Well, let's see... it's been almost a week and a half since last post...

First thing's first: the Apple Music Service, a.k.a. iTunes Music Store (iTMS), or buyTunes (lol). As anticipated, it was released last Monday. It seems to be a spectacular success, selling over 1 million songs in the first week, which was "totally unexpected", says one music label exec. Now that the RDF has worn off, there are a few comments I'd like to make:

1. I can't use it, because I don't have a credit card. Wah. I guess it's good, though, because it shields me from the possible $50-$100 I could potentially spend. :p The price seems to be right (although it would be nice a bit cheaper).

2. It's pretty damn easy to use, and I love that you can preview everything. All in all, it seems to be a pretty solid offerring.

3. DRM: It's there, but it's not too pervasive. Like I said, I'd like to be able to do anything I want, but I guess we don't live in an ideal world. You can burn to unlimited CDs, you can transfer tunes to unlimited iPods, and you can transfer the files to up to 3 Macs. Mind you, these limitations are in relation to purchased songs. Furthermore, you can easily get around the DRM padlocks simply by burning to a CD and then re-importing.

4. There are a couple of complaints that are with merit: first, the selection of songs. Although there is music from all 5 major music labels, the independent music is lacking. This is reported to change very soon, so that's good news. The other complaint that I heard was on the music quality. This certainly doesn't bother me, but perhaps Apple should give higher quality recordings (for a slightly higher price?).

In other words, I would use the iTMS if I could.

In other news, what the heck is up with this weather? Bryce claims that these rainy/cloudy days are the nice ones. Pff. What's with that? Rain is nice when we haven't had it in a while (I do love the smell of first rain), and it's also nice when we're actually having a thunderstorm, but we rarely have thunderstorms. It's just been cloudy and dreary and a bit rainy. That's just depressing. Rain is good sometimes, but I'd rather have a sunny day than the stupid weather we've been having lately.

I am reminded of the time I went hiking with a friend in the dorm last quarter (about which I posted a blog entry), but that's totally different... it was misty, and we were away from everywhere and it seemed appropriate. Peaceful, as opposed to depressing.

That reminds me -- I should start biking again during the week. I've been swamped with stuff lately, but it's probably going to ease up for these next three or so weeks, given that we have 1.5 weeks to do each of the next two CS projects, since we just had a midterm on Monday. That's good, so maybe I'll have time for my regular hobby. Speaking of midterms, the CS one went pretty well -- it's kind of strange to be writing code on paper without having a compiler on which to test it, but I finished it nevertheless.

I wish I had someone to bike around with, though. Sometimes I need someone to talk to and talking over the internet is so impersonal. Bah.

Here's [SNIP: The Corrs cover of "Dreams", by Fleetwood Mac] a music video from a Corrs cover of "Dreams", by Fleetwood Mac. I can't say I totally like the theme of the video, but the video itself is pretty good, and I think the song is great. I particularly like the percussion and the violin and flute use (that The Corrs seem to use a lot). I couldn't embed it directly in the blog since it was too big to fit on my iDisk. Oh well.

Last but not least, I got my draw number today: 2565. Not incredibly great, but it could be much worse... I should be able to get into Casa or Murray, given that I applied priority to both of them. Time to put in my housing choices. :)