Of course I was aware of CDBaby for years now but only tonight I took the time to visit their artist’s site, cdbaby.net (instead of .com). Apparently CDBaby is an amazing deal for artists. Not only they sell their CDs online, but CDBaby takes care of CD distribution in 2400 music stores throughout the US, plus they take care of digital distribution with many online stores (including iTunes) so you don’t have to. That’s a heck of a deal, considering that they get less than 10% of the cut (while labels ask for 80%). The only things that labels are still useful are for marketing and international distribution. Everything else can be done for cheap (including shooting a video clip).

This is not surprising, neither “stealing”. I said it many times in this blog: the future is touchscreen, you like it or not. I went as far as predicting that Nokia’s S60 4.0 operating system will be touchscreen-based too. It seems that I was right.

At our home we eat shellfish regularly (from shrimp to full crabs), but this was the first time we bought and cooked lobster. In fact, it was just my second or third time in my life that I had a lobster tail. It was pretty good, but the price still seemed steep ($14 each). Here’s how I cooked it tonight.

Ingredients (for 2)
* 2 lobster tails
* 1/4 cup olive oil
* 1/2 cup lemon juice
* 1 medium onion
* paprika
* salt

Execution
1. Wash the lobster. Get your cooking shears and carefully cut and discard the semi-hard membrane along the belly of the lobster in order to expose it for easier cook-through.
2. Peel, and then cut the onion in small pieces. Place the pieces in a large bowl.
3. In the same bowl add the oil, lemon, some salt and a generous amount of paprika. Using a fork mix everything well.
4. Place the lobster tails there too and let it marinate in the fridge for one to two hours.
5. Preheat the broiler for 10 minutes. In a grilling oven dish place your lobster with the hard shell facing down and pour half of the marinating sauce on it. Broil for 4 minutes.
6. Turn your lobster tails so the hard shell faces up and broil for 7 minutes.
7. Turn again, add the other half of the marinating sauce and cook for 3 more minutes. Enjoy with spicy tartar sauce and vegetables.

We went over to Brian’s last night (Drist’s guitarist) to drop off the (bug fixed) final cut of the video interview I shot for the band the other day. I burned a CD with the 1080p h.264 version of the 10-min video (10mbps, 640 MBs), as the idea was to play it back on his 1080p TV via his PS3.

JBQ and I liked the result so much that on the way back we discussed getting a PS3 — failing a better AppleTV. I mean, come on. Here I got an expensive HD camera and no way to play back my videos on our big TV other than through the error prone, arcane & archaic DV tapes.

In our good (?) fortune, Amazon was running a deal today: a PS3, plus 8 Blu-Ray movies. So we went for it, JBQ just ordered it. We went for the 60GB version of the PS3 instead of the 80GB one because the 60GB version does PS2 simulation in hardware instead of software emulation (which translates to better compatibility for our 100+ PS2 games in our collection).

I am personally interested only in the Blu-Ray drive and the H.264 capabilities of the PS3 of course, but JBQ will love playing the new Grand Turismo in there, that’s for sure. I already changed our Netflix profile too and it now includes both Blu-Ray and HD-DVD titles in our queue.

It’s 99% certain that this guy has been casted as “Jacob” for the upcoming “Lost” season. I must say that while I don’t know if the guy can act, he looks every bit as I envisioned Jacob. Great casting! Update: Apparently not Jacob.

“One of the founding fathers of the internet has predicted the end of traditional television” writes the Telegraph.

Not quite yet, but it’s getting there. When the majority of people get high-speed DSL and a BitTorrent-like engine is built on Adobe Flash (just like Joost does to share the bandwidth among users, because the TCP/IP protocol is not ideal for 1:1 streaming), there is absolutely no reason why traditional TV should exist. The reason why “TV programmes” are in a sequential order with special timetables it’s because traditional TV does not have an OnDemand system. People must sit down in front of a TV at a specific time to watch their favorite show, and failing that they must record it and watch it later. But there is no reason to do that with true OnDemand TV. You visit the web site you want (or an HD version of YouTube, or a future AppleTV’s internet channel) and just like with Joost, you pick to watch the latest episode of your favorite show either on a computer screen, or on your big internet-ready TV set.

Joost is the first company to “get it”, although I have my doubts about how it will play with Comcast’s ISP net neutrality policies overtime, plus I don’t find anything interesting to watch there, and quality is pretty low compared to very nice quality of ABC’s new HD availability.

Oh well, we are getting there. Transition will happen. And those networks that won’t make it, they will die a slow death.

“Apple Inc. is facing yet another class-action lawsuit over its iPhone, this time from a New York State resident who claims the company failed to adequately disclose to consumers that the handset is locked to AT&T’s network and that using the device internationally would result in substantial data roaming charges” writes AppleInsider.

I don’t think that Apple failed to adequately disclose to consumers that the handset is locked to AT&T’s network. You can’t even buy an iPhone without getting an AT&T contract, let alone that the relationship between the two companies was known from the beginning. This lawsuit does not hold ground in my opinion.

However, I hate locked phones as much as the next guy. I never buy or agree to review locked phones. I guess, that’s my own version of “software freedom”.

I also read recently that AT&T lawyers stopped the release of unlocked iPhones, which is sad. They should not have the right to do that. The DMCA was modified a few years back to allow these kinds of hacks, although of course nothing is black and white. Hopefully, the hacks would at least be released as software patches so users can decide themselves to unlock an iPhone or not. BusinessWeek wrote an article too.

I like Google’s perspective, if this rumor is true: open spectrum, open devices, open software.

And so I moved my blog to the following address, please bookmark the new location:

http://eugenia.gnomefiles.org/

Special thanks to Adam Scheinberg for doing all this hard work fetching and moving over the data to Wordpress v2.22, and to David Adams & Jon Jensen for letting me use their servers. I am very happy with the result. The only things that doesn’t work on my new blog is the Referrers support that Wordpress 1.5.1 used to have (for some reason they removed it in the 2.x version), and during the moving process I “lost” about 250 comments out of 3700. Actually, all comments are in the DB, it’s just that 250 of them are not “attached” to the proper blog post (long, technical story, I can elaborate if you want). So, if you need to comment in the recent stories, please do so in the new server.

The reason I am moving over to a more “manageable” server is because Blogsome started deleting some blogs lately on a whim and they offer no standard export support. I am grateful for their service so far, but I need more assurances because as you know, I write *a lot*.

I hope the Blogsome admins don’t delete this blog immediately, as it gets over 1000 page views daily. I have added their ad code so hopefully it will give something back to them for a few more months.

Update: Comments will be awaiting moderation before they go live. There is a bug on Wordpress 2.2.x and PHP5 that no matter how wordpress is configured, it will send comments to moderation. God damn it, I hate software.

Update 2: Comments are fixed. Found a workaround.

Did you ever play Guitar Hero on the PS2? If yes, chances are that you played Drist’s songs then. Drist is an amazingly talented alternative rock indie band here in the Bay Area and both myself and JBQ are becoming big fans - fast. Listen at their songs at their page on MySpace. I love their cover of Depeche Mode’s “Stripped” too, I believe that it’s much better than the original. But their new stuff sound even better.

I met the band on Saturday and we shot an interview about their new upcoming album. They were very kind to also let me include parts of 3 of their brand new songs in the video.

This is my first “as professional as it can be” video I have ever shot. However, there were hurdles on the way. You will see some washed out footage during the picture slide-show, a bug either belonging to my video editor or to the Huffyuv codec or the x264 encoder (I will have to investigate this further — edit: fixed). Also, I need to find a way to transform the recorded audio from mono to stereo (I have very little experience with audio as I always remove it from my videos). I used an external clip-on-shirt mic in order to make the interview parts more professionally-audible, but most such mics are mono… (edit: fixed)

I would really, REALLY, appreciate it if you check it out and leave a comment. This is my first serious video work I’ve done, so I’d love some feedback. Thanks.

Here is a better quality version of the video, iPhone/PSP-sized (75 MBs).

My JBQ is working way too hard again. I hope things will get better soon. He’s so absorbed into work that sometimes I feel that I have access only to his RSS and not the whole content… I am worried about him.