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Amazon issued a press release announcing that they'll be expanding their DRM-free MP3 music store internationally in 2008. No exact dates are specified though.

It's good to hear that there may soon be a place to buy music that is ethical, legal, and sensible.

Here's where I think that other options fail:

not sensible

Apple's iTunes has been gradually getting ridding of DRM, which improves its sensibility. (After all, what kind of sense does it make for "pirates" to offering an unambiguously better quality product than the labels themselves).

Even with reduced DRM, iTunes is difficult to use for those without iPods and completely unusable if running and operating system like Linux. It's also obnoxious. How many times do I need to delete the perpetually reoccurring iTunes and Quicktime icons from my desktop? Will it ever act like a standard Windows application?

questionable ethics

Russian stores like AllofMP3 offer downloads in MP3 format and may even be legal. However, they seem to fail on the ethical front. The artists are not currently being compensated.

It's not quite as bad as it sounds. They sell tracks at roughly the same rate as you'd pay if you could buy legal CD by the track in Russia. Russian copyright law also allows them to sell any music, but requires them to collect a royalty to pay the artists. Apparently they're collecting this money, although the rights-holding agencies in North America aren't unhappy with the royalties set by Russia.

When I moved out from my parents place I was reasonably consistent as far as cooking my own food went. I think that the last few weeks of work on my M.Sc. thesis did me in though.

Now if I look at the fridge, what do I find?

• Condiments
• Coke
• Pickles
• V8
• Cheese
• Brita-filter pitcher half-full with water

I really can't remember the last time that I went grocery shopping.

23andMe: I'd heard about this company a while ago, but now it's available to Canadians. Basically you:

1. spit,
2. send the saliva to California,
3. pay $999 for them to sequence parts of your genome,
4. get a report telling you:
   
   1. all the terrible diseases you're likely to contract,
   2. whether the computer thinks that its likely that you're an idiot, and
   3. whether or not you're likely to win the Boston marathon anytime soon, and
5. debate the privacy implications of a company having your genetic profile on file

Step E is the one that I'm wondering about. The CBC has more details on this company.

Outside of the smallish group of folks with whom I hung out with regularly during my high school years, the most frequent guess of former classmates has been that I majored in English in university. Oddly enough, some of them can remember specific things I was forced to make for English class. (I survived English by taking it seriously non-seriously... submitting well-formed assignments on the most ridiculous topics that I could think of).

Given that my field of study falls in the sciences - notoriously bad at communication - I tend to take people's assumptions of Dave the English major as a compliment. However English is probably the subject that I felt least inclined to major in. In fact the only reason that I took Philosophy at university was that the only alternative was English. I hated English for overanalyzing literature and its commitment for rules, when I think that English is one of the few areas where rules are meant to be broken.

That said, titles on my shelves include: On Writing Well, The Elements of Style, Orson Scott Card on Characters and Viewpoint, a book on Plot, and a number of other books in a similar vein in addition to an increasing amount of classic fiction.