ML Starkey's Weblog: Service with a smile!
Providing Technical Support to Sun's customers and other topics

I didn't have much of a budget for big name summer concert tours this year. But as it turned out I didn't need a big budget. The 70's band America made a stop at the Lowell Summer Music Series yesterday. I had seen the ads for the series back in May or June and figured for $16, you couldn't beat the deal.

We arrived too late to get a good spot, but that didn't bother me. Hearing all those great hits live from the original artists was great. Boardinghouse Park in downtown Lowell is a wonderful setting and I definately want to go again. Only this time, I'm going to heed the ticket warnings to get there by 6:00pm to ensure a seat!

I bought my daughter a SanDisk MP3 player for Christmas. It's a 256K (double the capacity of my iRiver, so I'm a bit jealous) and it was a good deal at Circuit City. It came with a "Digital Music Essentials Pack" that included a blank CD, 10 free downloads from MusicNow (which still required a credit card to obtain, but that's another rant) and a few other items.

So far so good, but since the MusicNow service requires Windows Media Player, I suspected that the music would be DRM'd and I was right. She picked out one song and I downloaded it and copied it to tbe player using Windows Explorer (the file management tool). It copied, but the player wouldn't play it. So we copied the music to the player using the Windows Media Player tool, and that worked.

Now, I have no intention of continuing this MusicNow service after the 10 downloads are done and I really don't want to be forced into using Windows Media Player for all eternity. Now I'm hunting for ways to convert the legally purchased digitally locked music to mp3. A quick google brought me to the site of Zittware.com, which has a tool to allow you to open your legally purchased DRM music, but you can't do a direct convert. You have to open the music, burn it to CD, then you can rip the burned tracks back to mp3. Alot of hoops to jump through, if I can't find anything less kludgy.

What an annoyance. My older iRiver, which only understands mp3, doesn't put me through this. I can understand wanting to preserve legal rights, but there should be a better way.

I'm in the mood for some classic rock this evening so I thought I'd fire up the Real Player and check out their store. So what's the #1 track on the classic rock chart at musicstore.real.com? It's "The Weight" by The Band. That's pretty funny since I've been hearing the commercial on TV that uses the song (I have no idea what the product is . . . a car or something?) and it got me thinking about buying some rock classics.

I love music, any kind of music. I can sit around making music all day long. As long as I'm making my music, ain't gonna do nobody no harm.

OK, enough old lyrics, that's not the point. But I do have one.

And it's this. Sun has a ton of musicians in it's ranks. Obviously, none of them professional full time or they wouldn't be here at all, but all the same, many singers and instrumentalists of all kinds. As a matter of fact, one sits right next to me (Hi Tim!). Yesterday, he whips out some drum sticks and drills out a beat on the books on his desk. Turns out my cube neighbor plays in this band. Cool! Occasionally, we are treated to live performances from employees at the Burlington site. Alas, I've never been able to catch one of these due to work schedules, but if I recall correctly, there's been a classical piano concert and a small jazz ensemble. There is a Yamaha Disklavier grand piano in the main lobby. Walk down the hall outside of the main reception area and you can't miss it. I would love to swap the 35 year old Baldwin Acrosonic spinet piano that I learned on for one of these fine digital instruments. Then I could have a grand piano in a fraction of the space (not to mention a fraction of the weight!). And it's so much more 1.) Never needs tuning. 2.) Can produce different voices. 3.) Can be setup to play on it's own. 4.) Can plug in some headphones and play whenever you want. 5.) And it has all 88 keys! That last one is a dig at the portable Yamaha PSR-220 I now own, which is otherwise a fun keyboard to play with.

But there's a downside or two with the Disklavier. Price is a big one. I haven't actually gone into a piano dealer and inquired, but I've done some Internet searches. The American dealers don't list their prices on the web and Yamaha doesn't list MSRP. But the European keyboard dealers do and with the help of an online currency exchange rate site, I figured it would cost me something in the neighborhood of $15,000 to $20,000 for my dream instrument. I could maybe get $800 to $1,000 for the Baldwin if I sold it. I don't know if a piano dealer would take my 30+ year old set of ivories in trade. That's pretty steep so I think I'll just keep the old Baldwin and keep plinking on the PSR-220 and admire the Disklavier in the Sun lobby when I walk by.

It's no accident that a technology company like Sun would have a fair sprinkling of musicians in it's employ. According to this article from the Wall Street Journal (link goes to sfgate.com), nearly 75% of the entrants in the Siemens Westinghouse Science and Math Competition were "gifted musicians". Mathematics = numbers and music = numbers, makes perfect sense to me. That close link didn't actually hit me until I took a Music Theory course my senior year of high school. I did very well in Music Theory that year. Music Theory clicked right into place after the 9+ years of piano lessons. But I always needed alot of help with my Math classes!

So hats off to the Sun musicians. Doesn't matter if you are just a Singer in a Rock and Roll Band, or the Guitar Man, or the Piano Man, or the Jazz Man, or an American Band, you are just all right with me!