Dav

You may or may not have heard of allofmp3.com, which is an mp3 pay site hosted in Russia. I had heard of it, but had never seriously used it until today. I went there on a lark today wondering if they had any songs by an obscure (to me) hair metal band called Firehouse. To my surprise, they had five full albums’ worth. It costs anywhere from 10 to 25 cents per song from what I’ve seen so far, depending on filesize (which in turn depends on song length and bitrate). Here’s the cool part though — instead of straight downloads, they encode the songs on the fly when you buy them, which means you get to specify the format and the bitrate you want. Higher bitrates cost a little more, but in my opinion it’s worth it. I’ve been grabbing ogg vorbis files at 320kbs variable bitrate. How cool is that? They also have MP3, AAC, WMA, and MPC.

The downside to this method is that you have to wait a little bit between when you order the song and when you can actually download it. Fortunately, the downloads get stored in your account for 2 weeks before being deleted, so you can order some songs and grab them all later.

At my office, there’s a chess board set up in the corner of the room near the watercooler in the meeting room. When I started working here, the pieces were mostly in their starting position except a couple moves had been made. This never changed so I figured nobody ever used it. I decided to play an extended game with myself, so every time I went into that room to get water, I made a move. First for white, then for black, etc. After a few moves, I came back and noticed somebody else had taken a turn for white. So I responded for black. This has been going back and forth for a while now. I’m playing a very long game of chess with somebody at this office and I have no idea who it is. Currently we are even in material and my opponent has a slightly better position.

Update: We found out who we have been playing against.

Last week, I went to the McDonald’s near my office in downtown Boston to grab some lunch. Like I always do at fast food places, I ordered some food and a (free) water. The clerk asked me if I meant bottled water, to which I replied “tap water is fine.” His response? “Oh wow, you’re brave.” I did end up drinking the water, but very uneasily. I’m not dead yet so it can’t be that bad.