The World's Greatest Rock 'n' Roll Band!!!

Apple just announced the availability of many Rolling Stones albums on the iTunes Music Store (iTMS for short). I've never been a huge Stones fan overall, but I like a lot of their individual songs. "Satisfaction", in my opinion, is one of the greatest rock songs ever written, and there are probably about eight or 10 more songs of theirs that I'll download to carry around on my iPod.

That's the beauty of the iTMS. In most cases, you can download individual songs for 99 cents each, instead of having to buy a $15 CD to get 2 or 3 songs you really want. A typical song downloads in less than a minute with a broadband connection.

I really love the "instant" nature of it, too. For example, during the summer we saw James Taylor in concert. He played some stuff from his latest album, October Road. A. decided she really liked the songs she heard and wanted to get the album. When we got home, I fired up iTunes, downloaded the album for $9.99, burned it to a CD and presto! Had the album in less than 15 minutes. No trip to the record store. No waiting for Amazon to ship.

The iTMS is very easy to navigate, has a pretty wide selection of music, and is fully integrated with iTunes, Apple's jukebox software. If you live in the land of the virus-free (i.e., you have a Mac and are using OS 10.2), try it out! If not, Apple is supposed to make a Windows version of iTunes available by the end of the year.

OK, enough of the free commercial for Apple...


On a more serious note

With all the issues surrounding Internet security, identity theft and everything else, I'm going to avoid using full names in the blog (unless they're names of public figures, of course). When I refer to my family, A. will be my wife, J. will be my son and R. will be my daughter. I was thinking about using nicknames, but I couldn't come up with anything good. :-) Safety first!