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HOW DID I MISS THIS

I knew I was out of the loop while we were away on holiday, but I didn’t realize I was so far out of the loop that I missed this:

“CUPERTINO, California–April 2, 2007–Apple® today announced that EMI Music’s entire digital catalog of music will be available for purchase DRM-free (without digital rights management) from the iTunes® Store (www.itunes.com) worldwide in May. DRM-free tracks from EMI will be offered at higher quality 256 kbps AAC encoding, resulting in audio quality indistinguishable from the original recording, for just $1.29 per song. In addition, iTunes customers will be able to easily upgrade their entire library of all previously purchased EMI content to the higher quality DRM-free versions for just 30 cents a song.”

It’s the logical follow-up to Steve Jobs’ open letter to the music industry from back in February, but I hadn’t expected it to happen quite so soon.

Er, yay!

Now if only Apple would get some video content into the Store for us folks outside the USA, everything would be peachy. See, I’ve just got myself a new 80GB iPod, and I’m suddenly alive to the idea of small, portable video. Which leads to thoughts of converting our DVD collection to H.264 and using iTunes on our Mac Mini as a full-fledged media library, rather than using VLC and distantDVD to play ripped VIDEO_TS folders. And suddenly the whole Apple TV thing makes sense, too. (If only they’d make the video content available, yada yada.)

Man, I feel so behind the times. This is what I get for not keeping up with BoingBoing every day.

(One prediction, though: given that us poor Windows users need Photoshop Elements or Adobe album in order to show their photos via Apple TV, but that we can sync our photos to an iPod with iTunes alone, I don’t think it will be long before iTunes gains some form of photo album capability.)

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Going Dutch: NL in ’07!

The year is 2007, and the time of the Big Move is drawing near. For three years, we’ve been planning to move to the Netherlands, and it is finally starting to happen.

We took a trip to Rome in the spring of 2003. Alex had just turned two; Fiona was still in the planning stages. Our journey to Rome took us through Stansted Airport, where we had a couple of hours to kill. It was a nice day, so we went outside to enjoy the fresh air and sunshine. We were joined by a few other kids and their parents, and we started chatting. We ended up speaking mostly English, this was mostly because it was the main language we all had in common. I don’t remember what the nationalities of the other couples were, but I think that one of them was Spanish + Italian, and the other was Italian + Danish. Their children were all merrily running around and jabbering away in a variety of different languages at age two.

Abi is grew up in California, I grew up in the Netherlands, and we both have a very international outlook. But talking to those other parents, we felt painfully aware that staying in Scotland was not the best way to pass our multi-cultural perspectives and love of languages on to our children. So we decided to move, and to live in a country without English as its primary language.

Because we’re very cautious by nature, this wasn’t an overnight decision. For a long time, we just talked about where the best place to settle would be. We love Rome, but Italy didn’t feel right. Initially we also dismissed the Netherlands, because I thought it would be unfair to give me the advantage of living somewhere I already spoke the language. Then we thought about Quebec, because it would give us a nice balance between English and French. It wasn’t until after Fiona was born in 2004 that we cut the knot and made a decision: yes, it would be the Netherlands. And the year would be 2007.

Why wait three years, though? Well, did I mention that we’re very cautious people? Although we knew intellectually that this was what we wanted to do, the idea of moving straight away scared the crap out of us. We were both at transition points in our careers. I had just started contracting, and Abi was just moving into test management. We both felt that we would prefer to pump up our skills for a while before attempting a big move. We recognized that we had to set an exact date, though, because otherwise we might just keep postponing it because we didn’t feel “ready”.

That’s why we chose 2007. It was far enough in the future not to be too scary, but not so far away that it was a pipe dream. Alex would be six, Fiona would be three; almost exactly the ages that Scott and I were when we moved to NL. We were both speaking Dutch within a matter of months, so we knew that Alex and Fiona wouldn’t have any great problems with the language. In three years, Abi could take Dutch lessons, and bring herself up to a level that would allow her to hit the ground running in a Dutch company. We both had specific professional goals that we wanted to achieve that would maximize our value to employers. It would also give us time to do some work on our house (new kitchen, bathroom) to increase its value before selling.

So here we are. Abi has been taking Dutch classes at Edinburgh University for the last two years. In 2006, we took a couple of scouting trips to the Netherlands to look at some different cities and to get a feel for the place. Alex finished his first year of school at the end of June. Yesterday evening we had a decorator round to give us a quote for painting our hallway and living room in preparation for putting the house up for sale. And at the weekend, Abi sent off her first job application.

If we could choose all our dates, this is what our ideal plan would look like for the next few months:

  • Mid April: we come back from holiday, and Abi starts sending out CVs and job applications
  • Mid/end April: paint & tidy up the house
  • Begin May: house goes up for sale
  • Mid May: Abi starts getting job interviews
  • Begin June: Abi gets offered a job, to start on 2nd July
  • Begin June: House gets sold
  • Rest of June: Various trips to NL to look for houses and schools
  • End June: We find a house in NL
  • Begin July: Abi moves to NL, stays in a hotel or short-term rented accomodation
  • Begin July: I stay in Edinburgh with the kids, tying up loose ends
  • Mid July: The kids and I move to NL, to stay in a hotel or short-term rented accomodation
  • End July: Arrange school for Alex, and find childcare for Fiona
  • Begin August: Move out of house in Edinburgh, and into new house in NL.
  • Mid August: Alex starts school.

As Abi is fond of saying, it’s a plan for Angels. It wouldn’t take much to blow all of this careful preparation out of the water. But we’re ready for that. Abi has handed in her notice at the Bank, and won’t be going back to work after we get back from holiday at Easter. This will give her the opportunity to be flexible with anything the comes up. And in the absence of any major emergencies, we still plan to go ahead with buying a house, and moving in July. It’s a bold move, but we think we’re ready for it.

(Oh, and as for me? I had the foresight to find an excellent company in Edinburgh that will let me work…from the Netherlands. They rock.)

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2006 in review: Games and gadgets

The Legend of Zelda: Twilight PrincessI wouldn’t say that we’re obsessed with gaming in our household, but we did somehow manage to acquire four new games consoles in 2006. Okay, so two of them were handhelds, but still:

  • a GameBoy Advance for Fiona
  • a shiny new DS Lite for me
  • an XBox 360 for the family (honest)
  • a Wii

The tipping point for the XBox 360 came in September, when Lego Star Wars Lego II came out. We had bought a new “HD ready” LCD TV (720p only, not 1080) over the summer, but we didn’t have any HD sources for it yet. We had to get Lego Star Wars II, of course, and the 360 version was in HD, and so was reported to be the best-looking of all the multi-platform versions. So it was just common sense to buy a 360 to play it on.

Game of the year, though, is without a doubt Zelda: Twilight Princess. I got a Wii at launch, and Zelda kept the whole family occupied over the entire Christmas and New Year period. We finally finished it early in January after clocking up about 200 hours of play time on our various save games.

Other games that were fun during the year were New Super Mario Bros on the DS, and Geometry Wars on the 360. I finally finished Halo 2 as well, which was tedious and had an annoying cliffhanger ending. But nothing else even came close to Lego Star Wars or Zelda.

I’m going to be facing an interesting choice over the next week or so, as various shops in the UK start taking pre-orders for the PlayStation 3. There’s no way I’m going to camp out in front of a real-world shop to get one, nor do I have any intention of buying one on eBay for more than the standard retail price. But if I could get my hands on a pre-ordered one from an online retailer? Hmm.

Arguments in favour:

  • It would replace our (old, noisy) PS2 with a quieter console with wireless controllers. (Apart from the N64, the PS2 is the last bastion of tangle-friendly wired controllers.)
  • It would give us a high-def video player without having to buy an HD-DVD add-on for the 360. And seeing as we’ve got one of the loud 360s (even without a disc in it, it sounds like a Tornado on take-off), I don’t think I want to use it as a player, anyway.
  • We could afford it right now, whereas money is likely to be tighter after the summer and the move to NL.
  • High resale value of it doesn’t work, or if I fancy a sudden infusion of cash.

Arguments against:

  • There isn’t a single PS3 exclusive either at launch or on the horizon that I want to play.
  • By the time there are PS3 titles I want to play, the console will be cheaper.

Hmm. Brain says no. Gadget Fever says OOH OOH SHINY WANT.

Gadget Fever needs a slap.

(And this is finally the last of the “best of 2006” entries. I’ll move on to talking about some of the interesting things we’ll be doing in 2007 soon.)

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5 Things You Probably Didn’t Know About Me

Kev tagged me with the “5 things you don’t know about me” meme last week. I considered doing an “Amazing…But False!” selection (as the set of things that people don’t know about me encompasses more than just true facts), but I eventually decided on a David Cronenberg body horror version.

1. My thumb bends back at an abnormally large angle

My thumb bends back too far

I used to think that everyone’s thumbs did this. Apparently they don’t.

2. I can make freaky zombie hands by bending just the top joints of my fingers

Freaky zombie fingers

Many people find the sight of this to be the visual equivalent of nails scratching down a blackboard.

3. I can manipulate my eyebrows to an unusual extent.

I can do left and right independently, and an extreme innner raise. This is not too uncommon, but can you raise the outer edges of both eyebrows together? I can.

Raising both eyebrows at the outer edges

(Note: eyebrows + sneer = rather sinister!)

4. I can turn my left and right eyeballs inwards independently.

Left eye looking inwards Right eye looking inwards

Last year Liza showed me a trick for making the eyeballs look outwards rather than inwards, but I haven’t put in the necessary practice to pull this off yet. (What, you think maybe this kind of thing comes naturally?)

5. I can do a respectable impression of a Cardassian without any make-up or prosthetics.

Cardassian neck

Okay, that’s enough flesh for the moment. Out of spite, I shall now tag: