Eric J. Gruber

In the last few years, I’ve had several friends move to the east coast. It’s gotten to the point that it’s just ridiculous.

Here’s the rundown of friends who have deserted the Midwest: Aaron, Mike, Brandon, Alex, Kyle, Grant and next week, Summer.

Really, it’s a bit of a bummer.

I love my iPhone, but I’m getting fed up with Apple’s iTunes Store.

A friend of mine recently told me about a band I should check out called “The Hold Steady.” I did a quick search and found them on the iTunes Store, and also found them on Amazon.com’s MP3 store.

With Apple’s store, the songs came with Digital Rights Management, or DRM, which limits how many times you can transfer the song files to other computers, and you have to “authorize” a computer to play the file with your iTunes username and password.

But Amazon.com’s MP3 store doesn’t have that restriction. Many times you can music for the same - or sometimes even lower price - but without all this DRM mess. The download process is smooth, and it works great on any MP3 player.

Why Apple persists with DRM is beyond my comprehension. I recommend that you send Apple and the rest of the music industry a message: purchase DRM-free music from Amazon.com.

It’s your money. Make it your music, not Apple’s

Today was the first “official” (not counting weekends) day of my vacation. Here’s how it went down:

• Watched the movie “Dog Day Afternoon.”
• Gave my desk a much needed cleaning, accompanied by shredding of documents no longer needed.
• Jump started one of our cars after it died on Amy while she was at the bank. I’ll get it checked out more tomorrow.
• Studied my Ruby on Rails book (a lot).
• Joined Amy and Ember for a little recycling at Wal-Mart.
• Played outside with Ember, then played even more with her inside while Amy went to work.
• Circuit training in the hot garage.

A pretty full day, I suppose. It started out with rain, so I knew it was going to be a pretty low-key day anyhow. Tomorrow is even more packed. It’s funny how vacation can be sometimes.

At least I succeeded in not checking my work e-mail. That’s a big deal for me. Really.

The dead battery thing was a bit of a bummer. I’m going to get it checked out more tomorrow by taking it to Auto Zone. Are you aware that they’ll test your battery for free? Of course, if the battery is dead, you’ll likely feel inclined to go ahead and purchase from them. I’m hoping that’s all it is. I’d hate to get stuck when we do our traveling later this week.

I’m glad I had a lot more time to spend reading my (731 page) book. Man that thing is a doozy. But, I need to read it to keep up with web technologies, and it’s the perfect tool for some projects I’m working on. I just need a little more education to make my ideas come to fruition.