Faraway, So Close

Well my initial experience has been pretty good with allofmp3.com. I plopped $10US (approx $15Cdn) into Paypal and got 1GB of downloads from them. Being a bit nervous about how long it might actually last, I'm quickly burning through that 1GB. I've downloaded 5 complete albums (Nelly Furtado, Johnny Cash, Dido, Norah Jones, Daniel Lanois) as well as a bunch of other single tunes (call them guilty pleasures, *cough* Timberlake *cough*, stuff I wouldn't want to be caught buying at Future Shop - ).

The more I read about them, they seem to be on the up and up. I found a review of allofmp3.com that explains a bit. They also link to a bunch of artists that have free downloads on allofmp3.com. Use your discretion. It boils down to laws being different in Russia (duh) as well as the US dollar to Russian ruble conversion being in our favor in a big way.

It's no where near as easy as what iTunes music store would/will be - if they ever get around to releasing it up north here.

Posted by iChris at 4:22 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (8)

I'm trying out allofmp3.com - a mp3 sales site based in Russia. heh heh. Sounds way too shady to be good but there were a bunch of people on Slashdot who've been using it for awhile and haven't had any problem. I paid $10US through Paypal (so about $15Cdn) which gives me 1GB of downloads at whatever encoding rate I choose - including AAC (mp4 - what Apple uses). A 5 minute song encoded at 192k AAC is roughly 5MB. 1000MB (1 GB) divided by 5 is 200. 200 songs for $15 is pretty good. :) It's about $0.08 per song. Because I paid through Paypal they don't have my credit card number so at worst I'd be out $15.

Basically you choose the songs you want, the rate you'd like them encoded at and then they send you an email when it's ready to be downloaded. I'll let you know how it turns out.

Posted by iChris at 1:11 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (3)

Any fellow iTunes users out there (Apple or Windows) might want to go grab the 4.5 update to iTunes they released this morning.

Now if only the iTunes music store would hit Canada I could empty my bank account into music like I want to.

Posted by iChris at 10:10 AM | Permalink | Comments (4) | TrackBacks (2)

Mark Cuban's blog is quickly becoming one of my favorites. He recently talked about how he got his money (part 1,part 2) and in his most recent entry, he calls out The Don to have a corporate meetup at Whitecastle. I think Mark should hire me to do a reality blog on his life. I'll just follow him around with a camera so when other famous people try to schmooz him and he calls them on it, he can back it up with video footage.

Posted by iChris at 10:59 AM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (1)

Thanks to everyone who sponsored us! We're in the homestretch now - 9 more hours to go. The apple juice is getting a little stale but I think we'll make it. :)

Off to clean dorms at Bethany and collect food for the food bank before we have our "feast" (aka subs - don't try feeding 40 kids pizza after they haven't eaten for 30 hours... it'll shoot right through them!) at 7 tonight.

Darren's having a 1031 party tonight - so if you've ever been connected to 1031 Osler in any way, stop by there tonight and say goodbye to 1031.

Posted by iChris at 11:04 AM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (4)

Sue and I are doing the 30 hour famine this Friday/Saturday. If you'd like to sponsor us, click here.

Posted by iChris at 12:29 PM | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (1)

It's funny because we were just talking with Chris & Lindsay about how these would never make it in Canada, and I read today that the Smart cars are in fact coming to Canada this fall.

Posted by iChris at 9:53 AM | Permalink | Comments (4) | TrackBacks (3)

It was Lindsay's birthday last week so we went to their place on Saturday and made him BBQ our bison for us in honor of his birthday.

This picture is up for no reason than to see if Darren is still reading my blog even though he claims to be over his blog reading addiction.

Posted by iChris at 12:03 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

If you can dodge a wrench, you can dodge a ball.

And one more clip to get ya going.

Standard Ben Stiller/Vince Vaughn flick - but I'll still love it.

Posted by iChris at 5:31 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (1)

No, this is not something to do with the Cuban controversy brewing over at Matt's place. I found out from jordoncooper.com that Mark Cuban, owner of the Dallas Mavericks, has a personal blog that he updates fairly regularly. Apparently he also responds to most of the emails he gets from fans/customers. Amazingly enough, he uses their ideas and suggestions to better the experience customers have when they go to a Maverick's game.

Imagine that? A rich, billionare CEO who listens to his customers. Do you know of any other interesting blogs like this? And don't tell me about Paul Martin's blog - it hasn't been updated in forever and was probably just some Liberal employee typing it for him anyway.

Posted by iChris at 5:22 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (2)

Mp3.com is back only it's been bought out by download.com and has a fancy new interface. It's in beta right now but you can go and sign up and get your artist name locked in before everyone else.

You're limited to 50MB per artist, but you can have as many artists as you want - though they say they'll kill any duplicate names (i.e. No Method, No Methods, etc) if you attempt to gain more space that way.

Right now you can only put your songs up there to be downloadable. There's no streaming option since they're still working out the kinks.

Posted by iChris at 12:10 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (1)

I got an email from my dad today who's suffering down in Mazatlan right now. Suffering from golf addiction. He shot a 1 under par for the first time on the course by their condo last week, and the other day had another once-in-a-lifetime golf event happen.

His story begins below:

Accompanying Picture

This is strictly a golf e-mail because I did something a little rare today. This occurred after I took Lynn to the airport in Luis' truck and then returned back to the clubhouse to play a little more golf.

Today was one of those days when I accomplished something I will probably never do again down here in my lifetime -- and for that matter I'm not sure too many people ever will in their lifetime. I did something which is very, very rare. Hole #9 is a very, very,difficult hole - a dog leg right and only 380 yards BUT the wind blows across right to left both off the tee and on your approaches, the right side of the fairway is totally lined with huge bunkers from 150 in, the green is totally surrounded by cavernous bunkers(on average at least 3 of 4 golfers in every group end up in the bunkers at the front of the green which are about 10-12 feet below the height of the green) and the green is very, very fast. Well I nailed my approach to within 18 inches and the clubhouse staff were there cheering me on when I got up there because they could go a month on this course without the 9th hole ever getting birdied. I birdied it for only my 3rd or 4th time in about 150 rounds down here. But it didn't end there.

If you're not on the edge of your seat with anticipation, you better re-read this and then get ready to go on by cliking below:

Anyways, I played the front 9 again because I was playing late tonight and I felt it better if I was 'hidden' in the back 9 so people wouldn't start asking the staff why I was allowed to play late and no one else was. Anyways, the second time on 9 I hit my approach to 130 and then the unthinkable occurred. I eagled it from 130! That is a first for me on a par 4 and I believe on the 9th hole on this course for anyone. The unfortunate part was that I didn't see it go in. The green is elevated. I knew it was a decent shot but when I got to the green I couldn't see the ball. I assumed it had gone into the sand behind the green. But nothing there. I eventually checked the hole and 'voila' there it was.

I'm not sure if all of you will appreciate how rare this event was but I am sure Lynn and Alfredo will after playing that monster hole #9 and watching hundreds of people struggle in those bunkers.

Well, that's my excitement for the day and week ....

Posted by iChris at 12:06 PM | Permalink | Comments (3) | TrackBacks (100)

Amazon has released their own search engine to compete with google. It's amazing how history repeats itself. Yahoo steals from Netscape, Google does Yahoo one better and now Amazon builds on what Google has done and improves it.

I'm still waiting for my gmail invite. Grrrrr.

Posted by iChris at 1:16 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (4)

I'm thinking of selling our eMac and putting the money towards an iBook for Sue - anyone interested? I haven't totally decided to sell it but there's some good prices going for them on eBay so it's got me interested.

This is what you could buy right now if you were looking at a new eMac:

Mine is the 1Ghz model with more RAM (640MB) but less hard drive (a 60GB). We bought it August 2003 so it still has 4 months of warranty on it. I could throw on an extra 2 years of warranty for $200. iLife '04 (Garageband) is on it, as is Panther. I think we may even still have the original box.

Even if you're not interested in buying it, if I listed it on ebay is $1000 a fair price?

Posted by iChris at 11:15 AM | Permalink | Comments (9) | TrackBacks (2)

Brad has a great post up from awhile ago on how to do your entire site with MT. Could be a good way of doing it for the church site I'm being asked to design a site for.

Posted by iChris at 10:09 AM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (1)

HP has sponsored a Nation Photo Album of the UK's history. Very cool. Some pics are copyrighted and others are public domain - a good resource if you're looking for old pictures to throw into a video or slideshow.

Also check out the Dutch National Image archive. (Thanks Caroline)

Posted by iChris at 9:55 AM | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (27)

Sue and I went for a walk down by the river on Good Friday. It was nice to get out of the house after being cooped up working on videos, web pages and BF:Vietnam all week. Well, not really "working" on BF, but that's beside the point.

One more perfomance on Sunday to go, but I'm only involved with my guitar for a couple of songs. It should be interesting to see how the rockin choir is recieved. The band is having fun regardless.

The Tenebrae services went well - not without their own little glitches but nothing that noticeable to the audience I think. It's always fun to play with Brent and his djembe. We talked about hooking up to try and make some tv commercials for some of his audio clients - we'll see what happens. Watch for a casting call soon! :)

Posted by iChris at 11:46 AM | Permalink | Comments (4) | TrackBacks (4)

Got a busy week - at least on paper - ahead of me but it'll be good once it's over. I'm playing guitar and running a few videos in the two Tenebrae services (one on Monday at 8pm and another on Friday at 7:30pm) and also playing guitar for the Easter musical performances on Sunday. But there's no Jr High Friday night and we also get Friday off from work so there's plenty more time to relax than usual.

Pretty much everyone who's anyone has picked up a copy of Battlefield: Vietnam here at work so we're gonna have to get some multi-player hurtin going on pretty quick. So Ryan, if you were debating - now's the time to get in on the action. Staples has it for $39.95, cheapest in town!

Posted by iChris at 2:20 PM | Permalink | Comments (6) | TrackBacks (1)

Possibly only available today: Homestarrunner.com forgot to pay their domain bill.

The one April Fool's day item that's got everyone confused is the possibility of google.com offering email - in the order of 1GB of storage for each user. It sounds way too good to be true, but it's all over the legit news sites and Googles gone to great lengths to promote this. It's a win-win situation. Either the news sites end up with egg on their face and we get to laugh, or we get a sweet email service that doesn't have anything to do with the borg.

Atari releases the final clip in the 3 part series of promo videos they shot for Driver3. Slick cars, crashes... all the makings of a good video game.

Posted by iChris at 12:03 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)