Welcome to this week’s Reno News & Review.
Spring is springing like crazy around here. Crazy is springing like crazy around here, too, but I guess the concepts go hand in hand.
I’m so happy to see the crocuses, daffodils and tulips reaching their little green fingers toward the blue, blue sky. It’s like a weight has been lifted off my shoulders, and I feel my chest expanding like a yogic cobra.
Something about this time of year makes me really appreciate new music, and since my brother, Chip, brought me a $50 Amazon gift certificate for my 50th birthday last week, I’ve been listening to a lot of it. I bought a bunch of MP3s I’ve been wanting. Let’s see, out of that $50, I got Beach Fossils, Cults, Jason & The Scorchers, Joe Walsh, St. Vincent, and The National’s latest. Awesome. Having all the music in the world instantly available at my fingertips is, to put it mildly, addictive. And then there’s this whole inexplicable Taylor Swift “Enchanted” thing. Do you think she’s really a good girl? Because I don’t.
I find Amazon’s and Google’s cloud computing platforms interesting but frustrating. I have an Android phone, so I mostly use the Google apps. For it to work easily, buying music on Amazon would require me to add the Amazon app, taking memory and battery power from my phone, which I won’t do. So I go this whole circuitous route of buying the music on Amazon, downloading to my home computer, uploading to Google Play, then pinning it back to my cell phone so I can listen to it without dependence on network “bars.”
That’s a lot of work when the nature of the cloud is sharing, instantly, anywhere. If somebody wants to make some money, they’ll figure out an app that works around all this proprietary, my-piece-of-the-pie stuff. The internet is a wholly collaborative environment, and Bill Gates and Steve Jobs business models are passing like those cold winter days that trapped the daffodils.