Published by james on January 19, 2006
in Site.
So I’ve been looking for a way to clean up my reading list and maybe spike out some albums that I think are essential to anyone’s collection. Amazon has a very robust API and I had signed up for an Amazon Web Services ID several months ago but never really got around to actually using it. So today I poked around looking for some plugins that I might leverage when I found the Amazon Media Manager by Sozu Web Design. It is a truly slick plugin that allows you to build and manage lists of products from Amazon for displaying on your Wordpress site. Below is a sample of the plugin’s output:
Another plugin that I’ve been fiddling with is Amazon Wishlist which you can see on the left hand side. The beauty of this plugin is the flexibility in formating the output with CSS as the author documented it throughly. Good stuff.
Funny thing is that turning 30 wasn’t so bad and 31 we had just bought the house. This year… I think I can actually feel myself getting a touch decrepit. Seriously, my vanity is really starting to gain momentum as the other day I was carefully cataloging and tagging potential gray hairs in my beard for Management to confirm their existence; mind you she insists that they are blond but I know better.
So what is it that is making me feel like I’m past my prime? Work? Life? Chronology? Over active neuroses? Likely all of the above. I certainly feel like I am working hard while getting nowhere and that could be chalked up to the simple fact that we have not had a vacation, one where you go away somewhere for five or more days, since our honeymoon some six years ago. It feels like I’ve passed the point of burnout and am leaving the carbonization phase and will be ready to be used as a fuel source in the near future. At least my utility continues.
Tonight, in celebration of my debatable grayness, we’ll be having a quick and quiet dinner with my in-laws, a long walk with the dog, and then I’ll retire to my over stuffed arm chair to quietly bemoan, “kids these days”. Thread bare robe and thin slippers with knobby knees is optional.
As some of you might have figured out I am a bit of a fanatic when it comes to music. There is always a pressing need to discover and hear new sounds on a daily basis and that drive has often totaled up to some insurmountable bills, like the year Management and I purchased some 200 CDs (around $3000 USD for those of you playing along at home) to feed our habit. So when I stumbled across eMusic four years ago I thought I had died an gone to heaven, particularly given that it was an all-you-can-eat buffet for the mind-numbingly low price of $9.99 per month. Those days are gone but I thought I would do some quick accounting to see how the deal has fared since the great billing change over of 2003 (I currently pay $19.99 per month for 90 tracks).
| |
CPT* |
TPY* |
CPY* |
| eMusic |
$0.22 |
1080 |
$239.88 |
| iTunes |
$0.99 |
1080 |
$1,069.20 |
| Retail |
$1.25 |
1080 |
$1,350.00 |
To keep things easy I used the same amount of tracks for each of the services and for retail copies of CDs that works out to an average of 12 tracks per album which is just about right when looking at what I purchased over the past year.
So what’s the point of this exercise? Nothing other than my smug self-satisfaction that I am getting the best possible deal I can for my listening habits. Hell, the dollars speak for themselves: eMusic is 22% of the cost of iTunes and only some 18% of retail CDs. Now, this is the point where we could get into a discussion about distribution channels and the actual costs of producing, promoting, and retailing music but really, I don’t want to. Just look at the numbers! Those sweet, sweet numbers allow me to spend even more money on music and artist related tchotchkes.
Enough math, I’m going to listen to some music. On deck, Renaissance The Masters Series: Hernán Cattáneo Vol. 2 (Continuous Mix) and Nick Warren’s Shanghai.
* CPT - Cost Per Track
* TPY - Tracks Per Year
* CPY - Cost Per Year
Here are five things that you don’t know about me (and Management only suspects):
- I keep sketches of the tattoo I’ll never have the courage to get.
- I like to sing the lyrics to songs in Spanish even though I don’t know what I’m saying.
- My love of Moxie was cultivated so I could be different®; I used to hate the stuff.
- I time myself to see how fast I can shovel the driveway after it snows.
- I really like to say the word “kitty”.
So there.
Paradise is an interesting novel in that the trappings of alien civilizations and far off planets are just a pretense for telling the story of colonial conquest and the subsequent struggle for native independence. Honestly, by some thirty pages into the book I had completely forgotten that the tale revolved around the contact of two different intelligent species, Homo Sapiens and Peponis, instead reading the tale of equals of which one was subjected by the other. Paradise reads almost like the post-colonial history of Africa replete with racism, bondage, economic and social inequalities, and the struggle of the people to define and strive towards their own vision of the future. Reading like the memoirs of one who has bore witness to the upheaval in Uganda, Kenya, and Nigeria Resnick formulates the story with great care and sensitivity to all the characters.
It could have been very easy for Resnick to slip into dogmatic prose painting Homo Sapiens as the perpetrators of all the violence and all the evil wrought on the world of Peponi. The tale, however, like real life, is infinitively more complex and there is no black and white, in Paradise there is only gray for as far as the eye can see and I often found my sympathies stretched between the two species. Although great atrocities were committed on either side of the conflict tracing it to its root revealed only that no one is infallible and that, at least in this story, the great evil is a lack of foresight, the desire to remain bound by one’s ignorance, and a general tendency to resist understanding. In short, we all share the commonality of being unable to move beyond subjective reality.
Paradise is not a novel that should be overlooked for the sole fact that it is classified as science fiction. Resnick has written a moving portrayal of what happens when two vastly different cultures collide and the destruction that is visited upon the individuals trapped in the clash. In the end it is a story about how truly flawed we are as people and it should find a way onto your reading list.
We live just behind the middle school/high school complex which makes for a great place to walk Peri, the best part of which is all the things that we find lost or forgotten. At last tally we tripped over or sniffed up the following:
- (60) tennis balls
- (15) baseballs
- (3) softballs
- (2) soccer balls
- (1) “Superstar Princess” Glitter sticker–not the rapper–which went straight to Management, of course.
- (3) love notes of the 12-13 year old variety which makes for entertaining reading.
- (1) second page of a letter from an elderly aunt which makes for not so entertaining reading.
- (1) satchel with a safari hat, Marriott hotel room key card, and cigar box filled with pens and a Wild Kingdom Kids Club membership card dated 1998. We flagged down a janitor to return this since it looked to be a collection of mementos.
- (1) five dollar bill just defrosted from a snow bank–Peri has a sharp eye for money!
- (3) detention slips
- (76) Time for Kids magazines which were spread over one of the back parking lots and were all of the same issue from August of 2004. We found them in June of 2005.
- (2) sweatshirts, one in a field the other in the skate park.
- (1) pair of Granny Panties® discarded in the teachers parking lot. Peri wanted to sniff them like a Japanese business man and I wanted to steer a wide path. We compromised and turned around and went the other way.
- Countless beer cans and empty liquor bottles in the teachers parking lot, which should tell you something about the stress of dealing with hundreds of adolescents. I’m just surprised I haven’t seen needles and homemade crack pipes yet because if I was working there that would be the direction I would be leaning in.
Cash, balls, and Princess Superstar stickers were kept the rest was laughed at and left where it lay. It really is no mystery why Management calls me Trash Man.
