Tag Archives: music

CDs vs. Downloads

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I couldn’t have said it better myself.

For the past few weeks, I’ve been thinking a lot about the inconvenience of downloading music from iTunes. Yes, you read that right. I said inconvenience.

Sure, it’s great to download music immediately, when I want it, and pay only 99¢ per song. But what’s not so good is the restrictions on music use:

  • I must register every computer I want to play my purchased songs on and I only get 5 of them. That covers my desktop Mac, my PowerBook, my Mac test mule (for writing Mac books and articles), my Windows test mule for writing Windows books and articles), and my husband’s laptop. About a year ago I was faced with a not-so-unique problem: the motherboard on my dual G5 went bad and needed to be replaced — before I could unregister it from iTunes. I lost one of my computer registrations and had to do battle with Apple to get it back.
  • I can’t easily back up my purchased music. I need to go through some kind of procedure that I simply haven’t had time to explore. In fact there seem to be restrictions on how I copy the music, period.
  • Apparently, there is some loss of quality if I burn purchased music to a CD and then rip that music to a computer. I haven’t played around with this enough to have the full story, but I shouldn’t have to spend the time to figure out why my music quality should change. It shouldn’t change.

Fortunately, I have an iPod (or three) so the fact that iPods are the only MP3 players that can play iTunes purchased music isn’t a problem for me. But I understand that it’s a major gripe for other people.

I was going to write a blog entry about all this, but now I don’t have to. I just read a piece that expresses my feelings and frustrations on this matter better than I could. From Alpha Geek: CDs vs. Downloads on Lifehacker:

DRM, the chief source of all this grief, is the love child of Satan and Osama bin Laden. If I could pay 99 cents for an unprotected, unrestricted, 320Kbps MP3, I’d do it in a heartbeat–and it would be all over for CDs. Instead, online music stores treat us like thieving children, locking us into one bit rate, one file format, a limited number of CD burns, and other annoying handcuffs. Apple and Microsoft impose the worst kind of restriction: Songs purchased from iTunes and Zune Marketplace can be played only on iPods and Zunes, respectively.

And later:

Call me old-fashioned, but I’ve rekindled my love affair with CDs. They let me do things, to borrow from Old Blue Eyes, my way. See you in hell, DRM.

Thanks, Rick Broida, for putting my thoughts into words. See you at the CD store.

An Evening Out

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We visit a friend above town.

Last night, my husband and I spent the evening with a friend who lives part-time in Wickenburg. His house sits on a ridge overlooking the town.

As I drove up the road that led to his home, I felt I was rising above the scum that floats just below the surface of Wickenburg, the scum of small-town politics, corruption, and business owners being threatened for signing petitions that support their personal beliefs.

Our friend, Tom, can’t live full-time in Wickenburg. He simply can’t get the things he needs to live comfortably. So he has a condo in the Deer Valley area of Phoenix, near where his business is based. He comes to Wickenburg to work on his house, which he’s systematically torn apart and put back together over the past three years, working with one contractor after another to get each job done. By the looks of things, he’s about 80% finished. He shops in Trader Joe’s and Whole Foods Phoenix before he comes to Wickenburg, bringing up organic groceries to stock his kitchen and incredible wines to stock his in-wall wine “cellar.”

I used to try to get Tom to move his business up to Wickenburg, to build a building in the town’s industrial park and operate out of there. But he would tell me that he has a great staff in Deer Valley and he knows they wouldn’t commute up here. He doesn’t want to lose them. Now, after thinking about it for a long time and seeing the hurdles a small business needs to jump to get set up in Wickenburg — I’ve been trying, unsuccessfully, to get an office at the airport for my helicopter charter business for more than eight months — I don’t nag him about it anymore. I wouldn’t want to push him to a decision that would make him unhappy.

Tom’s ridgetop home offers stunning views in every direction, marred only by the power lines APS recently strung along another ridge nearby. The poles and wires are a heartbreak to Tom, who bought the house because of the incredible views. He’s angry because APS had an alternative route, one that would have taken the power lines through unoccupied areas of town where they wouldn’t be such an eyesore to residents. But APS took the easy route, following the edge of state land. Although I agree that they hurt his view, the situation is even worse for the homes they pass near. Literally dozens of homes were affected by the power line installation. But although he’s complained to APS and the Town of Wickenburg, no one seems to care.

We spent the evening listening to classical music and jazz, drinking wine, making dinner, and looking out at the lights of Wickenburg far below us. Tom’s view of the town at night is just like mine from the helicopter as I come into Wickenburg at the end of one of my moonlight dinner tours. He remarked at how many more lights there are now than there were just three years ago when he bought his home. “Imagine how the difference is to us,” I told him. “We’ve been here ten years.”

At Tom’s house, I felt so far removed from town, like I was in another place. A place where culture, fine wine, and quality food were an important part of everyday life, not something to be treated to once in a while. The air seemed somehow cleaner up there, the political situation not so dirty, the conversation more educated and interesting. It was as if we’d left Wickenburg and stepped into a city home. Not necessarily a Phoenix home, mind you. Perhaps one in New York, high above Second Avenue and 60th Street.

The feeling stuck with me all evening as I sipped wine chosen by my host, minced fresh garlic for the garlic bread, and ground sea salt over my soba noodles. Less than two miles as the crow flies from my home, I was in another world.

Treadmill vs. Walk in the Park

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Pros and cons.

I joined a health club recently. Wickenburg has an excellent “exercise center” that’s part of the Physical Therapy department at the local hospital. It has weight training equipment, elliptical exercise machines (is that the right name for those things?), stationary bikes, and treadmills. Just about all of it is computerized, so you can set goals and quantify many activities. The place is clean, there’s good music playing at a volume that’s not too loud to override it with iPod earbuds, and there are even televisions with captioning so you can read what’s being said onscreen.

Best of all, the members are an incredible mix of people, from the 20-year-old, skinny as a rail (as I was at that age) to the 40-something-year-old-who has had about five hundred too many cream puffs in her lifetime to the 90-year-old who comes in on a walker. I fit in nicely with this group, since I’m middle aged, overweight but not dangerously obese, and just enough out of shape to have to really work at my exercise regime, which is still in its infancy.

The treadmill is part of that regime — the warmup part. I start with a 20-minute session on the treadmill, using one of its built-in programs and setting the speed to about 3 mph. The programs change the machine’s incline, so I could be walking on flat ground for part of the time and climbing a hill moments later. Not a big hill, mind you. But one that’s enough to get your heart beating, which the machine monitors for you. In fact, if I enter my age and weight into the machine, when it gives me my heart rate, it’ll also tell me whether my work out is for weight loss or cardiovascular. I try to keep it in the cardiovascular range. I want to break a sweat, but not get soaked.

When I first thought about treadmills, I thought they were pretty dumb. After all, why use a machine to go for a walk. Why not just go for a walk? But I realized, after using a treadmill for about a week, that it does have some benefits over just walking. I thought I’d summarize them for people who have never tried one and, like me, wonder why they should.

TreadmillWalk in the Park
You can set a speed and stick with it.You don’t really know how fast you’re walking or whether you’ve changed speed.
You can monitor exact distance, speed, incline, time walked, and calories burned.You can’t easily monitor exact distance, speed, incline, time walked, and calories burned
You can do other things while you walk: watch TV, listen to music or podcasts, read a book or newspaper (a bit tricky), or talk to a companion.There are a limited number of things you can do while you walk: listen to music or podcasts or talk to a companion.
You’re breathing “conditioned” air, which may or may not be of a good quality.You’re breathing “fresh” air, which may or may not be of a good quality.
While you’re walking, there’s nothing to look at but the room you’re in, the view out the window (if you face one), and the people around you.While you’re walking, you can see a wide variety of things as you walk past them.
You can do it in any weather, at any time of the day or night (dependent on access to machine).You can do it in any weather, at any time of the day or night (but you probably will avoid hot, cold, rainy, and dark).
There’s nothing to interrupt you while you’re walking.You can be interrupted by friends and acquaintances you pass along the way, traffic, or obstacles along the trail.

 

This is all I can think of right now. The conclusion I’ve reached from all this is that a treadmill offers an efficient way to walk for exercise. Efficient is good if you’re pressed for time and want to make the most of every minute. That’s me. Right now I’m walking at 3 mph (average) for 20 minutes as a warm up for other exercise, including weight training. During that time, I can burn about 75 calories (no Hostess Cupcakes in my immediate future) and get my heart rate up to 130+ beats per minute. But if I didn’t want to do weight training and wanted to base my workout around a good, long walk, I could easily choose a more difficult program at a faster speed and for a longer time, I can just push a couple of buttons, pick a good playlist on my iPod, and have at it. Nothing will interrupt me and I’ll get the workout I want.

If you live in Wickenburg and have been considering the hospital’s exercise facilities, I highly recommend it. It’s moderately priced — I paid $300 for 6 months, but that includes the “setup fee” to introduce me to the weight machines (and them to me via programming). A longer membership is cheaper per month; a shorter one costs more. But the way I see it, what’s more important: money or my health? I know I won’t walk or exercise regularly on my own. And I know I don’t walk as fast when I’m out with my walking buddies as I do on that machine. So I’m getting a lot of exercise each 90-minute session at the “health club.”

I must be. I slept 10-1/2 hours straight through last night.

And a side note here: I also started the Atkins/South Beach diet. I know they’re not the same, but they’re close enough for my purposes. I’ve lost 8 pounds in a week. Still very overweight, but starting to get back to the point where I can wear most of my jeans again.

And the way I see it, every pound I lose is one extra pound of passengers I can take flying. With some of my passengers so big they fully extend the seatbelt before fastening it around their midsections, somebody has to lose weight.