September 27, 2007: Amazon Music

Today is a relaxing day. It just is. For some reason I was really tired this morning and didn’t even realize that Dominica had gotten up and gotten ready for work until she woke me up to kiss me goodbye! I am working from home today so Oreo and I had the luxury of sleeping in late (late is a relative term based on the fact that I normally get up at five.)

There isn’t much sun today but the weather is decent. Warm but not oppressive. (Sounds like a good description of a third world dictator.)

Dominica sent me this email. This is so funny that I had to share it. So a seagull walks into a store…

I had a very productive morning and for lunch I decided that I didn’t feel like going out anywhere so I just microwaved myself some Simply Asian noodles. In creating today’s post I discovered that Amazon now has an online grocery. That is amazing. Since the Peapod service doesn’t service Newark we didn’t know how to get groceries delivered. Now we do. Awesome. I bet that we will be using this soon.

Today I decided that it was finally time for me to both join the “music download revolution” as well as try out Amazon’s new DRM Free MP3 download service. The reason that I have been hesitant to get my music via source like iTunes is because of their useless proprietary formats and DRM. But Amazon has a ton of music available at great prices available as super high quality (256Kb/s vbr – nominally below CD quality) standard MP3s without DRM. You can’t go wrong. So I bought thirteen songs to try out the service. That is just under twelve dollars for thirteen songs. Awesome. So far I am extremely impressed. I am looking for more artists and songs to be added. I will be buying the bulk of my music this way from now on. This saves time and money but my music is still an investment for the rest of my life like the CDs that I started buying nineteen years ago. Every CD that I ever bought still plays perfectly exactly as it did the day that I bought it. Not like that music with DRM that people have been buying that is already starting to fail and be lost forever. What a waste.

I got a bunch of work done around the house today. Lots of cleaning and organizing. We had a shipment come in from Amazon today too which included several books that I have been looking forward to, a CD and some DVDs of the 1980’s classic The Cosby Show. I got all of the packing material cleaned up and recycled before Dominica got home so that there was no evidence. Everything was neatly put away. Today is a day with great strides forward in the overall state of our apartment.  I even managed to hang some artwork in the kitchen that Dominica bought a week or two ago.

After work Dominica had a dentist appointment in Kearny so she didn’t get home until late.  She made really good time, though, and was home just before seven.  Long before I had expected her.  It was late and she was tired so we ordered in from Golden City and popped in the first disc of the first season of The Cosby Show.  We spent our short evening watching that while I worked on setting up and learning about my new Netgear SC101 Storage Central SAN device.

While Min was out shopping earlier today she picked up Knocked Up on DVD.