antinomian.com

Waiting for my plane at Oakland airport and rather than connect to the web via their $10 (!) WiFi network, I’m online using my EDGE-enabled cell phone. (See previous entry for more info on this phone). 2006 is gonna be an interesting year. Either broadband (DSL/WiFi/EDGE) will become so cheap that it will become just a total given like electricity or natural gas, or the Telephone / Cable companies will succeed in establishing a new payment structure that keeps connectivity artificially scarce and expensive. Let’s hope it’s not the latter.

I walked past a biography of D.H. Lawrence in a bookstore the other day, and I was like, “Whoa! I had no idea he was a beardo. He looks like he could be in some emo band!” (See illustration at right). Then today as I was preparing to make this post I figured, “Hmm, I’ll take a look at some of his stuff online…” Now I’m sure he could be in an emo band! I think there must some mystical beardo connection down through the ages that people tap into at various points when they’re gonna write stuff like:

To Women, As Far As I’m Concerned

The feelings I don’t have I don’t have.
The feelings I don’t have, I won’t say I have.
The felings you say you have, you don’t have.
The feelings you would like us both to have, we neither of us have.
The feelings people ought to have, they never have.
If people say they’ve got feelings, you may be pretty sure they haven’t got them
So if you want either of us to feel anything at all
you’d better abandon all idea of feelings altogether.

Then if your beard gets too long you start writing about, you know, dragons or forest creatures having parties in the trees. If I could just get some more data points I could calculate some kind of function to correlate beard length with lyrical content. I’m sure of it

Ok, cellphone providers… I’ve ordered a new phone it’s now safe to release all the awesome phones you were saving until after I’d made my commitment! =)

[UPDATE] Well, we’re off to a good start. T-Mobile rejected my application for an account because (apparently) you can’t use a cell-phone number to apply for a cell-phone account. Luckily, after a few calls to the “secret” Amazon customer service number things are back on track. Now I’ll just sit and wait paitently for the phone to arrive so T-Mobile can screw up my number migration!

So Kompakt has this thing where you can purchase MP3s online. It’s kinda like Warp’s Bleep except that it is largely sucky. Here’s my problems with it.

1. It’s slow as fuck. I’ll allow that maybe their server is all up in Dusseldorf or Cologne or whatever, but please… If you’re going to encode the damn things at 320 KBps, can we at least try to get the download speed somewhere up in that vicinity? Otherwise, it’s just perverse.
2. The site is coded in such a way that I can’t even post a link to an album on here. (In case you’re curious, their entire shopping cart is built in HTML forms, and they all submit to the home page. It really looks like they did this so that “http://www.kompakt-mp3.net/” is the only thing you ever see in your browser’s address bar. Laaaaame. Oh, did I also mention that it was a pain in the ass to even figure this out, since their HTML source all outputs on a single, unbroken line? Well, it does.)
3. Anyway, if I could post the album link, I’d let you know that I purchased the album “Okie Dokie It’s The Orb on Kompakt” recently, and while I’m really enjoying the MP3s, what I’m not enjoying is the fact that *after* purchasing the album I found out that they were selling the same exact album for half the price in another part of the shop. Why the difference? Well that’s the truly stupefying part. See the MP3s I bought are from the Double Vinyl version of the release. The cheaper ones are from the CD. Just to be clear. I am *not* getting a hard-copy of this music, and I’m pretty sure that there is no difference between the MP3 versions of these items (In fact if there is, that’s a whole other problem.)

So the whole point of all this ranting is this: Due to carelessness on my part and a basic lack of understanding of the economics of online retailing on Kompakt’s part, we have a problem. Now once I get to work and dig up my “customer number” they are going to hear about it! (Did I mention that they don’t email reciepts, instead opting to give you a random number to keep track of your order?) I’ll follow up here and let you know if I get a refund. In the meantime, I’ll continue to suggest that you take your online MP3 shopping to a place that knows what they’re doing.

ps. How awesome is it that Bleep sells Thrill Jockey records (including Bobby Conn) now? The answer? Very. =)

pps. How not awesome is it that Bobby Conn is doing a residency at Schuba’s next month, and here I am all the way out in the middle of the other side of the country? I’ll leave this one for you to figure out =P

[UPDATE] Well here we are 3 days later and still no response from Kompakt customer service. I guess i’ll just eat the €6.26 they overcharged me. I am very disappointed in Kompakt’s unwillingness to work with an otherwise very satisfied customer to improve their site. Why is this so often the default mode of merchant/customer interaction? Has no one read cluetrain? (or hughtrain for that matter? =)

On the local FOX affiliate in the Bay Area, they have some hilarious “human interest” stories. A previous one was “Some guy who puts up signs in his window with thought-provoking quotes” Here’s an actual voice-over from that story: “His day starts in the kitchen when he reads 3 magazines a day. When he finds something noteworthy, he writes it down!” My favorites though are the ones where the anchors have to make reference to something video game related. (Recall the “Xbox Game” I mentioned a few weeks ago). Tonight there was a piece on the closing of a hobby shop in Mountain View. Apparently this place was going out of business because these damn kids today are not building models of WWII airplanes, but are instead “At home, pushing buttons on their Xboxes” or “At home on their Playstations, as they say.” This seems to be a cause of concern in the over-60 set, because “Where will the engineers of tomorrow come from, if they aren’t building things when they’re young?” One interviewee imagines that “They are going to have to build things on the computer I suppose if they’re not going to do it with their hands.” It was inevitable that this store had to close however, since “you can’t sell buggy whips to people driving hybrid cars.” Somebody remind me, when I am old, to get out an old PS2 controller and harass some kids about how their retinal implants and subdermal wifi connections are no substitute for 8 buttons and a D-pad.

In slightly less useless news tonight, apparently SFO has been chosen as the hub for Richard Branson’s new Virgin America. Certainly this is more exciting than being the American hub (Dallas) or the Northwest hub (Minneapolis), but I doubt Virgin America will bear any more than a superficial resemblence to it’s hip British sibling. I think I’ve linked to it before, but it seems appropriate to revisit Momus’ essay on Virgin v. British Airways vis-à-vis Britain v. the USA.

I’ve purchased the new David Foster Wallace book. So far, it is so good.