Big Wheel

Exactly. Jurek's reviews only make sense once you start with the principle that he knows nothing about music and is constantly trying to cover for that fact by spewing BS in the manner of a college freshman.

The lack of a patch cord (to say nothing of an orchestra) is a bit of a tipoff. Wireless amplification was not exactly common back then...

Google Music Beta is free and you get about 150 GB of storage. I'm currently at about 70% uploaded of a 75 GB or so collection. (invitation required at the moment) What I hope is that one day someone codes an app allowing cloud-to-cloud file transfer. That way you can have really robust backup that allows you to quickly copy stuff from one cloud service to another.

this one? http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2008/03/24/080324fa_fact_mcgrath Couldn't happen to a nicer guy.

That would make the most sense of all but it's never going to happen. No way the NCAA and individual universities would ever give up this cash cow at this point.

I would be OK with that, though let's face it, the amount an orchestra makes the university is effectively zero compared with the average D I-A football program. Most college football players may be dickish meatheads but they are still effectively getting exploited by a system that makes millions of dollars off them for universities while requiring them to risk injury for no pay. Your average university endowment fund manager makes in the high six to seven figures for the money he brings to the university by being a spreadsheet jockey all day and making smart investments. College athletes are also the source of huge amounts of revenue and yet make nothing. But to me the most realistic way to handle this isn't to pay student-athletes - it's to stop making them be students. Let them take a class or two if they want for free just like employees can at many universities.

http://www.michaelei...rg/blog/?p=358# Very interesting! Thanks BW! Granted, this is only what Marketplace sellers use. Amazon's own algorithm is almost certainly much "smarter" even if it does still occasionally lead to big price swings. Does anyone want to try a little experiment with the "Tell us about a lower price" button? If so PM me.

Now $53.31! Now it's all the way back down to $14.11. :blink: The price of this has been dropping like a rock day by day these past several weeks. It won't get much lower... I think. Thanks for the Nat King Cole repost. I missed it the first time. Sweet! No problem, the day after I posted about this, it was at $54. I think some other people who saw this post probably bought copies too. Just received a notice from Amazon that this shipped. Moral: When you see a great deal like this, grab it. Delivered today; it's now $71.98 on Amazon. I don't know if this has always been true, but there have been some big price fluctuations on Amazon, not just at usual sale times (like Christmas) but day to day and week to week. It's surprising--at east to me. Another example: my wife wanted a KitchenAid mixer and sent me a link (a gentle hint ). While I mulled over this state of affairs I checked back on Amazon a few days later; price had dropped more than $20. It seems to pay to check the pricing over a few days time. Amazon seems to be pursuing the pricing game that airlines now use, where seat prices will fluctuate up or down depending on a host of factors on an almost continuous basis. I'm sure they are using some sort of algorithm to set pricing. No more "set it and forget it." That's some crazy algorithm they're using there. http://www.michaeleisen.org/blog/?p=358#

That's virtually nothing to most division I programs. As a Miami Hurricanes fan I take great joy in Tressel's disgrace but it's really long past time we dispensed with the economic charade that is big-name college athletics. Just pay the players fair market wages (which is a lot, a TON more than Spurrier's $300/game) and make it a junior NFL. They ain't learning anything anyway 95% of the time, so stop making them enroll. Universities pay their development offices and food service people and so forth-time to treat their football players as the employees they are.

Any chance you can tell what model the speaker in the picture is? I really can't afford this right now but a friend is likely swinging through Tucson in, of all things, a big RV this week. Trying to decide how crazy it would be to buy the thing sight unseen...

I wonder if your local DNS server might be having problems. You might try clicking the following links and then pasting them directly into your browser address bar. If there is a noticeable performance difference, you might want to change the DNS server being used. http://68.71.208.25/ http://espn.go.com/

It could be any number of things. It's possible that it's simply that your computer is getting slower. Windows accumulates a lot of crap that slows machines to a crawl after a couple of years. But Facebook and Twitter could be culprits as well because they are constantly using bandwidth to get new updates and so forth - that could be slowing down your connection. I would at a minimum clear IE's cache and cookies, or switch browsers entirely to see if that speeds things up. If you are using a laptop, you should also make sure that the laptop isn't having any power/temperature problems. My laptop was performing atrociously until I finally installed a temperature monitor and realized that tons of accumulated dust inside the machine was causing it to overheat and automatically slow down to protect itself.

Haven't these things been made for years? I'm pretty sure I've seen companies sell soda mixes as a complement to their seltzer makers, though maybe nobody's been slick enough to market them all together as a single concept. The main flaw if I had to guess is that the mixes usually taste like crap. Or at least not enough like name brand flavors for people to want to drink them. Plus homemade soda isn't portable like a can is so you can't bring it to work/fishing/bbqs etc.

It's just the glass (I have the same Duvel tulip). Trois Pistoles is a Belgian-style strong dark ale made by Unibroue in Canada. I've been cellaring a bottle of it for about 3 years now!

Are they allowing new signups or is this only available to current members? I let my subscription lapse in 2006.

Let's put it this way: it's reasonable for an Amazon customer to expect that 70% of the reviews for Led Zeppelin III are going to be from diehard Led Zeppelin fans. It's reasonable for them to expect that 70% of the reviews of All Music are going to be from diehard Warne Marsh fans. It's not reasonable to figure that they're going to expect that 70% are from Organissimo forum members who happen to interact with Chuck all the time. Obviously there are lots of shades of gray here, but this does make a difference in credibility IMO.

No, but IMO it's ethical to disclose your personal friendship with Chuck when doing so. Not exactly because I think there would be a conflict of interest, but because reviewers owe it to readers to provide some information about who is doing the reviewing. A cousin of mine wrote a bestselling novel and I read it and thought it was great. I gave it 4 stars out of 5 on goodreads.com and wrote a nice review, and also disclosed that the author was a family member. What if all 30 Goodreads reviews were from members of my family and none of us had disclosed that fact? It's not like my cousin kicks back percentages of his book sales to me, but anyone who discovered that our family was spamming Goodreads would instantly think that the skewed distribution was fishy and a possible indicator that the book sucks. A lot of this is just about having a basic level of respect for consumers of information on the Internet. People come to Amazon expecting the reviews to be from an organic cross-section of the public. That's why I'll never buy another Terry McAuliffe book again - NOT because he exploits his friendships and his power relationship over his employees to juice his Amazon reviews, but because the juicing shows he has no respect for his readers' ability to sift through information and decide for themselves whether they should buy his book.

Not spam if you use the strict definition of "purely commercial, dishonest and unsolicited garbage communication used to sell more garbage." But if you use a more flexible definition that encompasses stuff like advertising clickspam, such as "using organized means to abuse or take advantage of systems that rely on crowdsourced data," then things start to look rather dicier. When I worked at Giant Megacorporation™ back in the day, there was once a magazine article critical of Giant Megacorporation making the rounds that we all agreed was factually inaccurate and unfair to us. One of my stupider coworkers wanted us to all visit Digg and give this article the thumbs down so it would be "buried" and Digg users would have a harder time seeing it. In my book, that kind of manipulation, however heartfelt and just, is clearly a form of spam. One other point is worth making: -Those of us who think spamming Amazon reviews is a bad idea are also on Chuck's side here. David's original post didn't say "this is categorically evil and wrong", it suggested that we keep this kind of thing to a tasteful minimum because going overboard may well backfire on Chuck. As an independent label, it seems like Nessa probably wants to position itself as the little label that puts out great, impeccably and honestly produced music in contrast to the majors for whom filthy lucre is everything. If that reputation is tarnished, that can have serious repercussions on Chuck's bottom line just as much as any stupid Amazon review can.

Very much agreed. +1. While the bad review sucks and is not particularly fair to Chuck, it would also be bad to see the board turned into a conduit for obvious reviewspam. After reading Terry McAuliffe's hideously written What a Party! I went over to Amazon to see what people thought about it. To my surprise not only were there lots of glowing reviews from McAuliffe's famous buddies like Paul Begala, but there was this one from a guy who looks like a normal reviewer - except that in the book itself, McAuliffe mentions a person by that name who happens to be his own personal driver. Before I realized that, I thought that McAuliffe was just a bad writer - now I think he's a manipulative jerk who encourages his own employees to juice his book sales at the expense of the public.

They will also cost you about $15 in tax if you go into the store in New York. Anyway, the high shipping cost is one more reason I like to wait to see if they drop the price further.

Well, sort of. J&R is selling lots of RVGs for $5.99 right now and it looks like everything in the Mosaic box except for Indeed is offered at that price point. Lots of other good stuff too, although I am holding out to see if they offer all of these under one of their "2 for $10" deals in May.

I would say the legal considerations are minimal, if not non-existent. That's never stopped our aspiring barristers exalted moderators before...

A last minute heads up for android users-the tunein (radiotime) app pro version is free for the next hour or so. I am a big fan of the regular free version which gets tons of radio stations...looks like the pro version allows you to record anything you hear to your phone. Good stuff. In case it wasn't clear, you can get the app from the amazon android app store, not the regular android market.

Uniqlo and BN? Holy crap, it's true: hipsters ARE ruining everything.

You are all very welcome. It shows that it pays to maintain (and regularly check) a wishlist on Amazon. Or you could use the Amazon price tracker at camelcamelcamel.com, which sends you emails or tweets automatically when the price of stuff on your list goes below a certain level. My new favorite site.