About 2 weeks ago I purchased Kaskade - Strobelight Seduction from the Amazon MP3 store. Its been a really off year for downtempo dance music. The Aromabar and Supreme Beings of Leisure albums are way too downtempo. This Kaskade album is perfect though.

Also for a nostalgic good time take a listen to the Was Not Was - Boo! album. Its a nice jazzy rock album. There are some great videos up on YouTube from live shows you can check out. With all the 80’s bands putting out new releases - most of which are a miss - these guys bring it back to basics and it works really well.

The new Moby is really good too. I tend to shy away from Moby albums because, while they may have a “theme”, the music is so varied that usually what you want are the choice singles because they come with remixes. This album is all really good though.

Told you it wasn’t scalable

Techcrunch reports that twitter is scraping ruby on rails to rebuild with another platform based in PHP or java. (what, no python? its 2008 after all)

A framework on top of another framework puts you in a hole real fast. An airplane that had two frameworks would be really hard to get flying. One framework, one skin, and engines baby…lots of engines.

Invented the practice of bottling Franzia and reselling it for 100X price as “Opus One”

No this isn’t another rant about Mondavi. He passed away last week.

His funeral opened with a nice bouquet and there were hints of cinnamon and currant, with a smooth yet delicate earthy finish.

If I wanted to call India I’d buy a Dell Computer

Like many other people who’s stories I have been reading, I am now done with American Express after my latest bout of having to call the customer service number 4 times to get through with a decent telephone connection where I could hear and understand their India-based customer dis-service staff and their broken English.

Marketing 101: When people buy a product or service they are buying a story. Look at Apple’s advertising and the success it brings them. They aren’t advertising a product, they are advertising a story: Fun music, Facebook on your phone, maps on your phone - not the iphone itself which lacks many capabilities that other phones have. Not the ipod itself. You can get fun music, facebook, and Google Maps on almost any phone.

Seth Godin used bottled water as an example in his talk at Google.

American Express’ marketing story was that yes you pay to be a card member, but membership has privileges and first class service. This is a value proposition that was proven to me early on in my years as an AMEX member. Issues were solved quickly and without fuss or hardship.

Now, however, calling customer service ends up in being stonewalled with a foreigner with no empathy and a preset script that includes nothing but false apologies. They have poked holes in their marketing story and without that the value proposition is negative. Why pay a yearly fee? If I want bad service I can get that for free and get a lower interest rate to boot.

Another Treasure Amongst the Bluegrass

Any true computer geek will lament that the best QWERTY computer keyboard ever made was the IBM model M. Hacker savvy outfits like DAS Keyboard are modeled after it and there is at least one online store that specializes in finding original Ms.

Much like the world’s best bourbon, however, there is only one place to get a new model M keyboard: Kentucky.

Unicomp, a small manufacturing services company bought the rights to the buckling spring technology behind the legendary keyboard in 1996. This company is in Lexington, Kentucky where IBM’s keyboard manufacturing was done under Lexmark.

Unless you fancy a trip to Kentucky for some fried chicken and bourbon, you don’t have to come here to get ahold of these keyboards. They have an online store where you can purchase one and have it shipped.

After using it for a few days I have to say that I had the original Das Keyboard and this is way better. It is an absolute breeze to type on.