I heard a piece of music last night, "Variations for the Healing of Arinushka" by one of my favorite composers, Arvo Pärt, on the local (but not really local anymore) classical radio station WILL FM 90.9. I noted down the title before falling asleep.

Today, I headed to Amazon to see if I could find an album with this particular recording of the piece by Kalle Randalu, an Estonian pianist. It turns out this track is from the soundtrack of Ken Burns' film "The War", and not surprisingly, there's a lot of other great music on the soundtrack. So I was a click away from buying the MP3 version, when I thought I might as well check the CD version and see if there were any additional tracks on it.

There weren't, but guess what? The MP3 album ($9.99) costs $2 more than the CD ($7.98)! What the hell? I hope this is an accident and not the start of a trend. I might as well pirate the MP3s while the CD is in the mail. Read more »

Apple has just updated their terms of service. To download and install a new app, you must agree to the terms of service for the App Store. Apple provides a convenient way for you to read the ToS in the form of a little book reader. Lucky for us, because the terms are over seventy pages long. It took me three or four minutes just to flip through them without reading them, though admittedly I got distracted a few times.

One project that the EFF started that I appreciate but rarely use is TOSBack. It notices when various entities' terms of service change and shows you the old and new terms, side by side, with differences highlighted, à la Wikipedia's diffs. I'm glad to hear they're planning to use the Google Summer of Code program to improve it, though—even the diffs themselves can be a chore to page through. Read more »

When ING's savings interest rates started plummeting, the graph of the rate over the last several months mysteriously disappeared from the website. I contacted customer support but got nothing useful in reply. So I organized a collection of the data I had kept since September 2007. Here is a chart and data series of ING's savings interest rate.

If anyone knows how to get Google Spreadsheets to graph date-series data in a useful way, please let me know.

I've updated my perl module for INGDirect (US only) to work with their new authentication system. It seemed like a good time to try to get it listed on CPAN, which turns out to be a rather involved process. I imagine that's a good thing, as it probably keeps the quality up. Anyway, in the meantime, you can download Finance::Bank::US::INGDirect here. There's a test script in the documentation that you should get you started. Read more »

I heard "The King's Hunting Jig" on WILL a week or two ago and got the Philip Jones Brass Ensemble album from Amazon MP3. Having sung barbershop for several years now, I've developed a taste and respect for ensembles that have this sort of tight harmony and perfect intonation. Other musicians that have struck a chord with me recently: The King's Singers (listen to Greensleeves!), the Kassiopeia Quintet (Gesualdo's madrigals), and Moira Smiley & Voco (their performance at BLEMF was on Harmonia recently).

If you use last.fm, I made a pipe for recently weekly artists (for a given user), since they don't seem to deliver that information in RSS format for some reason. The whole point of this post was to share a link to the Philip Jones Brass Ensemble from my feed and show how nicely information can flow from one place to another, but Google Reader stripped all the links out of my note. Fix it, Google!

Also nice: moc and lastfmsubmitd.

I went up to Chicago yesterday to play Whirlyball with a bunch of friends. It's kind of like basketball with bumper cars. Only these are not your fairground bumper cars that top out at a snail's pace. These things must be going a good seven or eight miles an hour (lucky car Black #7 was surely even faster), making for some bone-jarring, muscle-bruising, seatbelt-straining head-on collisions. It's even more fun than it sounds! We headed back to Chris and Helen's place afterward for many hours of good food and drink, fun games (hooray for Wii Sports, the only way I will ever make par), and impromptu music. (Cheers to Matt; I haven't heard "If You Could Only See" in a long, long time!)