April, 9, 2005 archives

one thing that marillion deserves is more recognition for how they’ve really stepped up to being a fan-supported band, and have largely disentangled themselves from the major record labels. this article in the independent covers the recent “marillion weekend”, which was like a weekend-end long concert and fan festival. they’ve had a united states tour financed by the fans, and have now released two albums financed by their fans.

compare that to the recent saga of fiona apple’s latest not-yet-released album. imagine how different things could have been if the fans had financed the album instead of apple being stuck in the mess she’s apparently in with her label.

it puzzles me that the goal of some musicians is to hand over so much control to a record label, even after they often have to be very hands-on in doing the same sorts of things the label will be doing for them.

i think we’ll see an accelerating trend away from the major labels as more music is made available online, just because it almost totally squeezes out the distribution costs. i’m not sure that it is quite as imminent as mark cuban thinks it is, but it is only a matter of time. when you can spend a few hundred dollars a month to pump out bits at 10Mb/s and supplement that with a tool like bittorrent, the economics of releasing music online starts to look very attractive.

and i think that is irrespective of the outcome of grokster vs. riaa. if there’s an upside to that case, it demonstrates that the labels are not employing a fire and motion strategy. they’re focused on defense.

i tell ya, it’s almost enough to make one want to start an online music label. and one potentially brilliant way to start would be by buying out fiona apple’s sony contract.

it takes serious cajones to call judges marxist and leninist and then adopt a quote from stalin as your own.

this is the sort of event that i hope gets lost in the history books, and doesn’t resurface as an example of how things got really bad.

it is rare that i walk more than a few blocks in my neighborhood without being asked for change. but today’s “<mumble> blow job, $5” was a new one. i didn’t try to get clarified whether he was buying, selling, or mediating.

i may not be doing web development for my day job any more, but i put a little more elbow grease into the mysql bugs database to add two new features that people have asked for at various times: subscribing to updates on bugs, and making private comments. i also cleaned up the database structure a bit. for example, instead of storing email addresses for the assigned developer and reviewer, it actually has a proper link to the user database.

it’s not a particularly pretty code base (although i clean it up as i go), but i’m rather fond of this little bugs system.

i saw melinda and melinda, woody allen’s latest film, this weekend, and sin city, robert rodriguez’s latest, last weekend.

melinda and melinda was a bit of a disappointment. the acting was all good, but the direction felt a little off for a woody allen film, and it was hard to shake the feeling that the parallel-stories thing has been done better in other films. it was good to see will ferrell in a relatively understated role, and radha mitchell was great as the two melindas. reviewers seem to be consistent in saying the comic side of the story overshadows the tragic, but i’m not sure that i agree.

i don’t have anything to add to the plethora of other sin city reviews, other than to agree that it is a great film. actually, here’s something add: linux and mysql powered the asset management for the film.