blog.shrub

I found a card at SXSW for a free music sampler from Verve. They want you to go to verveforecast.com/sxsw, then register, thenenter in the “download code” of vforecastsxsw.

The music sampler (Jamie Cullum, Brazilian Girls, Jackie Greene, Rhett Miller, Susan Tedeschi, Teddy Thompson) comes in four formats, all of which are annoying:

• WMA, zip
• WMA, sit (who’d want this?)
• QT, zip
• QT, sit

The QuickTime files are .mov files with an embedded AAC track. However, QuickTime won’t let me extract the track cleanly — I can only export as AIFF, AU (why?) and WAVE.

Glenn Anderson has some handy QuickTime Exporters, including one that will save it as AAC (after downsampling from 256 to 128).

Anyone have any better solutions?

It would be nice if Google Finance allowed you to use easy-to-type URLs, i.e.
http://finance.google.com/goog

Which could redirect you here:
http://finance.google.com/finance?q=goog

Perhaps something like:
RedirectMatch /([a-z]{4}) http://finance.google.com/finance?q=$1

I saw a lot of great music at SXSW. But one performer stood out.

Just after midnight Thursday—making it Friday—I walked in to the Hotel Café showcase at Copa.

I was immediately impressed. No. Amazed is more like it: the woman on stage did in 30 seconds what nobody else did at all night. She blew me away. I had to know who she was.

“Who was that?”

“KT Tunstall.”

The title here is a bit misleading. My favourite Tiger feature really is Spotlight. But I want to talk about something really cool that nobody is talking about:

kABWithinIntervalAroundTodayYearless

kABWhat?

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My sister likes to talk on the phone. A lot. And Cingular charges use $85 for a family plan where we share 1250 minutes. And 35 cents/minute for extra minutes. Highway robbery! With T-Mobile, we could get 1500 minutes each with two $50 individual plans. Great, I thought.

However, T-Mobile doesn’t work in my house. Still. I figured three years was plenty of time for them to fix the holes in their network. I figured wrong.

In Sunnyvale, the middle of Silicon Valley, finding good cell phone coverage is harder than you think. So it’s T-Mobile for my sister and I get to stay with Cingular (GSM 800 gets them reception in my house).

First stop is the T-Mobile store on El Camino Real in Sunnyvale. I tell the sales rep I want to sign up for a plan (pass the credit check and such) here in California, and have my sister pick up the phone at a NYC store. No can do, the guy says. If you want the phone in NY, you’ll have to ship it there yourself. I point out to the guy that if I order online, shipping is free.

“What do I get out of it?” he asks me, point-blank.

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