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Wednesday, February 25, 2009

Those people keep a-movin'

50% of my iTunes purchases are now DRM-free! The rest should follow by the end of March, according to the press release. If 80% of all iTunes songs are DRM-free now, and yet only 50% of my (admittedly very small) purchase set falls into that category, do I have extraordinarily unlucky taste in music? Or just not mainstream?

I have a Smart playlist called "DRM" which grabs all songs in "Purchased" with a bitrate of 128 kbps. Before my upgrade yesterday, the DRM playlist looked like this:

Then I upgraded these:

Then the DRM playlist looked like this:

So the DRM-free version of Follow Me still has a low bitrate? Huh.

Today I bought textbooks. I wasn't going to buy them before speaking to my lecturers, but they're on the shelf in Vic Books with course titles on, which is usually a pretty good indicator that they're needed for the course (Vic Books so seldom get this wrong, they must be talking to each individual lecturer when they make up their readings lists for each trimester). Two books cost me $288. And I already bought one other for around $120 (it was to be "summer" reading, but it didn't arrive until late January. Fortunately it also turns out to be a recommended text). Textbooks are expensive.

Vic Books know nothing of a Micro textbook, so I will speak to the lecturer on that one. Otherwise, my book shopping for the trimester should be complete. I've never had it done so early before.

The math course starts in one hour. In principle, all the Honours students in econ or finance should be there. Will there be many of us? Will they be nice? Will I know anyone? About the only certainty is that some parts of the course will be boring.

1 comment:

bk drinkwater said...

In 2003, when I did English Lit 213 (Modern Poetry) Vic Books stocked the wrong Yeats book — a selected poems, rather than a collected poems.

The selection omitted most of the Yeats poems we studied. The lecturer, Jane Stafford, had some fairly biting things to say about the whole process. Maybe that's what spurred them to improve things.

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