Media Consumption Habits Flip-Flopping Again

I'm very surprised that I will actually pay $2 per episode for a TV show I can get at home for free. But I do. My latest addiction is downloading Season 2 episodes of "Lost" on iTunes and watching them on the train on my laptop. If you recall, I watched the pilot on my PSP and got addicted to the series, eventually buying the Season 1 DVDs and watching the whole season. After finishing that up, I wondered how I was going to catch up with Season 2. Question answered. I'm all caught up now, but I don't get home in time most Wednesday nights to watch, so I see a good number of iTunes episodes in my future.

Two observations:

1) iTunes should sell subscriptions to this stuff, so when the new episodes come out, they automatically download like a podcast. (Maybe they do this already, I dunno...)

2) If I were smart, I'd go to CompUSA right now and buy a Slingbox before I spend what I would have spent on the hardware on content.

What I'd Do With More Cable Choices

Cablevision seems to welcome the notion of a la carte pricing, which would be great. I'm not naive enough to believe that pricing for basic packages wouldn't be completely upended, but let's look at what I pay Cablevision every month: My cable bill runs roughly $210/month. Sometimes more if someone in the family goes nuts with On Demand movies. I get all these services:

• Basic cable, HBO, Cinemax, Showtime, Starz, Encore and The Movie Channel
• Three regular IO boxes and a fourth with a DVR in it (in the basement)
• Optimum Online
• Optimum Voice (I use it when working from home)

At least $100 of the total cost per month comes from television viewing - more if I get On Demand movies. Of this cost, a good deal comes from all the premium channels I'm getting.

Not for nothing, but these premium channels are pretty much useless to me. On weeknights, I get home after 9 PM and I might watch an hour of TV tops before I go to bed. Most of the time, I end up watching some crappy movie I've already seen 100 times before. There are movies I'd love to see, but they never start at the times I like. I'd like to pull the DVR out of the basement. (That might be an interim solution. I've been trying to catch the start of "The Aviator" but haven't been able to.)

If I could, though, I'd kill many channels on basic and premium. I'd get rid of:

• All the premium movie channels, save for basic HBO. (I'd replace them with HBO On Demand, Cinemax on Demand, etc.)
• All the Spanish-language channels
• LOGO
• Oxygen
• ShopNBC
• Shop At Home
• VH1 Soul
• The Hallmark Channel (sappy, sappy, sappy)
• Sundance Channel (useless, useless, useless)
• The Independent Film Channel
• E!
• Hollywood.com TV
• Broadway.com TV
• etc., etc., etc.

My point is, there are probably only a handful of broadcast channels I'd need - mostly to remind me of what the On Demand services have to offer. The rest of my TV viewing would be On Demand.

Somehow, I doubt that Cablevision could give me what I want for less money, even though I'd cut a ton of channels from basic and premium cable.

Messing with GarageBand

Last night, I came home late (as usual) and figured I didn't have much time to mess around with my new Mac Mini, but I went downstairs to clear the Trackback spam out of my blog anyway. While waiting for the web server to remove several dozen penis enlargement spams, I started messing with GarageBand and couldn't believe how easy and intuitive it was. A riff popped into my head and I hacked it out on guitar. Within 10 minutes I had drums, bass and a rock organ backing up the guitar riff. Back when I used to mess with Cakewalk and PC-based recording tools, it would take forever just to set things up - make sure the MIDI cables were hooked up right, make sure the mics were in the right input on the digital audio interface, level-setting, etc. GarageBand makes it easy to quickly get those ideas out of your head.

I know this is an entry-level application for recording, but it's definitely going to help me get a lot of songs out of my brain and onto a hard drive. What I really need is another week off, so I can mess around with this stuff unmolested for hours at a clip.

Speaking of messing around, I dropped into TekServe yesterday to see what was up and ran into my old bud Steve Grassotti, who I know from his days in Gringo Love Show (a band I loved that used to play my summer party). Turns out he sells the high-end Apple video systems at TekServe, which is nice. We caught up a bit and talked widescreen displays for a bit. I had no idea he worked there.

I (Heart) Macs

At some point, I completely forgot how cool Macs were. The first Macs I ever used were in my high school journalism lab and we used them to lay out the newspaper. That's when I first learned how to use PageMaker. From there, I used them at my college paper, programmed on them some in college, and used them for more desktop publishing when we started The Sound Observer in 1994. But I never owned a Mac before last week.

I gave myself a Christmas present after seeing the Mac Minis. I bought it from the Apple Store at the Walt Whitman Mall on Long Island. Of course, the sales guy tried to upsell me to a $3,000 G5 Power Mac, but I resisted.

Instead, I got a mid-range Mac Mini and a ton of add-ons. First, I decided that the acrylic keyboard with the white keys was too cool to pass up. I also got the mouse, too. (No sense having some shitty USB scroll mouse for a computer as cool-looking as the Mini.)

Then I decided I needed some things to make GarageBand a lot more fun, so I got a 61-key MIDI controller, an external interface for GarageBand, a USB sound card and a USB hub to have something to plug everything into. I also got two JamPacks for GarageBand so I'd have plenty of sounds and loops. I plan on dicking around with this stuff in my basement for the next several months.

What surprised me was how easy it all was to set up and use. 5 minutes after I had it out of the box, the Mini was up and running. I hooked it up to a Sony 19" LCD I had lying around.

What also surprised me is how easy USB can be. Plug a USB device into a Mac and there's no detection, driver downloading, conflicts or any of that nonsense. The device just starts working. I didn't have a single problem hooking up a USB keyboard, mouse, MIDI controller, external interface, USB hub and sound card.

The software seems more intuitive, too. GarageBand is a breeze compared to CakeWalk, ProTools and any of the other crap I've used. Nothing has stumped me yet, although I need to sit down and go through some tutorials so I get used to MacOS again. I can't get over how it feels like Suse Linux...

I'll take a pic in the next couple days of what my home studio looks like and post it.

It's quiet, it's reliable (so far), it's cool looking and it does everything I want it to. What's not to love?