Archive for January, 2007
Burrell
Andrea and I visited the Burrell Collection in Glasgow today, my first visit since I was still at school. It’s an impressive collection, and an impressive building within which it’s all housed, with giant glass windows filling the exhibition areas with an abundance of natural light.
The pieces are generally not hidden away behind glass display cases, giving you a much closer look at some of the artefacts on offer, and there are a wide array of them to be seen. The best ones are those the pre-date any modern civilisation, 4000 year old works of art that you’re actually able to put your hands on and touch. It is at times staggering to think about what some of them have survived through and often how well preserved they still are. And while I’m sure letting anybody touch them (although let’s be clear here, it’s not in any way encouraged) they’re limiting how much longer they are going to survive, there’s no better way to have people have an appreciation for history.
Flat
I signed up for a Napster account again, although this time I skipped past the free trial and just went for the full subscription. I’ve gone for the full “on the go” plan right now, which means I can download tracks onto a portable player (one of which they give you free when you signup) but I’ll likely pair that back to a normal subscription based on whether or not I find myself using it over the next few months.
The Napster model has you paying a flat subscription fee every month and in return you can download or stream full high quality versions of any track in the library as much as you want. If you stop paying the subscription, then anything you’ve downloaded stops working. Alternatively you can still buy tracks for 79p a pop and keep them forever, just like the iTunes model.
People usually look at this in two ways. Either they think that music should be owned and not rented and think the model is therefore stupid because they don’t want their whole music collection to disappear when they stop paying the subscription. Alternatively they look at it like I do, in that it’s not about being able to download tracks, it’s about having access to a giant music collection from any computer, anywhere in the world, and being able to play whatever you please. It’s access to all those classic albums you probably should have heard, or listening to the full back catalogue of an artist you like, or listening to a new album you’re interested in buying before you go and purchase the actual, DRM-free, physical CD.
Apple continue to miss a trick here. Since the iTunes Music Store exists purely to give people a reason to buy iPod’s, it should be an easy to sell to market a subscription service not as a “download as much as you want service” but a “listen as much as you want” service. The fact that people would be able to fill the full capacity of their iPod’s for a flat fee every month should not only encourage people to buy them, or even larger capacity ones, but they also get the added benefit of the monthly subscription revenue. Why Apple continue to rebuff this idea is a mystery to me.
Zune
The simple hardware design, the ease of use on the interface, the tight integration between the hardware and the iTunes software - these are some of the main components of what makes the iPod such a success. So it’s no surprise that Microsoft’s Zune copies each of these ideas wholesale, even going so far as to abandon their existing PlaysForSure program by creating a whole new incompatible type of DRM.
The results? Well firstly there’s no podcasting support, so already they’ve lost the support of many a tech evangelist, especially since most of them are producing podcasts themselves. Then there’s the couple of bucks they’re giving to Universal Music for every player sold, because they could potentially be used for holding pirated music. It’s not a good start to immediately brand all your customers as thieves. And as for that new type of DRM, well you just pissed off all your other partners who you’ve been selling protection systems to for the past couple of years.
So in a triple header Microsoft managed to piss off tech evangelists, freedom fighters (and those who don’t like to be called thieves) and manufacturers of other music players. It’s an almost unprecedented level of bone-headedness. But yet somehow they just went from nothing to the number two music player in North America (even if it is trailing Apple by tens of millions of units). If that’s not a sign of the might of the Microsoft, I don’t know what is.
Outdoor
Since we’d already ventured to Manchester’s Trafford Centre, it was Newcastle’s chance to wow myself and Andrea with the delights of the Metro Centre. Well…. I say delights, but it wasn’t very good.
They go for a similar thing as Manchester does, having little food areas designed like you’re on a real outdoor street, but not done anywhere near as well. There are plenty of shops, but none of them excited me too much, and they lacked the Apple store you get at Trafford. But mostly it just had no charm or character, it was just another large faceless shopping centre. The reason the Trafford Centre was so good was because they went for something different than the usual plain white floors and walls, with all their faux marble columns, the classic looking cinema and the giant freaking cruise ship design of the food court.
The other reason for going though was to try out the TomTom 510 that I got, which did an admirable job of directing us to the front door. It’s cool when you pass a sign saying that there’s 49 miles to go at the exact point your satnav tells you the same thing. Or when it tells you to turn left at the roundabout that’s coming up in 28 miles and then it counts down to it absolutely perfectly before bang, there you are.
Charades
Me and Andrea played charades with Jennifer and Alan tonight, because we’re just that kind of party orientated group of people. Alan decided that hitting Andrea was his aim for the night, twice skelping her in the head and misunderstanding the concept of “mime”.
It had been a while since I played, so I completely forgot you could do the whole syllable thing until Andrea did it. That would have helped me a lot when I was given “Hercules: The Legendary Journeys”. Although maybe not that much, that one was too damn hard. I was so annoyed with myself when she pointed at her leg.
