I’m sorry to who I am about to offend, but this Presidential Race feels like a joke.  To me I equate it to none other that one of those “Hi, I’m a Mac”, “And I’m a PC” commercials.  You know the ones.

“Hi, I’m Barack Obama and I’m cool.  Celebrities want to support me because I am cool.  If I could I would wear a t-shirt and jeans on this commercial, because I am like you.  Don’t you think I’m cool?  In fact, if I could play a Feetwood Mac song on the saxophone I would because I am that cool.  Even the “cool” Christians like me because they are ‘thinking outside the box’.  Pretty soon I hope to be in the cover of Relevant Magazine because I am just that…. Relevant.  Check the box for Barack Obama”.”

“Hi, I’m John McCain, and I’m not cool.  I usually am never found without a suit on.  I’m really old and am the personification of a ‘Conservative Republican’.  That makes me not cool to most people, including ‘cool Christians’.  People make fun of me because I don’t play the saxophone, and I didn’t have a cool, popular Christian author pray at my party.  Pretty soon I hope to be on the cover of AARP, and I’m secretly praying there are more ‘conservative’ people in America than there are ‘cool’ people.  Check the box for John McCain”

Am I way off here?  Does anyone else feel like this Presidential Race is quite literally the same as one of those commercials?  I don’t follow politics all that much, and this is why.  It’s a joke.  It’s a race to see how many popular people in specific genre’s and mediums you can get on TV supporting you, and then America does what they are told.  Mac told us to buy iPhones because they were cool.  We did even though we just needed a phone.  Mac told us they were “cooler” than PC’s and we listened.  Now you can’t walk into a trendy part of town anywhere in America without seeing a wall of people tucked behind that Apple logo wondering how to right click something.  Marketing is awesome.

Thoughts?

According to an article in Wired Magazine:

“Apple is under pressure from the four major labels to change its pricing model to a tiered pricing structure,” said Susan Kevorkian, an IDC audio analyst. “The way the labels are pressuring Apple is by withholding DRM-free downloads from the service … [while] cultivating other online music services, most notably Amazon’s MP3 downloads store.”

“If Apple tires of butting heads with the labels, it could eventually cut them out of at least part of the equation by forming its own record label to keep a portion of the estimated 65 cents it currently pays out to the labels for each song sold.”

And here’s the kicker of this whole shebang.

By 2012, digital music is projected to account for 40 percent of music sold, according to InStat. If Apple holds onto its current market share, it will account for more than one-quarter of all music sales by its ninth birthday. Not bad for freeware.

Are record labels in trouble if they mess with the beast that is Apple? Sounds to me like it’s time for artists to have a solid online presence more than ever. What do you think?

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So, I took my computer in last night to the two early-twenties guys standing behind the counter at the local Mac store.. The first guy asked me what the problem was and I told him that the temperature on my dashboard was saying that something in my computer was floating around eighty degrees Celsius.
“That’s not good”, he said.
Then he looked at me disapprovingly and asked if I had done my software updates.
“Yep”, I assured him.
“Hmmm, are you sure?”, he said opening my laptop and clicking in the Apple icon in the top left corner.
“Yep”
About ten minutes later a window popped up on my screen saying that I had, in fact, updated my computer and there were “no new updates”.
“That’s weird”, said the guy behind the counter.
“Not really”, I thought.
So now my computer has been left behind the counter for three to five days. They are going to look at it, open it up, play with things, and most likely run any updates that need to be run.
Thank you Mac people. And thank you Kristin for treating your computer better than I treat mine, so I can use it for three to five days.