Earlier this week, I tried out http://www.puretracks.com/ to get a taste for paying for digital music. Overall, the experience was a good one. Absolutely no problem purchasing three interesting tracks, paying for them, downloading them or playing them. I haven't tried burning them to a CD yet, but that will be next.

Puretracks sells their music at an average price of $1.39 Canadian per song. iTunes and other American services sell theirs at 99 cents per song. On a per-song basis, that is still a touch too high. Having said that however, with per-album prices at $9.99 and $13.99 at puretracks, consumers are definitely better off buying their albums online that at the retail store.

The selection at puretracks was a bit disappointing. For instance, I could only find 20 albums available in the hip-hop and rap category (and less than 90 albums for the entire urban category, which includes R&B). Perhaps I'm not looking in the right place.

The service advertises 175,000 tracks... that works out to something like only 10,000 albums. I don't know what percentage of “all albums” 10,000 is, but it is probably less than 10%...

The next time there is a full-album I am dying to get, I would be tempted to buy it at puretracks and burn it myself. But I doubt I will be filling my hard drive with thousands of singles from their service any time soon. One thing I wonder about is what happens when my computer crashes (hard drive fails) as they often do. Do I lose my entire investment in music?

Man oh man, it's been a tough week this week.

After a good four-day weekend for Christmas, on Monday morning I woke up with a serious cold/flu. And the darn thing has not let go of me all week. Here I am on Saturday night, and I still feel like crap.

Thank God for the New Year's holiday. I took Friday off, so I had another four-day weekend. My wife and I headed for Niagara Falls for a couple of days of fun, and I cleaned up at the casino. Cha-ching, baby! Nothing cures the flu like a good couple of days at the Blackjack tables.

I was planning on going to New York for the long weekend, but the illness meant I had to put the trip off. Too bad. I was really looking forward to seeing New York again.

I have had that song, “Hey Ya” by Outkast, in my head all day. Shake it, shake it, shake it like a Polaroid picture.

The people of Polaroid are not idiots. They immediately signed up Outkast to promote their products, and judging from the lyric repeating in my head all day, this will work. Perhaps Outkast mentioned their product in his song on purpose hoping for a marketing deal?

It's amazing what you discover when you are just poking around google for nothing in particular.

From this interesting article at Discovery Online called “Why We Fear Nuclear Power and Not Peanut Butter“:

“...you're more likely to die from the natural carcinogens in peanut butter than from living next to a nuclear power plant.“

There are several amazing statistics buried in that article. For instance, 1 in 50 people will die in a car crash. I guess I will have to try harder to keep the speedometer below 140 kph (85mph) on my morning 40 minute drive to work.

This from the BBC:

In the alert, the FDA said: "The totality of the available data showed little evidence of ephedra's effectiveness except for short-term weight loss, while confirming that the substance raises blood pressure and otherwise stresses the circulatory system.

"These reactions have been conclusively linked to significant adverse health outcomes, including heart ailments and strokes."

I mention this here because Ephedra, also known as Ma-Haung, is often an ingredient in herbal supplements. The Atkins diet relies heavily on taking daily supplements, and some people may have mistakenly chosen one that contains this dangerous drug.

The Blue Bus web log also links to an interesting article.

While reading a blog entry at DonXML's blog, I started thinking about his comment “I doubt the rate will become 100%, but I can't help but wonder what a society with 100% divorce rate will be like.”

The divorce rate statistics we all hear in the news from time to time are probably a bit misleading. Let's look at an example. Imagine that there are 200 people in a society, 100 men and 100 women. They each get married (to each other), so you have 100 marriages.

90 out of those 100 marriages last a lifetime. 10 out of 100 end in divorce. Simple math tells us that there is a 10% divorce rate, right? Based on this example, that is true.

But imagine if the 10 couples who got divorced got remarried and redivorced again (to different people, of course). Let's assume each of them has 4 marriages and divorces in their lifetime.

That means there are 130 total marriages in this small society, with 40 divorces. That's a 30% divorce rate! Even though 90 out of 100 of the original couples lasted a lifetime. Divorce statistics are based on total number of marriages, not total number of people. High divorce statistics are not what they seem sometimes.

Perhaps a small percentage of people (15% in North American society) are causing 100% of the divorces? Elizabeth Taylor is their leader.

ZDNet has an interesting, if slightly skewed, editorial on how, once you start using Visual Basic you can't stop. This Visual Basic addiction means the author can't get the same functionality on his Blackberry as he can on Microsoft Outlook.

Paul Vick confesses to being part of the most evil product inside the most evil company.

Really, I must say that Visual Basic is not evil, as outlined in the ZDNet article. The author is extremely happy that he has been able to create an incredible productivity enhancement macro in less than a month, but now is disappointed that his macro makes his Blackberry less useful.

That's like going on a beautiful vacation to Cancun, Mexico, and then when you return to your cold home town, blaming Cancun for it being so cold.

All the author is really saying, is that VB is so useful. “Damn you, evil VB! Damn you for making my life so easy! It was better before I knew you, because although managing my email was hard, I didn't know it could be easier.”

I think it's a case of crocodile tears, as they say.

I stumbled across an interesting editorial at the Arab News online:

But as a member of a generation that experienced the war with the Nazis, I cannot accept the principle that every war is evil. Once the Nazis had taken hold of Germany and started to carry out their aggressive designs, there was no way of stopping them other than by force of arms.

I agree. Not every war is evil. World War 2 was a just war. Hitler had to be stopped, on behalf of the millions who were being killed or oppressed as he made his way from country to country across Europe.

But can the Iraq situation compare to World War 2?

In some ways it can. There is no question that thousands of Iraqis have been killed over the years by a brutal regime. I'd even say that Hussein dug his own grave by invading Kuwait 10 years ago.

But the similarities are weak when compared to the differences. Most of the world believed Hussein had been largely declawed by George Bush Sr. The Iraqi tiger no longer posed any sort of threat to his neighbours. Really the only people suffering were his own people.

And an argument can be made that most of the Iraqi suffering over the last 10 years has been imposed by the United States and the United Nations. The trade embargo has meant that a once rich country has been reduced to poverty. Iraq, along with Cuba, proves once and for all that trade embargos only hurt the citizens and not the dictator. You'd think, though, that the citizens would revolt or something... But they don't.

In the end, it's hard to make the case that the war in Iraq was ultimately just. Tony Blair has had difficulty convincing the British public that there was a case for war. George Bush has been able, so far, to wrap himself in the American flag to stifle criticism. He also benefits from a famous American attention deficit disorder. Once Americans hear something for a few months, they get tired of it and move on.

Critics are going to have to come up with something new and original in order to get the public's attention, and just/unjust war is not it.