January 2004 Archives
Just got my Press Gang - Series 1 DVD from play.com this morning. It's one of those shows you never expect to get a release but thanks to Network Video the first series at least is out.
Apparently it was a surprise to everyone, not least the writer Steven Moffat, better known these days for Coupling. Hopefully they will continue with the - even better - later episodes and do some commentaries and extras.
Although definitely a kids programme it has that snappy dialogue we've come to rely on in shows like Buffy and The West Wing. It also features the young Julia Sawalha (Ab Fab) and Lucy Benjamin (EastEnders) as well as Gabrielle Anwar in season 2 (numerous Hollywood movies). The blokes careers didn't seem to do as well in the long term - although most of them got a few movie parts out of it.
Steven Moffat is, of course, a big old Dr Who nerd who wrote "The Curse of Fatal Death" as well as some short stories. An early pointer to this is in the first episode where a sign says "Trespassers will be exterminated". A later episode, "unXpected", about the mysterious star
- Professor X - of an old childrens TV series is a bit more blatant.
Lastly, Lucy Benjamin also starred in the late, great, fondly-remembered, sci-fi soap - on the late, great, fondly-remembered BSB - Jupiter Moon, "one of the most accurate and realistic science fiction programmes to hit the small screen". Apparently.
From Mydoom virus 'biggest in months'.
"SCO is one of the largest Unix open-source vendors in the world."
Perhaps not.
Well I've pretty much used up my free track download limit on eMusic so I'll have to decide whether to go for a month's subscription now. I think I probably will as there's quite a few albums on there that I'd like but unless they grow at quite a rate I'll probably be cancelling again in a few months when I exhaust what I'm interested in.
Looking further down the Guardian list I mentioned I had a look at Streets Online's offering and found a fine example of why a little more thought is needed in this business. I discovered that they are doing Tangerine Dream's Logos Live for downloads. Now like all their offerings you can put each track individually for 99p or the entire album for £7.99. Now that's a bit pricey - but typical - until you realise that Logos only has two tracks on it anyway, which makes it a bit of a bargain. In fact track 1 is 90% of the album so you can get almost the whole thing for 99p. Just to add to the nonsense you can buy the CD for £6.99. Madness.
There's actually a similar problem with eMusic due to their simple track counting system. There's a double "tribute to John Cage" CD which has a very large number of tracks on it - many less than 30 seconds long - which means that it would probably take a whole month of your top rate subscription to get the album.
Still if they fixed that, they'd probably start charging extra for long single tracks so I'd lose out there instead.
Having just bought myself a Rio Karma with my totally unexpected, but most welcome, Christmas bonus I've started paying a bit more attention to downloadable music. I'm not sure why I noticed now particularly given that I've been moving all our music over to a jukebox over the last year anyway.
Anyhoo I found eMusic thanks to a Guardian article on legal downloads and browsing through discovered that they have exactly the kind of music I didn't expect to find actually being sold. e.g. A large number of Fax records. Plus their introductory deal is 50 free song downloads.
The odd thing is that after the free intro the paying deal is $9.95 for 40 downloads a month (plus a couple of higher downloads for more money). Now this is a very good deal - compared to the rip off 99pence a track that most outfits are standardising on - but if you want to download more you can upgrade to 90 tracks for $19.95 but beyond that you can't go. Now I guess their catalogue isn't so huge and so you'd probably exhaust what you were interested in pretty quickly at that rate. But it still seems an odd model to me.
So a big thumbs up to eMusic (so far). After all any outfit who even has an Electronic/Krautrock section is off to a good start.
