A musical act should be rated against this rubric to determine their quality:

Band’s name – 3%

Band’s aesthetics (clothes, make up, hair, physical attractiveness, showmanship) – 7%

Ability to attract listener’s attention (lyrical hooks, real life publicity, etc) – 10%

Instrumental proficiency – 23%

Originality/inspirational quality of lyrics – 26%

Ability to perform live (without production effects/mastering) – 31%

If we used this rubric, we’d prevent over saturation of pure entertainment acts being passed off as musicians and talented.  It also avoids the ostentatious personalities that think just because they can shred on a guitar means they are the best thing that happened to the world.

There are only 3 requirements for a successful event or party:

1. Something to eat
2. Something to do
3. A place to go to the bathroom

As soon as one of those is not present, the event will end.

Today didn’t go quite how I wanted it to go.  I lost structure and got distracted and demotivated a lot.  We’ll see if I can get better for tomorrow.

7:30 am – Wake up for an 8:00am workday start from home

Noon – quick jaunt to the local post office to send off some last minute gifts, a netflix movie, and a textbook I sold online.  Also stop at the Family Dollar for some milk.

5:00 pm – Return a bathing suit for Kallie to target, then I took a trip over to best buy to pick up new computer speakers.  I was given a $50 gift card to best buy for my birthday, so I was going to pick up something there since my current speakers have a terrible and an unresolvable buzz coming from them.  When I started to browse, I noticed how ridiculously high the prices were.  I pulled up the amazon app on my phone and pretty much every speaker option was $20-$30 higher at best buy.  I was also interested in picking up a nice wireless N router, but those are way too expensive, and still about $20-$30 more than amazon’s prices.  I left without getting anything.

While in transit, I texted 2 separate friends to see if they were interested in grabbing a pint of beer at rock bottom, which used to be a weekly wednesday tradition with some friends.  Both could not go.  I tried not to let it get me too down, but my sails lost some wind.

7:00pm – Come home, move computer desk down stairs to the new lair in the basement.  I grabbed something to eat too, and started to watch “Who’s still standing?”, which is really stupid.  Once I had my fill of stupid, I came back downstairs to keep working at arranging my new set up.

9:00pm – My idea was to organize stuff downstairs for bit after eating, and then go for a run at 9.  Kallie called me pretty much at 9, which was just enough reason for me to lose focus on running.  I have to be up around 4:45am in the morning to make breakfast for the labor halls with the Living Ministry, so I should just call it a night, and hope to rest enough to be motivated to catch up tomorrow.  bed by 10.

This was part of a challenge this year to make something homemade for 5 people.  Adam’s always been a big Who fan.  Probably took 3 hours to design, build, and then glue.

So this device was announced back in September of 2010 when Apple announced their Airplay technology. I was stoked for this technology. Kallie wanted a way to play her music in the kitchen, and throughout the house for that matter, and her laptop speakers…well, they’re laptop speakers. I didn’t want to go buy a new stereo system and I didn’t just want to figure out a way to play music through the TV because that wasn’t portable. Then I stumbled upon iHome’s iW1. It was exactly what I wanted. There are a bunch of other airplay solutions out there, but none offer a rechargeable portable solution.

So I waited. for months. Finally in August 2011 I got an email that said they would start taking orders for special people like me.  I must have placed my order within 20 minutes of the 2pm EST Aug 31st.  It was reported they sold out within 45 minutes.  I must not have been quick enough though, because I was sent an email that the item I bought was out of stock and that I would receive an email when they are able to send it.  I received that email last Thursday, and got the package yesterday, Sept 29th.

In appreciation for being so patient for them to release the iw1, they also sent a free IP37, which is a nice little portable speaker for an iphone or ipod.  Great for camping or needing music on the go.  Heck, a $99 product for free?  Thanks ihome!!!

So, on to the review.  It’s not as large as I expected, but it’s still pretty sturdy and lightweight.  One thing I learned in my reading is that it does not support WEP wireless encryption.  The reason being that WEP is easily cracked and is an outdated technology.  I get that, honestly, but not to support it really seems like their enforcing network security standards.  If you have WEP like me, you are forced to decide between opening your wireless network or to change it to another form of encryption, like WPA2.  In a house with multiple devices set up on WEP, it’s a pain in the butt to do.  I’m the type of person that sees it as iHome just giving me the kick in the butt to change my wireless security, but really, I don’t appreciate that coming from them.  Really, if they’re going to force what kind of encryption is good enough, why not force people to use encryption and not support open networks?  Whatever, I’ll get over it.

Set up was pretty easy.  you can either connect an iphone/ipad/ipod with iOS 4.1 or later by the supplied(!) usb charger cable and download the free set up app.  All you have to do is give your speaker a nifty nickname and configure the wireless.  The other option is to push a button on the back of the speaker that essentially turns it into a wifi access point, get your laptop or other wifi device to connect to it’s signal, and then open up a browser configuration page to give it a nickname and configure it for your wireless network.  That it’s.  You should be all set to go.

Open up your itunes 10.1 or later, down at the bottom right corner click the speakers option and either send sound only to your new wireless speaker or send it to your PC and the wireless speaker at the same time.  Independent volume controls too.  Once it’s playing, you can leave your itunes station alone.

Back to the iw1, you have a nice remote to control next track, volume, and bass/treble.  You can also use the illuminated touch sensors for the controls on the speaker itself.  response time seemed great when using the remote.   One quirk I noticed though, I stood back about 12 feet from the speaker and tried to use the remote, and the indicator light on the speaker flashed, acknowledged I pressed a button, but it didn’t do anything.  No next track, no mute, no volume change.  As I got closer, it worked reliably though.  Weird, right?  I seemed to be within proximity for it to know I pressed a button, but not close enough for it to carry out the action?  I was bummed for like 5 seconds, until I realized — IT’S PORTABLE.  Just take it off it’s charging base and move it closer and you’re all set.

Other nice things about the unit is that you can just plug your iphone, ipod, or ipad into it and play from the usb, or you can can stream over wifi with them as well.  You can switch between wifi or cable on the remote.  The remote also allows you to turn off the device, but it will still be active on the network, which allows you to “turn it on” through itunes.  This saves a lot of time in having to set things up or configure it when you want to use it.  It’s just ready for you to play music.  So far so good.

It seems like it doesn’t have any special requirements to use and is user friendly.  We’ll see how well Kallie warms up to using it instead of relying on her laptop speakers.  Next time we have a house party, we’ll be able to play music throughout the house and control it with our remote app on our iphones, which lets you control itunes over wifi.  CONNECTED.  I’m already thinking about applications with having a baby.  Turn some music on in their room and be able to turn the volume up or off without having to go into the room and risk disturbing them.

acoustic guitar and electric guitar are not genres of music you can play.  Meaning, don’t ask me if I play acoustic or electric guitar.  That’s like asking me whether mac is better than dell.  The confusion that emits from those makes a response impossible.

It’s been long  enough out of the original Napster era and RIAA filing extravaganzas that we can revisit this and see if there has been change.  In fact, there’s probably even room to take it a step further away from even acquiring music at all.  Some people may rely solely on places like last.fm, pandora, satellite radio, and grooveshark for their music needs.  Who needs to spend any money at all?

1. There’s no delete key.  There’s a backspace, to remove characters from right to left, but there’s no way to delete characters from left to right.
2. Prices are ridiculous.  Especially after they switched to Intel based hardware, prices should have dropped significantly.
3. Their CD/DVD drives sound like death.  All of them.  WHY?!?!?!  RRRRBBBBBRRRRZZZZRAREARE.  Every time you eject or insert, it sounds like 100 little bugs in there are choking on asbestos and they’re about to die which means you’ll never see your disk again.
4. Proprietary hardware is proprietary.  It’s so stupid that I can’t just go buy the hardware that fails and replace it myself.  In the PC world, it works just the the automobile industry.  You have a choice to fix it yourself or not.  Apple says you have to let them fix it and you can’t get the hardware out or in without voiding warranty.
5. Planned obsolescence.  They’ve forced depreciation on their customers.  With their latest generation of the ipad, they even reused the name of the first generation, so you have no clue what you’re getting any more, just that if you haven’t bought it in the past year from them, it’s old and dated.
6. What are they giving back?  Steve Jobs himself was not a fan of philanthropy.  I may just be unaware, but I don’t see huge innovation competitions or research grants or programs coming out of Apple.  Where is the investment in future of people?  future of technology? of society?  I don’t like it.
7. Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain hype.  Most companies get beta testers for their new products.  They’ll have honest excitement and information and let everyone know what they’re working on.  Not Apple.  Everything is shrouded in mystery until their big unveiling press conferences.  So much hype.  I’m almost positive that strategy stems from legal paranoia or even actually stealing technology but releasing it before anyone has time to stop them.  Secrecy makes me not want to trust you.
8. Itunes on Windows is a load of crap.  I think they do it intentionally.  There’s no plugin support or API to add functionality or change it around or even customize the appearance.  Not to mention the huge memory leaks and errors.  You see Microsoft spending a lot of time and money making it’s products work on macs, but it’s not the same the other way around.  Even take a look at how they treat their app store developers.  They deny apps based on their mood that day and then turn around and put the same functionality themselves!  ^%$&3@$F
9. You need a third hand for key combinations.  I mean, come on!  4 different keys pressed at the same time and they’re no where near each other?  I feel like I’m playing a micro game of twister.
10. I hate gestures.  More prevalent on the laptops, I hate having to gesture on the mousepad to see what windows I have open or perform certain functions.  I have the same distaste for gesture driven browsing on PC.

Honorable mentions:

• No double click on the mouse – There are ways around this now, but that ticked me off that I had to use the keyboard and the mouse at the same time to perform a function.  Isn’t Apple supposed to be known for their interface design?  Or is it just their looks?
• I hate how the system bar changes by what application is open.  It’s as if there’s no way to get back to the operating system functions without closing every application you have open.

Checking out BoringPGH.com the other day and stumbled on this gem.  I’ve never heard of the band Formula412 before, but I dig it.  The video is pretty decent, and I really like the concept.  Might even make PAT Transit look cool…if that’s possible.  It was done by Bill Paladino, who you’d recognize as the guy behind Wiz Khalifa’s Black and Yellow video.

Spurred from Hall’s Rule of Social Order #103.

The Ramones did it.  Tom Delonge did it.  Some fans say it’s like wearing uniforms in sports.

Some fans think’s it silly that you can wear a sport jersey to a game, but you can’t wear a band’s tshirt to their concert.  Maybe it’s a point of if the fans can’t do it, the band can’t do it either.