When I’m done with the series, I’ll be printing off some fat head stickers to put on my wall at work. 2′x4′, 1″x2″ & 1/2″ x 1″ will probably be the sizes… Let me know if you’re interested in one. If I get enough interest, I might print enough to put some up for sale (not for profit, just enough to cover printing/shipping costs).

My wife broke her phone last week, and I spent about an hour in the AT&T store waiting to be helped. I played with the iPhone almost the entire time. When I first saw the display, my only thought was, “Oh yeah… I guess AT&T is the exclusive iPhone service provider… huh…” and then I just moved right on past and started looking at the other phones.

I found the pink Razor my wife wanted (she was sick, and waiting in the car). I waited and waited for a salesman so I could make my purchase. I tried to look at the sweet windows mobile phone my Dad has, but you couldn’t even slide it open to test it out (stupid) and I was shocked to see that it was almost $600. This phone had been the phone I was planning on getting for my Christmas present (Julie and I buy our Christmas presents from each other for ourselves each year), but not with that price tag on it.

Finally, thoroughly bored, and sick of the crappy music some kid had left the iPhone blaring, I went over to the display to try and figure out how to make it shut up. I’m sad to admit it took me a bit (probably 30 seconds) to figure out how to turn off the Macy Gray crap crackling the (what sounded to be blown) speakers. I instantly disliked the UI, but I can’t now remember why. Probably that there were no real menus or anything like that. Oh, and I couldn’t fine the stylus and was disgusted by how nastily smeared up the screen was.

I stopped the music, and then pressed the square button at the bottom thinking that would turn it off, or give me some sort of menu with options (I didn’t care which). It didn’t. I was presented with the home screen. Ok… Hrm… No games… “Text” (boring…) “Calendar” (boring…) “Photos” (who cares, I have a digital camera) “Camera” (couldn’t that have been part of photos?) “YouTube” (really? hrm… intriguing…) *click*

I am presented with a bunch of videos. Cool. That could be entertaining for a while… I’m not really up for watching youtube videos in the middle of a store at the moment though, so I click back on the home button.

“Stocks” (boring) “Maps” (sweet… That could could be helpful) *click*

Google maps pops up and I start playing with it. I’m a sucker for Google maps, and I see that it has the “satellite” view. I start flying around the country looking at things for a few, and then click the home button to see what other treats there might be.

“Weather” (meh… not completely useless) “Clock” (boring…) “Calculator” (always useful) “Notes” (oh… wait… where is the keyboard???) *click*

I pop open the little note pad, and start trying to type in a test sentence with my thumbs. It is extremely awful. Where is the freaking stylus? I horribly misspell every single word as my fat thumbs jab at the tiny little pictures of letters crammed at the bottom of the screen. I somehow managed to type in “Mac sux, and so does this” before I put the phone down completely disgusted, and walked away.

At this point the loud business man with the blue tooth ear piece looking for a blackberry-like cellphone who had been monopolizing the salesman’s time walked over to the iPhone display. He started asking questions about it and tried to type in a note. He started complaining about the keyboard immediately(who wouldn’t?). He then exclaimed, “bah… Too high tech geeky for me! I need something that just works” and walked back over to the blackberry a few phones down. On his way he got a phone call and started talking noisily on his phone.

The salesman rolled his eyes and turned towards me. “I’m sorry, I’ll be with you very shortly.”

He wasn’t helping the guy at the moment, so I asked, “Do you guys have the stylus for the iPhone?”

“Doesn’t come with one. Apple made it to be used only with one index finger, cradling it in your other hand.” (turns out this isn’t entirely true)

“Wow… ok…”

At that point he started helping the guy again, and I wandered a bit more.

Over the next 45 minutes I wandered back to the display again and again. Each time staying a bit longer, and each time I left staying away a little shorter. By the time they got around to helping me, I was sad that I had to pull myself away from the phone.

I began asking questions about the data plan and price, and found that it was shockingly affordable (it was only $50 more than the phone we were buying Julie, and over $200 less than the one I was already looking at for Christmas), and I was happy to hear that it would interact with my home wifi and that I got unlimited data transfer over the phone even when not on wifi. It had a web browser, and it was even an iPod. It was like a little web surfing, music/movie, phone. It was… wait… no… oh the horror… it was awesome!

Saturday afternoon I went back and bought it (very early Christmas present). I went straight home and activated it. I called my brother as soon as it was activated and told him about it. I looked up show-times for a movie. I lay in bed that night watching youTube videos until the battery almost died. I checked my e-mail while furniture shopping the next day. I looked up coupons for the furniture store while looking around. I listened to music while mowing the lawn when I got home. I downloaded the Rush Limbaugh podcast and watched/listened to it while I cooked dinner and cleaned my computer room. I ripped King Kong off of a DVD I had bought and watched it that night while I went to sleep (and then finished it this morning while I went through my morning routine). I used it so much that the battery didn’t get completely charged until Sunday night, and it has run all the way down and back up about five or six times now. I love this little phone.

It has so many features I like that surprised me, and only a few that really pissed me off (no flash??? What the heck were they thinking?). The battery life is lacking (although it charges extremely quickly), and it irritates me that I can’t plug my normal headphones into it (I hate earbuds, and want to use my normal sound-canceling over the ear headphones).

All in all it’s a crazy tight little phone. I guess I will have to admit that I think Mac sucks a little less now…

Today’s conspiracy theory? Microsoft is paid by the “record industry” to play certain songs through windows media player more than others whilst WMP is on “random” mode.

Why did my mind suggest this to me?

Simple. I just bought 7 cds at Half Price Books that I have never owned before, as well as loading 8 (or more) cds into my computer to add to the current 8 gigs of music that I legaly own that I burned off of cds (again, RIAA, pay attention, that I own). lol…

Anyways, so I’ve got right around 10gb of music on my computer. I put EVERY SONG into one playlist, UNRATED. Which means the computer has no idea whatsoever what songs I like better than other songs.

Now, since these are new CDs, there is no way I can know which songs on the cds I like the best having not heard them all. So one would assume that out of the 3gb of music I have just placed on my computer, roughly 2/3 of this music I should have never heard before. So this means that I should only recognize 1 out of every 3 songs, correct? WRONG.

I have been listening ALL MORNING and have only “not recognized” maybe 4 songs (this is probably an over-estimate). Huh? How does that work?

On top of that, the songs I do recognize are (well, were, since it is mostly old music) extremely popular.

What’s going on?

I then notice that all of the songs have “ghost ratings” which means that M$ has taken the average rating from all of it’s users who have this same song and shown it to me in gray. I can then override that rating with my own, which will show up in gold/yellow.

This shows that there is indeed some sort of “internet connection” happening, highlighted by the fact that all of the CD covers/song titles/band names were downloaded for me upon ripping the music.

So, what is going on? Why am I not hearing songs I don’t recognize?

In reality it is probably because I just happen to know a lot more music than I would like to let myself believe, and that I really only wouldn’t recognize about 1/10 or 1/20 of my music rather than the 2/3 I thought.

In overactive imagination land it is probably because M$ is paid by the record industry to (during random playback) ensure that certain artists and songs are played more often than other artists and songs, and that the more “the industry” pays for certain artists/songs the more likely you are to hear that artist/song.

This doesn’t have to be an ongoing thing. M$ could have a price sheet that says “$10,000 to have your song have a 5x play rating, $7,000 for a 4x, $5,000 for a 3x, $3,000 for a 2x, $0 for a 1x”. Then forever and ever your song will have whatever rating you paid for. M$ then plays 5x songs most often, followed by 4x, etc. So that out of 22 songs 7 would be 5x, 5 would be 4x, 4 would be 3x, 3 would be 2x, 2 would be 2x, and 1 would be 1x (or something like that, could be out of 40 or 50).

This is a double edged sword. It is advantagious for the user as well as the CD company. The CD company pays for the invisible star rating, these are normally going to be the “really good” or the “really popular” songs. Then when you load a bunch of music on your computer and play it you are more likely to be happy with what is played, and the “industry” has a small amount of control over which songs you are hearing.

What’s in it for them? Why would they do this? To get you to buy the cd. Let’s face it, there are millions upon millions of GB out there of illegal music. Pretty much every nerd/geek/hacker/computer user I know has at one point downloaded/borrowed/gotten through less than legal means music.

So, if you know that people are out there listening to your music illegally, what would be the smartest thing to do? Make sure they listen to your more than someone else’s. Eventually, chances are, once they have the money, they will buy your crap. There are many many reasons people steal music. I won’t pretend to know what the number 1 reason is, but I would be my collection that somewhere in the top 5 is “I just can’t afford it right now”.

Can you picture some 30 something making 100k a year risking his net worth by downloading illegal music? F-NO. Not if he/she is smart. Especially if they have kids.

So, this means that it’s mostly just a bunch of young kids with nothing to lose really. Ok, so what happens when they grow up, and get something to lose (family, job, house, car, junk)? They start behaving a little better.

So when that happens, if you are the industry, you want to make sure that they keep hearing your music so that at this point they might go “hrm… I have a bunch of illegal music, what happens if RIAA comes after me? I lose… well… everything. So maybe I should clean out my collection and purchase my favorite stuff”. Well, their “favorite stuff” is probably going to be the stuff they heard the most. Which means the stuff with the 5x rating. Which is why “the industry” would pay M$ to play their music more than other people’s music.

Oh, and if you keep hearing Maroon 5 (with a 4x rating), then when they come out with a new CD you are more likely to buy it, which is why Sister Hazel never plays in your playlist, they didn’t pay the piper and now they have a 0x rating where Matchbox 20 has a 3x and plays almost as often as Jack Johnson and Snow Patrol who have a 4x, but not quite as often as Keane’s “Frog Prince” which has a 5x (while the rest of the Keane CD only has a 3x, which is why you don’t hear any of their other songs that much). Get it? Got it. Good.

So yeah, I know all of this is paranoia, but now that I have explored it further… why wouldn’t Microsoft do this? No reason I can think of…

(Note: The image that I based my windows media player montage on is from this site: http://images.google.com/imgres?imgurl=http://img.slate.com/media/1/123125/123051/2111767/2121805/050727_mb_Payolacolor_tn.jpg&imgrefurl=http://www.slate.com/id/2123483/nav/tap1/&h=150&w=205&sz=16&hl=en&start=8&sig2=f4isglXsxmYhaYdbuRRQhw&um=1&tbnid=5az-XfPvCRbiCM:&tbnh=77&tbnw=105&ei=DJpIRrm4GoTOiQGv663PCA&prev=/images%3Fq%3Dpayola%26svnum%3D10%26um%3D1%26hl%3Den%26sa%3DN)