Furry friends forever

In the spirit of equality, this dog - the guide dog of a human guest, gets his own guest tag. The tag reads "Joey Dog"

This is cool

"Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic"
- Arthur C. Clarke

The magic for me is "I'm so impressed they thought of that too." I've blogged on this topic before, and I keep hitting it with my sexy unlocked Nokia 6300 I bought on my last trip to India.

The customization on the phone is to be seen to be believed. Then of course, there's the feature that blew me away - the phone has a timed 'silent' mode. So if I'm going to be in a meeting or in a film and I have an estimate on how long I need my phone off, I can time it to that. No more worrying about remembering to turn my phone on or missing phone calls, playing phone tag et al.

Then, I got this in email from a friend replying to an email I sent out:

While I've always been questioning about the Tablet PC, this is cool.

Edit: Fixed typo in Nokia model number. Thanks CAR.

Music wants to be free

Amazon recently launched its online MP3 store. What is notable about this store is that it sells MP3s. Not AACs that the iTunes store sells, not Windows Media Audio, but plain MP3s. What is even more remarkable is that these songs are not under any DRM.

Why is this significant, you ask? For the greater part of the past decade, music sold by the major labels in digital format has been under DRM. This means that after you buy the music, there's a lot of restrictions around how you can play your music. For instance, music I got from the iTunes store (courtesy a gift card last year) cannot play on my phone's music player. Music I got from MSN music won't play on an iPod or on my cool phone which doesn't license Windows Media DRM.

The reasons for this kludge are varied, including Apple's refusal to license its DRM for other music stores or players to use (cue "I hate monopolistic behavior" rant here). But the primary reason is that all four of the major record labels refused to license their music for digital distribution without copy protection.

I hated this restriction and I've avoided buying music online except from emusic which sells MP3s without any restrictions. I've moved this music around on three different desktops and a laptop, burned it to multiple CDs and played it on an iPod and two different phone music players. This kind of flexibility is not possible with DRM-ed music. Of course, the caveat is that this music is mostly from independent labels and not from major artistes.

Now, two of the four major labels allow DRM-free downloads prompting this move by Amazon. Apple's iTunes recently launched DRM-free downloads too, but they are AAC, which means that they may not necessarily play on the music player of my choice. MP3s are the most widely supported, so this new service definitely rocks.

The next step would be sale of lossless audio to be heard in full glory on hi-fi systems. The loss of fidelity in the music we listen to today as part of the iPod generation is a long post for a different day.

Go Kimi!

There's worse ways for the season to end.

Previously:

On the heretical idea of Raikkonen in a Ferrari.

Has his time come? Or is there more waiting to be done?