mike the mountain

So I’m sitting here in my office, studying changes in income tax legislation and other thrilling topics, listening to some lovely classical music on our proud national radio station: the CBC (Canadian Broadcasting Corporation). A song comes on that pulls me from my reading; a catchy, somewhat familiar tune but with a light, folksy bent.

I take a look at the iTunes window: “a rural holiday”, from an album called “Snake Fence Country”. Cool name. I summon Google.

Cool name, and local too!

It’s from the CBC Records label… hey sweet! Edmonton Wind Ensemble! My home town. I think I would like to give them money in exchange for my own copy of this album to enjoy at my leisure! Back to iTunes. Search for: “Snake Fence Country”

D’oh. Disappointing, but not everything is in iTunes. Back to Google. First link is Classics Online: Your Classical Music Download Source. Sounds promising… but then I see:

ARE YOU FUCKING KIDDING ME???

Not available in my country? It’s from my country! My city! The label is our national media company! This can’t be right. Trying somewhere else. Amazon.ca:

A HUNDRED AND FIFTY-ONE… ok, ok. It’s obviously out of production, fairly obscure, not completely unreasonable that the CD would be unavailable. What about Amazon.com:

Ah-ha! So it is out there somewhere! That gives me an idea. Back to iTunes, change the store to U.S…

What the hell!?

How can an album made in Canada, by Canadians, and released by a national Canadian government funded organization not be available to Canadians!?

Stupid, ignorant, hateful, petty… who wins here? Tell me. What possible benefit is this situation to anyone involved in or interested in this music? How the hell did the CBC allow this to take place? Since the CBC is publicly funded, which means that Canadian tax dollars were involved in the production of this album, how is it that the rights have become locked up by a foreign entity that can block Canadians from purchasing it??

This is everything that’s wrong with our intellectual property legislation today. Pointless and ridiculous interference that doesn’t help anyone. Well, except for the ignorant politicians that get bribed into passing this bullshit and the soulless corporations that seem to exist only to drain money away from the people who actually care about music.

Unfortunately this particular album is obscure enough that I can’t seem to find it on any of my usual torrent search sites, otherwise I’d be freely enjoying it while writing this diatribe (“free” being a key word there). I do have my fake US iTunes account that I set up last time I ran into this stupidity. But honestly, as much as I enjoyed that one song, and I’m sure I would love the rest, I have my doubts as to whether any of the money would actually get to the artists if I were to purchase it this way. Maybe I’ll get lucky and find the CD in a second-hand music store somewhere. More likely I’ll just never hear it again, and no one will have got any of the money that I was happy to spend. Lose-lose.

Another example of why your life will be far more interesting if you just do everything Warren Ellis tells you to.

The Impossible Girl, new EP by Kim Boekbinder. First track might be the catchiest song I’ve heard in years. The rest is a glorious transportation to an exotic punk/jazz burlesque club where drinks come from bottles with no labels served by a bartender with no eyes.

One of my favourite things about my Last.fm subscription is it’s tracking of my listening history. It’s one thing to try and arbitrarily choose today what my top songs of 2009 were, but to actually look at what tracks I played the most over the year offers a more interesting (to me anyway) view.

So here’s the list of my top 25 songs of 2009, in order of the number of times I played the full track on my computer, iPod, or iPhone:

1. Joel Plaskett Emergency – Nowhere With You
2. Flogging Molly – What’s Left of the Flag
3. Hi-Standard – Wait for the Sun
4. Portal – Still Alive
5. Leonard Cohen – Waiting For The Miracle
6. Enter the Haggis – One Last Drink
7. Great Big Sea – The Night Pat Murphy Died
8. Jonathan Coulton – Mr. Fancy Pants
9. The Salads – Get Loose
10. Styrofoam and Sarah Shannon – I Found Love
11. Jonathan Coulton – The Future Soon
12. Finnegan’s Lads – Dirty Old Town
13. Da Vinci’s Notebook – The Gates
14. Semisonic – Closing Time
15. Jonathan Coulton – Code Monkey
16. Three Dead Trolls in a Baggie – The System Administrator Song
17. Dean Elliott & His Big Band – Lonesome Road
18. Corb Lund Band – The Truck Got Stuck
19. The Tossers – Altercations
20. John Coltrane – Giant Steps
21. Dropkick Murphys – The Dirty Glass
22. Patti Smith – Gloria
23. Tenacious D – The Metal
24. Rancid – Roots Radicals
25. Flogging Molly – Rebels of the Sacred Heart

Of course, the math geek in me just screams at the idea of using raw play count data that doesn’t take into account when any of these songs actually became available to me. For example, I bought Enter the Haggis in November, and they made it to #6. I bought Jonathan Coulton’s album in March, and he appears three times (four if you count “Still Alive”). And yet, bands like Flogging Molly and Corb Lund, oft-stated “favourite” bands of mine of which I own many albums, only appear once or twice. Some of these tracks I don’t own at all, but have appeared often enough as “recommendations” on my last.fm station that they make the list!

Hmm… I wonder how hard it would be to build an algorithm that could level out the initial enthusiastic repetition of a new album or song, consider the time of year it was added to the overall library, and assign an appropriate weighting as compared to those that have been in rotation for more than 12 (24? more?) months. I wonder how clear the pattern would be if I could go back and track plays of a new song from purchase, peak, trough, to plateau. What kind of timeline does there need to be for a song to stabilize into regular rotation, or just be forgotten until it gets picked up by a random shuffle and brought back into play? How much of an effect does placing the song into a playlist have versus leaving it in the overall library?

How much time can I waste discussing pattern analysis of my music listening habits before I get back to work?

That one I think I can answer.

I had forgotten just how spectacularly awful/awesome this video is.

All I wanted to do was use one of my mp3s* as a ringtone.

I could do that on any of my old phones (that were capable of playing mp3s, if not I just converted it to an older audio spec).  But then ringtones became BIG BU$INE$$.  Now, if I want to use a clip from one of my songs as a ringtone on my iPhone, in Apple’s own words:

Buy a song for 99¢, then turn it into a custom ringtone you can buy for 99¢.

Oh lucky me!  A song I already own, I can buy from you again, then buy the RINGTONE version from you!

Silliness.  And easily ignored.

But for some strange reason, the internet was funny today: every page I clicked on didn’t immediately offer complete, accurate, and up-to-date information on a minor techincal solution.  Weird.

Me – I summon Google!  How do I change an mp3 into an iPhone/iTunes ringtone?

Google – Easy, just change the file extension to .m4r.

Me – Didn’t work.  iTunes ignoring me.

Google – Well, first you convert the mp3 to an AAC file (extension .m4a), then change the extension to .m4r.

Me – Right-clicked on the file in iTunes, only option was to convert to mp3 (which it already was).

Google – You’re an idiot**.  Preferences –> Import Settings –> AAC Encoder, then right-click on the file, convert to AAC, change extension to .m4r.

Me – Jeez, you don’t have to be mean about it (who the heck knowingly leaves the default import to AAC anyway?).  OK, I have the mp3, I have the AAC, I changed the extension of the AAC file to .m4a.  Hooray!  I has a ringtone!  Syncy-syncy.  Umm… why no syncy?  Ringtone not copying over to iPhone why??

Google – Exactly how long do you expect people to wait for you to pick up the dang phone?!   40-second max for ringtones.

Me – You couldn’t have just said all that at the beginning?

Google – But then all those other pages wouldn’t have gotten any hits!  Share the love.  Now quit your whining and go back to looking for the answers to those xkcd puzzles (yeah, good luck with those).

So, to recap (Windows Vista [please don't make fun of me], iTunes 8.0.2.20, iPhone 2.2.1):

1. Right-click –> Get Info on the track containing the sound bite with which you would like to annoy people in elevators.  Options tab, choose the Start and End times of your clip (keep it around 30 second or less to be safe).  OK.
2. Right-click –> Create AAC Version.  If you see “MP3 Version” instead, change your Import Settings to AAC Encoder.
3. Right-click on the new AAC track –> Show in Windows Explorer.
4. Right-click file in Explorer –> Rename, change extension from .m4a to .m4r.  Double-click the file to import it into iTunes.
5. Sync iPhone (make sure you have checked the option to Sync Ringtones).  Smugly smile, raise middle finger to the nearest representative of The Man.

*For the record, my ringtone is now the opening Prelude from Final Fantasy III.

**I always hear this phrase in House‘s voice now.

Top Artists (according to Last.fm):

1. Flogging Molly
2. Gogol Bordello
3. Great Big Sea
4. Dean Gray (Green Day mashup DJ)
5. Corb Lund
6. Captain Tractor
7. The Free Design
8. Blink-182
9. Death Cab for Cutie
10. Jack Johnson
11. The Flaming Lips
12. Dropkick Murphys
13. Rancid
14. Feist
15. Dungeons & Dragons podcasts

My Top Tracks (according to Last.fm):

1. Big Audio Dynamite – Rush
2. Great Big Sea – The Night Pat Murphy Died
3. Webb Wilder & The Nashvegaans – One Taste Of The Bait
4. The Flaming Lips – Yeah Yeah Yeah Song
5. Scissor Sisters – I Don’t Feel Like Dancin’
6. Gogol Bordello – Sally
7. Trace Adkins – Honky Tonk Badonkadonk
8. Flogging Molly – What’s Left of the Flag
9. Ian Tyson – This is My Sky
10. Tenacious D – The Metal
11. Dean Gray – Boulevard of Broken Songs
12. Montgomery Gentry – Gone
13. Flogging Molly – Sentimental Johnny
14. Dean Gray – Dr. Who on Holiday
15. John Michael Montgomery – Sold (The Grundy County Auction Incident)

Movies I saw that were released in 2008 (not necessarily the best, just some of the more memorable; in no order):

• WALL-E
• The Dark Knight
• Kung-Fu Panda
• Iron Man
• Cloverfield
• Quantum of Solace
• Mamma Mia
• Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull
• Horton Hears A Who
• The Chronicles of Narnia: Prince Caspian
• The Incredible Hulk
• Hellboy II: The Golden Army
• Forgetting Sarah Marshall
• The Forbidden Kingdom
• Harold and Kumar Escape from Guantanamo Bay
• Semi-Pro
• The Ruins
• Be Kind, Rewind
• Futurama – The Beast With A Billion Backs
• Tropic Thunder

(If I tried to remember ALL the movies I watched last year, it would take me until the end of ’09!  The most watched movie of the year was a tie between WALL-E and Shoot ‘Em Up, 3 times each.)

Some of the best stuff I read in 2008:

• The Happiest Days of Our Lives, by Wil Wheaton
• World War Z, by Max Brooks
• Crooked Little Vein, by Warren Ellis
• The Gunslinger Born (The Dark Tower Graphic Novel)
• G33k Mafia, by Rick Dakan
• Godel, Escher, and Bach, by Douglas Hofstadter
• Y, The Last Man, series
• Transmetropolitan, series
• The Boys, series
• Planet Hulk/World War Hulk, series
• Punisher MAX, series (Garth Ennis’ run)
• Wanted, series
• Wizard’s First Rule, by Terry Goodkind
• Ender’s Game, by Orson Scott Card
• Speaker for the Dead, by Orson Scott Card
• Dungeons & Dragons Fourth Edition, core books and supplements

Teh awesomist tubes on teh internets:

• Wil Wheaton dot Net: In Exile
• The Adventures of Accordion Guy in the 21st Century
• Lifehacker
• xkcd
• Garfield minus Garfield
• Least I Could Do
• Questionable Content
• Penny Arcade
• Tcritic – Daily T-Shirt Blog
• io9
• Boing Boing
• Ain’t It Cool News
• Horror Movie A Day
• PostSecret

Favourite Online Video of 2008:

Where the Hell is Matt? (2008) from Matthew Harding on Vimeo.

Favourite Video Game of 2008:

Tie: Guitar Hero III and Portal

To understand just how epic this was, here’s the Wikipedia entry on Rickrolling.

Think you know your hard rock history?

October 20… can’t wait!

\m/

This is one more reason why you should never doubt just how much Prince kicks ass…

Courtesy of Topless Robot’s The Best 11 Songs From Geek-Movie Sountracks

Batman, meet Prince’s dirty mind. Prince’s dirty mind, meet Batman. I’m sure you’ll have a lot to talk about! Man, try to imagine modern-day Warner Bros. and Christopher Nolan turning over the soundtrack for their ponderous Batman Begins to, I dunno, OutKast and you’ll have some idea of how freaking crazy it is that this song and video ever even happened. Torn between his brother-in-mononymhood Batman and his fellow purple enthusiast the Joker, Prince created a hybrid character called Gemini, who presides over a berserk interpretive dance involving women in batsuits, a parade of Vicki Vales led by a woman in a shirt reading “ALL THIS AND BRAINS TOO ” (an homage to Frank Miller’s The Dark Knight Returns!), cheeky references to the ’60s TV-show theme that still have over-serious Bat-fans sputtering with fury, collage-style lyrics culled from all of Prince’s other Batman soundtrack songs, and a fucking vicious guitar solo. The end result is a ballsy slab of industrial-dance-funk-rock-madness that proves superhero soundtrack music doesn’t have to be kid-tested and mother-approved.

A Finnish new-wave band… called The Leningrad Cowboys… backed up by the Soviet Red Army Choir… singing “Sweet Home Alabama“…

Yes.

I don’t know when this concert was held, but I really hope it was in cold war times because I would have to give serious credit to this geo-political anachronism for knocking down the Berlin Wall by sheer force of irony alone.

I wonder if the choir singers knew what they were singing, or if they were just following along phonetically.