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Nettwerk’s Terry McBride on ProTools mash ups

I got a kick out of this interview — Canada’s Killer of Major Labels in Wired — with Nettwerk’s Terry McBride. His whole approach of letting the equivalent of influencer customers play with Nettwerk’s bands original ProTools files and audio recordings is encouraging your customers to mash-up your productions.



“Let’s give away the ProTools files on MySpace. Vocals, guitars, drums, and bass. We’ll let the fans make their own mixes.” The room falls quiet. Musicians usually record their instruments and vocals on separate tracks; the producer and mixer combine those tracks into a finished product. McBride wants to make the individual files available so that amateur DJs can use them like Lego bricks to create something all their own. The record industry likes control. McBride is proposing unfettered chaos.”


Can you say DangerMouse’s The Grey Album? ; )


And on that note, this is something that my old friend, Christopher Bock would have loved to see: people doing things that push the creative and control envelope.


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Pluto’s out: will Rhode Island be designated a “dwarf state”? (Friday humour)

As was widely reported, the International Astronomical Union voted to remove Pluto’s designation as a planet in the solar system. Now, it’s considered a “Dwarf planet.”


Note that the IAU has not updated their official page page on the topic of Pluto’s status on the org’s web site, but have published this post on the last general assembly meeting. NASA has already updated their page on the new scientific definition of a “planet” which does not include Pluto. (NASA: “Pluto has now been classified scientifically as a “dwarf planet”. For more details, see the IAU resolution.“)



Download Fullsize TIFF   Download Fullsize JPEG  Credit: The International Astronomical Union/Martin Kornmesser


I take offense to this casual rewriting of history, with Pluto occupying volumes in history books since it was first discovered in 1930 (on February 18th by Clyde Tombaugh, named after Pluto, the Roman god of the underworld). Want to make your opinion known? Contact the IAU’s Secretariat or the Division III president for Planetary Systems Sciences, Iwan Williams.


For traditional (print) textbook companies, this will mean a bonanza of new book sales as they rush the findings of the IAU revision into print. Up to 2 million pages, according to msn Search, will need to be updated. Countless observatories and museums will be spending millions on renovating their exhibits of the solar system: the National Air and Space Museum’s exhibit will no doubt have to build a new broom closet for the dwarf planets, or at least crowd Pluto’s area to include Ceres and 2003UB-313 along side Pluto.


Not likely.


What’s next… will someone decide that Rhode Island is too small to be a full-sized state and designated it as a”dwarf state”? No one in Canada calls Prince Edward Island — the smallest province in Canada — a dwarf province. Perhaps the mini will be classified as a new type of automobile.


This will no doubt carry over to the tech industry, with mini SD storage cards casually referred to as “dwarf storage,” Ultra-Mobile PCs would be Dwarf PCs, and WindowsXP Embedded known as a “dwarf OS.”


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Where are your files archived? Is “Live Drive” coming soon?

A few months ago I was lamenting and thinking of an easy-to-use, online storage in the cloud service: “Give me a file share in the cloud where I can regularly back up critical files (photos, email and contacts) off-site… and make the files (or at least the recoverable image) accessible over the Internet as well should the whole PC disappear.”


Now, there’s more talk, as reported by ZDNet news in Oz, about LiveDrive:



“Speaking at a blogger’s breakfast before the opening of Microsoft’s Tech Ed conference in Sydney on Tuesday, technical specialist John Hodgson said that the basic Live Drive was likely to include around 2 gigabytes of storage for free. Additional storage capacity will be available for purchase, he said, though pricing and final release dates haven’t been announced.”


For our use, 2 GB is just about enough to back up my current non media documents for each of our home PCs… but not our archive of photos, scans, audio and video. That’s OK, as with OneCare and our broadband connection, I imagine that I will be able to schedule an automated back-up directly to the cloud, selecting Live Drive as one of the available storage devices in the set-up.


Great if this could be one of several options, rather than the only “save to” option: that would let me still back up regularly to our home server as well as a redundant back-up to the cloud.


As for my solution with larger files (especially those I want to keep “forever”) is to make a couple of redundant archives. This includes…



  • regularly scheduled back-ups with OneCare to my shared, networked Buffalo hard drive, which includes a complete back up of all machines with all files,

  • important family files – photos and videos of the kids, art and music, and

  • a small portable drive as well as DVDs for long-term storage in our off-site storage in an inexpensive safe deposit box (so that’s what you use them for…).

I also rely on PhotoWorks (originally known as Seattle Film Works) which originally scanned and archived all of our developed film images. Now, as long as I place an order a couple of times a year (cards, prints of digital images), they maintain the archive on their system. That’s not hard to do as I find that for larger than 4×6″ prints (or lots of ’em), I regularly upload my favourite digital images for printing… and then those images are also archived for safe keeping. 


digg this


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Comments turned off

I’m turning off the comments on my blog for the weekend do to a slew of inappropriate comments.

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Update: IVR Cheat Sheet is now the “gethuman database”

A few months ago I wrote about Paul English’s IVR Cheat Sheet, which is a great resource for getting to a live person when you’re seemingly stuck in an automated operator call system. “IVR” means interactive voice response, those core of those automated systems that handle inbound and outbound call center telephone traffic, hopefully routing a caller to the right department.

Update: you can now find the IVR Cheat Sheet here on his new web site, http://gethuman.com/.


You can still get through to the live operators through Microsoft’s main number (listed on his site as 800-936-5700) by dialing/pressing 0.


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