Wasting Away Again
2004-01-30,

It�s a slow Friday here in Insuranceville, so I thought I�d plod out a sentence or two to help pass the time between crucial, life-altering tasks.

As of last night, I�ve found myself volunteering to become the Boy Scout Pack 3508 Advancement Chairperson. This involves keeping records of Cub Scout advancement and turning it in to the district scouting hub, as well as getting patches and awards for the advancers. And I�m supposed to make sure that everyone involved is registered officially for insurance and advancement purposes. Very exciting stuff, I know, but someone has to do it. It was either that, or volunteer for Assistant Cubmaster, for which, while I�m sure it would be a lot of fun, I am certainly not cut out. I�m good with kids, it�s the planning and dealing with adults on which I�m not all too keen. It�s bad enough that this Advancement thing takes some communication. It�s small enough that I can adjust, I�m sure. Baby steps, man, baby steps.

I�m starting to get excited about music again. For the last year and a half, buying albums hasn�t exactly been in our financial scope. Disappointing, especially to someone who has 400+ albums and always wants more, even in these days of not much from which to choose. I�ve been a member of emusic.com for a goodly while, but they just got bought out by another company who saw fit to limit individual downloads to something like 35 or 40 songs per month for the same subscription price that used to get me virtually infinite downloading. So screw them.

So I was downloading my last month�s worth of songs before canceling, when lo and behold, someone on the site that listed some favourite albums posted a reference to another site that sells music online. It�s a Russian site that�s called, somewhat humorously, allofmp3.com. I, of curse, being of unsound mind, first read it as, �allo fmp 3�, which was a mite confusing. But I got better.

Anyway, not to sound the advert or anything, it has some potential and is offering around 1000 downloads per month for the same subscription price as emusic.com. Plus they also have a pay-to-play option, which amounts to about $.01 per MB of song. Pretty cheap, all told. So this makes buying albums potentially affordable again. Yay. And as they seem to have a decent selection, yay again. Music for me. Uh� us. Music for us. Yeah, that�s it.

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