Home of Hewins

UFO at Storm King, originally uploaded by Dan Hewins.

I found another UFO in a pretty unlikely place. This is etched into the window of the elevator at Storm King sculpture park.

My new plan

eMusic is planning to add 200,000+ songs to the catalog from a few major labels. This is good news, however it’s coming with a price increase.

I used to be able to get 65 track downloads per month for $14.99. Now, as you can see above, they are drastically cutting the number of downloads I get for the same price, starting next month.

65 downloads for $14.99 comes out to $0.23 per track. That’s a lot less than iTunes.

37 downloads for $14.99 comes out to $0.41 per download. Still less than iTunes.

So, I’m getting 57% of the music for a 78% increase in cost per track.

I really hope the new selections are a really, really good.

This, however, is the eMusic thing. I’m honestly surprised that any major labes are getting in on this. It’s not as good of a money maker as iTunes is on a per track basis. But I guess the labels are at the point where they’ll take what they can get.

The Cougar Label sells Up The Empire tracks  on eMusic and we don’t see much from there (especially compared to iTunes). Maybe that’s why Tzadik took their catalog off of eMusic a few months back. They just didn’t think it was worth it.

Central Floral Supply, originally uploaded by Dan Hewins.

Taken on a (one of the many) rainy day(s) this Spring.

Here are more of my shop windows.

Lyndhurst 3 with Hillary, originally uploaded by Dan Hewins.

This was taken the day that Hillary and I got engaged! We went to Lyndhurst, an old mansion on the Hudson River. After that, we checked out the river near Cold Spring and then the town of Cold Spring, where we stayed.

I got this “Benefit Update Rider” from my health insurance company last week. They are willing to recognize same-sex marriage as long as the jurisdiction recognizes it. They can adapt, why can’t everyone adapt?

Oxford Health Insurance Benefit Update Rider

bridge from roof, originally uploaded by Dan Hewins.

After being burglarized, I climbed up to the roof via the fire escape ladder and saw that the reason I couldn’t open the hatch from the ladder inside the building was because it had been sealed closed. I don’t know if this constitutes a fire hazard or not but it makes it harder to get on the roof of the building (which we’re not supposed to do anyway). While I was up there at dusk, I took a few photos.

In response to Toby’s post on Record Store Day.

I’ve been buying more vinyl lately too. Mostly bcause I like vinyl and they usually come with a free mp3 download. Sometimes they even come with a CD or CDR. I am also in teh process of getting rid of all but my most precious CDs. I do like packaging and liner notes and I wish that was available for digital downloads (on iTunes it sometimes but rarely is) but I do not have any particular attachment to the CD as a format. It’s on its way out, I think. And here’s the part I have trouble beleiving about myself: even after working at a recording studio and having recorded several records, I am not bothered by the lossy format of AAC or MP3. I can hear it on real lo-res or old mp3s but I can’t really tell the difference with a 256kbps AAC encoding. So, keeping CDs as a better digital representation of my music really isn’t that important to me. All of this music will still be available somewhere in the future (except for the ultra-rare, which I’m keeping.

that was my 2 cents.

I need your help as I propose to launch the first social media manhunt.  Someone broke into the apartment I share with my fiancée, in the Williamsburg neighborhood of Brooklyn over the weekend.  They stole electronics mostly, including the laptop containing her unfinished master’s thesis and years and years of pictures.  Yes, we should have backed up this data. But we didn’t and that’s the unfortunate fact. Lesson learned. But a learned lesson doesn’t bring back thousands of photos and other data.

I came back home on Sunday night to discover that the window had been opened by the fire escape and that all of our things had been rifled through.  I rushed immediately to the hiding place where her engagement ring was hidden (she didn’t take it out of town with her) and was relived to find it where I left it. What was missing was what, apparently, one person could carry out. The burglar took a canvas tote bag of mine that had my iPod in it and packed into it the rest of the goods that were stolen: a Playstation 3, a Wii, their controllers, and my fiancee’s Mac PowerBook laptop.

They are just things, things that can be replaced. However, on the computer are things that cannot be replaced with any amount of money. These are the things we want back more than anything else. It could have been a lot worse. There were a lot of our belongings that could have been taken that weren’t. Cameras, a TV, stereo, etc. I count us fairly lucky all in all, but we should not take this lying down.

Why should you want to help? I’m not sure. Maybe you want to help us out of the goodness of your heart. Maybe you want to see if this social experiment can work. Maybe you want a reward. Maybe we stop this from happening to our neighborhood.  For whatever reason, I hope you can help.

Let’s get this message in front of anyone you know who lives in Brooklyn or the surrounding areas. The computer could have made its way to Queens or Manhattan, so let’s just get people to see this.

Here’s what we’re looking for: Apple Macintosh PowerBook G4 Aluminium with a 15″ screen and a 1.25GHz PowerPC G4 processor. The serial number is V73394FSNRZ It’s the September 16, 2003 version. It’s got some cosmetic damage on the outside corners, small dents and scratches. The screen has some lighter-colored splotchyness to it. There are probably around 10-15 light splotches on the screen. The power adapter was not taken but if there is one with it it probably has to be jiggled and finessed to keep the green charging light activated. The battery life is abysmal. It may be being carried in a canvas tote bag with WNYC printed on it in red. If it is on, the desktop background will have a comical picture of a woman wearing a head-scarf with various funny things floating in the sky behind her tiled on the screen.

There are so many people online that I think we have a good chance of getting this message in front of someone who has the chance of coming into contact with this computer. I believe that the thief intends to sell the computer to the first person that can be found who wants to buy it at a cut-rate. Perhaps it’s already been sold. Perhaps someone on Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, or some other network already has the computer in their possession. Perhaps someone online will see the computer for sale on some street corner. We have a lot of eyes and ears and typing fingers. Maybe we can retrieve this special information. If it can return a camera to its owner, maybe it can return information and photos to their owner as well.

If you have this computer and have come into ownership by any means whatsoever, I will be happy to arrange to meet you and get it back, no questions asked. Please, let your conscience get the better of you.

Please email me at hewins@gmail.com if you have any information leading to the recovery of the data on this computer or the computer itself.

Thanks, and let’s see if we can do this!

this is a screenshot from an account I created with the email address support@twitter.com

I have a few email addresses. I hacve some that I use for my everyday life, one for work, and others for things like signing up on email lists and entering contests.

One of the email addresses I use to subscribe to Jim Bramlett’s “inJesus” evangelical email list got a strange email the other day from Twitter. The subject was, “Welcoming you to Twitter!” and it began, “Hello, new Twitter-er!” This, I thought was very strange because I didn’t sign up for a Twitter account with that email address, and I looked into it. It turns out that someone had created my account and called it “PastorFurtick” with the name Steven Furtick. I immediately changed the password on the account so that nobody could access it anymore (I wish I hadn’t, more on that later). Then, naturally, I googled Steven Furtick and came up with this site. I looked for a way to contact his church and found a phone number, called it, and didn’t reach anyone. I didn’t leave a message either. I was going to ask about the twitter account while knowing that it wa not necessarily Steven who had created it.

As I was discussing this with my coworkers today, I decided to try it myself. I realized that I could complete the sign-up process and start tweeting without even verifying the email address that I used to create the account. I made an account called “securityproblem” with the email address support@twitter.com. (In the meantime, my coworker created one with my work email address.) It seemed that someone else had dome something like that becuase when I saw the home page, my new account was already following and followed by “llk4235 / Lupe King“.

So I tweeted. I tweeted more and tweeted @biz, the founder (nothing in reply yet). A screenshot of the first few tweets is what is above. Check out the twitter account page here. I have tested logging out and back in to this account, and that works, no problem.

Looking around for other people talking about it, google turned up the Twitter support page on “My account is compromised…” but it doesn’t really address the issue at hand. This is more about something strange happening to an existing account. I need to know about creating new accounts. I didn’t really find anything useful after googling “sign up for twitter with someone else’s email address”. Mostly, people were concerned with Twitter “impoersonators” but this was not related to the email address issue.

If you know anything about this issue, please comment here or tweet @hewins.