In 1986, my father took my brother and I on a trip to Europe - mostly Germany, both East and West, as well as some time in Yugoslavia and Austria, and of course Lichtenstein.

Somewhere along the way, we stopped at this pretty impressive looking palace:

Nearly 20 years later, I have no clue which palace it was, but I’d like to know so I can reference it. Hmmm… here’s an interesting shot. And probably one I over-exposed (14 year olds with manual-everything Yashica cameras tend to do that):

Huh… I wonder if at full resolution that sign says where we are…

Chinesisches Teehaus? Hmmm…. wonder what good ol’ MSN Search has to say… no, no, no…hey, what are these refs to Sanssouci Park? Bingo! This was the summer palace of Fredrich II, his “Sanssouci Palace.” Sans souci is French for “without worry.”

I love my job.

I’ve begun to get asked by various people about Kai-Fu Lee, who was recently hired by Google away from Microsoft to build Google’s Chinese research lab. Kai-Fu Lee built Microsoft’s Beijing lab, Microsoft Research - Asia (MSRA), which I can say from personal visits is staffed with some amazing people. However, it’s been under the strong leadership of Harry Shum (another fine CMU alumn) while I’ve been interacting with them.

So what about Kai-Fu? Is this a huge loss for Microsoft and a great coup for Google? Will Microsoft win in its suit to enforce the non-compete Kai-Fu signed? Will Google’s counter-suit win out? And how will Batman and Robin escape from the vile clutches of the Joker this time around?

I have no frickin’ clue. I’ve never met the man, and I’m not privvy to whatever it is he signed. I don’t even know if the juridiction is in Washington State (although I’d assume it is), and I have no idea how non-competes work when a California company (with an office in Washington State) hires someone away to relocate to China. My wife doesn’t even quite know, and she is a lawyer.

So please, ask me something that I might know something about. Like unlocking an AudioVox 5600…

So, maybe six months ago the Sony cordless phone / answering machine we had gave up the ghost. Bummer. So, I went and got us a Uniden 5.8Ghz PowerMax extendible phone system. An extendible phone system is one where instead of buying more and more cordless phones and dumping them throughout the house, you buy extension phones that connect to your one cordless base station. The advantage is that you don’t need a phone jack as these guys have decent range - just a recharger cradle - and you can access base functions from any phone (e.g. listen to messages or copy the phone book). I thought at the time that in theory, I might buy another phone for the system, but really, at $70 a pop, I’ll probably just end up buying another cheap cordless phone if we ever need another one. As it stood, I wasn’t liking the $130 price tag, but I had a gift card for Best Buy from returning something there, so I went for it.

Flash forward five months. The cordless phone we have upstairs dies (probably due to Laura abuse… nice AT&T 5600 that had lasted me since ‘94), and so off I go to Best Buy to drop $70 on a new cordless expansion. Or a cheap cordless phone, depending on what I can find.

Lo and behold, the extension phones are on closeout for $9 a pop. Now, that’s a reasonable price… so I buy 4 of ‘em. I’m not sure what I’ll do with 2, but at $9 a phone, I don’t feel bad about having some extra phones around.

MK and I then start to notice some of the nicer things about these phones. For example, the Room Monitor and Intercom functions. *Boggle* hello, where did these come from? And why didn’t we know about them when we were using this crappy battery-powered monitor that never worked well anyway? And Intercom… normally in the evening, MK needs to yell at me when I’m upstairs at the computer or reading and she’s downstairs. Now, she can just use the intercom and get me… this is pretty sweet.

Now, I haven’t been impressed by mundane technology for some time, but I gotta say, this expandible phone system is pretty nice. It’s all screwed if that central base station goes (and when it does they’ll probably not be making 5.8ghz phones anymore), so I should probably look for that on clearance and get a backup, but otherwise, it’s a very nice, nice system.

Update: I don’t have a tip jar, as I support myself in what I say. That being said, the below would normally cost you $30 - $60 elsewhere. Therefore, if you were going to spend some cash, and this saved it, please use that money to donate for the Hurricane Katrina relief effort. I’d like to recommend these that I support (both images will direct you to the appropriate donation page):

[Updated Oct. 10 2005 to freshen up the directions… here is the original article for unlocking an AudioVox 5600.]

Background: The following comes from my scouring of the Internet to find out how to unlock an AudioVox 5600 (or SMT5600) that was locked to the AT&T (Cingular Blue) network. I had to do this as Cingular does not unlock their phones on the AT&T network, and I needed to put in a local SIM while on a trip to Brazil. T-Mobile will apparently unlock your phones by just calling, and is probably a safer way to go. But for everyone else who is stuck, and doesn’t want to rely on possibly dodgey sites that ask for money via paypal, continue on!

Note: actually doing the following probably voids your warranty (I don’t know as I never read it), and botching it could well render your phone unusable. But it worked for me, even with a few missteps I didn’t include here.

Microsoft people: This doesn’t work for Magneto, but apparently upgrading to Magneto seems to unlock your phone anyway… try it first. BTW, if you’re thinking of upgrading, I don’t recommend it.

You need the following three files:

1. aeconfig.zip
2. resetSecurity.zip
3. SPV Services

Or to save you some time (and in case the above are down), you can just get them all in one big zip: UnlockAudioVox5600Apps.zip

What you’ll need:

• A SIM card on the network your AudioVox is locked to. For example, if you’re locked to AT&T (Cingular Blue network) then you’ll need an AT&T SIM card. For people who bought their phone off e-bay or something, find a friend, as you need one of these to proceed!
• A SIM card on some other network to make sure things worked. Any network will do. Again, find a buddy.

Here’s what you do:

1. Plug your AudioVox into your computer via the USB cable that came with it. Open an explorer window via ActiveSync and browse the top level directory of the SmartPhone… you should see directories like Temp and Storage.
2. Extract aeconfig.zip, say to C:\unlock5600. DO NOT SIMPLY OPEN THE .ZIP AND TRY TO COPY FILES TO YOUR SMARTPHONE, IT DOES NOT WORK! You’ll get a folder named “unlock-all” which contains two directories, StartMenu and Temp, along with a manual. The manual is almost correct for the 5600. What you want to do is:
   1. Put the “Disable Security” file in StartMenu under \Storage\Windows\Start Menu\ in your 5600.
   2. Put “AEConfig.exe” and “DisableSecurity.xml” in Temp in \Temp in your 5600. Do not reboot your 5600, as it will erase these files in \Temp!
   3. Go to Start on your 5600, then select Disable Security and run it. Phase 1 done. If you don’t see it via the start menu, use the File Manager to run it. Sometimes it takes a bit for the Start Menu to re-read the directory and include things.
3. Open resetSecurity.zip and extract the files on your computer somewhere. I’ll say C:\unlock5600, but feel free to replace that with anything you like.
4. On your computer, go to Start -> Run and type “cmd” for a DOS prompt. Change directories to the directory you put the files of resetSecurity (e.g. cd c:\unlock5600 using our example).
5. Run RapiConfig as follows from the cmd prompt:
   % RapiConfig.exe /p ResetSecurity.xml
   This will unlock your phone to install new apps (needed for the next step).
6. Confirm it works by putting “CheckLock.exe” in the \Temp dir of your 5600 and running it by going to Start -> File Manager on your AudioVox and selecting CheckLock.exe under \Temp. It should say “Your phone is not locked.”
   Phase 2 End.
7. Open up SPV-Services.zip and copy the files somewhere (say c:\unlock5600).
8. Copy the Cert.cab into \Temp of your smartphone
9. From your smartphone Start -> File Manager, browser to \Temp and run Cert.cab. Install the program.
10. From your computer, run SPVServices.exe. Click on the SIMLock Toggle button and type AGREE. Don’t worry about the “Doesn’t work on AudioVox” as this did for this purpose.
11. Unlock your AudioVox by clicking on the button. End Phase 3.
12. Test out your new unlocked AudioVox with a friend’s SIM card on another network (I used T-Mobile). You will need to power down the phone, take out the card, put the new one in, and power up. If you see “Network locked, enter unlock code” then something didn’t work. If you see the normal home page with the carrier’s name, you’re golden.

Troubleshooting:

• Unknown error -2147467259 in read operation. I don’t know why this happens. Some people have reported success by re-trying all of the previous steps after rebooting the SmartPhone. Others have suggested it’s because Cert.cab wasn’t installed, just copied over to \Temp. If you get this, please report it in the comments and let us know if you’re able to figure it out. UPDATEA post on the SPV Developers Forum appears to answer this by describing how to: resolve the read error by manually changing two registry keys. A file is included in the post to update the registry. Hat tip to Volkmar!
• Can’t copy files to SmartPhone. Remember, you have to extract files to some directory, then copy them. You can’t just copy directly… some lame bug in Windows.

Update: I don’t have a tip jar, as I support myself in what I say. That being said, the below would normally cost you $30 - $60 elsewhere. Therefore, if you were going to spend some cash, and this saved it, please use that money to donate for the Hurricane Katrina relief effort. I’d like to recommend these that I support (both images will direct you to the appropriate donation page):

Every now and then, somebody asks me why I do search. There are lots of cool things to do out there… writing the latest game, creating a photo-sharing service, etc. But search is one of the few that teaches me new things. Search answers my questions.

For example, as I’ve posted before, I’m heading down to Brazil. Also, I have a new AudioVox 5600, aka Typhoon, on the AT&T network — yes, it’s owned by Cingular, but it’s still AT&T. What I’d like to do when I’m down there is buy a pre-paid SIM card so I can make relatively cheap calls home and to anyone local. Seems reasonable. So, I need to call AT&T and have them unlock my phone so I can use it on the Brazilian network.

Except they won’t. Nope. They don’t give out the codes, and they don’t even give out the names of who would know how to get the codes to customer service. See, Cingular wants you to buy a new locked Cingular phone and suck down a new 2-year contract, and migrate over to the Cingular network instead of the AT&T network. So yes, this means that Cingular merged with AT&T Wireless the same way that you might merge with a donut. You eat it, chew it up, swallow it, slowly digest it, and, well, you know what happens to whatever you don’t need.

So, what am I do to? I could pay 20 GBP for some service and take it. I could potentially search CraigsList for someone who can do it. Or, I can type in something like unlock audiovox 5600 free into MSN Search and… hey, check out those first two results on the Cingular forums!

So, the second result almost solves the problem. However, it assumes you have a couple other programs, which you then need to find using a search engine. It’s kinda like an internet scavenger hunt. Well, for people who found this page, I’ll cut to the chase:

Note: actually doing the following probably voids your warranty (I don’t know as I never read it), and botching it could well render your phone unusable. But it worked for me, even with a few missteps I didn’t include here.

You need the following three files:

1. aeconfig.zip
2. resetSecurity.zip
3. SPV Services

Or to save you some time (and in case the above are down), you can just get them all in one big zip: UnlockAudioVox5600Apps.zip

OK, now what? Again, sadly, there isn’t a single page that gives good detail on how to unlock the 5600, at least not that I could find with MSN Search or Google. And I don’t bother much with Yahoo :).

Again, to save some time searching, here’s what you do:

1. Plug your AudioVox into your computer via the USB cable that came with it. Pop open a browser window and browse the top level directory of the smartphone… you should see directories like Temp and Storage.
2. Extract aeconfig.zip. You’ll get a folder named “unlock-all” which contains two directories, StartMenu and Temp, along with a manual. The manual is almost correct for the 5600. What you want to do is:
   1. Put the “Disable Security” file in StartMenu under \Storage\Windows\Start Menu\ in your 5600.
   2. Put “AEConfig.exe” and “DisableSecurity.xml” in Temp in \Temp in your 5600. Do not reboot your 5600, as it will erase these files in \Temp!
   3. Go to Start on your 5600, then select Disable Security and run it. Phase 1 done.
3. Pop open resetSecurity.zip and extract the files on your computer somewhere. I’ll say C:\unlock5600, but feel free to replace that with anything you like.
4. On your computer, go to Start -> Run and type “cmd” for a DOS prompt. Change directories to the directory you put the files of resetSecurity (e.g. cd c:\unlock5600 using our example).
5. Run RapiConfig as follows:
   % RapiConfig.exe /p ResetSecurity.xml
   This will unlock your phone to install new apps (needed for the next step).
6. Confirm it works by putting “CheckLock.exe” in the \Temp dir of your 5600 and running it by going to Start -> File Manager on your AudioVox and selecting CheckLock.exe under \Temp. It should say “Your phone is not locked.”
   Phase 2 End.
7. Open up SPV-Services.zip and copy the files somewhere (say c:\unlock5600).
8. Copy the Cert.cab into \Temp of your smartphone
9. From your smartphone Start -> File Manager, browser to \Temp and run Cert.cab. Install the program.
10. From your computer, run SPVServices.exe. Click on the SIMLock Toggle button and type AGREE. Don’t worry about the “Doesn’t work on AudioVox” as this did for this purpose.
11. Unlock your AudioVox by clicking on the button. End Phase 3.
12. Test out your new unlocked AudioVox with a friend’s SIM card on another network (I used T-Mobile). You will need to power down the phone, take out the card, put the new one in, and power up. If you see “Network locked, enter unlock code” then something didn’t work. If you see the normal home page with the carrier’s name, you’re golden.

So, that’s a decent number of steps… but it’s in painful detail, for someone who might not be a 5600 hacker and knows where to find and use all these files. Search isn’t a magic bullet; it won’t find The Answer if The Answer doesn’t exist in a single page. Sometimes it doesn’t even find the single page. But it will provide you the path to get there… and thus I’m psyched that the tool I help build was able to teach me, and now potentially teach you, how to unlock an AudioVox SMT 5600.

Hey Cingular: Bite me.

As faithful readers (Hi Meg!) will recall, I’ve been scanning old photos into digital form. I’m about halfway done with my photo scanning, which is to say I’ve completed the wedding album and am working through maybe 50 rolls of random 35mm and APS film.

While I was waiting for a scan to complete tonight, I decided to take a look-see though a box of photos from my late great-aunt and uncle, June and John Marcinkevich. One of the first things I found was a nice frame with three kids pictured, and on the back a description of the kids, who are the children of Joe and Kathy. Apparently, they’re the neice and nephew of June and John. And I don’t think I’ve ever heard of them before. And now that June and John are gone, I’m not sure I’ll ever find out.

Which brings me to today’s deep thought. A lot of people are doing stuff that amounts to putting your entire life in digital form… some colleagues at Microsoft BARC (Bay Area Research Center, the Shoebox Greetings of MSR) are working on this thing called My Life Bits. The idea is straightforward enough: put everything in digital form and store it. No more writing letters, that’s e-mail. Christmas Cards? That’s what Jaquie Lawson is for. Photos? Canon, Nikon, or pretty much every frickin’ phone made is the past year. So it’s easier and easier to record your entire life.

Say June and John did this. And whereever they digitized things had full backup and recovery, so nothing was lost. Would I have any further idea who Joe and Kathy are? Like their last names… or whether or not they’re still alive. How they’re related (I assume on John’s side, as I know my side of the family fairly well).

Knowing one way or the other won’t really affect my life. I doubt these folks live in Seattle, and judging by the photo style the kids are probably grown and gone on with their lives by now. But I found it an interesting lesson in thinking about things such as My Life Bits. When my daughter’s children look at my photos, they’ll probably know who the people are who are in them. But will they know why those people are in them? Will they know the stories that the pictures tell, or just that some people related to them happened to be in front of a camera? In looking at how I arranged my photo gallery, right now, no. There’s just a title for a photo shoot… no names, places, story, or whatnot. I just scanned in a thousand pictures from our wedding. The event needs no explanation besides “Erik Selberg marries Mary Kaye Rodgers.” But that isn’t even the caption… it’s “2000-07-20_Wedding_Pictures.” It’s assumed that it’s our wedding and people viewing it know that…. a grandchild might also, but would a great-grandchild? Or a niece or nephew?

So, looks like I’m going to need to put down some more descriptions of events. Hopefully, I’ll have the patience to do it well, but who knows what I may miss for someone who doesn’t know my history (for example, I now know the importance of last names). But the issue is still there… without some way for people to meaningfully store both the facts and the backstory around their lives, personal histories will still mostly die with the person. I’ll leave the pondering of how to solve this for the comments.

I’ll gripe about the lack of IPTC tomorrow.

Wow… the power of blogs. So I post a somewhat snarky comment in the Nokia 6800 post about Robert blowing me off after saying he’d give me his old TiVo, and I get a response the same day.

Now, I’m pretty sure I don’t have the world’s most popular blog, and I’m not the most frequent writer nor do I even stay on relevant topics to most people. And I can imagine there are plenty of sites that filter things so that Robert can see them, not to mention just plain ol’ email that may have been sent by the original comment author.

What’s cool is how fast a random comment on a random post can become visible. This is frickin’ amazing. You’re starting to see some interesting synergies around systems such as search and routing (the IR kind, not the Cisco kind). Very cool.

I’d also like to thank Robert for his kind words… yup, we’re steadily improving MSN Search as well as Desktop Search. MSN Search still isn’t where I want it, but I’m a bit of a perfectionist and my own harshest critic. Well, second harshest… tech support calls from your mom is nature’s way of subtly telling you that you haven’t got it quite right for everyone yet. But, much as people like to say Microsoft can’t ship software, I gotta say that the Search group at MSN is shipping software like clockwork. It’s an awesome group, and you’re going to be amazed at what you see in the next couple of years. We’ve only just begun.

Making its way around the blogosphere is the story of a blogger pulling down over $10K per month by having a couple blogs and putting up a ton of Google ads. Sweet, eh? So there are interesting things happening… but don’t quit your day job just yet.

A couple of things are happening here that’s going to make the next 5+ years very interesting, and there are some very, very cool opportunities about.

First, people are figuring out how to monetize traffic. A former CEO of mine many lives past once had the following analogy about traffic: Imagine if you had a football stadium full of people, every day. Surely, you could do something or provide something that these people wanted and make a living. But you wouldn’t have to spend anything on marketing and customer acquistion — they’re all right there! So that’s just more profit to you / lower prices to your customer.

Granted, he couldn’t quite monetize traffic all that well, so the company got bought. But the sentiment was right — if you have traffic, you’re already providing something of value to (at least most of) these people. Presumably, you could do more. The hard part is figuring out what more is, but lots of people, such as Microsoft, Yahoo, and Google (with Google clearly in the lead) are going down the ad route — a tried and true venue for monetizing eyeballs.

Second, you’re seeing the Web slowly migrate from a self-help world to that vision of everyone, or at least millions of people, being an author. You’ll always have things like Amazon.com as a place to browse and buy, and maybe look at useful reviews. You’ll always have sites that provide great technical support because they’ve migrated their entire live call-center support to India. You’ll always be able to Turn Off the Internet (at least if you use IE… FireFox users, pranksters the entire lot, are thankfully prevented from pushing the Big Red Button).

But now, you’re getting people discovering things and posting them. News is a great example… you’re seeing lots of international news and political news coming through blogs very quickly. You’re also seeing product news, game hints, and nearly everything else coming out through blogs. It’s rather amazing.

So, you put together monetizing content + tons of authors and you start to get an interesting ecosystem. You’re starting to see a world where some solid entrepreneurs can actually write all day and make a good living doing it. Right now, it’s mostly an ad-based thing done by a few key people. But imagine the possibilities…

Something else to consider… and this is just a trick I use to help trend lines. Imagine who has time to do a ton of blogging, and could make use of the money, esp. at this stage of the game.

Seniors. Stay-at-home parents. Children.

There’s a lot of people out there with time on their hands, and often disposable income. It’s going to be interesting to see what happens.

So, we found out the hard way that the Nokia 6800 isn’t water repellant. Oops. Anyway, I broke down and got the Scoblephone — the AudioVox 5600 SmartPhone chock full o’ features using Windows Mobile. The main reason is I wanted a phone that would sync automagically with Outlook so I would know what meeting I was blowing off at any given time. Syncing with mail was also nice.

So far, it’s been pretty good, although it’s getting all mail, not just mail I leave unfiltered in my inbox (I have a mostly bi-modal mail filtering system… about 4-5 “b-list” folders and everything else in my main inbox). And the vibration seems week. But it does sync with my calendar, so I’m happy!

Sadly, it’s not compatible with the ton of Nokia stuff we have. Alas. And I still really, really want the N90… maybe next year.

Wow… turns out people do read this! Or at least, turns out that a decent number of people use search engines to find out information about FreeRhapsody. So I figured I’d post more information about it.

Disclaimer: I had a 2.5 year tour of duty at RealNetworks. Not sure if that makes me positively biased or negatively biased though…. Oh, and I now work for Microsoft, which competes with RealNetworks in the music and player space. But I work in the Search group. Besides, both Real and Microsoft are getting totally schooled by Apple anyway, as nobody can seem to make anything as cool as the black iPod. But I digress.

Anyway, looks like Real is doing an outsourced promotion for Rhapsody. The way it works is that they give some number to someone who is willing to promote Rhapsody, and for every person Real signs up, the promoter gets a bounty - cash money! That’s why you see things like www.103.freerhapsody.com or www.51.freerhapsody.com. 103 and 51 are just different IDs for different promotion agents. (random trivia: Historically, people did this with 800 numbers and PO boxes… what you do is rent out a ton of ‘em, and when you tell people where to call or what PO box to use, and you can then track which ad or which promoter works best by volume to the individual boxes or calls to each 800 number. IDs on URLs is just the same song, different verse.).

To me, it seems that Real’s only focus now is on Rhapsody. RealPlayer is kinda irrelevant, although they require it for Rhapsody as (a) they’re unwilling to give up RealPlayer, as it was their founding product, and (b) they want to have a permanent presence on the desktop to send updates / ads / additional software (Microsoft does this through Windows Update, and Google and Yahoo do this through their toolbars. Joy.) I’m convinced it’s (a) versus any strategic reason… the company was founded on providing a media player, and that’s what they’re going to stick to. Nevermind that at the end of the day, what people want is content — the format doesn’t matter, and usually gets in the way (”You must download this plugin to view this content. Blah.”). That and the player is just bloated to hell (still, even after some movements to make it leaner and more user-friendly).

Now, the way Real makes money is on subscriptions… that’s what they’ve been hawking for about 5 years now. And they’re very good at getting people to pay for a subscription… some would argue they trick people into it. And they do intentionally make it difficult for people to cancel. For getting a subscription, they do two things:

1. Bait-and-Switch. OK, Rob & co. would protest my use of that, but it’s what it is. They offer something for free, and then when the customer takes them up on the offer, the customer is presented with big buttons to download the pay or subscription version. For example, on Real’s homepage (www.real.com) there’s a link to “Free Download” (not Free Player, but you assume it is). You then get a page asking to download the pay version, or you can hunt for the link for the free version. To me, that’s Bait-and-Switch. The Real folks would call it aggressive marketing, and that people can read and know what’s happening when they put in their credit card numbers. But that’s just not true. It’s also driving down the number of people installing RealPlayer (more later).
2. Free Trial. This is what the porn companies do. Yeah, that’s right… works for porn, works for Real. Real offers a “Free Trial” which is usually 14 days. However, unless you cancel before the end of those 14 days, Real will automatically enroll you in the subscription program and start billing your credit card. And you’re too lazy, or (most likely) you forget to call until that first or second CC bill has come in. Then, you’re usually good for a few months.

Real also uses a call-to-cancel trick, although from some of the help dialogs it looks like they may have automated it now so you don’t have to call. The deal is that to cancel, you have to call an 800 number, where somebody will try and “save” you by telling you more of what the offer gives you, telling you what you’ll be missing if you cancel, and finally offering other products. For most people, they just want out, so as soon as they’re no longer on hold they get the subscription cancelled.

Oh, that’s a 800 number, right? Wonder what happens to people outside the US…. turns out they usually can’t call, so that brings in its own set of issues.

Now, in theory, Real’s offering a 25 tracks a month free thing with Rhapsody, no credit card required. You download Rhapsody, and you can play 25 different songs, or the same song 25 different times, each month. This is essentially a better version of the Free Trial and is designed to follow the heroine model — the first 25 are free to get you hooked, and then you start to pay monthly. Except it isn’t really heroine… it’s more like a Big Mac. I mean, it isn’t bad for free, but a lot of people can do without a Big Mac. Granted, some do love a Big Mac (and Real only wishes they had McDonald’s numbers). I actually didn’t see a big button / ad for this on the Real page, just the Rhapsody page… so I wonder how much Real is really pushing it.

A big question you might have is whether or not you should get it. I gotta admit, Rhapsody is pretty nice. I love the artist radio feature, which creates a radio station based around a particular artist. So you can get “Miles Davis Radio” and artists like Miles Davis. Or “Weird Al Yankovic Radio” and artists like Weird Al. Or whatever you want… it’s pretty cool. Of course, it’s on a PC, so it’s mostly a work thing. My father-in-law gave my wife and I XM Radio and the boombox for a year-plus (he apparently cancelled the subscription, but it still works… ). I gotta say, the boombox is nice, and I’d love to have XM Radio in the car vs the local stations when nothing is on and MK won’t let me listen to KJR SportsTalk Radio - 950 on YOUR AM dial. XM is now $13 a month, vs $10 for Rhapsody… and you can now get portable iPod-like devices for XM (and I suspect Sirius too… same stuff, slightly different sports and talk jocks). Granted, they don’t have the mp3 player / sat radio combo, but I suspect that’ll be out by Christmas.

Me… frankly, I do think a subscription service is the way to go, mostly out of laziness on my part. I’m just too frickin’ lazy to catalog and manage a zillion mp3s, make playlists, and all that. Maybe I was in college when I had delusions of being on the radio, but when it comes down to it I want to spend time listening to music, not thinking about what I want to hear next. I also really don’t want to have to be on a PC… so I’d probably go with a sat radio solution if anything. I mostly listen in the car, and MK listens at home downstairs, away from the computer. But y’know what… AM and FM are actually pretty decent still, and it turns out both Comcast and DirectTV have audio stations with basic programming, so you can listen to some commercial free radio via your TV for entertaining big events. So the question is, do you have $10 - $15 a month to spend on music?

Here’s the answer to the final question… should you get Rhapsody? Well, if you like it, and you think you’ll be near a PC (or can move things from your PC to your non-Apple iPod clone), then sure. Yeah, Real can be amazingly annoying, and their sales tactics make used car and door-to-door vacuum salesmen proud, but that isn’t the issue. It’s whether or not you like the product and think it’s worth the money. Apple is much nicer and slicker. But you’re paying Apple prices. There’s Microsoft and Yahoo which have similar offers — I actually don’t know anything about them, so I can’t comment much, but my lack of knowledge indicates to me that neither has done a ton of promotion and neither is pushing something amazing cool that would turn people away from an iPod. So who knows. But you can probably safely check out the 25-track free version of Rhapsody if you go to www.rhapsody.com and make sure you always follow the “Free Rhapsody” links — watch out for those Free Download links!

PS - also full disclosure… MK is thinking about getting one of the iPod minis (the 6G ones). ‘cuz they’re COOL! I still think it’s a waste, as neither of us are into mucking with mp3s and iTunes just seems to be amazingly expensive for what you get, but hey… iPods are incredibly cool.

Me, I’m still jammin’ to 950 on my AM dial. I think it’s all a bit of a waste.