Date: Wednesday, March 21st
Time: all day
Location: Dunkin Donuts (click for store finder)
Cost: Free

To celebrate the first day of spring, Dunkin’ will “put winter on ice” today with their first ever Free Iced Coffee Day. All day long, Dunkin’ Donuts locations all over the US will be giving away free 16-ounce iced coffees. Their iced coffees are “double brewed” for smoothness and come in nine different flavors, in addition to regular coffee

So it’s been about a month since I upgraded to Windows Vista.

I must say I actually LIKE the experience of using my computer again.

It’s “the best windows ever” and even some of friends that are Mac users are jealous.

Everything is different, from the start up sounds to the way files and tranferred and overall navigation.

The biggest “surprise” is that I have not experienced one glitch, reboot, bluescreen of death or bug!

Ok, besides the fact it didn’t find the audio driver to my laptop during the install and that up until 2 weeks ago there was no official support for Palm OS, and you still can’t install applications from syncing, but besides that nothing.

I have a function key that I have to press when connecting my laptop s-video output to a television monitor.

I expected to have to do that but as soon as I plugged it in, Vista knew I plugged it at and asked me if I wanted the display to appear on both monitor or not.
(this resulted in hitting the function key several times in Windows XP to do that)

They even did away with the hobernate function on laptop and combined it with standby and call it “sleep”.

So now I can just open my laptop and begin working instead of turning it off all the time and wait for it to boot up.

It takes some getting used to , but worth the upgrade overall.

Don’t do it unless you have a fairly new computer and at least 1GB of RAM.
The installation of the Vista OS will take up about 12GB of hard drive space.
Besides the new look and speed, there isnt a reason to upgrade from Vista, but after I did I’ve never looking back.

Thanx Bill.

My favorite online radio station SOMAFM is in jeopardy once again.
It’s my favorite for Three reasons:

1. They keep the Jonn Nubian and ViceLounge tracks on the playlist,
2. I get inspired by the many other artist that they play, COMMERCIAL FREE!
3. I would have never read Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, if I wasnt curious about what SOMA was.

Here is a letter I received in my Inbox from Rusty Hodge, the General Manager/Program director.
Please read, forward and sign the online petition:

This doesnt just have an impact on this online radio station, but EVERY online radio station.

You may have heard, but once again internet radio is facing huge additional royalties for broadcasting music. These royalties are in addition to the ones that we pay to ASCAP and BMI, and are a royalty that is only paid by internet broadcasters. Over-the-air (AM/FM) broadcasters are explicitly exempt from this royalty; it only applies to internet broadcasters and subscription music services.

In the past, we paid royalties based on a percentage of our revenues, in our case 10% of our revenue. But the new royalties don’t allow that percentage of revenue factor, and instead charge us for each song we play times the number of people listening. This works out to about $8 per average concurrent listener per month. In 2006, we averaged over 6000 average concurrent listeners per month, and the royalties we will have to pay for 2006 is about $628,000, over 4 times the amount of money we brought in.

And these rates go up drastically each year, until 2010, where they are 2.5 times their initial rate: by then we will have to pay over $1 million dollars a year in royalties if we want to stay on the air.

So you can see that this puts us in an impossible position. And to make it even worse, the rates are retroactive to 2006.

It doesn’t seem fair that a small radio service like SomaFM has to pay all these additional royalties, when over-the-air stations who reach much larger audiences are exempted from paying them.

If you are in the USA, we would appreciate it if you could sign this online petition which will be presented to members of Congress.

It’s important for us to let Congress know that independent internet radio is about to be forced out of business.

We need to keep our existing “percentage of revenue” royalty rate structure, or better yet, have Congress extend the exemption to internet radio stations as well as terrestrial (over-the-air) stations.

http://www.petitiononline.com/SIR2007r/petition.html

Thanks for all of your support for SomaFM in the past. We will do what we need to do to keep SomaFM on the air and broadcasting. We love you!

Rusty Hodge,
General Manager and Program Director
SomaFM.com