http://orourkesdiner.com/
If you haven’t heard yet, O’Rourke’s Diner in Middletown had a very serious fire.
The inside is a total loss, and they aren’t sure if they’ll be able to use the shell.
One thing that is for sure is that they have a lot of support, and if they should choose to try and rebuild, the community will be behind them 100%.
I for one loved the diner, and hope they will try to resurect it. Take a look at the website and forums, if you feel like I do.

Dance of the Freek by Keller Williams:

So I’ve brought the main somjuan.com site back online, and I plan on starting serious work on it in the coming weeks.

Here is the roadmap:

1. Finish all basic coding by the end of September

2. Put the site into open Alpha in October. This means that people will be able to sign up, and start making content, but the site will not be stable yet, and should be expected to act weirdly, drop data, etc.

3. The site will go into open Beta in Feb, and will be stable enough for permanent use. The only change is that things will continue to keep changing until Mayish.

4. Site goes live. Hopefully.

Damn, thats a long time from now…

Some other changes I’ve made (to this site). My Flickr photos are now all accessable from daboo.somjuan.com/flickr. Fun.
Also, I’ve included a thumbnail of my webcam in the sidebar of this blog. You can click it to see the larger image. I’m trying to find a better location for the camera…right now its pretty boring.

Stay tuned…

The site is spiralfrog.com, and it has a new concept of legal music distribution. The premise is, that they will offer users free downloads (secured my DRM, of course), and their service is supported completely by ads. You can play your music on one PC and two mobile devices. If you do not log in to their service once every month(to see the ads, etc), your music will cease to play. Universal Music Group (a massive record label) has already agreed to sign on, and Spiralfrog is in talks with the other major labels.

This BoingBoing post contains a lot of links to various sites around the internet who are reporting on this. Xeni at BoingBoing, along with almost everyone else contributing their opinion are skeptical at best of a service which I feel has so much potential.

This will cost no money to the end user, and the artist and record company are still compensated. If the company can prove to be profitable, this benefits everyone. In fact, the only real support I’ve seen of this service comes from the comments on digg. Now, I’m no fan of DRM, but my opposition of DRM only extends to things I have paid for. This service is free, I really can’t complain.

Most of the news articles on this topic are coming from the wrong direction as well. While they don’t exactly take sides, they keep comparing it to iTunes, which is blatantly incorrect. iTunes offers a completely different service than Spiralfrog intends to. In fact, all they really have in common is their product. What this should be compared to is Napster and Yahoo!’s music services, which allow unlimited downloads (again, protected by DRM), but for a fee. If this service should succeed, it could completely kill the already crippled music subscription services.

Why this is a step forward: Spiralfrog has discovered a way to provide a service that previously cost $10/month, for absolutely free. It also has the potential to decrease piracy, which gives the RIAA a little less to complain about (don’t worry, I’m sure they’ll find something).

And your song for this fine post? Taught to be Proud by Tea Leaf Green. This version is from a live show hosted here.

Thats right, I’m starting a blog.

Well, sort of.

I had a blog on the old somjuan.com, and I wanted to keep one running somewhere.

So this is it.

I’m also going to try to include a tune from somewhere online that is good enough that you should be listening to it.

That is Jericho by Stolen Ogre, and you can find the mp3 here.