Baby Shower for Tamie

May 26, 12:56
We had a surprise baby-shower for Tamie. While she was away for lunch, we put up decorations in the room. See members.shaw.ca/asln/2006may26/index.html for more photos.

Buying Songs from the iTMS

On Sunday, May 21st, I bought music from the iTunes Music Store for the first time ever. I had been holding back from buying because I am opposed to the copy protection that iTunes uses, the prices are a bit high, and I dislike the way the music publishing companies run their business (setting unfair usage limits, taking away ownership from the original authors, overcharging, lobbying for stricter laws, etc). This time I had finally found an album that I felt was worth buying. The artist goes under the name "Bassic" and he had previously given away several tracks of his electronic music on MP3.com which I downloaded in 1999/2000 and liked very much. Furthermore, he does not appear to be under the thumb of a major publisher. On iTunes he had his 1991-2003 complete collection of 89 tracks for $49.95. That works out to 56 cents each track, but still $8.76 per hour of music.

Bassic's music was a long time coming to the Canadian iTunes store; I had seen Bassic's collection in the US iTunes store a year ago and wondered why it took them so long to get it on the other
countries' stores. The bonus is that the Canadian price is cheaper than the US price: they charge $49.95 US ($56.18 at current exchange rates).

It took almost 2 hours to download the 5 hours and 42 minutes worth of music. Then I started the task of removing the iTunes copy protection. I burned the songs to CD rewriteables and copied them back to my harddrive in a lossless filetype ("FLAC" format) for archiving. I also converted them to unprotected MP3 files for regular use. It was a time-consuming procedure, as I had to manually re-input the track titles and other metadata. I probably won't be buying any more songs from iTMS for a while.

Museum of Anthropology

These photos are from February 19th, 2006. I drove out to the Museum of Anthropology at UBC with Jan (who was visiting us from New York), Lisa and Paul. Lisa and Paul have student cards, so they could get in for free, and we had some other free passes for myself and Jan. We were there from 12:50 until 1:50pm.




Left to right: Paul, Jan and Lisa.

Library Show

April 28, 2006, 12:25
There were a few groups of dancers performing in the mall area outside the Vancouver Central Library entrance. I only watched for about 5 minutes.

Two Retirements

April 25, 2006, noon:
We had a retirement send-off for both Paul Owen (guy on left) and Lorne Anderson (the guy on the right). Paul Devine gave a little speech talking about Paul's career with TD, and Chris Mortier talked about Lorne's long history with the bank.

We all gathered on the second floor. Then we had Chinese food for lunch. I think the food was brought in from Victoria Restaurant.

Latest CD: Head Hunters

May 2nd, 2006:
This is the cover art for the latest CD I've borrowed from the public library: Head Hunters, by Herbie Hancock, published in 1973. This is the 1109th music CD that I've borrowed since March 2005.

When I was in elementary school, I only knew of Herbie Hancock through his electronic music. It was only last year that I learned that he had a long career as a jazz musician prior to his popular hit, "Rockit" in the 1980's.

Granville Street

April 26, 2006, 12:27
A portion of Granville Street downtown (from Hastings to Robson St.) has been closed down to vehicle traffic, except for construction crews, since April 24th. They're doing work on the new rapid transit system, which I guess will be an underground track.