Over the weekend I’ve felt a sudden urge to listen to one of Ben Harper’s records. I went to iTunes to check the price and availability - $17.99NZ for a DRM-ed version. Ahem… A bit pricey compared to what I’ve seen in Amazon MP3 downloads - $8.99US for unrestricted MP3 version. Of course, I knew Amazon shop is US only, but nevertheless I clicked the 
button to make sure they really didn’t want my money. Turned out they didn’t:
We are sorry…
We could not process your order because of geographical restrictions on the product which you were attempting to purchase. Please refer to the terms of use for this product to determine the geographical restrictions.We apologize for any inconvenience this may have caused you.
I understand that Amazon and music labels treat that project as an experiment and after it proves to work it will be (hopefully) extended to other countries as well, but without a given time line when that could happen, it’s really hard to accept iTunes conditions. Beside it, it doesn’t really take a lot of special powers to predict that a globally accessible MP3 shop offering what Amazon currently does, would beat iTunes hands down and could easily become a standard in music distribution. Come on Apple, Amazon - you can’t overcharge like that or make clients jump through hoops when illegal sources are so easily reachable.
So, guess what?! Nobody got my money and I’ll leave it to you to guess to what I’m listening right now. Oh, and of course I’ll buy that album as soon as Amazon or any other shop offers me the same deal the US residents get.
It’s up to you - that’s what Radiohead say when you ask how much is their latest album. The album is released in 2 versions: as download and as discbox. The discbox is basically ÂŁ40 worth of goodies which is a bit pricey, however the download version costs… as much as you wish to pay for it + credit/debit charge. I’m not the biggest fan of Radiohead, but I loved the idea so much that I ordered the download straight away. I declared ÂŁ5 as my price - it’s about $10 at the moment so somewhere around what I would have to pay in the Amazon MP3 Downloads. I wonder if my order was accepted if I declared that I want to pay ÂŁ0.01? Anyway, cool marketing idea - I wouldn’t buy a Radiohead album otherwise…
I use Google Spreadsheets to let everyone interested how my blood test results look from week to week. It’s so cool that you can just publish them for everyone to see. Today I have been playing with charts and as a result of that, you can see how my white cell count looks since I have started taking Glivec. It would be nice if the chart could be created as a separate sheet but it’s really a minor thing. From the first moment that I started using Google Docs it was pretty obvious that feature-wise it will be very hard to replace full blown desktop applications. Unless… there is enough added value that desktop apps cannot offer. For me there are three things that provide exactly enough additional functionality to dump desktop spreadsheet. First of them is the collaboration tools (sharing the document with others for editing), the second is the possibility to publish the document as a website for everyone to look at and the last feature that is rather hard to manage on desktop is revision management. So, I’m a complete convert - I’ll never buy M$ Office (not that I ever have).
On the leukemia-side-of-things - seems like currently I’m slightly below the norm but it also looks like my blood is stabilising and I hope that in coming weeks it will climb up a bit.
