They’re taking a cue from Napster and RealNetworks and going with a subscription model. No word on exactly what type of DRM they’ll be using, but it does say that you’ll be able to listen to the music on your MP3 player, but the songs will stop working if you don’t renew your subscription every month. They’re also severely undercutting Napster to the tune of $7 vs. $15 per month.

In such a saturated market, one can only wonder how long it will take Google to jump in and do it better than all of them.

I’ve been hacking together my own PCs from spare parts for years. It started when I was 16 and finally scraped up enough cash to replace my old Commodore 64. It wasn’t much cash, though, and in order to get the most bang for my buck, I wound up piecing parts together from old used computers. There was a lot of pride in that first 286, 12MHz PC. No hard drive, and not much RAM, but plenty of pride.

Every upgrade I’ve done since then has included at least one or two parts from the computer before it. Often it was nothing more than a video card, or a modem, or some memory, and eventually there were no remaining parts from the original PC. But somehow it always felt as if that first computer was always a part of whatever the latest one was at the time. Maybe not any of the same physical parts, but hey, this hard drive was in the last box, and that one’s video card was in the PC before it… My computer had its own lineage, and it, too, was proud.

So you will understand that it is a bittersweet time that finds me announcing the passing of that once illustrious line. But not too bitter, because LOOK AT THIS HOT NEW MAC!

I’ve already mentioned how much I love my new iBook. Ever since I got it, I’ve known that my next desktop would have to be a Mac as well. I’ve been patiently waiting, though, for the proper convergence of events, and with the recent release of Tiger and the (admittedly disappointing) updates to the PowerMacs, the time was ripe.

Unfortunately, everyone else in the bay area thought so too, and I had to call four different Apple stores to find a dual G5 2.0 GHz in stock (man, I love that I live within driving range of four-plus Apple stores!). But I managed to find one in the end, and took home this brand new powerhouse of productivity. You wouldn’t believe how much more efficient I am now at wasting time!

I don’t think many people realize this, but Apple has as much to offer the super-geek computer user as it does the technophobe to whom it seems to target most of its marketing. Darwin means that I can have all of the Unix tools on my desktop that I’ve become so attached to on my servers. That, and the second-to-none UI, bundled software, and professional-level software availabile combine to make this my dream machine.

Sorry if this sounds like an Apple ad, but I’m just excited. I get that way. Right now, I’m busy exploring the world of development for Mac OS X. It’s a slightly different world than Windows, and there’s a lot (Cocoa, for one) that looks very cool. I’m eager to share some of those experiences with you here as they happen.

Early Friday morning, I flipped the switch on Elistic, my idea for a social list manager come to life. The concept was born from a combination of my desire for a good organizer for my Getting Things Done lists and my interest in social networking tools like del.icio.us. The current product is the result of several commutes’ worth of hacking and is still very much in its infancy. I hope to continue developing Elistic in response to the ways in which people want to use it.

Elistic gives you the ability to create lists containing any type of text content, organizing them using a free-form tagging system, and “linking” your entries to other users’ entries as you see fit. Elistic offers RSS feeds for all of its hosted content, and I’m working on an XML API similar to that offered by del.icio.us to encourage creative development of extensions.

It’s a pretty simple system, but I believe that it creates the potential for rich social interaction — one could conceivably use Elistic to host a blog, or a discussion group, or a communal mind map… It would thrill me to see people eventually using it in ways that I had never considered. I hope you’ll check it out and tell me what you think!

There are a couple reasons why I waited until now to start telling people about it. Most interestingly, I wanted to perform an experiment to see how effective del.icio.us would be as the sole promotion tool. Friday morning, I added Elistic as a del.icio.us bookmark and tagged it with a few values that I thought were appropriate.

Within a short while, the bookmark had been picked up by a few more people, and people were starting to sign up at Elistic. By the end of the day, Elistic had about 50 unique visitors, and about 200 more throughout Saturday, all from one link on del.icio.us. Of those 250, ten people created an account and started experimenting with it.

I don’t know that this proves anything other than del.icio.us is a success as a useful social bookmarking tool. Not that I didn’t know that already, but it’s fun to see it in action, anyway.

The other reason that I kept quiet for a couple days was becuase I wanted a chance to start nice and quietly to make sure things were working. I have already found and fixed a couple minor problems thanks to the interest of one particular user. But it seems like things are running more ore less smoothly, so if it sounds interesting, why don’t you check it out? I’d love to hear what you think I can do to make Elistic a more interesting and useful service.

You know that guy on BART with the pony tail who hasn’t shaved in about a month? He sits on the edge of his seat and stares down everybody who gets on the train, occasionally breaking down in silent laughter — you know, him? Well, he was on my train this morning, and I finally realized something about him.

He’s not crazy. He’s a genius. On a crowded commute, nobody once dared sit next to him. And this was one of the good sideways seats, where you don’t have to wait for someone to let you out.

So from now on, I’m working on developing my crazy. Cue bug eyes and random laughter.

Why didn’t they give February 30 days and use the extra two to take a couple of the 31-day months down to 30? That would be much more consistent.

Since moving to the bay area and starting work in San Francisco, I’ve been doing much more city walking than I ever used to. On my way from the BART station to work, I have to cross two streets. As a computer programmer (and as Distracto!), I’ve been thinking about which is the most efficient way to get there. Allow me to demonstrate with this map (xx is a crosswalk):

---------+--+----------------
         |  |    Market St.
---------+--+----------------
         |  |
[BART]   xxxx - A
         |  |
         |  |
         | -+—- New Montgomery St.
         |  |
         |  |
     B - xxxx   D
         |  |  /
——-x-+–+-x————–
       x |  | x  Mission St.
——-x-+–+-x————–
      /  |  |
     C   xxxx - E
         |  |
         |  |
         |  |
         |  |  [Work]
         |  |

Now, I could cross at A, and if the walk sign is on, it might seem like a good idea. But the time taken at A might cause me to miss D, forcing me to wait another full cycle. And for my particular case, it’s a much longer wait to cross Mission than New Montgomery.

It’s possible that if I had not crossed at A, I might have caught the tail end of the light at C, and then could immediately cross at E. And if I missed C, I could still cross at B and I’m no worse off than I was before. So now I never cross at A. I’m convinced it saves me a ton of time.

And the software design lesson? Don’t optimize prematurely. Wait until you know what your biggest bottleneck is, and work around that first. Okay, maybe it’s a strech, but these are the things that I think about on my way to work.

A post by lilliebet got me thinking about something I’ve often considered before… Why do so many bloggers feel compelled to post pictures of their cats? It doesn’t really annoy me as much as baffle me. Are all these people graduates of the Wil Wheaton school of blogging?

Anyway, I was curious as to how many of these there actually were, and I smelled another Google query coming on. The last one was pretty well-received, so maybe you’ll like this too:

Google for people who blog pictures of their cats

Do you remember playing Tetris so much that you’d see the pieces falling when you closed your eyes? Sleep was no escape — I just kept fitting them together in my dreams. That’s when I knew it was time to take a Tetris break for a few days.

I haven’t had the same experience with any other game since then. Until last night. I bought a new Sony PSP the other day (yes, I am occasionally susceptible to hype) and have been playing Lumines ever since.

Lumines (darned if I know how to pronounce it) is a puzzle game in the falling-block tradition of Tetris, but its mechanics are different enough to provide a completely different experience. Every block is a 4×4 square made up of some arrangement of two different colors. Your goal is to arrange the falling blocks into 4×4 squares of the same color, which will then disappear. There are more subtleties that enhance the gameplay, but that’s basically about all there is to it. Pretty simple, but somehow it works, and it works very well. Especially when you add up the exceptional production quality of this game. The music is so tightly integrated with the gameplay it feels like I’m composing it while listening to it at the same time. And it looks stunning on the PSP’s sharp LCD screen.

It works well enough that now I have to take a little Lumines break so that I don’t see these stinking blocks falling every time I close my eyes. I left my PSP at home this morning so I wouldn’t be tempted to play it on the train on my way to work. That’s the only reason you’re getting this entry. Argh, my eyes! Somebody make it stop!

Here’s a screenshot from the Ubisoft website:

In keeping with the theme of this weblog as it seems to be evolving, I have adopted a new blog title: Distracto! It’s literally the story of my life.
There’s a new domain name to go with it, too: distracto.net. All future updates will go there, so be sure to update your bookmarks (yeah, both of you!). I’ll link the RSS/Atom feeds so that existing subscriptions don’t break, but your best bet is to start using the new domain name.

I’d write more, but I just started thinking of something else. Hey, that’s why they call me Distracto!

I’ve been a subscriber of Bruce Holland Rogers’ shortshortshort for slightly more than a year now, and his few emails each month are always some of my most enjoyed.

For a measly five dollars per year, Bruce will email you thirty-six short-short stories, meant to be read in no more than a couple minutes. I can say from experience that they’re well worth the money. You can check out some samples of his work for yourself at his site. I especially like Don Ysidro, his most recent sample story that won a 2004 World Fantasy Award.

If nothing else, it’s a very cool example of an independent artist using the power of the Internet to support his work and reach an audience in a way that would have been impossible in years gone by.