daverea.com

As Verizon wireless customers go, I think I’ve been a pretty good one. Since I signed up with them almost eight years ago, there’ve been more than a handful of reasons for me to jump ship. If having the sorryest crop of phones on the market wasn’t bad enough, Verizon is nearly always last-in-line when it comes to new products and devices. Despite their launch of “Any Device, Any App” – an openness initiative that had lots of folks in the wireless world hoping that maybe Verizon might start offering them some actual choice – they still cripple their phones, restrict Bluetooth profiles, lock out non-Verizon GPS applications, and turn out utterly disappointing products like the Blackberry Storm.

But through all this, I stuck with them. I touted their great network, I talked up how reliable my LG handset has been, and I’ve helped plenty of folks set up BackupAssistant. I’ve held out hope that maybe some new devices will start hitting the market under the auspices of “Any Device, Any App”, but to date only a handful of devices – mostly embedded wireless modems – have been certified. And we haven’t even heard rumors of any handsets, let alone the Android smartphone I’ve been pining for.

And then, they did this.

More…

Right about the same time I was snapping this photo, BBC News was posting this article, which was ultimately how I learned of the demise of digital rights management (DRM) restrictions on music purchases from Apple’s iTunes online music store.

For years, I’ve been just one voice among countless others calling for music companies to stop insulting their customers by locking down purchases with DRM. If you’ve paid your hard-earned money for a song or album download, you should be able to use it at your own discretion – even if that means playing it on something other than an Apple iPod.

When all’s said and done, it was the record labels – Sony BMG, Universal and Warner Music – that made this change. But I have no doubt that Apple had to push very hard to achieve that outcome, and with a daunting market share they just might have been the only ones truly in any position to do so. Though I’ve admittedly been hard on Apple in the past, and despite this change ultimately being reflective of a larger tidal shift in the music business, we all owe Apple a giant thank-you for being the catalyst that was needed.

Now all they need to do is let Linux users shop at their store – web interface anyone? – and they might just add me to their growing list of customers!

In a recent installment of Saturday Morning Tuneage, I talked a bit about Teagan and the Tweeds – and their upcoming concert on January 23rd.

Lovin’ Cup has updated their events page for January, and they’ve got the time listed as 9:30PM. That’s just a wee bit off from our previous report of a 5PM start time, which we picked up from here at MySpace Music.

So – see you around 9:30 on the 23rd?

There’s an episode of Britain’s gearhead petrolhead phenom-show Top Gear (Season 11, Episode 2, to be exact) when Jeremy spends some quality alone time with a drippingly-beautiful Mercedes-Benz CLK63 AMG “Black” coupe. At the beginning of the segment (which you can watch here, at around the 52-minute mark), he introduces the car with this monologue:

Hey now listen: When was the last time you just got up and went for a drive? Not to anywhere, not for anything – just for a drive? … This is brilliant. No phone. No kids. No interruptions. It’s just me, in my little metal shell. Time to think. Time to work stuff out. Small wonder crabs are so wise… And this really is an ideal car for when it’s four in the morning and you’ve got the whole 400,000-mile British road network all to yourself.

Since I saw a rerun of that episode a few weeks ago, I’ve been intrigued with the idea of a “microcosm of escape” – personal experiences that wrap us in that little singular cocoon of relaxation, or exhilaration, or isolation and give us a momentary break from the balance of our reality.

Listening to Jon Hopkins is such an experience.

More…

…we bid you a [not-so*] fond farewell.

When I checked out DaveRea.com’s stats last night, I noticed that the site’s consumed bandwidth – normally around 200-300MB per month – was over 9GB. As it turns out, some less-than-scrupulous person (or web robot) might have exploited a security flaw** in the Gallery 2 script – or somewhere else ’round-a-bout daverea.com – and planted several pirated files amongst the photo albums.

Fortunately, when the letter from the MPAA came, the kind Server Hajji at Angryhosting, being a kickass host and all, removed the offending files.

So, at least until I get ambitious and glom in one of the many WordPress-based gallery scripts, the DaveRea.com photo galleries are offline.

(* FWIW, Gallery – or, more accurately, Gallery Remote – always was a complete PITA any time I tried to upload photos to it…)

(** Also notable: I never kept the Gallery script up-to-date, so chances are I was using a thoroughly-obsolete version!)

…to these two dear friends…

…who, as I learned last night, got engaged on Christmas morning!

Congratulations Brie and Jason!