We live in the future

Walmart impressed me again this weekend. I know they're evil and all, but I'm a sucker for good prices. In particular, I buy all my shampoo and such there, because their prices are always as good as or better than the sale prices at the local Stop & Shop. Also their film is about half the price of the grocery store. So it's usually worth the extra trip.

Anyways, I wanted to buy a cheap set of earbud headphones. I have an old Nike PSA MP3 player that is very pocketable, and wanted to get something cheap to go with it. All my other headphones (and I have many) would complain if I just stuffed them in my pocket.

Walmart has headphones for $0.97. That's just incredible. If you're old-school, they'll remind you of the original Gameboy headphones, back when they still gave you headphones for free. They don't come with a case, and obviously they have no bass at all. But you can't expect bass from earbuds so that's ok. And at that price, they're almost disposable. What a wonderful world.

This is what the weather's like here today. (This isn't here of course, it's a photo of chateau in France I took a couple of years ago.)

Rainlendar

Rainlendar. A really cool, simple calendar program for Windows. If you want a calendar on your desktop, this is the program to get. The default skin is kinda hideous, but the "Shadow3" one (shown below) is a very nice transparent design with colored date highlighting -- and a red circle around today. And the taskbar icon shows the current date as a bonus.

Mother's Day presents.

Summer is almost here

Central Park on Saturday.

What's the point of cdbaby?

I recently heard talk of a group called the Section Quartet, that does string covers of rock songs. It's always nice to hear re-imaginings of "familiar" tunes. So I checked out their website, listened to some samples, and decided to buy the CD. The bad news: it turns out it's only offered at cdbaby.com, and not at any of the CD stores I usually use, like Amazon. That sucks. I hate creating new accounts. And while their prices aren't horrible, they are higher than I expect to pay for a one-off, independent CD. $14 (off an alleged list price of $19) plus $2.25 shipping. That gets you a slim manila envelope (with $0.80 in postage) and a cardboard CD case. No jewel case. Talk about cheap. It feels like a $5 package. At least a real CD from the mall feels like some cash went into it at some point. I really hope the artist gets most of that money.



But the CD is pretty good. Not going to hold my interest for months, but nice background music. So I can deal. Plus cdbaby has a monopoly on the artists they distribute, so what are you going to do?

Welcome

This is my new blog. I think I've attempted to do one of these 2 or 3 times now, always giving up after a few entries. Maybe I'll stick with it this time.

(If I don't, at least this post will look ironic in a few years.)