May, 6, 2003 archives

the integration of apple's music store with itunes is fantastic. giving things a spin, i've bought three albums (elvis presley's elvis ’56, massive attack's blue lines, and morcheeba's charango) and one single (johnny cash's cover of nine inch nail's "hurt" from american iv - the man comes around).

i bought the johnny cash single after hearing the song in the opening scene of last night's boston public. the original is great, but cash's cover is incredible. i had to do a little bit of digging with google to figure out what the song was, and who did the cover. it would have been a great example of the sort of shop-from-your-television service that has been speculated about for years.

so far, i still have more of an album mindset than getting excited about buying singles. there's a small amount of irony in having bought a full elvis presley album, given how singles-oriented the music industry was during that period of his career. but with 22 songs, the whole album for $9.99 was a better deal than individual songs for 99¢.

i'm impressed with apple's music service. it will be nice to see the catalog fill out, and i'd really like to see the price come down a bit. (but given the convenience compared to hitting a music store that sells used discs, the price really isn't bad at all.)

here's something apple really needs to add to the service: letting you buy music for someone else. that would be so much cooler than an amazon wishlist.

wagner james au's salon review of masters of doom, a biography of the founders of id software, is in that fine tradition of reviews that largely uses the book as a pretext for exploring the topic on its own. the book comes off as something like a late-’90s dotcom puff piece, whereas james is much more critical of id's real impact outside of the hardcore gamer community.

reportedly doom iii features less of the huge-horde-of-creatures battles for which id games are known. it will be interesting to see if that's really happens, and how well it works.

i remember when the original doom came out, and crippled some machines on our campus network. the first version used ipx broadcast messaging for its networking support, and that caused enough network traffic to overwhelm slower machines on the same network segment. needless to say, they got that sorted out in the next release.

(oh, you'll probably need to jump through hoops to read the full review. i decided to spring for a salon premium account a while ago.)

in a bit, i start my trek to lax on the way to budapest. viszontlátásra! (if there's any wifi at heathrow, maybe i'll try to blog from there.)