Ultimate can be very aerobic and it's not that hard to find people to play with who don't keep score and where people switch sides at random in the middle of the game. I.e. when you get tired, you switch out with someone, and then when you are recovered you switch out with someone who is tired without regard for which team you're on. There are plenty of people who play who just enjoy running back and forth really hard throwing a disc around.
I haven't played in a while (been cycling mostly) but way back there was some talk about trying to get it in as an olympic sport, but one of the big barriers is the lack of respect for team boundaries. "Hey, you guys are short a few players and look tired-- why don't we have our extra subs play for you for a couple points" doesn't go over well at the olympics.
911E doesn't necessarily work correctly everywhere. Even after Minneapolis had 911E, the neighborhood I lived in about 8 years ago near downtown apparently didn't.
One day there were sirens *everywhere* and I went outside and for 6 blocks in all directions there was a firetruck on the corner, and the firefighters were getting out and knocking on doors.
I asked what was up-- apparently they had a 911 call from a little kid who didn't know where s/he was, and 911E didn't tell them closer than the neighborhood, so they rolled everything within several miles and filled the entire neighborhood with firefighters.
I used to do a lot of live recording, and we had a college radio show where we would play live recordings we had made of bands that came through.
They signed a very simple release that said they owned it, we wouldn't copy it for anything but archival preservation, and would present all copies to them or destroy them on demand. It also allowed us to trade tapes with a few other stations (and the artists could also restrict that if they wanted, by checking a few boxes). We took it very seriously, and I don't think there were ever any problems with it. As a result we had a pretty amazing archive.
One time we were recording at a festival, and asked an old blues guy (I can't remember who) to let us record. He very much refused-- he said he played ~100-150 days a year, at $1000/day, and he wasn't going to risk it with recordings. A lot of blues guys who have sold tons of recordings, and gotten tons of airplay have died penniless due to the record companies. He was a good businessman, and knew what paid the bills.
Some friends from way back were playing in town last night-- they're on a minor label, and come through maybe once a year. They probably made more on merchandise (including CDs and vinyl, but also t-shirts and refrigerator magnets) than on the door. Bands will always be able to sell CDs on the road (hell-- vinyl has made a resurgence with indy bands) and people who hand their $10 to the band are probably less likely to distribute broadly, but more likely to distribute directly to people who will buy more.
The people I know who have lasted the longest in music (and often been independent the entire time) have all spent a lot of time playing live.
be careful eliminating unincorporated areas-- LA County has a huge number of people in unincorporated (and often quite densely populated) areas. I'm not sure if there are other areas of the country like that though.
But if all the meta-data is self reported, you run a huge risk of people spamming you with things that they report as britney videos but are really sales pitches for viagra or something.
If you look at those costs, and look at the labor involved in publication, that's quite low and very reasonable. I've done a number of reports published by my company (as a technical lead), and even after all the technical work is done, there is a lot of editing, layout, image prep, and more that is done before it goes out. The people who do that typically cost much less than technical people, but much more than grad students. Most of them are skilled graphics people, editors (who read and write english much better than most technical people, and can read the technical stuff without getting terribly confused), and layout people. They have to be paid enough to eat and not walk away to another job on a whim, and overhead charges are typically somewhere from 150-200% of pay.
Given the small and specialized circulation, publication charges are entirely reasonable. Many journals will also waive them if you show hardship (with a fairly easy threshold). The journals run by professional societies (APS, ACS, AAS) that don't have ads tend to give you a lot of bang/buck as both an author and subscriber.
the fact is one tends to acquire a particular song once, just as one tends to purchase a meal once.
But under normal circumstances you can only eat that meal once, whereas you can listen to the song repeatedly. (I'll admit that on occasion I've seen cats eat the same meal twice, but it's not pretty). The bus passes might be better a better analogy-- you can buy a monthly or annual transit pass that entitles you to ride as much as you want. Even there, though, seats are a finite resource that can only be occupied by one person at a time, while making a perfect digital copy still doesn't affect the usability of the original.
The major lables pay for the production of the... In this sense they play the part of the advertisers. They pay for the delivery of the content of media.
They act more as a cartel that controls the distribution, because they have better access to store shelves and can pay radio stations large amounts of money to play what they want played. They're a middleman that's becoming less necessary.
It could be that it only hurts the artist only after the artist reaches a certain level of popularity or exposure
Given that if we maintain the status quo most artists will make little or nothing, file sharing will generally help them. Even in the presence of file sharing, commercial play of artists is compensated through their representatives (e.g. BMI and ASCAP) and essentially unaffected by filesharing- BMI and ASCAP don't charge me every time I put on a CD at home, but they do charge radio stations and clubs.
Those who have the wealth will resist its redistribution and anything that may cause said redistribution.
Gotta agree with that one, and the way they're resisting is looking desperate.
There's a pretty substantial difference between the all-you-can-eat restaurant and the music: the restaurateur adds value to the raw materials before putting them out, and for each unit of food that the restaurateur puts out, he has to use real resources (raw food, labor, gas, electricity) to add that value. Once someone eats a particular unit of food, that unit is irreversibly consumed and unavailable for others to eat.
In the case of music, the major labels really function as distributors, not value added producers, and because of the previous high cost of duplication and distribution, as filters. They distribute music, and people listen to it. When it's listened to it doesn't disappear, and one person listening to a copy doesn't irreversibly destroy the content (i.e. through digestion). There are plenty of media that essentially give away the content and charge advertisers for access to the consumers. Radio and broadcast TV are examples of that. Cable TV, newspapers, and magazines all give away the content for much less than it costs to produce and charge a small fee to keep people from consuming resources indiscriminately, but make their money primarily from paid advertisers. There are also plenty of free magazines and newspapers around that depend solely on advertising. What makes music distribution special?
There's plenty of reason to believe that people will continue to produce music even if they make no money from distribution of copies of recordings. Most artists have to produce one (or often multiple) albums on their own, with their own money before they can get signed to a major label. Many never get major label contracts, and continue to produce records for years (I know quite a few people who have done this). That is to say that they already produce content without much, if any, compensation, and I suspect will continue to do so. They make money by performing live or when other people play their music for profit (e.g. radio, TV, DJs at clubs play, BMI and ASCAP collect based on laser drops, and distribute money to artists, but they don't collect if you play a copy at home).
These independent artists will benefit substantially from distribution costs approaching zero (and the subsequent elimination of the near monopoly the majors have had on high profile distribution). Artists who are presently very low profile will be heard by larger audiences, and will be able to sell more tickets on tours, and more merchandise, and will be played more by people who want to sell money to advertisers for access to the ears of their listeners.
The major labels will suffer because they are not the producers of the work-- they're distributors who have traditionally fronted money for production and distribution. Production costs can vary enormously for comparable service, and the cost of quality production (recording) equipment has gone steadily down at the same time quality has gone up. Some of the primary reasons (up front money for recording, expenses of distribution) for the major labels' existence are disappearing-- the only thing they still do is filter, and in the opinion of many people, they do a lousy job of that (and have for quite some time).
I'm wondering if in general better players actually get less excercise than crappy players
"It doesn't get any easier, you just go faster"- Greg Lemond, three time Tour de France winner.
Most sports or exercise things are like that-- as you get better, you get more efficient so that things that were hard before are easy and take very little energy. The catch is that you do harder and harder things, often without realizing it. When you first start out with anything, you end up totally thrashed after an hour because you're not very skilled and are really inefficient. After you've been doing it a long time you end up totally thrashed after an hour because you're skilled enough to enjoy it at a pace (and energy consumption level) that would have killed you when you started.
As other sibling posters have pointed out, you can eat fairly well and healthy for cheap. I used to make a pot of spaghetti sauce (4 qts) once a week, and eat pasta for dinner all week. It's very cheap, and very good. I even did meatballs (these days I used turkey) that are about half breadcrumb by volume, with an egg to hold it together. Pasta is really cheap, and a pot of sauce is cheap to make and lasts a week.
Even ramen can be part of a healthy diet-- I just took a look at a packet, and it's about 190 kCal/pack, with 70 of those from fat. If you add vegetables (fresh or frozen) you can rapidly get the amount of fat to less than 30% of the calories. Two packs of ramen plus a couple cups of chopped vegetables is a meal, and cheap. Just use only one packet of the salty flavoring unless you need the salt for some reason.
Bread is cheap to make, and not that hard. It's not even time intensive, but you have to be there when it wants you to do stuff to it. If you make sourdough (which tastes better anyway) you don't even need yeast. Sourdough starter can be made from a bit of milk and yogurt, or even just by leaving some moist flour out for a few days. Sourdough bread is made from flour, water, starter, and salt, all of which are really cheap.
Rice and beans of various forms are also extremely cheap, and can be really good. Around here a 25lb bag of good jasmine rice is about $10, and will last a long time (just keep it dry and away from mice). Pinto beans are cheap, even already prepared, lentils are also really cheap, easy to cook, and go great over rice.
One of the keys to making it all taste good is the right spices and herbs. Garlic is important (and cheap), onions are cheap, cumin, basil, oregano, chili powder, and a few other spices can be cheap if you buy them in bulk at a coop or in the cheap bags that are usually hidden away from the jars of expensive spices. Ethnic stores that mostly serve your local immigrant population often have good produce and spices for much less than at the chain groceries.
None of it has to take a lot of time-- I work full time (or more), have pets to take care of, have some semblance of a social life occasionally, exercise way more than your average person, and still manage to make most of my food from almost scratch (I don't bake bread or make my own tortillas or noodles form scratch), and do it pretty cheap. I probably spend less than 20 minutes preparing most meals.
Reminds me of one time when I lived in Minneapolis-- I heard a *lot* of sirens and went out to look. There were firemen going door to door all up and down the street. Apparently a little kid had called 911 and our area didn't have 911e, and the kid didn't know his address, so they sent a huge number of trucks-- I looked from the corner and there was a truck on every corner for ~4 blocks in every direction. I found this out from a fireman when he was asking if we knew which houses had little kids.
and if you like rock and roll (in the Social Distortion, Johnny Cash, Cramps sort of way) take a listen here...
You seem like a good candidate for listening to my current favorite local band: Gram Rabbit (http://gramrabbit.com I think there are still some downloads there.
They're from the desert (Joshua Tree) started out playing at Gramfest, and on a good day Jesika von Rabbit starts to seem kind of like Madonna channeling Lux Interior, with a dose of bunny thrown in. I caught them last summer when they were playing on a bill with some friends (GR were in residence -- once a week for a month-- at one of the local clubs). I haven't missed a local show since then, except when I was out of town. They have one CD out (music to start a cult to), and they can make an LA audience dance.
As far as the audience is concerned, I might as well be playing tetris or minesweeper.
there are plenty of bands that are entirely electronic that can totally rock. Try http://Seksuroba.com
Being totally electronic can free you from the anchor of the guitar and drums.
Then again, there are also bands that are totally electronic (and even bands that aren't totally electronic) that can cause me to fall asleep in a crowded, loud club.
Buy their T-shirt anyway. It's one of the few ways they're going to get money, short of a handout.
Touring and publishing (what the bands get from radio/club/tv/whatever play of the recorded music, typically collected through BMI/ASCAP) are what pays the bills for the band. CD sales only pay *very* established bands that are selling huge quantities and can dictate terms to the labels.
Buy the CD from the band at the show, or send them a check and get a CD in the mail. The get money from the door, they get money from the CD, the CD usually costs less than in a store and the band gets a bigger fraction.
Which is why I alwyas go car shopping wearing blue jeans and a t-shirt
Try riding an expensive (but dirty and well used) bicycle. You clearly aren't desperate for transportation when you mention your car died a while ago and you're going to noodle by a bunch of the dealers over the next 15 miles or so. A couple of them figured me out fast after I told them what used cars I was looking for-- one replied "And you're going to pay cash?" "Yep". "Don't have one on the lot, but give me your number and I'll call you if one shows up. How much does that bike weigh?" "The full water bottles weigh more than the frame..." He and another salesman then hung around and chatted with me for a while about random things. Very pleasant, and if they'd come up with a car I wanted I would have taken it.
The Saturn dealer also didn't blink when I pedaled up and started looking at cars-- he immediately offered to let me test drive a few.
I ended up buying used from a non-dealer person, but I take it to that Saturn dealer for most of the service.
more important than taking a year off now is doing a year abroad, or at least a semester.
Absolutely agree with this-- a year is definitely better than a semester, because you'll be getting used to things the first semester, especially if it's in a foreign language.
There are lots of ways to do a year abroad as both an undergrad and a grad student, often with someone else helping foot the bill. It's also not much more expensive to spend a year abroad than a few weeks or month, especially if you're living like a student.
It also seems to make more sense to travel after university, rather than high school, or even after doing university, living like a poor student while making a reasonable income, and then traveling for a year. The important thing is to not be seduced by the lifestyle that's possible with money, because you can get stuck supporting it.
I looked at a bunch of (mostly back catalog) albums I was interested in a while ago when I signed up for iTunes. A pretty good fraction of them were incomplete-- they didn't include all the tracks from the original album. That kind of turned me off iTunes pretty quickly, as well as the reduced quality at the same price.
Format failure is an issue if DRM can't be removed. I brought up iTMS because it has the same potential format failure problem as Napster, not because that's something that I spend a lot of time worrying about.
I picked up a really nice turntable about 15 years ago when it looked reasonably likely that turntables would disappear, rendering my record collection (much of which will never appear on CD) obsolete. It still works great. There are actually bands now doing special releases on vinyl-- I asked one of them recently and apparently it hasn't gotten terribly expensive- it's a little more than CDs, but not prohibitive, even for small indy bands.
I picked up a nice cassette player a few years ago when it looked like cassettes would vanish. I got a decent digitizer at the same time, because tape has the additional potential problem of binder breakdown. I have a lot of cassettes of live shows (all legal) and cassette releases by bands that were never released in another format.
I had someone copy my 1/4" 2-track tapes (of original work by bands I knew) to CD a couple years ago because they were old enough to be in danger of sticky-shed, and the cassette copies used for casual play were deteriorating.
8-track was DOA. It was tolerable in the car, but the "thunk" when it changed tracks mid-song was terminal.
None of that stuff had DRM, and I can still listen to all of it, and convert it to any format I want. Since people have figured out how to remove the DRM from most music services (or will, if they haven't already and find it necessary-audio DRM can be trivially broken by D->A->D) people who don't want to lose their large collections will probably survive the format failure just fine. People with small collections will probably just reacquire the stuff in the new formats.
But it's not as clear cut as you think. Napster's business model - as shocking as this may be to you - may fail. And then what happens to your precious model?
The same could be said about iTMS--the tracks you download from iTMS are DRM'd (ignoring for a moment that people have figured out ways to remove it) so if Apple were to stop providing the hardware and software to play them, eventually you would lose the tracks you bought that way, once your computer that was running iTunes died, and new OS's didn't support it, and your iPod finally gave up the ghost.
There are ways to keep your tracks in such an event-- since iTunes lets you write the tracks to CD without DRM, you could write all of them to CD (which would be quite a pain if you had accumulated a large number of tracks). There are of course, hacks that let you remove the DRM, as well (apparently also possible with Napster, but I'm a bit of a luddite and still mostly buy CDs-iTunes isn't really any better cost, since I like to buy albums, and has the disadvantages of lower quality and DRM).
I took german for four years in high school and learned a lot of words, but the grammar never stuck. In college, I was in an intensive program taught entirely in german, with two class sessions per day, 4 days/week, plus a special room outside the dorm cafeteria where we went out to have lunch in german (every day). Between homework, lunch, and class, we were probably spending 5-6 hours/day in german.
We also put on a play in german (and it became a regular thing that they've been doing for 20 years now in the program), so that added another several hours. The cool thing about a play is that you end up memorizing all sorts of sentences combined with acting them out, so both the structure and the meaning stick. Singing along with Einstürzende Neubauten is a great way to get a good accent.
After all that, when I went to germany for study abroad, I could carry on a pretty good conversation and do fine in class.
Now I have to learn french without the advantage of all the intensive program stuff, but I do get to spend several weeks a year in Montreal (yeah, it's funny french).
You also don't have to move your lazy ass if you order the CD to be shipped by mail, but you do have to wait a little.
I kind of like getting whole albums still-- if I like one track, it's likely that I'll like more than one, and if the album was put together by the artist (rather than the record company) it's likely that there's some intent behind the structure and flow of the album.
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Ultimate can be very aerobic and it's not that hard to find people to play with who don't keep score and where people switch sides at random in the middle of the game. I.e. when you get tired, you switch out with someone, and then when you are recovered you switch out with someone who is tired without regard for which team you're on. There are plenty of people who play who just enjoy running back and forth really hard throwing a disc around.
I haven't played in a while (been cycling mostly) but way back there was some talk about trying to get it in as an olympic sport, but one of the big barriers is the lack of respect for team boundaries. "Hey, you guys are short a few players and look tired-- why don't we have our extra subs play for you for a couple points" doesn't go over well at the olympics.
911E doesn't necessarily work correctly everywhere. Even after Minneapolis had 911E, the neighborhood I lived in about 8 years ago near downtown apparently didn't.
One day there were sirens *everywhere* and I went outside and for 6 blocks in all directions there was a firetruck on the corner, and the firefighters were getting out and knocking on doors.
I asked what was up-- apparently they had a 911 call from a little kid who didn't know where s/he was, and 911E didn't tell them closer than the neighborhood, so they rolled everything within several miles and filled the entire neighborhood with firefighters.
That's the force, but the thing you really want to know if you're talking about mileage is the power (energy per unit time), which goes as V^3.
just to add some anecdotal support:
I used to do a lot of live recording, and we had a college radio show where we would play live recordings we had made of bands that came through.
They signed a very simple release that said they owned it, we wouldn't copy it for anything but archival preservation, and would present all copies to them or destroy them on demand. It also allowed us to trade tapes with a few other stations (and the artists could also restrict that if they wanted, by checking a few boxes). We took it very seriously, and I don't think there were ever any problems with it. As a result we had a pretty amazing archive.
One time we were recording at a festival, and asked an old blues guy (I can't remember who) to let us record. He very much refused-- he said he played ~100-150 days a year, at $1000/day, and he wasn't going to risk it with recordings. A lot of blues guys who have sold tons of recordings, and gotten tons of airplay have died penniless due to the record companies. He was a good businessman, and knew what paid the bills.
Some friends from way back were playing in town last night-- they're on a minor label, and come through maybe once a year. They probably made more on merchandise (including CDs and vinyl, but also t-shirts and refrigerator magnets) than on the door. Bands will always be able to sell CDs on the road (hell-- vinyl has made a resurgence with indy bands) and people who hand their $10 to the band are probably less likely to distribute broadly, but more likely to distribute directly to people who will buy more.
The people I know who have lasted the longest in music (and often been independent the entire time) have all spent a lot of time playing live.
be careful eliminating unincorporated areas-- LA County has a huge number of people in unincorporated (and often quite densely populated) areas. I'm not sure if there are other areas of the country like that though.
I know what you mean. On the one hand, we've got the transistor and UNIX
and don't forget the discovery of the cosmic microwave background.
That's got a lot of potential to become labor intensive-- I thought google avoided that kind of thing.
But if all the meta-data is self reported, you run a huge risk of people spamming you with things that they report as britney videos but are really sales pitches for viagra or something.
If you look at those costs, and look at the labor involved in publication, that's quite low and very reasonable. I've done a number of reports published by my company (as a technical lead), and even after all the technical work is done, there is a lot of editing, layout, image prep, and more that is done before it goes out. The people who do that typically cost much less than technical people, but much more than grad students. Most of them are skilled graphics people, editors (who read and write english much better than most technical people, and can read the technical stuff without getting terribly confused), and layout people. They have to be paid enough to eat and not walk away to another job on a whim, and overhead charges are typically somewhere from 150-200% of pay.
Given the small and specialized circulation, publication charges are entirely reasonable. Many journals will also waive them if you show hardship (with a fairly easy threshold). The journals run by professional societies (APS, ACS, AAS) that don't have ads tend to give you a lot of bang/buck as both an author and subscriber.
the fact is one tends to acquire a particular song once, just as one tends to purchase a meal once.
... In this sense they play the part of the advertisers. They pay for the delivery of the content of media.
But under normal circumstances you can only eat that meal once, whereas you can listen to the song repeatedly. (I'll admit that on occasion I've seen cats eat the same meal twice, but it's not pretty). The bus passes might be better a better analogy-- you can buy a monthly or annual transit pass that entitles you to ride as much as you want. Even there, though, seats are a finite resource that can only be occupied by one person at a time, while making a perfect digital copy still doesn't affect the usability of the original.
The major lables pay for the production of the
They act more as a cartel that controls the distribution, because they have better access to store shelves and can pay radio stations large amounts of money to play what they want played. They're a middleman that's becoming less necessary.
It could be that it only hurts the artist only after the artist reaches a certain level of popularity or exposure
Given that if we maintain the status quo most artists will make little or nothing, file sharing will generally help them. Even in the presence of file sharing, commercial play of artists is compensated through their representatives (e.g. BMI and ASCAP) and essentially unaffected by filesharing- BMI and ASCAP don't charge me every time I put on a CD at home, but they do charge radio stations and clubs.
Those who have the wealth will resist its redistribution and anything that may cause said redistribution.
Gotta agree with that one, and the way they're resisting is looking desperate.
There's a pretty substantial difference between the all-you-can-eat restaurant and the music: the restaurateur adds value to the raw materials before putting them out, and for each unit of food that the restaurateur puts out, he has to use real resources (raw food, labor, gas, electricity) to add that value. Once someone eats a particular unit of food, that unit is irreversibly consumed and unavailable for others to eat.
In the case of music, the major labels really function as distributors, not value added producers, and because of the previous high cost of duplication and distribution, as filters. They distribute music, and people listen to it. When it's listened to it doesn't disappear, and one person listening to a copy doesn't irreversibly destroy the content (i.e. through digestion). There are plenty of media that essentially give away the content and charge advertisers for access to the consumers. Radio and broadcast TV are examples of that. Cable TV, newspapers, and magazines all give away the content for much less than it costs to produce and charge a small fee to keep people from consuming resources indiscriminately, but make their money primarily from paid advertisers. There are also plenty of free magazines and newspapers around that depend solely on advertising. What makes music distribution special?
There's plenty of reason to believe that people will continue to produce music even if they make no money from distribution of copies of recordings. Most artists have to produce one (or often multiple) albums on their own, with their own money before they can get signed to a major label. Many never get major label contracts, and continue to produce records for years (I know quite a few people who have done this). That is to say that they already produce content without much, if any, compensation, and I suspect will continue to do so. They make money by performing live or when other people play their music for profit (e.g. radio, TV, DJs at clubs play, BMI and ASCAP collect based on laser drops, and distribute money to artists, but they don't collect if you play a copy at home).
These independent artists will benefit substantially from distribution costs approaching zero (and the subsequent elimination of the near monopoly the majors have had on high profile distribution). Artists who are presently very low profile will be heard by larger audiences, and will be able to sell more tickets on tours, and more merchandise, and will be played more by people who want to sell money to advertisers for access to the ears of their listeners.
The major labels will suffer because they are not the producers of the work-- they're distributors who have traditionally fronted money for production and distribution. Production costs can vary enormously for comparable service, and the cost of quality production (recording) equipment has gone steadily down at the same time quality has gone up. Some of the primary reasons (up front money for recording, expenses of distribution) for the major labels' existence are disappearing-- the only thing they still do is filter, and in the opinion of many people, they do a lousy job of that (and have for quite some time).
I'm wondering if in general better players actually get less excercise than crappy players
"It doesn't get any easier, you just go faster"- Greg Lemond, three time Tour de France winner.
Most sports or exercise things are like that-- as you get better, you get more efficient so that things that were hard before are easy and take very little energy. The catch is that you do harder and harder things, often without realizing it. When you first start out with anything, you end up totally thrashed after an hour because you're not very skilled and are really inefficient. After you've been doing it a long time you end up totally thrashed after an hour because you're skilled enough to enjoy it at a pace (and energy consumption level) that would have killed you when you started.
As other sibling posters have pointed out, you can eat fairly well and healthy for cheap. I used to make a pot of spaghetti sauce (4 qts) once a week, and eat pasta for dinner all week. It's very cheap, and very good. I even did meatballs (these days I used turkey) that are about half breadcrumb by volume, with an egg to hold it together. Pasta is really cheap, and a pot of sauce is cheap to make and lasts a week.
Even ramen can be part of a healthy diet-- I just took a look at a packet, and it's about 190 kCal/pack, with 70 of those from fat. If you add vegetables (fresh or frozen) you can rapidly get the amount of fat to less than 30% of the calories. Two packs of ramen plus a couple cups of chopped vegetables is a meal, and cheap. Just use only one packet of the salty flavoring unless you need the salt for some reason.
Bread is cheap to make, and not that hard. It's not even time intensive, but you have to be there when it wants you to do stuff to it. If you make sourdough (which tastes better anyway) you don't even need yeast. Sourdough starter can be made from a bit of milk and yogurt, or even just by leaving some moist flour out for a few days. Sourdough bread is made from flour, water, starter, and salt, all of which are really cheap.
Rice and beans of various forms are also extremely cheap, and can be really good. Around here a 25lb bag of good jasmine rice is about $10, and will last a long time (just keep it dry and away from mice). Pinto beans are cheap, even already prepared, lentils are also really cheap, easy to cook, and go great over rice.
One of the keys to making it all taste good is the right spices and herbs. Garlic is important (and cheap), onions are cheap, cumin, basil, oregano, chili powder, and a few other spices can be cheap if you buy them in bulk at a coop or in the cheap bags that are usually hidden away from the jars of expensive spices. Ethnic stores that mostly serve your local immigrant population often have good produce and spices for much less than at the chain groceries.
None of it has to take a lot of time-- I work full time (or more), have pets to take care of, have some semblance of a social life occasionally, exercise way more than your average person, and still manage to make most of my food from almost scratch (I don't bake bread or make my own tortillas or noodles form scratch), and do it pretty cheap. I probably spend less than 20 minutes preparing most meals.
Reminds me of one time when I lived in Minneapolis-- I heard a *lot* of sirens and went out to look. There were firemen going door to door all up and down the street. Apparently a little kid had called 911 and our area didn't have 911e, and the kid didn't know his address, so they sent a huge number of trucks-- I looked from the corner and there was a truck on every corner for ~4 blocks in every direction. I found this out from a fireman when he was asking if we knew which houses had little kids.
and if you like rock and roll (in the Social Distortion, Johnny Cash, Cramps sort of way) take a listen here...
You seem like a good candidate for listening to my current favorite local band: Gram Rabbit (http://gramrabbit.com I think there are still some downloads there.
They're from the desert (Joshua Tree) started out playing at Gramfest, and on a good day Jesika von Rabbit starts to seem kind of like Madonna channeling Lux Interior, with a dose of bunny thrown in. I caught them last summer when they were playing on a bill with some friends (GR were in residence -- once a week for a month-- at one of the local clubs). I haven't missed a local show since then, except when I was out of town. They have one CD out (music to start a cult to), and they can make an LA audience dance.
As far as the audience is concerned, I might as well be playing tetris or minesweeper.
there are plenty of bands that are entirely electronic that can totally rock. Try http://Seksuroba.com
Being totally electronic can free you from the anchor of the guitar and drums.
Then again, there are also bands that are totally electronic (and even bands that aren't totally electronic) that can cause me to fall asleep in a crowded, loud club.
Buy their T-shirt anyway. It's one of the few ways they're going to get money, short of a handout.
Touring and publishing (what the bands get from radio/club/tv/whatever play of the recorded music, typically collected through BMI/ASCAP) are what pays the bills for the band. CD sales only pay *very* established bands that are selling huge quantities and can dictate terms to the labels.
Buy the CD from the band at the show, or send them a check and get a CD in the mail. The get money from the door, they get money from the CD, the CD usually costs less than in a store and the band gets a bigger fraction.
Which is why I alwyas go car shopping wearing blue jeans and a t-shirt
Try riding an expensive (but dirty and well used) bicycle. You clearly aren't desperate for transportation when you mention your car died a while ago and you're going to noodle by a bunch of the dealers over the next 15 miles or so. A couple of them figured me out fast after I told them what used cars I was looking for--
one replied "And you're going to pay cash?"
"Yep".
"Don't have one on the lot, but give me your number and I'll call you if one shows up. How much does that bike weigh?"
"The full water bottles weigh more than the frame..."
He and another salesman then hung around and chatted with me for a while about random things. Very pleasant, and if they'd come up with a car I wanted I would have taken it.
The Saturn dealer also didn't blink when I pedaled up and started looking at cars-- he immediately offered to let me test drive a few.
I ended up buying used from a non-dealer person, but I take it to that Saturn dealer for most of the service.
more important than taking a year off now is doing a year abroad, or at least a semester.
Absolutely agree with this-- a year is definitely better than a semester, because you'll be getting used to things the first semester, especially if it's in a foreign language.
There are lots of ways to do a year abroad as both an undergrad and a grad student, often with someone else helping foot the bill. It's also not much more expensive to spend a year abroad than a few weeks or month, especially if you're living like a student.
It also seems to make more sense to travel after university, rather than high school, or even after doing university, living like a poor student while making a reasonable income, and then traveling for a year. The important thing is to not be seduced by the lifestyle that's possible with money, because you can get stuck supporting it.
combined with fresh bread from a bread machine and it's easy to get out of bed.
I looked at a bunch of (mostly back catalog) albums I was interested in a while ago when I signed up for iTunes. A pretty good fraction of them were incomplete-- they didn't include all the tracks from the original album. That kind of turned me off iTunes pretty quickly, as well as the reduced quality at the same price.
Format failure is an issue if DRM can't be removed. I brought up iTMS because it has the same potential format failure problem as Napster, not because that's something that I spend a lot of time worrying about.
I picked up a really nice turntable about 15 years ago when it looked reasonably likely that turntables would disappear, rendering my record collection (much of which will never appear on CD) obsolete. It still works great. There are actually bands now doing special releases on vinyl-- I asked one of them recently and apparently it hasn't gotten terribly expensive- it's a little more than CDs, but not prohibitive, even for small indy bands.
I picked up a nice cassette player a few years ago when it looked like cassettes would vanish. I got a decent digitizer at the same time, because tape has the additional potential problem of binder breakdown. I have a lot of cassettes of live shows (all legal) and cassette releases by bands that were never released in another format.
I had someone copy my 1/4" 2-track tapes (of original work by bands I knew) to CD a couple years ago because they were old enough to be in danger of sticky-shed, and the cassette copies used for casual play were deteriorating.
8-track was DOA. It was tolerable in the car, but the "thunk" when it changed tracks mid-song was terminal.
None of that stuff had DRM, and I can still listen to all of it, and convert it to any format I want. Since people have figured out how to remove the DRM from most music services (or will, if they haven't already and find it necessary-audio DRM can be trivially broken by D->A->D) people who don't want to lose their large collections will probably survive the format failure just fine. People with small collections will probably just reacquire the stuff in the new formats.
But it's not as clear cut as you think. Napster's business model - as shocking as this may be to you - may fail. And then what happens to your precious model?
The same could be said about iTMS--the tracks you download from iTMS are DRM'd (ignoring for a moment that people have figured out ways to remove it) so if Apple were to stop providing the hardware and software to play them, eventually you would lose the tracks you bought that way, once your computer that was running iTunes died, and new OS's didn't support it, and your iPod finally gave up the ghost.
There are ways to keep your tracks in such an event-- since iTunes lets you write the tracks to CD without DRM, you could write all of them to CD (which would be quite a pain if you had accumulated a large number of tracks). There are of course, hacks that let you remove the DRM, as well (apparently also possible with Napster, but I'm a bit of a luddite and still mostly buy CDs-iTunes isn't really any better cost, since I like to buy albums, and has the disadvantages of lower quality and DRM).
Immersion definitely the best way.
I took german for four years in high school and learned a lot of words, but the grammar never stuck. In college, I was in an intensive program taught entirely in german, with two class sessions per day, 4 days/week, plus a special room outside the dorm cafeteria where we went out to have lunch in german (every day). Between homework, lunch, and class, we were probably spending 5-6 hours/day in german.
We also put on a play in german (and it became a regular thing that they've been doing for 20 years now in the program), so that added another several hours. The cool thing about a play is that you end up memorizing all sorts of sentences combined with acting them out, so both the structure and the meaning stick. Singing along with Einstürzende Neubauten is a great way to get a good accent.
After all that, when I went to germany for study abroad, I could carry on a pretty good conversation and do fine in class.
Now I have to learn french without the advantage of all the intensive program stuff, but I do get to spend several weeks a year in Montreal (yeah, it's funny french).
You also don't have to move your lazy ass if you order the CD to be shipped by mail, but you do have to wait a little.
I kind of like getting whole albums still-- if I like one track, it's likely that I'll like more than one, and if the album was put together by the artist (rather than the record company) it's likely that there's some intent behind the structure and flow of the album.