DEBRIS.COMgood for a laugh, or possibly an aneurysm

So much for “99¢ per song.” How about a penny per megabyte? That comes to about a nickel per song… maybe $0.70 per album.

AllOfMp3.com is a Russian company that sells music in bulk. You can choose MP3, AAC (for iPod), and even FLAC in some cases. If you download at a low bitrate, you’ll pay less per song… if you download at a high bitrate (or FLAC), you’ll pay more per song but get higher quality.

The question burning in your mind, especially those of you who have not purchased a CD in three years, is of course “is it legal?” As far as I can tell, the answer is: it’s legal for them to provide the service, but it may not be legal for you to use it.

The site’s FAQ answers the first question, “Is it legally to download music from site AllOFMP3.com?”

All the materials in the MediaServices projects are available for distribution through Internet according to license # LS-3-03-79 of the Russian Multimedia and Internet Society. Under the license terms, MediaServices pays license fees for all the materials subject to the Law of the Russian Federation “On Copyright and Related Rights”. All the materials are available solely for personal use and must not be used for further distribution, resale or broadcasting.

The Terms of Service page contains this disclaimer:

You agree with the fact that you are not able to use and even to download audio and video materials from Allofmp3.com catalogue if it is in the conflict with legislation of your country.

I learned about this from a friend who was raving about it. I won’t name him here in case the RIAA comes kicking down doors. He says the hip way to do this is to pay via PayPal, so you don’t need to send your credit card info to Russia. But there’s a $10 mininum purchase, because nobody is going to make money selling 5¢ worth of music at a time.

Personally I haven’t tried the new service yet, because — this sounds dumb — I can’t come up with a 10 gigs of music I want that I don’t already own. Maybe I should organize a group music buy… get all my neighbors together, order 300 songs, then have them each write me a check for, like, $1.50.

Here’s a bleak link for a dreary Monday: motorcycle tour of Chernobyl.

The tone is somber yet matter-of-fact.

Usually, on this leg of the journey, a beeping Dosimeter inspires me to shift into high gear and streak through the area with great haste. The patch of trees in front of me is called red — or “magic” wood. In 1986, this wood glowed red with radiation. They cut them down and buried them under 1 meter of earth. The Dosimeter readings on the asphalt paving is 500 -3000 microroengens, depending upon where you stand. That is 50 to 300 times the radiation of a normal environment. If I step 10 meters forward, Dosimeter will run off the scale. If I walk a few hundred meters towards the reactor, the radiation is 3 roengens per hour — which is 300,000 times normal. If I was to keep walking all the way to the reactor, I would glow in the dark tonight. Maybe this is why they call it magic wood. It is a dark magic with the power to turn biker leather into shining armor.

The accompanying photos seem random and somewhat uninteresting, but I guess this is appropriate: radiation is invisible.

Thanks to Bim for the link. (Bim’s motorcycle trip to Turkey was much less bleak!)

wreckedexotics.com: the internet’s largest collection of exotic car crash photos

Wired’s Googlemania is a collection of 10 stories about Google. It offers short takes on several interesting facets of the Google story, like Google vs. Microsoft, 3rd-party Google API apps, PageRank-killing comment spam.

The opening piece, “Surviving IPO Fever,” contains a list of IPO cautionary tales: sudden wealth going wrong, culled from longtime members of the Silicon Valley community:

• The mousy guy in accounting who dumps his mousy wife and runs off to Mexico with the admin.
• The lonely programmer who goes off to a men’s club to celebrate his new wealth and marries a stripper he meets there.
• The sober family man who, upon discovering that he’s half-Native American, renounces his US citizenship and moves to an Indian reservation so he won’t have to pay taxes.
• The programmer who quits, buys the sports car of his dreams, crashes, loses everything in the resulting personal-injury lawsuit, and ends up broke, back in his old job.
• The senior executive who takes his new wealth up into Los Altos Hills and spends the next decade putting the money up his nose one gram at a time.

Another great story of the darker side of IPOs comes from Jeff Skoll, eBay’s first employee:

“Before [eBay] went public, I used to send out a company-wide joke each day, just as a way of loosening things up,” says Skoll. “The day after the IPO, I sat down at my computer to write that day’s joke and in walked the general counsel. He says to me, ‘You know that joke of the day thing? I think it’s very funny.’ Gosh, thank you, I replied. ‘Well, stop it,’ he said. ‘We are a public company now, and we don’t want to offend anyone. If you want to keep sending out jokes, they can only be about lawyers.’ So I tried sending out lawyer jokes for two weeks - and then I gave up.”

Four statistics describe how often this site is updated:

• number of days this week
• number of days this month
• number of days this year
• number of days since the site was launched

All are shown as percentages. For example, if I post something to the site on Sunday, Tuesday, and Thursday, my posting rate for the week as of Friday would be 3/6 or 50%.

I put these counters together so site visitors can get a sense of how frequently the site is updated. There are four counters of decreasing recency so that when taken as a group they would reflect trends. For example, as I write this, my overall (site-to-date) post rate is 55%, but this month I’ve been writing much more than that. So far this month (and this year), I’ve posted on 87% of days.

By subtracting these values from 100, the reader can calculate a related measure, which I call the “Flake Rate” — the percentage of days I’ve flaked by not writing. I chose not to display these counts because I don’t want to tempt Fate. She is tempting enough already.

Current values appear elsewhere on this page, under the calendar.