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My friend Ben of the bentropy blog sent me a link to “post-punk laptop rap artist MC Lars’ page on purevolume.com (of course MC Lars is also on MySpace, YouTube, etc etc). After listening for a day, I’ve got to say I’m hooked.

“MC Lars is a member of what he dubs the iGeneration, a group born and raised in the time of the Ninja Turtles, cassette tapes and new wave music, who now live in the age of Desperate Housewives, Sidekicks and screamo bands. These are the kids who have grown up using the Internet as a part of their every day life. They can conveniently carry 5,000 songs in their pocket, but are faced with the glooming fact that the worlds oil supply and Social Security will both run out in their lifetime. MC Lars is the hero of this new generation, addressing their thoughts and every day struggles in his music.” (from his Purevolume page).

One of his tracks, “Download This Song”, is freely available to download (as the name implies). It’s a pretty catchy tune and speaks to the an issue that lots of us feel strongly about, namely that there’s a growing dissatisfaction with the current music distribution method. MC Lars isn’t just complaining about the issue – he’s making a successful career out of producing and distributing his own music. Checkout this analysis on copyright.corante.com and this one on the Future of Music blog.

Watch “Download This Song” below:

You can find a free download of this song on his Purevolume page, where you can also stream many of his other songs. Pretty quickly you’ll be a fan too. Strangely, on his MySpace page, this track runs $0.99. So start with the purevolume page.

His myspace page also has a bunch of videos and other crap (as most myspace pages do) which I haven’t had time to watch, but if you have more free time, go for it.

By the way, I think “screamo bands” is a hilarious phrase. Can’t wait to slip that into a work email somehow.

Some are calling this nerdcore, which I think is incorrect. Now this is real nerdcore.

This is a little old, but I don’t know how I didn’t see this earlier: Beckham scored his first goal for the LA Galaxy this past Wednesday. And what a pretty goal it was – nice and “bendy” just like he’s known for. Somehow he even managed to get the keeper moving in the wrong direction… from a free kick!

Why did it have to be against the DC United? Well, at least it didn’t happen in front of the United’s home crowd (DC was victorious in that matchup).

So will this radically change the way Americans view soccer? Doubtful. But at least Beckham is starting to earn his salary.

I turned 28 this past weekend and one of my presents from Nicole was a Nintendo Wii, which is awesome.

Unfortunately the controller that came with the console died shortly after I plugged everything together. I contacted Nintendo and they are sending me a replacement, free of charge. So my first impression of their customer service is a good one, although I’m still bummed that we haven’t been able to try out the multi-player features.

I did pony up the $5 for the “Internet Channel” which allows me to browse the web on the device, and of course the first thing I did was watch Chocolate Rain. But I’ve got a list of cool websites that I need to add to my favorites, mainly poached from this article on Five resources to create a Wii media center.

I had some difficulty at first getting the Wii to connect to my wireless (I had to manually upgrade my router firmware and assign it an IP) and also ran into trouble downloading from the Wii Shop Channel (error 204904). But a good thing to know is that purchases from the Wii Shop Channel can be “re-downloaded” for free if your download fails or if you wipe out your box and need to start over. So exiting the Wii Shop Channel and starting over fixed my issue.

Sadly, after a lot of browsing the web, I still haven’t found a great solution for streaming videos to the Wii (see my Del.icio.us bookmarks tagged with Wii). The best one seems to be Wii Media Center X, although it’s still in its infancy. Hopefully as the Wii matures, this program will too.

All in all, this little box has the potential to be much more than just a game playing device. Because of that, as well as its unique gameplay, this is the first game device I’ve had that I’m really excited about using (I’m not a hardcore gamer).

And I’m not the only one in the house excited about the Wii:

If anyone wants to come over and try it out (once I have the second controller sometime later this week), just let me know!

Today the Express daily newspaper, published by the Washington Post, ran a story about Nicole and me. The Express has a section called B.I.O. (By Invitation Only) that lists upcoming weddings and unions. Nicole contacted the paper and told them about us, and today they ran the story!

Click the thumbnail to see a picture of the article:

Or download the high resolution PDF of the whole page.

This is much cooler than the last time I thought I was famous. I hope we don’t let all this fame go to our heads.

I recently decided to switch from Blockbuster Online to Netflix. Back in college I had Netflix, but had switched because of Blockbuster’s lower prices and in-store coupons. Well Netflix has lowered their prices and Blockbuster keeps reducing the number of coupons they give.

So I went to sign up, and accidentally entered the email address I had used with Netflix years ago. It told me I wasn’t elligible for the free trial and offered me a selection of different plans, starting at $4.99. But their intermediate plans were listed as $13.99 and $16.99, one dollar a month MORE than if I was a new customer.

Checkout these screenshots to see what I’m talking about:

Prices for Old Users:
The 2 and 3 DVD at-a-time plans cost $13.99 and $16.99 respectively.

Prices for New Users:
The 2 and 3 DVD at-a-time plans are $1 cheaper for new users.

And once you’ve identified yourself as a returning member, Netflix sets a cookie in your browser so there’s no easy way to get to the New Member prices. A less observant user might not even realize that lower prices are possible!

Seems like Netflix is engaging in some pretty blatant price discrimination. The question is why? I guess that Netflix is very concerned with luring new customers. I suppose old customers who are returning to Netflix are slightly less price sensitive because they are probably returning after trying, and not being satisfied with, the competition. Also, maybe customers are willing to pay more to revive their old rental queues and recommendation histories (although this is doubtful, considering the data is bound to be old and probably way out-of-date).

For this specific situation, to get around it, all I had to do was plug in a different email address and presto, lower prices. As for the cookie, I just switched from Firefox to IE. Alternatively, I could have cleared my cookies. But seriously, I shouldn’t have to jump through hoops like this.

In the offline “real” world, it’s not always possible to have perfect information, so stores can price discriminate. To find the best price for seedless watermelons, I have to run around to different grocery stores, which takes time. Also, with offline goods, you usually know you’re being charged more. No one shopping in the ritzy part of town is surprised to know that things cost more than in the dilapidated parts of town. You don’t like it, but people usually recognize what’s going on.

In the world of online goods, price discrimination is very hard to pull off. A quick Google search will usually turn up the cheapest price. So trying to charge different customers different prices usually just ends up causing you to lose the sale. Also, the means of differentiating customers is much more subtle, and sometimes borders on invasion of privacy. Most web surfers have no idea that their behavior is being tracked, often with the goal of figuring out if they’ll pay more. CNN ran a a great article on this topic titled “Web sites change prices based on customers’ habits.”

So the key is to be a vigilant shopper. Check other stores before deciding on a price. You might want to go as far as to clear your browser’s history and temporary files, restart the browser, and go back to the page before buying.

But if Netflix or any company wants to get a little money from old customers, try actually offering me added value. Netflix could have offered me the ability to import my queue from Blockbuster or a way to quickly list all the movies I’ve seen in the past few years. Being creative is good, and I’ll pay extra for that. Trying to trick me is bad, and makes me like your brand less.

In some cases, companies have gotten into hot water trying to price discriminate. BestBuy realized that customers in their store could use the internet on their computers to check the online prices versus in-store prices. So they setup a fake BestBuy.com site that in-store computers displayed that included higher prices. Of course, that in itself isn’t illegal, but BestBuy is being sued due to allegations that it intentionally advertised lower prices then pulled a “bait and switch” and used the phony in-store BestBuy.com to “prove” to customers that they were just mistaken. See the full writeup at the Ecommerce Times site.

In this case, I’ll be using a new email address to get lower prices, thank you very much.