went to a whole bunch of people.
We held a very small Oscar night, including as always too much food. For example Tortillas, which looked like that before they were done:
and like so when they actually were (to the right):
In the end, they weren’t worth the trouble. What I liked a whole lot better were the Empanadillas, which had a nice cheese dough and a filling consisting of delicious cheese, bacon and beans.
The show itself was fun, John Stewart did an excellent job. We did the whole ballot thing, and I actually had 15 correct, including most of the important ones. Oh, and the foreign one, which turned out to be the Austrian contestant, The Counterfeiters. I’m really happy for them, but I fear there’s going to be a whole lot of self-applauding by politicians and other sycophants in the coming weeks. Filming in Austria most likely hindered the makers more than it helped them. Which makes their win even more impressive.
Since there was The Counterfeiters up for best foreign movie, Austrian National Broadcasting decided to broadcast the show live again, filling the US-commercials-void with blabber by two self-indulgent men, who constantly were so engrossed in their own story-telling, that they kept forgetting to go back to the show when the commercial breaks were over. Next year, if you do decide to broadcast again, please either show commercials yourself or just a still image until the US commercials are over.
Here’s the whole list of all the winners.
A posting on Michael Kamleitner’s blog once again brought to my attention last.fm’s subscription model. Next to Flickr and Diigo, last.fm is one of the rare services I actually use daily. And apart from Flickr, there is no webservice I’m actually paying money for.
The question is, why change that by paying 2,50€/month for last.fm? Well, here are the reasons given by last.fm:
Subscription Benefits
- Blue icon status
Trade your grey user icon in for a blue one.
- No ads
You won’t see them; visitors to your page won’t see them. No one will, because they won’t exist.
- Recent Visitors
See who’s been visiting your profile page.
- Personal radio paradise
Turn your profile page and tags into a portable radio station you and others can listen to from anywhere. It’s like a smart playlist for the music you’ve tagged.
- Share the Love
Your “Loved Tracks” become a listenable radio station for you and others.
- Red carpet treatment
Get top priority with our webservers and radio servers at peak traffic times.
- Top secret beta access
Be the first to know and try what we’re working on and help shape the development of the site. You’ll see a subscriber-only announcement during beta.
Well, here’s what I think:
- The Blue icon really does have me sold already. That’s it, I’m buying!
- That I like. Even though, quite frankly, certain Firefox plugins take care of that already.
- That I like as well. I love knowing who’s been checking out my sexy music collection, so that’s worth at least, say, 0,5€.
- This is it, that’s one reason that’ll make me pay, if I decide to. The current radio limitations for unpaid members are a drag.
- That’s where the last.fm marketing guy cheated a bit. Because, actually, that’s part of the above point. Still worth 0,5€.
- Considering that the last.fm website is sometimes so slow, it makes a snail look fast (pretty good image, right? witty even), this one is worth the 2,50€ alone.*
- You know me, I like me a bit of secret betas once in a while. I can’t really say how much that is worth, as I haven’t ever paid for access to betas (it’s unfinished software after all), but I’ll give it a symbolic 0,1 €. *Selling tolerable speed is actually a bit cheeky. Not able to scale your service? Not my problem. In the end though, you won’t get more speed by complaining, so you might as well hand over those 2,5€.
Well, after this lengthy and thorough analysis, a last.fm subscription actually adds up to 6,1€. Which is considerably more than 2,5€, in case you haven’t noticed.
So, teleologically speaking, a last.fm subscription is worth it. Which of course doesn’t mean I’ll buy it, but at least I won’t feel like a total ass once I do.
Any subjective opinions out there as well? Leave them in the comments!
Update: I just ventured forth and subscribed for a month. Doing is better than blogging, as the old saying goes. I’ll see how I like it.
Train-station walls provide for the transiting traveler what wikis provide for the transiting Internets-user. Only that train-station walls are geodata-sensitive by default. Only thing lacking is a Creative Commons stencil.
Somehow even my crude humour doesn’t allow me to fully appreciate the bruhaha of that tagline.
After eating the equivalent of Ireland’s GDP yesterday, we decided to have a healthy breakfast today:
Somehow I get the impression that the health-value of a bowl of cereals is drastically devalued by the fact that it’s not a 30g serving of oatmeal, but a 100g serving of sugarcoated, chocolate-infiltrated obscenities. The shock-frosted Special-K red berries probably don’t help much either.
Nevertheless, I still feel much better now. May FSM have mercy on all those dead animals I devoured yesterday.
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