on the web for free. Grade: D-

This is fast becoming Optical Character Recognition (OCR) week. On Monday I called Kinkos and they wanted to charge roughly $600 to OCR convert a roughly 300 page manuscript into DOC or PDF format. This got me thinking that I could buy a scanner and some OCR software and do the job myself. First, the printer.

Bought the Brother MFC-240C all-in-one scanner, fax, printer at Wal-Mart for $100. There were more expensive scanner only options as well as less expensive printers. What I liked about the MFC-240C was that it had a document sheet feeder so multiple pages could be fed to the scanner at one time. This way we could feed a chapter at a time through the scanner. Here’s what the first target document looks like:

To give you an idea how old some of these documents are: they were originally printed in dot matrix on a Commodore 64 printer. Older than the gray in my stubbly chin. Through the years the old 5 1/4″ and then later 3 1/2″ disks that went with the manuscripts have been lost or damaged. Thankfully, the print versions still remain, but the text is fading and the pages are starting to yellow.

Next, clear off a spot in the corner of my glass desk.

As you might expect, I found the built-in OCR software that came with the Brother MFC-240C to be worthless, producing only garbage characters from the tested pages. Software with an SE after it for Special Edition is begging to be sent to the recycle bin. Rarely does any cheap printer come with decent software, so it’s at least partly my fault for not being willing to spend more.

I’ve had good experience with other Brother printers in the past and I checked that the replacement ink cartridges weren’t too spendy. The red, yellow and blue cartridges all run about $12 and the black is around $25. They always get you on the most used ink, don’t they?

As mentioned, this mostly is going to be used as a scanner with sheet feeder, not a printer and we’re very happy with the results so far. I’ve recruited my teenage sons to help me with the process and they give Omnipage and the Brother scanner a thumbs up.

The machine comes with software for both Mac and Windows XP. If you want Vista drivers you need to visit the Brother website where they are freely available. The Mac drivers installed without a hitch. My main Windows XP would not install the included software, erroring out with the message that I was trying to install the wrong printer name. I called Brother support (free call) and they sent the issue to a higher up. Still waiting on another answer.

We tried installing on another Windows machine, my son’s laptop, and all worked right away. The issue appears to be something with USB drivers on my main developer machine. I won’t blame Brother for this one, but will blame the gods of plug and pray.

One last thing. This printer didn’t come with a USB cord. This reminds me of when I bought a Westinghouse LCD monitor and it didn’t come with the cord. We had a couple extra USB cords laying around so this didn’t end up being a big deal, still they should bump the price a couple bucks and include the necessary cord. The box is clearly marked that it doesn’t include a USB cord but I still think it’s stupid selling without all the necessary cords.

Overall, good price, does what I need to do with only a few annoying things. Grade: B-

Our search for a $10,000 new car is over.

Ok, well, we didn’t pay exactly $10,000, but we came pretty close. That is if you don’t count taxes, fees and the five year maintenance plan we purchased. Here’s how things went down.

Friday night we stopped by the Chrysler dealer and asked if they had any small cars around $10,000. The salesman told us that they had purchased too many PT Cruisers and were offloading them for $10,990 which included a $3,000 rebate and other dealer incentives. We didn’t have to be military or college grads to get the deal. It wasn’t a special for only one car or an internet only deal, they had several to sell at this price.

The PT Cruisers came with air conditioning, but were five speed manual transmission. We tried to negotiate for an automatic for a few hundred more dollars but we’re denied because those were “more desirable” cars.

I don’t mind driving a stick and Kara decided that getting automatic wasn’t worth paying an additional $1,500+. Strangely, the price on the sticker for automatic was $800 and yet they wanted to charge almost twice that at the table. Whatever the case, we were growing weary of searching for something at/under the $10,000 mark and we pulled the trigger on the 2007 PT Cruiser. Later we would learn it was the salesman’s second week on the job and the sale seemed to have made his day. The dealership seemed pretty empty for a Friday night, but that made the deal move swiftly.

Since Kara doesn’t have her license yet by choice, the salesman drove the car seven miles or so to our home and I gave him a ride back to the dealership.

Back home I checked the web for the price and the cheapest I could find a brand new base model 2007 PT Cruiser was $12,000, so I’m fairly confident we got a good deal. If you spot the base model 2007 PT Cruiser brand new with air conditioning for less than $10,990, please tell us about it below. According to the Edmunds true cost to own tool, the cost of owning the 2007 PT Cruiser over five years is $36,903. Edmunds shows as low to the depreciation side which is good. The Edmunds tool shows $41,453 for our Saturn Relay.

On Saturday, we drove the 2007 PT Cruiser down to pick up our middle teen at his friend’s house in Vancouver. The ride is nice, but not as smooth as our 2005 Saturn Relay, and I don’t care that much for the legroom under the driver’s side dash. I separated my key rings so that I only have three keys on the PT Cruiser ring. Having more than that had them dangling down and brushing across my knee. No cruise control either which on long trips might be a bit of a bummer, but we knew we were going to get few, if any, luxury items at basement pricing.

Other features included power windows and locks, keyless entry and car mats. If we had been willing to go into our pockets $3-4k more (that’s what all car dealers hope for, but were denied in our case) we could have gotten the Luxury Edition with sunroof, cruise and a few other items.

The air conditioning in the PT Cruiser is the best I’ve ever seen/experienced in any car. It’s arctic cold. So cold that we had to keep the indicator at the center position on the lowest position not to freeze. This will be awesome on hot summer days. Haven’t tried the heater yet (making note to test that).

One of my favorite 2007 PT Cruiser features in the auxiliary input on the standard radio. Right beneath the single CD AM/FM radio is a handy shelf spot where an iPod, Zune or other MP3 player fits nicely with the cord going into the AUX in at almost perfect distance. Sweet. We weren’t expecting much more than a generic radio for the price paid, but the sound system is decent with good base and treble.

The standard warranty package is 3 years, 36,000 miles, whichever comes first. The power train and engine are warrantied for life. Yes, you read that right, the lifetime of the vehicle. It’s subject to some requirements like a certified inspection every five years and it excludes a few things, but if your engine just gives out because it sucks and you’ve followed the fine print, Chrysler will replace it at no charge. I’m not aware of any other car manufacturer that offers a warranty on the engine and power train like this, are you?

We skipped the gap coverage since there will be no disequity. We already have adequate life insurance, thus no need for credit life. We’re still looking over the extended warranty plans beyond the 3 years 36,000 miles (we have a week to make up our minds there) for items besides the power train and engine.

We paid an additional $1,565 to buy a five year maintenance package which includes every oil change and other preventive maintenance check/repair over the first five years of the vehicles. This means no charge for oil changes, tire rotation (Goodyear tires), windshield wipers or fluids for the next five years. We did the math on that and it works out at a savings of about $700 over the next five years, not counting inflation, assuming we take the car in every 3,000 miles or three months as scheduled. We will.

They did a haphazard final detail job on the car and we’re taking it back in later today to show them a few spots they missed and ask them to do a better job. You can see inside the car from the pictures above a few spots they could have vacuumed better.

Although we thought about paying cash for the whole deal, we decided to finance some of the car. We were going to use our credit union, but the dealer got us a better interest rate. That’s what we’re going in to sign for later today.

All in all, the 2007 PT Cruiser seems like a fine little car and the buying process was relatively hassle-free. We feel like we got a good deal, but as with any car purchase, you have to see how many things go wrong over time to gauge true customer satisfaction. Right now we’re happy, check with me in five years when the maintenance plan runs out and we’ll reassess.

The car could get a little better gas mileage (29 MPG highway, 15 gallon tank) but it will get better gas mileage than our Relay, which was part of our strategy. We leaned heavily toward the Chevy Aveo, but I think we got a little more car for the money. Grade: B+

I paid. I saw. I laughed.

Opening night, Friday, our family got to see one of the most anticipated movies of all time: The Simpsons Movie. The movie earned a PG-13 rating and contains enough jokes that one Rotten Tomatoes reviewer made the excellent point that to catch every joke repeated viewings will be required. This makes me wonder how many people will return to see it in the theater or wait until the inevitable DVD release to savor each joke.

Before getting to the review and for a limited time, Wal-mart is offering a Simpsons T-shirt with the complete seasons with donut hole packaging for $21.99 - $24.99. That’s less than the price of two tickets and popcorn to the movie for an entire TV season. DVDs continue to provide the most value.

The plot
A dome has been placed around Springfield trying to contain an ecological nightmare no thanks to Springfield’s dumbest but most lovable nuclear power plant employee, Homer Simpson. Speaking of the power plant, that’s one of my disappointments: barely featured in the plot. Mr. Burns and Smithers? You’ve probably already seen their scene in the previews. The previews spoiled some of the gags, unfortunately.

Other minor disappointments? No drinking inside Moe’s scenes. It’s almost like having a TV adaption of Cheers without a bar scene. There’s at least one Moe’s bar external gag. And very little of my favorite non-main character: Barney. Itchy & Scratchy made it, but it would have been nice to see them bookending the movie based on their placement in the plot. Principal Skinner? Don’t even remember seeing him, but he might have been there briefly(?). In fact, while Springfield is the center of the plot, a lot of the action happens outside of Springfield.

And no they don’t give away where Springfield is actually located other than a joke about it being bordered by four states (that you’ve probably seen in the previews). Maybe we’ll get the answer to that enigma in the sequel?

Is it too early to start talking sequel? I don’t think so. This movie isn’t quite as big as I’d hoped for, kind of like eating a single donut leaves you wanting a second one. It’s not the over the top awesome must see movie of the century, but it’s not Star Wars I Phantom Menace either. It’s, well, somewhere between Star Wars III Revenge of the Sith and Star Wars IV, the original Star Wars on my favorite movie of all time radar.

The movie theater physical experience
Why this movie didn’t make it to the best theater in town is a mystery. I was frustrated and uncomfortable by the crappy theater chairs and lousy angle of the screen. We arrived about just minutes before the 7:20pm showing and there were still 30-35% seats left, but in order for our family of five to be able to sit together we had to take the very front row. Definitely not the best viewing angle, but what did we expect? I was surprised we could walk in at the last minute literally on opening day and get any five seats together, but I blame this partly on the shoddy theater.

Regal Cinemas has much nicer theaters a few miles down the road but the Simpsons wasn’t showing on any of those screens. Strangely, they chose the more ramshackle theater for The Simpsons Movie (three screens). Disappointing. If they do this all over the country, the movie sales aren’t going to soar as I’ve predicted in the past. Harry Potter, Transformers and the new Sandler movie were eating up screen space at the nicest theater in town. Maybe if sales are strong enough, they’ll knock out a few of those screens and replace them with the Simpsons movie.

For those who saw The Simpsons Movie, was it playing at the nicest theater in your town? I’m really curious if this was something unique to our area because with a major movie launch this is the first time I remember this ever happening. Whomever made this decision certainly didn’t help Groening and crew.

Summary and grade
There are some gags in The Simpsons Movie that you won’t see on TV which I won’t spoil and unless you are immune to humor will make you at least chuckle. Despite a few adult gags you can still take the family to this movie and laugh together. During a poignant scene in the movie I heard crying and at the end of the movie there were a few scattered applauses. We didn’t stick around to see what goodies were in the credits rolling, if any.

Reader Wayne took his girls to see the movie and they enjoyed it, adding:

I don’t know that it will end up sinking Titanic’s record though. I consider myself a HUGE Simpsons fan and don’t see myself paying to see it again. It just doesn’t feel like it breaks enough new ground to warrant repeated theater viewings.

You can read my comment response there, but let me remind that the Simpsons are an international phenomenon and while the TV show isn’t as good as it was the first five or so years, this movie proves there is still gas in the tank. This wasn’t just an overly long TV episode. In fact while leaving the theater I felt it was maybe 15 minutes or so too short.

Not sure I’ll be paying to see it again in the theater — definitely not in the same theater — but perhaps in a better one. Still, I’m sticking by my original prediction after seeing it despite the unfortunate screening position by Regal Cinemas that while The Simpsons Movie probably won’t beat Titanic gross gross receipts it will make the top 10 overall. Furthermore, I’ll go on record predicting that it will take down Shrek 2 which has the record for highest gross receipts worldwide for an animated film ($920.7 million via Box Office Mojo) and is #8 on the all-time gross receipts list. That would make The Simpsons Movie the highest grossing animated film ever.

I saw Shrek 2 and The Simpsons Movie is better. A sequel is the highest grossing animated film ever? Wow.

Does The Simpsons Movie break a billion? It has to in order to get into the top three movies all time. It’s going to need to break $1.8 billion to be in Titanic’s league which are unchartered waters for any other movies. We’ll have to wait and see how much steam is left after a month in theaters. Movies tend to fade fast these days after the opening weekends. Remember Spider-man 3 (#11 all time)? That made almost $900 million worldwide and it wasn’t nearly as good IMO as Spider-man (#16) and Spider-man 2 (#21).

$100+ million the first weekend? Sure, why not? Grab a donut and hit the theaters now. Grade: A-

Update July 30, 2007 9:09am PST: The Simpsons Movie was #1 opening weekend with $71.9 million domestically (source: Box Office Mojo) and $168 million worldwide (source). #2 was the newest Adam Sandler vehicle ($19 million) and #3 Harry Potter ($17 million).