I don’t think I could live without my Rhapsody music service. It’s the coolest thing. Before iITunes, PressPlay and MusicNet there was Listen.Com’s Rhapsody. For $9.95/mo. I can stream as much music, within their catalog, as I like. And believe me… I stream quite a bit. 95% percent of the time when I listen to music is when I’m sitting on the computer at work or at home. Because of Rhapsody, I’ve been turned on to music that I would have NEVER heard before, let along buy their CD. Artists like ‘Delerium’, ‘Banco De Gaia’, ‘Guster’ (before Radio play), ‘Nickel Creek’, ‘The Afro Celt Sound System’, to name a few.

Currently, in my playlist (which changes every few days), I have ‘Nickel Creek’, ‘Aerosmith’ (just went to my first Aerosmith/Kiss concert recently), ‘Johnny Cash’, ‘The Ataris’, ‘Sting’, ‘Dido’, ‘Weezer’, ‘The Dandy Warhols’, ‘moonpools and caterpillars’, ‘The Smoking Popes’, ‘Pearl Jam’, and ‘Coldplay’. My musical tastes vary depending on my day/mood. You can usually tell what kind of mood I’m in, based on what I’m listening to at the time.

Although, Rhapsody is the coolest service for me, it’s not perfect. 1.) I can only stream my music. No downloading to my computer. 2.) I can “buy” a copy of the song and burn it to a CD for $0.79 and than proceed to rip it my computer. But if I’m logged on at all times, what’s the point? Plus, I’m one of those anal types that have to have every song from an album, not just a few songs. Call me weird – it’s a sickness. Which leads me to point – 3.) With Rhapsody, you pay $0.79/song. So if I want to burn an album like Tenacious D’s self titled album, it would cost me $0.79 * 21 tracks = $16.59. Much more expensive than buying it at my local Best Buy or www.deepdiscountcd.com. Some of the tracks on Tenacious D are less than a minute long. Mind you, they are comedy bits, but poignant bits that lead into the song. Rhapsody needs to implement the feature, such as iTunes, where if you burn the entire album, it’s only $9.99.

This is going to lead me to my RIAA tirade again. Why does the RIAA insist on providing an electronic copy of an album for $9.99? Until they get their heads out of their butt and start offering me full albums for me to download and burn on my own media for … let’s say… $5.99 or less, I’ll stick to streaming.

Sorry… I didn’t finish my points… 4.) I’m still waiting for the ability to stream/download artists like ‘Dave Matthews Band’ and ‘Radiohead’. From what I can tell, no other services offer these artists either. Why the holdout, Dave? (Matthews that is)

Pre-PDC:

* A 10:00AM arrival in L.A. means an 8:00AM departure from Chicago which in turn means a 5:00AM wake-up call. Ouch!

* It’s a good thing I knew about the fires before we made our descent into LAX. Nothing is more disconcerting than smelling smoke on the airplane.

* Snowing in Anaheim. A good friend and I decided to head down to Disneyland for the day on Saturday. We noticed white flakes were falling out of the sky (ash) and was noticeably worse later in the day when we were ingesting it into our lungs and eyes. Still, a good time had by all.

* Thank you, Ken Getz, for being a gracious host for your Sunday night soire. Ken has a gorgeous house sitting on top of a hill overlooking the valley. I had a chance to meet Rafael Munoz who is the MVP Lead for Microsoft, great guy! Now if I could only find someone to nominate me for the MVP program.

On to the show:

* BillG didn’t disappoint in his keynote. There’s a number of keynote blogs detailing the specifics so I want go into it here. But I’m excited about what’s ahead.

* Monday’s Keynote, Part II (Battle of the text editors). Did the VS team cringe when Don Box, Chris Anderson and Jim Alchin were battling it out with Emacs, SlickEdit and VI? Not to worry, Visual Studio ( Whidbey) had the spotlight during Tuesday’s keynote.

* Don Box is a presentation God! Part of me attending sessions is not only to learn the content, but to learn the presentation/speaking nuances of the “pros”. I always take cues, good and bad, to try and help me become a better speaker. Don is top notch in this category.

* Don Box was a PDC slave. I’m not sure how many sessions Don presented at, but I know it was quite a few in one week. Not only PDC, but on Wednesday he floated on down to OOPSLA in Orange County to speak. He has the gift of gab and the technical know how to go with it. I’m sure it’s second nature to him.

* Poor planning. I was getting frustated on Tuesday when I couldn’t get entrance to the sessions I wanted to attend. Even the TV displays, outside of the room, were jammed pack. Microsoft should have had a contigency plan for overflow. This forced me to buy the DVDs, which probably isn’t a bad thing, but it’s more money spent on the conference. Microsoft should pony up and send the DVDs to all of the attendees. Anyone up for starting a petition.

* Whidbey, Yukon, Longhorn. Oh my! Too much content to digest. In 4-6 weeks, I plan on digesting some more. * The hands-on-labs were great. There was too many to do in such a short amount of time. Hopefully we’ll have access to them post-show.

* Holy Junk Food! It was hard to pass up piles and piles and piles of free junk food. I did, however, splurge now and again but I held back as much as humanly possible.

* I attended the bloggers BOF session. Those bloggers are either very passionate people or insane. Being new to blogging I was quite getting what the points of the discussion were, but from what I could tell, only one point was being discussed and I’m not sure anything came out of it. Amusing none the less. A sampling of some of the attendees were Scoble (of course), Steve Wallace, Marc Canter, Clemens Vasters, Robert McLaws

* I tried installing Longhorn using Virtual PC. It took a very long time (can you say pre-alpha?). Once in Virtual PC the colors were all goofy. I was informed by one of the Microsofties manning the Longhorn booth that Virtual PC comes with “Additons” that need to be installed for additonal video drivers. I need to bump my laptop up to 1GB of memory before I attempt this again. I let you know how it goes.

* Great job on Microsoft’s part for providing ample plugs, cables and wireless capabilities for everyone to connect. Next time, they’ll be better prepared on the number of attendees requiring an IP address. A little frustrating at first but the came around in short order.

* The attendee party at Universal Studios was great, I just wish we had more time to enjoy it. Once again more food, drink and deserts than one could possibly consume in 4 hours, but a number of them tried. The bus situation was a nightmare, thank god we had a car. I wouldn’t have wanted to stand in those lines.

LA-LA Land:

* They were filming a movie 3 floors above me in the Westin Bonaventure. It’s called “National Treasure” and is slated for Fall ’04. It’s starring Nicholas Cage and is being produced by Jerry Bruckheimer. No chance of weeseling my way into a cameo.

* Wednesday night, one of the downtown streets was blocked off with all kinds of production equipment strewn about. Possibly a shot for “National Treasure”, but I’m sure that sort of thing happens all over LA-LA land and it could’ve been anything. Anyone know?