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Permanent link to archive for Sunday, June 18, 2000. Sunday, June 18, 2000

Steve Albini 

Steve Albini explains how the music business works.

Google search for Steve Albini.

Father's Day 

Cat Stevens: Father and Son. "I know I have to go."

Where do I send the money? 

Wow, I just did a Napster search for a song I have been looking for in record stores, online and real-world, for years. I was willing to pay $20 for the song, but the music industry couldn't get it to me.

The song is Them Changes by Buddy Miles. Listening to it right now. For the third time. Just try not to dance while this one is playing. Woooohheeeeee! She had me running. She had me hiding. She had me running. Hiding. Running. Hiding. Running Hiding. What I said. It's all right.

Napster and Pike don't work well together. When Napster is running I can't edit in Pike. I'll get to the bottom of this. I bet they're running on port 81.

BTW, Napster could be a lot smaller. The searches could be done from a Web site. All it really needs to have on the local machine is a daemon with a prefs panel, which if you were clever, could just be a Web page. With a Back button that works as you expect it to. The UI of Napster is pretty overblown for what it does. And when the music industry evaporates like the Wicked Witch of the East, they could host the songs on Exodus or AboveNet. There should be an Akamai in there somewhere.

The weblog twins 

At UserLand it's not uncommon for wives and girlfriends to have weblogs. Brent's wife, Sheila, has become a friend of mine, I like her intelligence, her rage, and her eyebrows, and I guess I just like Sheila. Well, today's her birthday, so happy birthday Sheila.

Andre's girlfriend Andrea also has a weblog, and I point to it, usually with some humor about wiener schnitzel or whatever, I've only met Andrea once in Amsterdam, but she's a sweetie too, and guess what, today's her birthday!

Now we don't ask this particular question when interviewing people, so it caught us all by surprise. Two birthdays on the same day. Well, that's synchronicity, isn't it?

Happy birthday to the Weblog Twins, Andrea and Sheila!

On "earn" and "worth" 

In Dan Gillmor's column yesterday he asks us to think about two important words, earn and worth. "Worth is not about money, not in my book. It's about other qualities -- values, if you will -- that matter far more. Yet we invariably say so-and-so is worth $100 million, as if that had anything to do with this person's integrity or other characteristics."

I agree. I can tell you what a big problem it is, for people of our generation (Dan and I are approximately the same age). We were raised to believe that our worth was directly related to money. This probably has something to do with our parents' generation's experience in the Great Depression and World War II, and the economic boom that followed.

Anyway, the big surprise to me, after making a large amount of money, which I worked for, and do feel that I earned, was that it did not increase other people's perception of my worth, nor my own. It took a few years of struggling with this to wake up to something. I had been putting off enjoying my life in a quest to attain a sense of worth, through money. So my advice to those who are sacrificing to attain financial wealth, find something else to illustrate the value in your life, if you feel you need to do that; the money is a detour, it won't get you what you want, imho.

On the other hand, there may be nothing you can do to create value in your life. This may sound depressing, but wait, just by being alive you have created a lot of value. Think about the miracle of the human body and the human mind. Think about the ages and the universe, and your relationship to these vastly incomprehensible things. You belong, like a leaf on a tree, to a great civilization, that has been working for many many milennia, just to create you. And like a link in a chain, you exist to create what comes next. Every one of us is necessary. Without you the universe wouldn't be the same. Now what do a few numbers on a disk in a bank mean in comparison to all that is you?

5/6/98: "When you make it, people don't want to hear what you have to say any more than they did before you made it. In fact, I think they want to hear you even less. Listening isn't based on how much money you have. Write that down and remember it. If you're waiting to be heard and think that having money will make a difference, trust me, it won't."

Technology 

David Strom: Shining Light Into the Realtime Blackhole List.

About the blue arrows 

Today there's a new feature on Scripting News, that takes advantage of the outliner I'm using to write with these days.

Each top-level item now has its own URL. The blue arrow points to that URL. So if you want to point to part of a given day's Scripting News, click on the arrow, copy the URL and paste it into your Web page or email.

     

Last update: Sunday, June 18, 2000 at 4:53 PM Eastern.

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