I choose the above title because I can't think of good title, and because it seems to aptly descibe my life lately. Wake up in the morning, go to work, and hang out. Eat lunch. Hang out. Do something or other that resembles productivity, and hang out some more. Come home, hang out. Go to Pearl Street, hang out. Etcetera.

So here I sit, hanging out, listening to the music piping in through the broadband line. Lately, I've been rediscovering the fun of the mp3.com site. Even after all the hype, lawsuits, and other bullshit, it's still a great place to go find music that's outside the narrow range of radio playlists. (Although I notice they also include some very mainstream artists these days.)

mp3.com's real strength, is, was, and always will be that pretty much any artist can put music up there, and anyone else can listen to it. Screw all the stuff about ripping and uploading cds you already own to listen to them at the office, especially when stupid lawsuits have effectively crippled the service to the point of uselessness. (Some of us have found much better, more efficient ways to do that.) The real gold is in finding music you'd never hear through any other means.

Of course, this can also mean a lot of sifting to find the good stuff. To aid in this, they've got lots of nice little "stations", which are basically mp3 playlists that anybody with an account can create. Someone with similar tastes made a station? Go hear their stuff. More music for all. Yipee.

Imperfections? Certainly. Popups sometimes appear between loading pages. (I think I'll have to configure Mozilla to start ignoring those. They've become altogether too common lately, even on otherwise respectable sites.) Despite the name of the domain, they've become a nonstop shill for a certain shitty OS-specific proprietary audio format. I guess they need ads pay the bills. (In a perfect world, they would be able to do so though cd sales, but alas...) As long as they keep offering normal mp3s for downloads, I won't complain. Oh, and if you give them your email address, they will send you spam. That's the big reason I got annoyed and quit visiting for a while. procmail is your friend.

In other news, Mozilla 0.9.3 comes charging out of the gate to dazzle us all. So far, I note various tweaks and improvements from 0.9.2. It's also supposed to be more stable. Then again, 0.9.2 seemed pretty stable to me. I guess I'm not the most terribly demanding web surfer in the world.

I'm not sure whether this was in before, but a /. poster today pointed out the CTRL + and CTRL - features, so I've been playing with those like a silly idiot. CTRL +++++. Eeeeeek! CTRL ---. There. That's better. Hahaha. Take that, all you microscopic font obsessed web designers! :)

DIE ANTS! DIE!

'xcuse me.

...

I hate ants. I think I'm gonna have to look harder for some ant poison this weekend. Maybe one of those fancy schmancy "home, garden, and all that other tacky stuff" stores.

So tonight... I'm thinking I'll hang out. And probably tomorrow too. Yeah. That'll do it.