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A few weeks ago, Radiohead did something. To borrow from Dave Bowman, “something wonderful”. That it hasn’t been featured on Saturday Morning Tuneage in the intervening weeks (despite my leanings on the subject) is purely an artifact of the availability of more-interesting or more-pertinent things to talk about. I like to let SMT be guided by experiences and stories, not my ideology, but this week will be an exception.

Plenty of face-time on daverea.com has been devoted to the topic of Digital Rights Management, a blanket name for technologies used to restrict the way media or technologies can be used. Plenty of space has also been devoted to promoting ways to avoid spending our hard-earned dollars on purchases that are shackled with DRM. You’ve heard it said here plenty of times before: we shouldn’t be restricted in the ways we can fairly and legally use what we’ve bought and paid for.

If I take this discussion a level higher, I start sounding like my friend Chris over at Dimen Designs, a music lover and constant evangelist for the new and changing business models that are forming as the world of Music and the world of the Internet merge. The reality of the situation, which Chris conveys far more eloquently and stylishly than I do, is this: The way content gets from its creators to its consumers is changing. The way content’s consumers compensate the creators is changing. The ways that disseminators of that content move it is changing. That Which We Value is shifting, and people are demanding greater degrees of choice and freedom.

One band is listening. For Radiohead’s latest album, In Rainbows, they decided to do something totally new. The initial distribution was to be via Internet download, and purchasers were free to choose the price they wished to pay. Paying nothing works just fine. Paying a hundred pounds works great too. Or anything in-between. The downloaded files are DRM-free, part of the way Radiohead has taken freedom to another level: they’ve given the consumer freedom to use the work as they wish, and they’ve given the consumer freeom to pay what they feel it’s worth.

Granted, Radiohead has enjoyed enough success that they can easily afford to break this new ground. Also Granted, I haven’t even heard the new album. But I’m going to give it a thumbs-up anyway, because part of what Saturday Morning Tuneage is about is innovation. Most of the time it’s innovation in music, but this week it’s innovation in how the music reaches us. If we want to continue seeing these sorts of innovation, we need to support it. So even if you go and buy In Rainbows for 50 cents, or play freeloader, you should go grab it. Doing so is a way to speak through numbers – to show the world one more reason that “business as usual” isn’t going to cut it any more, and freedom’s move toward centrality in the experience of that which we value must continue.

Sorry for the brief interruption – we’ll return to your regularly-scheduled Saturday Morning Tuneage next week!

…like when you learn that your family and friends who live in San Diego are doing fine, and have homes to return to.

…like when you curl up on a rainy, cold evening (Monday, for instance) with a warm cup of tea.

…like when your schedule, your job and the weather combine in just the right way (today, for instance) to let you get a fresh coat of wax on the car before winter.

…like when your first Metcal arrives in the mail and you finally have good tools to work with.

…like every single dinner-for-two, every single car ride where my hand isn’t alone on the 6-speed, every single dip in the jacuzzi, and every single kiss goodnight.

A good day for apple picking and [cold] cider! Hard to believe it’s nearly November…

On occasion, when I’m presented with a few minutes of computing time not previously consumed by my to-do list, I like to poke around the web development scene. It’s been a long while since I’ve done any real web development – I fear all the CSS and PHP savvy I so painstakingly developed might even be on its way to obsolescense. Not that I have any time to get into the nuts and bolts these days, anyway!

Today, presented with the aforementioned “few minutes”, I figured I’d check out the hosting scene. I’ve been super-happy with AngryHosting (where daverea.com is hosted), so I haven’t had much of an occasion of late to go shopping in this area.

After visits to Angryhosting and Rackspace, I headed over to 1and1.com – and was very disappointed by what I found:

On the right, we have 1and1’s “Windows VPS” – which is their virtual private server product – adorned with a photograph of a polished professional holding an expensive ultraslim notebook. On the left, we’re presented with their Linux VPS … a virtual server that’s surely used by plenty of businesses for mission-critical applications … but it’s flanked by an image of a scrubby-looking guy in a tee shirt and ballcap, surrounded by piles of some manner of clutter.

Considering that Linux has managed to achieve about 50% market share in the web server arena (according to Netcraft, January 2007) and is the OS choice for over 77% of the top-500 published supercomputers in the world (according to this list), I think it’s probably safe to venture a claim that Linux is not just for scrubs. Sure, there are plenty of Mountain-Dew-drinking, techno-background-music, stereotypical late-night coders out there in the Linux world (I should know, I’ve been there) – probably about as many as there are stereotypical FPS or RPG gamers in the Windows world. To look at 1and1’s images alone, one might conclude that Linux is the choice for the world’s “un”professionals, while Windows Server 2003 is what the grownups use.

Whatever hosting business I might have thrown their way, 1and1 has officially lost. You don’t earn customers – and their loyalty – by depicting them distastefully (at least in a relative sense) in your marketing materials. This same attitude (on my part) is probably why I respond so poorly to media ads that focus on the product’s users, and not on the merits of the product itself. The approach is fundamentally distracted – but for some marketing reason inexplicable to an engineer like me, it works.

The bottom line, from my perspective, is this: it’s a server. The true customers (IT professionals and managers) arent’ giving 1and1 their hard-earned cash to make a fashion statement, they want a product that meets their needs. So rather than putting two nearly-identical bulleted lists in front of them, whose products seem only to be differentiated by the name at the top and the image in the corner, how about selling each product on its merits? Linux is every bit as “professional” and “enterprise-grade” a solution as the Windows VPS is (some, including myself, would say more so) – so at least give us some indication you recognize that.

PS – And where the hell is the Tux, people? If windows gets a logo, can’t you put our mascot on display too? OK, I’m really done now.

Subtitle: Woefully underprepared.

Unfortunately, new music discoveries this week haven’t done much coinciding with bloggable experiences. Except maybe for one…

Tuesday morning, on my drive in to work, I decided to trade in my typical morning AM news station (yes, I am that boring) for some quality time with our local indie station, WBER (it is, after all, the only station that matters). Tuning in is always a crapshoot, given how varied their playlist is and how many different special-interest shows they run, but on this particular morning the DJ struck gold…

The song was Electric Worm by the Beastie Boys, from their new instrumental album called The Mix-Up.

I’ve been a Beastie Boys fan for a while – at least since Hello Nasty – so when I called the station and discovered they were behind this particular funk-infused, Hammond-B3-rockin’ bit of jazz, I was surprised to say the least. Once I got home and nabbed the rest of the album, I was even more surprised. While it’s certainly not the nouveau sounds of MM&W or the more classic funk of Galactic, The Mix-Up stands up on its own as a foot-tapper that’ll keep all but the avant-garde purists happy. The songs run the gamut, from trippy to slow and contemplative, topping out with the driving beat of 14th St. Break.

If you’re looking for Intergalactic or Body Movin’, you might want to look elsewhere – but if you want to groove out, The Mix-Up is definitely worth some airtime in your headphones.

Or whatever it is you play your music through these days…

One of the benefits of arriving at work early, combined with the orientation of my cubicle, is that I get to watch the sunrise (on mornings we have them, at least). This morning, a layer of wispy cirrus clouds is making its way across the sky over upstate NY, and the sun caught its underside with a brilliant red-orange as it broke over the horizon.

On any other morning, I’d enjoy the sunrise for a minute or two, then turn back toward work – but today a glint caught my eye. Something was sparkling below the cloud deck – a jet, skimming just a few hundred feet beneath, lights-on and headed toward the Rochester airport.

That must have been an amazing view from where they were sitting! What a way to end a red-eye flight…

Tonight. 8PM Pacific, 11PM Eastern.

Crack on Tour Radio. Hosted by DJSlideways, guaranteed to deliver on all your zany-but-cultured, rough-around-the-edges radio desires.

Not long after I started working at the GM Fuel Cell plant here in upstate NY, I was put on a project that called for some time spent in our engine test bays. I’d spent weeks assembling and fine-tuning a piece of lab hardware that would need to be tested with a real engine – and I was understandably excited. So excited in fact, that after installing my project one afternoon and being told the engine wouldn’t be run again until the morning, I happily dragged my ass out of bed at 4:30AM to arrive at 5:30 the following day.

When I arrived, I found the engine test engineer busily setting up the test and preparing to run. At first, I was sufficiently excited by the fact that I was about to see – for my first time – a real live fuel cell engine run, that I didn’t notice the music playing quietly in the control room. But when we hit a snag – another engineer had locked out the Hydrogen line the day before, and we couldn’t get fuel to the engine – I got a few minutes to sit back and relax. And then I noticed the test engineer’s iPod sitting in one of those little drop-in speakers, playing some seriously good music!

Some quick investigation revealed that the music I was hearing – an addictive half-pop, half-alternative, half-rock blend of the sounds of Coldplay, Radiohead and a pinch of Green Day (on their less-happy days) – was that of Canadian band Fieldguide. The lyrics and tune were catchy enough that the album’s opening song stayed with me the rest of the day, and that evening I ordered Fieldguide’s CD from their now-defunct website (come on, you knew there was a reason I hadn’t linked to it by now).

As it turns out, I probably got one of the last few Fieldguide CDs they made – which appears to be an inkjet-printable silver CDR (a Ritek, actually, according to `cdrecord -atip`) – before Fieldguide disappeared. Fortunately, the CD’s label includes a contact at Key Music Group in Canada… whom we at daverea.com promptly contacted on behalf of you, the loyal reader, not wanting to bestow upon you an episode of Saturday Morning Tuneage whose subject’s music amounts to unobtainium!

Fieldguide is now Drew Smith, and the album I heard (“The Ones You Love”) is now Fossils. You can buy it on CD at Amazon, and via iTunes – but please don’t give Apple your money for tracks that have DRM. So go buy the CD! (You can preview the tracks at Drew’s web site) In the mean time, I’ll try to get Drew to put the album up on CDBaby.

As for the music? After my copy of “The Ones You Love” spent well over a year tucked quietly between DVDs on our media shelf, Kelly found the disc last week and enabled the inevitable rediscovery. Since then, it’s been pulled onto my iPod and has become the chameleon of my current listening rotation… Whether I’m feeling happy, down, contemplative or relaxed, the tunes on [what is now] “Fossils” just seem to fit. Musically, Drew Smith is spot-on: While I often find the “rough edges” of many independent bands and performers distracting, Drew’s music doesn’t give me any opportunity to nit-pick. The vocals are confident and well-rendered, and the accompanying instrumentals are precise, and the production quality is solidly pro-grade – decidedly honest and well-done, not overprocessed or dripping with reverb or distortion. Keeping with the theme of previous issues of Saturday Morning Tuneage, the lyrics are smartly written, but not as esoteric as the bands which have seemed to lend some influence to Drew’s style.

Reading Drew’s bio, it’s clear to see that he and others put a great deal of work into “Fossils”, and it shows in the quality of both the music and the disc. I wouldn’t post it here if it weren’t worth your hard-earned coin, so go give Drew a listen. Or, check out his MySpace page, which has some full-length tracks for your listening pleasure. Or, just head over to Amazon and buy the record.

Come on, what are you waiting for? It’s good stufff!