The new version of iTunes was released today, and for the first time, it bundles in support for podcasting. Podcasting is one of those technologies that doesn’t seem like a big deal until it’s actually in your life, sort of like TiVo and other digital video recorders. It operates off the same principle — time-shift the content you want to hear until when you can hear it — but works with audio feeds.
iTunes’ list includes a lot of stuff I was already aware of (I’m a huge fan of the news and especially the entertainment content from coolest-station-ever KCRW, for instance), but hopefully this will open up a lot more people’s ears to podcasting and, in turn, the popularity (and Apple’s mainstreaming) of podcasting will help get the music licensors to the table to come up with some way the KCRWs of the world can podcast amazing shows like Morning Becomes Eclectic, Metropolis and Chocolate City, which for now are too expensive to bother with, due to royalties issues.
Even if you don’t have an iPod, which is one of life’s greatest pleasures, do download the new version of iTunes and check out what all the fuss is rightly about. So far the interface is a little clumsy, but Apple has a genius for design, if nothing else, and these corners will get sanded off ASAP, I expect. (Why no back/forward buttons on the podcast section of the store? How the heck do you get downloaded podcasts from your computer onto your iPod — it doesn’t work the same way as moving songs over.)
If you do, I promise to come back here on Friday with the Top 100 songs played on my iPod in the first six months of owning it. It’s a pretty cool list, if I do say so myself, and I do.
A little behind the curve, but Wired now has an article up about iTunes making new stars — at least by podcasting standards — with this move.
From the A.Word.A.Day mailing list:
caliginous (kuh-LIJ-uh-nuhs) adjective
Dark, gloomy, obscure, misty.
[From Latin caliginosus (misty, dark).]
Wow, that makes me want to write a gothic novel.
“From the narrow window in her room, all Emily could see, or almost see, was a single caliginous view across the moors.”
Saving this word here to remind me to use it some time. It’s like getting kissed by Siouxsie Sue.
Caliginous. Yowza.
In a transparent attempt to get me to come to Brooklyn later this year and babysit my as-yet-unborn niece, my brother just sent me the following images:
I know that’s what he’s after, because it worked. I’m tempted to order tickets right now.
Apparently, the supply company is all for a good cause. Well, better than merely saving New York from supervillains, anyway. So, superhero schwag and a good cause. Sounds like a plan to me.
Equally intriguing, there’s a pirate store in the Bay Area, for a related organization. My family has always been disappointed that I didn’t share their intense love of the Bay Area, but if they keep the good stuff from me, how am I ever going to learn to appreciate it?
Anyway, I’ve got my next two visits to my family planned out now.
It seems like only yesterday, to me, that I was still staring down the barrel of the gun vis-a-vis cancer. The red scar across my throat is a vivid reminder that my biopsy wasn’t that long ago, or that everyone in the medical community was pretty much convinced I had lymphoma. The first time anyone even suggested it wasn’t was when I did the lung capacity test the day before my operation. The technician said she’d thought it was possible it could be some sort of fungus, which brings up fairly strange visions for what treatment would have been like, in that case.
Had it been cancer, this blog would have been started in earnest earlier (and probably with me begging for a lot more help from my boy Jonah, let’s be honest).
Today, I saw a blog from someone whose biopsy (I can’t remember the name of the operation still, other than “medial thera-something-oscopy,” damn you, morphine!) didn’t turn out to be sarcoidosis. As was expected for me, she turns out to have a form of Hodgkin’s Disease, and other than being a woman, the thoughts and issues she has are very similar to what I was already privately flashing forward to myself:
There isn’t any reason that I should have cancer. I’ve never been a smoker, I’ve been a vegetarian since I was twelve, and I didn’t grow up near a nuclear plant or spend summer days baking in the sun. At 24 years old I don’t look like a typical cancer patient. The men and women I sit with each week in the oncology division at Mass. Gen. are old and tired – the experience of lives lived has worn them out. I feel like I’m bursting with opportunity of experiences yet to have, places yet to go and people yet to meet.
The survival rate for my type of cancer at the stage I was originally diagnosed is roughly 90%. Those are great odds … fabulous odds. “If you have to have cancer,� said my oncologist at my first visit, “this is the one to get.� He’s right of course. But, one out of 10 aren’t the chances I want when I’m talking about my life. With 10 cups in front of me, one of them poison, who would choose to drink? Unlike Russian roulette however, with cancer you don’t have a choice … you have to play the game.
My thoughts exactly. I remember sitting in the radiology waiting room at St. Mary’s Hospital in Apple Valley, listening to the elderly ladies, all of whom were in their late 70s or older, watch TV Land and saying that there were no more wholesome shows like “I Dream of Jeannie” on any more. (For the record, ladies, I’m pretty sure you can find lots of shows about half-dressed submissives and their kooky “serving Master” adventures on TV. You probably just need pay cable stations.)
I’m angry that this has disrupted my life and made my friends and family feel helpless. Being a cancer patient or cancer survivor doesn’t make someone a hero. You do the treatments because you have to and you’re sick because you have to be … it’s not some admirable sacrifice. It is what it is … an affliction of mostly nameless, faceless, masses of people. It doesn’t discriminate and it doesn’t pick and choose. It’s not karma or punishment for some forgotten sin. It’s a disease … not my life and definitely not my death.
Reading the blog, it’s striking in how many ways, the experience is different for a woman, even in ways that wouldn’t have occured to me. Of course harvesting eggs prior to chemo would be more difficult than sperm donation, which is merely awkward. And while men have Michael Jordan making baldness cool (especially for the “my hair is falling out in weird clumps, so I’m going to take command of this and go pre-emptively bald” crew), and I could almost certainly get away with being a cueball without much more irritation than the danger of a sunburn up here in the High Desert, bald-as-a-woman hasn’t really worked out well for anyone other than Sinéad.
Yes, obviously, living through all of this is still a better deal than dying, but the indignities and frustrations just feel like malice.
“Ha ha, we got you! Cancer and now walk around with a scarf on your head, chickie! Cancer and idiots staring at you in the grocery store!”
On this side of the table, where I rolled the natural 20, I appear to be going symptomatic again on sarcoidosis, if some of the blips over the past few days continue to grow in frequency and duration. But for the most part, the people I’ve come in contact with have been very cool, giving me my space. And I only tell people what the red scar they’re staring at is if they ask me, and only two or three people have done that.
OK, I’m clearly missing something in this story from Wired:
GamePal customers pay a $300 deposit, $150 for the first month and $130 for each subsequent month for access to their choice of 50 accounts (available initially) for 14 popular MMOs, including EverQuest, Star Wars Galaxies, City of Heroes and Ultima Online.
Newcomers to these games who aren’t sure where they want to devote their time are in luck: GamePal allows them to try out what they want.
“For all 14 games, they can choose any (available) account they want,” said GamePal co-founder Eric Smith. “It’s up to them what game they want to play.”
Say what? Pay $450 for the rights to play MMORPGs? That sounds OK — assuming you have more money than sense — until you realize that no way in hell can you even play a fraction of those 14 MMORPGs to any degree, and certainly not enough to get a taste of each. (Heck, most of your month will likely be spent downloading patches for them anyway.) And remember that it only costs $15/month to actually play one of these, after initial purchase of the game. If you really want to try out World of Warcraft or City of Heroes or EverQuest for free, finding someone who’s no longer using their account and will let you fool around on theirs for a weekend isn’t terribly hard.
I and the Wired reporter are either missing what the real business model is here, or GamePal is run by lunatics who are soon to be living in their car. Or maybe both.
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