jameswharris

Rhapsody v. Zune v. Lala

I recently discovered Lala from reading Ed Bott’s “6 Music Services Compared: Who Can Beat the iTunes Monopoly?” Lala is the slickest way to listen to music on the web yet. And since it’s free, anyone who loves music would be crazy not to try it out. Joining Lala gets you 50 free web songs. Lala offer four ways to listen to music. First, the free one time only listen. Second, the ten cents per song to listen via the web for as many plays as you want. Third, Lala lets you buy a MP3 version of the song, at prices a bit cheaper than other sites, and finally, they help you play songs you already own through the web.

I’m already a subscriber to Rhapsody and Zune and I’ve bought music from iTunes and Amazon. Digital music continues to blossom while traditional music sales continue to tank. I never liked buying music from iTunes because I was locked in to its DRM. In fact I’ve bought so few albums from iTunes that when it came time to upgrade my computer I didn’t bother moving them, it was just more trouble than I wanted to mess with, but I have access to those albums on Rhapsody and Zune. And although I like Amazon and its unlocked songs, buying songs one at a time and trying to keep up with them is a pain. I much rather have an unlimited subscription music.

Subscription music is the least amount of hassle. From thinking of a song to playing it, takes the least amount of time.

I do have 18,000 ripped songs from my CD collection, but even it’s a pain to deal with. For instance I’m thinking about putting Linux on my second machine but that’s where I keep my music library backup. Worrying about a 192gb music collection is a real ball and chain. Also, 18,000 songs is just too limited. This past couple weeks I’ve been playing all the versions of “All Along the Watchtower” that I can find. My collection has 5 versions. Rhapsody has 153 versions, and Lala claims to have over 300, although both Lala and Rhapsody list a lot of repeats. But I have heard maybe 60+ distinct versions so far. Damn, I love that song.

Playing musical games like this just isn’t practical with iTunes or Amazon, unless I wanted to buy the songs, say $60. Lala is free to listen to any song for free once, or 10 cents for unlimited web streaming, and Rhapsody provides all I can listen for $10 a month (I pay by the year, it’s $13 a month if you pay by the month). Zune is $15 a month. Spending $28 a month for two subscription services is wasteful because of the overlap, but I used to spend at least that much a week before digital music.

Lala is great to share with friends. It’s easy to sign up and use, and it’s free to use for playing any song or album once. I’ve never gotten my friends to join Rhapsody so we can share playlists, and I don’t know any Zune users either. So Lala is great for sharing. Lala might even be good for all my listening. $10 a month means 100 web songs. On Rhapsody and Zune I never find 100 songs a month I want to replay, so if I wanted to live on $10 a month or less for my music budget, Lala would be the way to go.

Zune is great for throwing albums onto the player and carrying them around. The trouble is I don’t like playing music on the go, so I will probably cancel my Zune membership in the future. If you do love playing music on a digital player, Zune is the easiest and cheapest way to go. Dragging and dropping albums onto the player can’t be simpler.

I’m going to play with Zune for awhile longer. Like Lala and Rhapsody, it allows me to play music anywhere I have a computer and network access, but so far it’s web interface is my least favorite for playing music online. Rhapsody and Lala are much faster at queuing up a list of songs to play. And Rhapsody beats Lala in that I can queue up songs to play on my big stereo through my SoundBridge, although I play 95% of my music while working at the computer at home and work. But if I do sit down and listen to music on the big stereo, Rhapsody wins against the others, but not against CDs.

I don’t buy many CDs, only ones where I think I want to own them for life and love playing them on the big stereo. And now that I’ve discovered that Tower.com is a dirt cheap way to get CDs, I’m buying CDs again. $6.99 and $7.99 CDs are not uncommon, and at those prices I’m much rather buy the physical CD than the download.

If CD prices are low enough to beat the prices of digital music, digital subscription music then becomes the way to discover great music, and you buy the best of the best on CD to keep. I’m partial to Rhapsody, but if I was uncommitted, I’d go with Lala for discovering music and web playing. If you have a SoundBridge or Sonos system, or one of the other digital media hubs, you’ll probably want Rhapsody, but that might change. I bet Lala comes to Sonos soon.

Like I said, you’d be foolish to ignore Lala if you love music. And if you like to share songs with friends, Lala is great. I hope Lala succeeds. It has fantastic potential as a social network. Lala doesn’t have as many songs as Rhapsody but it’s growing. If there was a Lala iPhone/touch app, it would be killer.

Give Lala a try, go listen to a dozen versions of “All Along the Watchtower.”

Here is a test to see if I can share Lala.com songs via WordPress. Let me know if you could play the song okay. Lala actually provides Flash code to embed a cute little player, but WordPress strips out that code.

Jefferson Goncalves plays solo harmonica in this version of “All Along The Watchtower.”

JWH – 5/2/9

Heinlein’s 13th Scribner’s Novel

There are legions of Robert A. Heinlein fans out there that grew up reading the 12 canonical Heinlein young adult novels published by Charles Scribner’s Sons in the 1940s and 1950s, that if we were ever given three magical wishes would use our first wish to get the 13th novel. Many science fiction writers have tried to write that 13th Scribner’s novel hoping to pay it forward for the immense rewards they were given from reading the original 12 Heinlein juveniles, as they are now called.

In 2003 the Heinlein estate gave Spider Robinson the chance to write that 13th juvenile based on an outline and note cards Heinlein had developed in 1955. In 2006 Variable Star came out with Robert A. Heinlein as the first author and Spider Robinson as the second printed boldly across the top of the cover. I immediately bought the hardcover edition thinking I’d read it as soon as it arrived from Amazon, but I didn’t. I wanted it to be the 13th Scribner’s, but feared it wouldn’t. It’s taken me two and a half years to get ready.

Over the decades I have read many essays by all kinds of people explaining how their lives were affected and even shaped by reading the twelve Heinlein juveniles. Spider Robinson wasn’t specifically tasked to write the 13th, and he even explains in the afterward that he was given leeway to write pretty much anything he wanted, but I feel from reading the results that he wanted to write another Heinlein juvenile. Since Robinson includes profanity, sex and drugs, we know he wasn’t seriously writing a novel that Alice Dalgleish, Heinlein’s editor, would have accepted back in the 1950s.

On the other hand, there is so much Heinlein in Variable Star that it is obvious that Robinson does want to write a novel that Heinlein fans will love, and maybe even praise as a novel that Heinlein would have written. This is a dangerous task to take on. What if you were a writer and William Shakespeare’s estate asked you to write a new play that they could sell to the fans of Hamlet and Romeo and Juliet? I think Robinson intentionally hedged his bets and put enough of his known style and favorite topics into Variable Star so if reviews were really bad he could claim he wasn’t crazy enough to imitate Heinlein completely. But this book is stuffed to gills with Heinlein cliches.

I am 57 years old and I still try to understand why those twelve Heinlein books imprinted so strongly on my adolescent psychology. It is enticing to think about Heinlein’s formula. And it would be a fun challenge to analyze those 1950s books and try and recreate updated versions of them for the 2010s. So here’s a quick overview what I think were his essential ingredients:

All the books are about boys of high school age
In most of the stories the boys are free of parental control
Girls and romance are not part of the story
No sex or profanity
All the stories involve outer space travel
Most of the stories involve exotic aliens
Success depends on the boys and their talent
Science, math and engineering are of supreme importance
Violence is often a solution
Great things can happen to kids if they are ready

Robinson breaks several of these points in Variable Star. Joel Johnston has finished junior college and wants to get married. He drinks, gets high, has sex, and he and his friends cuss. But if Robinson had jettison the insanely stupid romantic plot, cut the boozing, drugs and cussing, this book could have been very much like a Heinlein juvenile. Robinson appears to be as romantically tone deaf as Heinlein. Many of Heinlein’s later books had characters wanting to get married ten minutes after they meet, and Robinson’s writing follows later Heinlein in dealing with the same silly male and female relationships. Both write romances that feel like they were written by eleven year old girls trying to write about sex and love.

Variable Star is not the 13th Scribner’s juvenile by Robert A. Heinlein. Alice Dalgleish would have wanted to edit out Heinlein’s reproductive organs if he had submitted this novel to her back in 1955. I will admit Variable Star had many of Heinlein’s pet ideas from the time period, and the novel is somewhat structured like a Heinlein juvenile, but it’s more of a structural copy of Starship Troopers, because both are essentially one long first person monologue. I love Starship Troopers and have read it many times. Heinlein was at his best talking straight to the reader with Starship Troopers. It’s a very hard writing style to pull off, and he never got away with it again, at least in my opinion. Sadly, it’s the number one fault of Variable Star. Since I listened to the book on audio it was all too obvious how much the narrator told the reader information and how little came through real dramatic action. I wished Robinson had copied the more restrained and dramatic first person style of Time for the Stars.

Heinlein was great on coming up with far out science fictional ideas, but he was a damn poor writer when it came to dramatic scenes and plot, and Robinson marches right along in his footsteps. For all the wrath Heinlein fans give poor Alice Dalgleish, I feel she kept Heinlein from boring his readers. Alice Dalgleish is an evil woman among Heinlein’s true fans for censoring the master’s words, but I don’t think she deserves their scorn, nor does she deserve the evil portrayal of her as Alice Dahl in Variable Star. To me grumbling from the grave is just whining after you’re dead. Google Alice Dalgleish, she’s rather obscure, but she had a major impact on children’s literature. Heinlein fans should worship her for giving them twelve cherished books from the leading American literary publisher of the time, that won all kinds of awards for their children’s line, were these books were published.

Most of the juveniles are stories written in the first person, heavy with info dumps, but they were kept under control, probably by Alice, and in the juveniles the info dumps were just long enough to teach and inspire kids without sounding like lectures. Later Heinlein and in Variable Star, all too often the story comes to a complete stop so the author can pontificate.

Variable Star should have been published with only Spider Robinson’s name on the cover. Many of my criticisms of the book would have been removed if that had been the case. Of course we’re all savvy enough to know that writers estate’s want to maximize their profits by pulling various literary gimmicks. If Variable Star had been published with only Robinson’s name on the cover, but with an intro about how he was given the Heinlein outline and note cards in a forward I would have had much more respect for the estate.

Since I bought the book in hardcover and audio, I also feel cheated that neither edition contained the actual Heinlein outline and notes. I would have had much more respect for the Heinlein estate if they allowed Robinson to publish that working outline and notes in the back of Variable Star. The book is a gimmick, and we should be allowed to see how good Robinson was at playing the game. Also, with Heinlein’s name on the cover, we should have gotten some actual Heinlein words.

Now if Variable Star had been published with only Robinson’s name, and no mention of Heinlein at all, and I read the book for its own merits then my judgment would be totally different. I think the book has many serious literary flaws, but it also has some fantastic science fictional speculation. If I had read Variable Star as a book with no link to Heinlein on the cover, or within, I still would have thought it was inspired by Heinlein and figured Robinson is one of his literary descendents. And I would have called him out on several 1950s Heinlein ideas that I feel are invalid for science fiction written after the year 1988.

Using telepaths for ship to Earth communication on slower than light spaceships following all of Einstein’s rules was a far out idea when Heinlein did it in his book Time for the Stars. And from what Robinson said about the various names Heinlein considered for Variable Star I’m guessing he didn’t use that outline because Time for the Stars is the book he wanted to write with those ideas. Since science has thoroughly trashed the concept of telepathy in humans in the succeeding decades it’s rather silly to bring back the idea. ESP is only suitable for fantasy stories, not modern science fiction.

Science has also killed many other Heinlein ideas from the 1950s, like farming on Ganymede, people being able to do astrogation calculations in their head, and faster than light travel. For Robinson to have near light speed travel, much less FTL, he has to resort to mystical mumbo-jumbo of the silliest kind. Now I don’t fault Spider Robinson too much on this though.

Diehard Heinlein true believers have total faith that FTL travel is possible even though they are reduced to counting the number of FTL drives that can fit on the head of a pin. Their religious faith depends on science finding a way around all the physics we currently know today. I’m willing to concede there may be a God, Heaven and Hell, life after death and faster than light travel, but the odds are about equal for all of them. I try not to be too critical about people’s deepest desires, but if Robinson wanted to write a cutting edge 2006 science fiction novel he should have stuck to all the rules of known science today.

Now it might seem like I’m totally trashing this novel as unworthy of reading, and I don’t want to do that. I think Variable Star does have some merits, some even equal to the sense of wonder of the 1950s Heinlein juveniles, but I can’t discuss them in detail without spoiling the story. There is a core tragedy that if the novel had been written differently could have made this novel into a major SF classic. This part of the novel made me feel totally satisfied with my purchase, even counting that I bought the book twice. Sadly, I consider it a shame that these great elements were stuck inside a gimmick novel.

Robinson narrated the audio book and did a great job. Usually I don’t like audio books read by their authors. He also includes an afterwards that makes me really like him, so I hate to be critical. We’re both lovers of Heinlein’s juveniles, which I consider a stronger bond than blood relationship. However, I’m not like many of the spiritual children of Heinlein because I rebelled against the old man. Many of my Heinlein brothers and sisters hate me for the things I say about Heinlein’s later books.

The true believers raise their hackles at any criticism of Heinlein. I had a different take on the old man. Heinlein preached science, and the lesson I learned from him is go with what’s logical and real. Heinlein threw out many hypothetical ideas to research. Most didn’t pan out, no big deal. Science moves on. Heinlein always believed mankind was the toughest varmint in this neck of the galaxy, and you can’t be tough living in your naval gazing on fantasies.

Variable Star’s many faults remind me of later Heinlein, and I can almost imagine a much older Heinlein writing Variable Star trying to recapture his glory days at Scribner’s. I think Robinson missed the mark at writing the 13th juvenile but still came very close to writing a Heinlein like novel. This can be seen as praise and insult, since I think later Heinlein is a bloated parody of younger Heinlein. I truly hate stories like The Cat Who Walks Through Walls where Heinlein dredged up cherished characters I loved in adolescence turning them into silly kissy-kissy wife-swapping swingers. I give Robinson great credit for not doing this. Robinson is far more liberal than Heinlein, and I admired those liberal qualities in Variable Star, but I wonder what Heinlein would have thought though.

This is going to sound weird, but those twelve Heinlein juvenile novels from the 1950s are sacred to me. As much as I would love to read another one I can’t. The world of 2009 is too different. Heinlein vastly improved my troubled childhood with his stories, and I will always love them, but I had to grow up. I don’t think anyone can write the 13th 1950s Heinlein Scribner’s novel in 2009. I think Alexei Panshin came closest with his 1968 novel Rite of Passage but that novel worked because I was still in my teens. Maybe a 2009 teenager will find Variable Star just as magical as I found Time for the Stars all those years ago. I think that’s possible. But for us old Heinlein fans, I don’t know.

If I was going to write a series of young adult science fiction novels for the 2010s, that I hoped would be as inspirational as the 1950s Heinlein stories had been for me, I think they should include these elements:

The lead characters could be boys or girls
The main character would still be high school age kids who find some way to live independent of their parents
Science, math and engineering would still be vitally important
I would accept the importance of sex and romance in these stories because realistically sex and romance is a huge part of teenage life, but the primary subject of the story would be sense of wonder and the future
I’m not sure what role violence would play
I could skip profanity, although I think editors accept it now in young adult novels
Success of the plot would still depend on the kids
Nearly all the ideas Heinlein had about space travel have turned out to be wrong, so it would be vitally important to invent new realistic explorations of space that kids could evaluate

This is where Robinson really missed the boat with Variable Star. By focusing on Heinlein’s peak ideas he seems to have forgotten they are over a half century old. Heinlein speculated about many things that we’ve since come to realize as completely wrong. Kids can’t built atomic rockets that take them to the Moon. There is no intelligent life on Venus and Mars. Just the radiation will keep us from farming Ganymede. And all the forms of space travel Heinlein envisioned are no more realistic than Tinkerbell’s fairy dust as a mode of transportation.

Just because science has outpaced science fiction doesn’t mean those twelve Heinlein juveniles aren’t great stories, still readable today. They have just migrated to the world of lovable childhood fantasy stories. The job of the next Heinlein is to write speculative fiction based on the science we know today. Like I said, there are some core elements of Variable Star that does this, unfortunately Robinson ruins it with a fantasy invention that fits in a plot that’s based on a sequence of way too many coincidences to be believable. I’ve read that Robinson has gotten the go ahead to write three sequels to this book. I would have loved to read those books if they were based on Variable Star’s core problem, and if the book from chapter 19 on had been different.

The idea of developing many colonized worlds through slower-than-light travel is excellent speculative matter for current science fiction. Having the main event of chapter 17 affect those worlds is another great idea for science fiction to explore. But the story needs to do it without telepathy or breaking the speed limits imposed on information. That would be a far out story worthy of many books.

Finally, hey Spider, one mention that a door dilates is cool homage to Beyond This Horizon, mentioned over and over again is just story stopping agony. One unbelievable coincidence in a novel is forgivable, but one per chapter is authorial suicide.

JWH – 4/25/9

You Don’t Know What You Have Until It’s Gone

I scratched my cornea and other parts of my left eye over a week ago, and I’ve been home with my eyes shut 98% of the time since last Monday trying to get the left eye healed. I can’t watch TV, use the computer or read. Sitting around without looking at things is very enlightening about how important sight is to my life. I totally crave doing little things I completely took for granted before. I can see out of my right eye, but it makes my left eye move, which hurts. My eye is hurting, so I need to stop writing and go back to resting it.

JWH – 4/11/9

Going Paperless 7 – Junk Mail

It’s been over a year since I started on the paperless path and my life is still full of paper. I’ve spent this Sunday shredding files with personal information. When I started this project I was mostly concerned with the tons of magazines I was getting in the mail each month. Now my mailbox is mostly magazine free, but my paper recycling bucket has plenty of paper in it every week. After canceling magazines I loved, my mailbox is still full of crap that I never wanted.

Since we bought the house my wife grew up in, we get mail for her dead parents, and after my mom died, I had all her mail forwarded here, and between our five names we get piles of unwanted mail. Hell, we got a letter the other day for a man who lived in the house before my wife’s folks bought it in 1961. We also get mail for my wife’s two brothers and several of their children. And we get mail for two very special people: occupant and resident.

I’ve tried to write some of the regular senders and inform them about the deceased, but many types of mail we get are due to our names being on endless lists. Lists that are sold from one marketing company to another. It’s harder to fight junk mail marketing than unsolicited phone calls because there is no official federal do not mail registry, like the National Do Not Call Registry. (There is a campaign, Do Not Mail, that’s collecting signatures for a petition for the federal government to create a Do Not Mail service like the National Do Not Call Registry.)

The Direct Marketing Association does offer DMAchoice.org. Of course, these are the people trying to help businesses sell you stuff, but they claim they want to develop good relations between customers and sellers, so you can register for what you don’t want or what you do. However, many marketing companies do not belong to the DMA.

I have found a number of other web sites with good advice on how to reduce the flow of junk mail:

There are pay services that will do some of this work for you, but I couldn’t find enough information about them to risk hiring them. All these advice sites require work, and some of the advice requires contacting agencies and giving them your SSN. I’m still mentally debating that.

I have joined DMAchoice.org but it’s not simple to use like the National Do Not Call Registry, but it is helpful. DMAchoice divides junk mail into four categories: Credit Offers, Catalogs, Magazine Offers and Other Mail Offers. This service helps you to add or remove your address from hundred of member companies mailing lists, or it helps get you onto lists that warns companies not to market to you at all. But it’s not perfect. Any company that you buy from, or subscribe to, will continue to send sales offers to you. For example, I buy from L. L. Bean, and I get catalogs all the time in the mail, and emails about specials. And my wife would probably get mad at me if I canceled the J. C. Penny’s sale catalogs. DMAchoice.org expects you to take notes on what you get in the mail and work carefully to thin things out. Also, DMAchoice.org has a service to stop junk mail to deceased recipients.

I get a lot less mail than I did a year ago. Because I quit subscribing to magazines, I get far fewer offers in the mail. I’ve even had a rare day of getting no mail whatsoever, and on many days my red Netflix envelope is the only thing in the box. I bet my mailman loves me, if he’s not worried about losing his job. If only I could only convince him not to deliver those weekly bundle of local ads.

Going paperless takes work, a lot of work. Maybe a year from now I’ll have the junk mail under control. Not only will that save trees, keep carbon out of the atmosphere, but it will save me time. I’ve already saved a lot of time by paying bills automatically through bank drafts, so most of the mail I do process now is junk mail. However, I still get lots of printouts from Blue Cross Blue Shield after each doctor’s visit, and those monthly statements from my banks. And some companies that I pay by bank draft want to send me their statements anyway, which is a total waste.

My paper recycle bin will always have paper in it because of product packaging, but the amount I put out by the curb gets smaller over time. In today’s society where most people have a computer, there’s little reason to deal with the printed word. Email has replaced the letter, and now the web is replacing catalog shopping. I read far more news stories on the web than I do in magazines and newspapers. Instead of printing out copies of things I want to save, I just make a .pdf and file it away. Eventually, I think most of the communications we get in our mailbox can be processed digitally, including any junk mail that we might actually want.

JWH – 3/29/9

Fuel For Writing

It’s been awhile since I’ve posted anything on Auxiliary Memory. I’ve started several essays but never finished any. I also started a diet. I’ve notice over the years that there’s a relationship between calories and the number of words I produce. Cookies, cokes, cakes and candy fuel my mind for writing. Dieting leaves my brain lethargic, suitable only for watching TV. And man have I been watching TV this past two weeks! I’ve seen 33 episodes of Battlestar Galactica. I had to boost my Netflix from 1 disc at a time to 3 to keep up with my hunger for more shows, watching up to 4 episodes a night.

The difference between being active and passive is junk food. But since I’ve ballooned to 237 pounds I can’t keep feeding my creative drive. And those healthy fruits and vegetables just don’t stoke the fire to crank out words. I’ve got to find some kind of discipline to get back into writing. Without sweet calories, I guess I need to learn how to push myself by will-power alone.

Of course, I’ve got to ask myself why write at all? Not to mention the fact that I’ve been mentally beating myself up for the last couple years for writing on the blog instead of working on fiction. Blog writing is like practicing the piano. It’s very good for mental health. For the last decade I’ve been forgetting more and more words, and even how to pronounce them. When I started blog writing that boosted my ability to remember.

Getting old has other side affects besides the slowing of brain access speeds. There is a tendency to solidify thoughts in old age, so if you’re not careful you’ll parrot your frozen opinions whenever a response is needed. Exploring concepts in a blog helps break down comfortable old opinions into their basic parts so you can start over and remodel the rooms in your brain.

All this new thinking requires energy and time. My best time to write is mornings, but Monday through Friday I have work, and often on the weekends I have personal obligations. Writing at night requires lots of extra calories. The obvious solution is to get up at 4 or 5 in the morning and write before work, but right now I don’t have that kind of discipline. My body naturally wants to sleep until 6:30 am when the cats start meowing for their breakfast.

There are alternative fuels for writing. Sometimes playing loud music can stimulate my brain cells. Other times reading an inspiring article and taking a short nap to digest the thoughts will get me to jump up and start writing. I’ve never had the mental energy to write like a professional writer, that is to stick to writing like working a 9 to 5. Real writers can write when they’re not in the mood, or when they lack the energy. Real writers can’t not write, but I don’t have that demon.

One way or another I’ve got to find the energy to write. I would be tempted by artificial stimulants, but my old body can’t even handle caffeine anymore. I know I can’t stop writing because my mind would quickly start sliding downhill again.

JWH – 3/29/9