But sometimes I am not able to download a particular album, because of where I live. You would think the music industry is globally organised. Not so. Bummer. Bad!

But the next thing was new to me. I was able to download the album “Broken Social Scene”, by “Broken Social Scene” except one song, which was not available for download:

This is very strange. However I could download this one song by going to the single where it was available for download:

I am pretty sure this is not enforced by eMusic, but by the label(s).

I am one of the dinosaurs still paying for my music. But my main criteria is convenience. All those restrictions are hurting paying customers in my opinion. I was close to copying it from someone owning the CD. As a matter of fact I sometimes illegally download albums which are regionally restricted.
Please labels, enter the 21st century. We pretty much got rid of DRM, but regional issues still exist and are causing aggravation and only annoy the paying customers.

I will do my best, but convenience is the USP.  Remember that!

I was unpleasantly surprised that there is no listing functionality. You have to enter the image identifier yourself. You need another tool if you don’t have that information ready. After filling in the necessary parameters like number of instances, instance type etc., the image is started.

Starting image

After the image is started there is nothing you can do with it except shutdown or reboot. This was a bit disappointing. What surprised me more was that the next time I ran an image, the AMI id and availability zone were remembered by ec2Phone but not the number of instance or instance type. I do not understand that design decision.

Running image. Nothing to do!

Furthermore.
For some pet project I always have this workflow.

• Find image
• Start image
• Attach EBS volume
• Go to terminal to execute some scripts
• Connect browser to image

In my workflow only the start image is supported by ec2Phone. This is a bit thin. When you compare this to the (free) Firefox plugin ElasticFox it has only a small percentage of that functionality.

ElasticFox

Together with the fact that there is no support for European EC2 images I think ec2Phone/ElasticPod is just too lightweight to justify its current price.
However the developer has said that terminal integration and image listing are on the backlog for the next release. If he would add EBS support it would be a nifty iPhone app for me.

Another good example is UPC

I use two ISP’s. One ADSL provider: XS4ALL and one cable provider: UPC.
I want as much upload as possible and then cable is the one to go where I live. However UPC has a very very bad reputation and thus I keep XS4ALL as a backup, since XS4ALL has arguably the best service in the Netherlands.

Having two ISP’s has proven to be a wise choice because UPC is going down now and then. What really annoys me is the fact that their technical trouble page is always empty.

This is untrue and a plain lie, because when I call them I get an automatic response that there is a technical problem in the place where I live. How they know where I live when I call with a mobile phone is something I will not pursue right now…

In contrast with XS4ALL which very very seldom has failures, XS4ALL’s site always reports a problem somewhere.
It is a fact that UPC has a lot more infrastructure problems than XS4ALL. However if you look at both sites the opposite seems to be true.

What is up with that? Is UPC still believing that transparency is a bad thing? Reports show that transparency and a willingness to solve a problem creates more loyal customers.

It is definitely an improvement to the old site. Previously when searching for the band daryllann, there were no results whatsoever. The new site now changes the incorrectly spelled band name to the correct spelling. This means that the site is more forgiving to spelling mistakes. This should help conversion rates. Although….. the album Renko found on Bol.com is not the correct album: Renko…..bol.com still have to sort out some data issues.

Revamped product sections

All product pages are revamped, but especially the games, DVD and music sections look hugely different. The site looks and behaves the same across the different product groups now.

I love the feature that you now can search for children games or hardcore games. Ordering a PEGI 3+ game for a four year old is not what PEGI is about. PEGI rating just sucks™

Shopping basket

The shopping basket and checkout has pretty pictures.
Nice eye candy.

Pretty urls
http://www.bol.com/nl/p/games/metal-gear-solid-4-guns-of-the-patriots/1004004006052238/index.html
Bol.com has got rid of all the ugly urls they used to have. SEO to the max.

Payments
Unfortunately the Postbank was experiencing problems which caused problems with my Postbank credit card or iDEAL payments. This killed some of the experience, but this is not something Bol.com can help. It was handled gracefully on the bol.com site. My Visa card had no problems whatsoever… Good… good..

Next steps?
ATG and Endeca transformation almost done.  Time for the next phase….

I am a member of emusic, the retailer that offers a selection of independent music and audiobooks.

One thing which always bothered me a bit was the audiobook format. They split an audiobook in dozens of mp3 files which are not the best solution if you use iTunes and an iPod.
iTunes and the iPod have the so called bookmarkable format, that is, the track will resume playing wherever you left off the last time you played it.
There is a lot of information on the net, but I could not find a step by step process for the Mac how to convert emusic audiobooks to iTunes audiobooks.

This is my procedure for Mac OS X.

• Download two Applescripts scripts from Doug’s AppleScripts: Track Splicer and Make Bookmarkable. Install them as described.
• Add the emusic audiobook files to iTunes. They will be stored somewhere under music.
• Select the audiobook mp3 files. Make sure they are ordered correctly and run the Track Splicer script. This will create one big mp3 file.
  If you like to split it in a couple of 1 hour files, like an iTMS audiobook, then select a smaller number of files and repeat the procedure.
• Select the mp3 audiobook and convert it to an aac (m4a) file with iTunes. (Right mouse: Convert Selection to AAC). Use a bitrate
  applicable for audiobooks, since 256kbps or so seems like a waste of disk space.
• Select the aac audiobook and run the Make Bookmarkable script. This will convert the m4a file to m4b file. When you look under
  Audiobooks you will see your converted book.
• For nicety find a cover and add it as album artwork.

Enjoy!