Fract and Music
One problem with a really stable system is that you don't notice when your init scripts are broken. Fract have been down for the last few days. It happened that it wasn't properly restarting after a power cycle... It should be OK now but don't hesitate to annoy me by email if things aren't working as expected.
Now lets talk about music. Most music today is complete crap. Musicians stick to "the formula", always the same playtime, the same instruments, the same verse/chorus alternation, the same... The best artists can produce excellent stuff but for some reason they won't refrain from publishing the crap too, and they publish a lot of it... Take Wumpscut as an example, Draussen and Totmacher is among the most brilliant music since Beethoven but if you are dumb enough to just drop the CD in your player and push play you'll fall on crap like Wolf and Mortal Highway. Worst, there is plenty of random noisish padding like Phase Shifter and Beleive in Me. Am I suppose to care that you recorded the sound test of your latest reverb pedal? This guy must be smart, can he really not tell what is crap and what is good?
And if you pick a random artist, the good/crap ration drops really fast. The obsolete CD distribution is probably to blame for that. Would you pay 20$ for 2 songs? Probably not, nevertheless people like to pay 20$ for 2 good song plus a bunch of padding tracks. But what do you expect, that people won't notice how low the good/crap ration is? No wonder that people turned to file sharing and Internet stores. And there is the RIAA, who made themselves obsolete, who prefer to sue people instead of adapting. RIAA try to destroy the public domain and the the fair use in hope that people won't notice the extent of the lie.
To boycott the RIAA is a duty, if we let them have their way they'll destroy the concept of folklore and free culture. But they more of less control radio stations and with the current good/crap ratio radios play a really important filtering role. When I first tried to get RIAA free music the only sources were managed by relativist utopians who believed that all music was created equal. The good/crap ratio was lowest than if you had bought random CDs from a music store. After all record companies will at least try to put one "good" song per CD.
So I decided to listen to no music instead of listening to RIAA and/or crap music. Now let's all rejoice because I finally found a RIAA free radio that will cherry pick the good stuff and filter out the crap. Epiphany Radio plays really good ambient techno and all the music is certified 100% RIAA free. Most songs are lyrics free which makes Epiphany a pretty good background when working. The 128k stream is reliable with really few glitches. So far I'd rate it 7.5/10. At some point people will hopefully stop releasing the crap stuff, Beethoven didn't release his crappy experiments after all. Until then we will probably need radios.
Where do you find your RIAA free, non-crap music?