I love movies. After technology and computers, movies are probably my 2nd favorite hobby. Between the theater a few times a month, Netflix and my own collection of 500+ DVDs in my home theater, I watch more than my fair share of movies.

Quite a few years ago, I started watching a variety of movie reviews in order to better choose which movies to watch. I quickly came down to Roger Ebert and the various co-hosts he's had for his TV show. Now, I rarely bother with anyone else's opinion.

Now, that's not because I always agree with Ebert. Far from it. However, after all of these years, I can tell fairly accurately, based on Ebert's opinion and Roeper's counterpoint or agreement, whether I will like a movie or not. I've never been too concerned with their "thumbs" rating system, as it's mostly a gimmick to get you to read or watch the more in depth reviews.

That explanation of *why* they gave it a thumbs up or thumbs down is usually exactly what I need to determine whether I'm willing to see a movie or not. Heck, some of his most enthusiastic reviews have been for movies I absolutely hated, but I wasn't surprised when I hated them because of why he was enthusiastic.

Unfortunately, I'm often looking at a DVD on Netflix or in the store or on Amazon, wondering what his review was, 6 months or 2 years ago or whatever, when the movie was released. The current episodes of his TV show are great for deciding which movie to see in the theater this weekend, but don't help so much for a movie released last year that is for sale for $12 at Amazon.

That's why I think it's very cool that they've put up pretty much every one of those TV reviews since 1985 and a bunch of stuff that goes back as far as the beginning of that TV show, in 1975. With that archive, I can now pull up those older reviews easily.

Very cool and puts value on that huge repository of video footage that isn't easily monetized in any of the traditional ways. It's not like we're going to buy DVD box sets of 30+ years of movie reviews. Nor are we going to tune in for old re-runs of reviews from 1991. However, to look up a movie you've never heard of or to see if that DVD on the discount rack might be a hidden gem, it's definitely useful.

Photo: Charro Badger

About a year ago, I mentioned the band that a friend of mine from junior high and high school is fronting. At the time of that writing, they had an EP out that was a diamond in the rough. It was enjoyable and I looked forward to them refining their craft and seeing where things would go.

Well, I just listened through the new one that came in the mail today and I have to say that Mat and crew have taken that rough chunk of coal, cut and polished it and the resulting EP: Brand New Faith is a much more mature release in nearly every way a collection of music can be.

The song structures are more complex and Mat, while still doing some of that cruising-along-monotone that appropriately drives the song "This Truck Makes More $$$ After Midnight", he is also exploring much more of his tonal and dynamic range on "Bound for Glory".

The EP and the music overall are in that Americana/Roots Rock/Alt Country/Grit/Honky Tonk/Blues Rock/Whatever genre that has been growing over the last few years. The themes tap into some of that same mythology and themes that something like HBO's Carnivale explores. Many of the bits are familiar, including the vocabulary of faith, but with that gritty twist that makes it interesting.

Here's the band's own description of the album:

Voodoo curses, Doomsday Preachers and Truck Stop Transsexuals cross paths. A killer travels down highway 61 only to put his faith in a statue of Jesus while searching for the next 'good time.' A pin-up queen gives her soul to God and breaks the devil’s heart. An outlaw trucker rolls down the back roads of lost love and sin, pulled between the powers of heaven and hell. When you find the Ghosts of Redemption and the long lost lover known as Damnation rolled up like a cowboy's cigarette on the wrong side of the tracks…you’ve found a Brand New Faith.

Overall, it reminds me of bits of Ray Wylie Hubbard and The Legendary Shack Shakers, but unique in its own way. That's a good thing.

If you want to give it a preview, you can hear all of the songs on the band's page. And, if you like what you hear or just want to support independent music from the Midwest, you can pick up the album from CDBaby.

Dave Slusher recently took on a topic that I've been bothered by as well. He pointed out how often people flatly state how long a podcast "should" be and how seldom that's based on anything other than their own interactions with podcasts.

Basically, people who have a 30 minute commute insist that they should all be about 30 minutes. Those who listen in short segments throughout the day often want them in 5-10 minute chunks.

This is something I see often and is pretty much arguing from anecdote. It drives me nuts. It happens whenever you use just yourself, a couple of people or a small subset of the population at large and act as though its representational of the entire group. Unfortunately, on the modern web, you can get what *seems* like a big group and think you're looking at a good sample. 10,000 people on the web is NOT necessarily representative of the whole.

I saw it again today when someone posted "the" 7 levels of site revenue.. He put Adsense as the lowest level. However, because he included his revenue per 1000 page views (CPM), lots of people reacted just like I did. See, he stated that Adsense only generates $1 per 1000 page views.

I actually had to read that twice because of how far off that is from the numbers I've seen. Of course, my numbers aren't representative either, but I'm not claiming they are. However, I've seen more than once where someone was told not to bother with Adsense because of those kinds of numbers.

This is all a problem because of something I'm guilty of as well. It's a technique for commanding authority when you make statements. You just remove all of the indications of doubt. "I think X is the best way to do Y" becomes "X is the best way to do Y", "My results with program Z was to net 123" becomes "Program Z nets 123".

Basically, when you just state your opinion as fact, most people will just accept it. That's hugely powerful and terribly dangerous. However, if you just insert the disclaimers into those statements, you can take them with the appropriate grain of salt.

In the case of Adsense numbers, pretty much *everything* you hear is anecdote. Google prohibits sharing the exact numbers you earn and aren't sharing any aggregate data with the public. As a result, everyone who is making proclamations about how much money people are making is pretty much basing it off of the few people they've talked to. That's highly likely to be a group of people in a very similar target niche or similar demographic, etc.

On the podcasting side, the entire podcasting market consists of early adopters at the moment. Basing long term format decisions on anecdotes at this point is pure folly. Consider how different TV is today from what it looked like 20 or 30 years ago.

A few months ago, I watched the first 2 seasons of the new Dr. Who straight through. There were definitely rough spots, but the show definitely started getting its legs toward the end of that 2nd season and now into the 3rd season, which is currently airing in the UK. That 3rd season is viewable to those of us in the US only through "creative" means, which I have to admit, I've been doing (I'll be buying each new season on DVD as well). I've also gotten hooked on Torchwood, the spin off of the new Dr. Who.

I never really watched Dr. Who much before this most recent incarnation. I'm not sure how I missed out on catching the bug, but I did. I'm looking to work through some of the back catalog when I get a chance because of how much I'm enjoying it.

That enjoyment has led me to seek out a way of putting something from the series into my home theater. So, when ThinkGeek sent me an email offering a Dr. Who Sonic Screwdriver for $15, I bought it. I'm not sure how I'll display it, because I'd like the sound and lights to be usable while its on display. However, I'm still excited about it more than any adult should be about a toy.

Most of the TV/movie prop replicas are REALLY expensive or really cheesy toys. This one is a nice compromise. From what I've read, they actually re-molded the TV version *from* this toy after it came out, making this a reverse replica.

At any rate, this also has me thinking about the role of "decorative" toys and geeks. It's similar to other forms of room decoration in that it expresses personality and taste, but definitely has a geeky bent. I suspect that being a geek and a movie fan, I'm just fated to be drawn to this stuff. And, while I thought the sonic screwdriver was plenty geeky, I think what I really need for my new office cubicle is The Face of Boe.

A couple of days ago, Garrick asked a good question that I've wondered about myself: where can you find downloadable music from the upper midwest? I like finding new music and always get an extra bit of warm fuzzy when the artist is from Minnesota or nearby.

While the question raised some ideas about future projects, I did suggest CD Baby's state-specific listings: Minnesota, Iowa, Wisconsin, South Dakota, etc. While the interface that they provide isn't great, it does underscore just how much great music is out there from EVERY area of the world.

CD Baby is a great idea. Make a place for artists to sell their CD's without having to go through labels. Many of the discs are way cheaper than the $15-18 in most stores and I've bought a couple for well under the $10 that iTunes charges as well. Of course, since pretty much anyone can sell a CD there, pretty much anyone *does*, which makes the preview tracks a good idea (and just plain a good source of MP3's).

The tracks are all individual or by M3U playlist for streaming. The problem is that my searching for music is pretty much completely separated from my evaluation of it. I tend to find a list of artists/albums/tracks I might like, download them and listen to them later. I pretty much NEVER listen to the potentially interesting music when I find it.

All of that meant that to get the most out of the CD Baby sample tracks, I wanted a quick way to queue up the downloading of the tracks on a playlist. First, note that the playlist URL for an album changes (daily it looks like), so this is pretty much about downloading in the background while you're browsing the catalog, not trying to spider their entire site. What I am doing works today, but could always change.

At any rate, with a command prompt open (Linux, Windows or Mac doesn't matter) and a copy of wget on your system path, you can make quick work of grabbing the contents of a playlist.

See, an M3U playlist is pretty simple, coming down to pretty much a text file of URL's to MP3 files. That just happens to be the exact thing wget is made to handle. So, the general "workflow" works like this:

1. Find an album you like.
2. Right click on the "Play All Songs" link above the track list and copy the link address.
3. Go to the command prompt and type "wget" followed by a space and then the URL. On Linux, it can be pasted by CTRL+SHIFT+V. Hit ENTER.
4. Note the filename of the M3U that it downloads.
5. Run "wget -i playlistname.m3u" and let it run.

It will then download them all one at a time. It all works fairly well. I've got them all downloading to a specific directory called, simply enough "cdbaby". I'm keeping them all under there so that I know where to go to buy the albums I like. However, I do want them organized by artist and album. It's just how I roll.

Fortunately, I wrote code to move and rename MP3's by ID3 tag a while back. Add the folder to iTunes and make another smart playlist and I can evaluate more music easily. And, with as much as I've been working the last couple of weeks, more music is a really good thing.