Are Seven

For those of you following along at home, you’ll know that I’ve set aside Tuesday as a day to talk about various topics from the tech world that strike my fancy. It’s not enough to do a blog, but it’s enough to ramble on incoherently about. Come on along!

Anywhere.fm
I finally gave anywhere.fm a try this week. Think of it as an online iTunes, and you can share it. I was looking for ways that I could listen to music at my new, lonely solitary-confined office, and this seemed as good as any. Well sir, it turns out that it’s still FAR from being a replacement for iTunes. The upload works somewhat, but isn’t great. In theory, you could put your whole library in there…if you have several days.

I tried this for about half a day, but I realized that my dream of having my entire music library somewhere off in the cloud, available from truly anywhere, is still a wait away.

Open Source vs. Pay Software
I found myself with a very frustrating problem last week: I need to to use Microsoft Project, but the money to buy it was still in the works, so I had to deal first with a lousy trial version, then switch over to OpenProj, which didn’t work exactly as advertised, so I had to recreate and entire project plan.

Ultimately, this is why I usually go with Open Source. It’s not that I’m such a cheapskate that I just refuse to pay for anything that I can get for free (though I am a cheapskate). It’s that you so often have to jump through so many hoops to buy something that it becomes a detriment on your time as well as your wallet. Shouldn’t it be the other way around?

The music industry is finally learning its lesson, and you can get unprotected mp3s on Amazon. And I’ve started buying most of my music again. It wasn’t the fact that I had to pay for it before; it was that it was extremely simple to have the free, unprotected version (and much better quality) than it was to pay and have to worry about how many computers it existed on.

I love Google, but mostly I use their stuff because it’s so much easier. You’re not constantly running into features that you have to pay to use, you’re up and running in no time, there’s no passwords or verification codes: you just use it. Microsoft (and plenty of other companies. I’m looking at you, Adobe) could learn something. Fine; have people pay for it. But once they do, let them go with it.

Blogger vs. Wordpress
I’ve started using Blogger again, since we were looking for a free and easy home for Naive Harmonies. After time away from Blogger in favor of Wordpress, I’ve found that Blogger is WAY behind the curve, which is surprising. I don’t know if this is a very, very low priority for Google or if there’s some big redesign coming (a la Google Analytics), but it seems that they should pay a little more attention to it, considering that a lot of the blogs serve up AdSense, something that Wordpress blogs can’t do. But apart from it being free, and being able to host javascript and AdSense (all good reasons, granted), there’s no reason to use Blogger over Wordpress. The interface is so far behind Wordpress, there’s got to be at least a few Google employees who feel embarrassed about it. Naive Harmonies is on Blogger, due to the “free” part, but…I don’t know for how much longer.

The fate of Yahoo(!)
I have to admit I’m getting a little nervous about the fate of Yahoo. I guess that it’s unlikely that they’ll go completely belly-up, but it’s starting to look bad. I wouldn’t miss the mail (worst. free. email. ever), but losing Pipes would be a huge blow, and the fantasy football has been a comforting constant through the years. Here’s to hoping they get things fixed up.

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