David Emery Online

Dreams

There is a time you reach in your life when you have to accept that you will never do certain things.

I will never be an astronaut.

I will never be a Formula 1 driver.

I will never be a musician in a big rock band.

As you’re growing up you get quite accustomed, or at least I did, to a sense of almost limitless possibility. Yes, becoming an astronaut would be a bit of stretch – I wasn’t a foolish child – but still, by the year 2000 everyone would be going to space, right? Things were possible.

However, there comes a point where you realise that actually, no – some things just aren’t going to happen. Worse then that, quite possibly, is the realisation that you don’t want these things to happen.

I’d be a rubbish astronaut – I don’t even like flying for gods sake.

I can’t stay on the track for to long playing Gran Turismo, so I’d probably kill myself before I got to any decent speed in a F1 car. And I find go karting pretty scary.

I find going to more then one gig a week pretty exhausting, so how would I manage to go on tour?

Of course, it’s the last...

Indistr Lets You Choose the Price for Buying Music

Indistr is actually a surprisingly nice site, although slightly hard to browse around. There’s definitely a place for direct artist digital sales, although they’re not going to replace record companies (and their strengths in promotion and finance) any time soon.

Apple to Allow Free iPhone/Touch Apps Without Special Approval?

I do hope this proves to be the case – it would be a big shame to have to go through the hoops of Apple approval (which will no doubt take a while) before getting an app out there. If Apple approval is the only to way to get apps on the iPhone, I’m sure jailbreaking will keep its popularity.

The Broken Web Editor

I still don’t get Wordpress’ popularity – it seems to have so many problems. While Textpattern doesn’t feature the rich text editor Wordpress tries to use at least it, you know, works.

What’s wrong with this picture?

I can’t see this concept (digital insertion of advertising into pre-recorded video) really taking off, as it surely takes far too much work to have a team of animators (badly) overlaying adverts on billboards in the background of every single episode of a program?

Also, why would anyone think this form of advertising actually works? Just because a logo of a film appears in a video doesn’t mean that has any impact on ticket sales at the box office.

NZRN - On the internet.

Beautiful site design – love the cartography-inspired background and the use of a grid.

Ambient Information

Over on the 37signals blog there’s an interesting article on a little feature they’ve added to their unified billing system (well, as interesting as something about a billing system can be). They’ve added a simple stats stream page that everyone at 37signals can access that gives them a simple, colour-coded look at what’s happening with their product sales, upgrades and account cancellations.

I think this is actually pretty important.

While a seemingly superfluous feature – if they wanted to they could find out this information by wading into the main interface of the software – because they don’t need to jump through hoops they actually will. Users are busy people, and – unless the data is critical to their day-to-day work – simply won’t bother checking this kind of information regularly enough to make it useful.

However, as soon as you make it easy to view you unlock all this information and make it useful, and quite often this information is really useful. Certainly, the idea of being able to at a glance view the current state of how your products are selling, and easily see trends (‘oh, lots of people are upgrading right now – I wonder why?’), is very compelling.

This...

How Rainbows ruined the charts

I’d noticed that In Rainbows had been dominating the top of the Last.fm charts a while back – it’s amazing to see it’s still doing so. Maybe for last.fm the biggest improvement in scrobbles per week would be a more interesting metric…

Google Talk chatback

Pretty nifty – you can now embed a Google Talk widget into your webpage/blog/wherever and let your readers chat with you without them having to do any setup, logging in etc.

Let’s see if this works:

Jimmy Kimmel's Fucking Ben Affleck

Ok, so this is officially the most childish and immature thing I have ever posted to this blog. It is also possibly the funniest. Please be aware that I, like you, have an extremely low tolerance to ‘funny’ internet videos – rest assured that these are not some of them.

First, watch this:

Then, watch this (which manages to maybe even be better):