The Writers Coin

Want to know how I downloaded my very first MP3? It was The Devil Goes Down to Georgia, I downloaded it through mIRC, and I played it on my RIO PMP 300 player. Which let you listen to around seven songs at one time before you had to hook it up to your PC and switch the music out.

I know, I’m totally old school.

Downloading an MP3 back then was a real hassle.

Then Napster came along and changed everything. But it wasn’t legal, and a lot of people were still very skeptical. If you were in college, you got it, but everyone else didn’t trust MP3s. They had a “pirate” label attached to them.

Well, now MP3s are a part of our culture and the music industry itself has changed dramatically because of it.

But it had little to do with the MP3. It’s all Apple’s fault.

Apple Killed the Radio Star

I remember when I told people about my MP3 player and how I got music on it: they weren’t impressed. And for the longest time, I didn’t think MP3s would ever hit the mainstream.

Then iTunes came along and changed the whole game.

iTunes made it so anyone, and I mean anyone, could easily download music, pay for it, and listen to it on their computer/iPod in a way that was legal and cool.

All it cost you was a buck.

That was no small feat.

What Can We Learn From Apple?

I was thinking about all of this after reading this post on Apple and it hit me that what they did wasn’t terribly creative. They took an existing idea and made it better.

The thing is, they made it much better.

I spend a lot of time trying to come up with brand new ideas that no one else has come up with before. It’s really hard to do and it takes its toll. But what Apple proved with iTunes is that creating a better way to do something that’s already out there can be just as valuable. It’s not always about new and fresh, it’s about more efficient and better.

Look around your job/life and see if you can’t take an existing process or task and make it better. Or look at your budget and see if you can make it more efficient somehow.

Better doesn’t always have to be new or creative, but it can make a world of difference.

I think everyone dreams of starting their own business and being their own boss. But most of us dream big and don’t do anything about it—we’re afraid that it’s too much work or that we won’t be able to “make it.”

So when a friend of mine decided to launch a new venture without quitting his job, I was intrigued. I love hearing stories about how an idea came to be and how they managed to get all the work done behind the scenes.

My friend, we’ll call him C, started a website called Recipe Comparison. What it does is let you compare recipes from different big-time sites like The Food Network and Epicurious to see what differences exist and what makes them unique.

It’s a pretty cool idea. M and I aren’t chefs, but we do like to cook—so this site can come in pretty handy.

Anyway, I decided to interview my friend so he can shed some light on all the work that was done behind the scenes. A lot of you bloggers out there will see some similarities between what his model (and the time he puts into his site):

Q. How did you get the idea for the site?

Q. You mentioned to me that you did several things to cut costs on this endeavor, can you talk about some of those and how much you saved?

Well, that’s it. He’s done some pretty interesting stuff in terms of preparing for a sale from the very beginning and doing a lot of the work himself, but the time spent on has obviously been very high. This is where it helps that C is passionate about cooking and so it doesn’t feel like a job, it’s more like a passion.

Make sure you check out RecipeComparison and play around a little bit with the site. And I want to thank C for answering my questions so thoroughly.

by Bob Jagendorf

Yesterday the Chicago Bears lost to the Houston Texans and officially ended their season. There will be no playoffs for the Bears in 2008. For me, that means my football season is over—although I may watch the Super Bowl.

M thought I would be bummed, and part of me is, but mostly I felt a great sense of relief. I now have my Sundays back and I don’t have to plan them around a football game. Don’t get me wrong, I love following my home team, but I’m also looking forward to having the “free time.”

And that got me thinking about sports in general, and how much time sports fans like myself put into following our teams. Between actually watching the games, reading newspaper articles/blog posts, and talking about it, sports can take up a LOT of time. Time that could be spent reading a book, learning a new skill, or writing an incredibly interesting blog post like this one. Not only that, it also gets in the way of doing bigger things like going to a museum or driving to IKEA to find a proper TV stand.

Is devoting a significant amount of time to being a sports fan a complete and total waste of time?

I know it’s entertaining and gives you something to talk about/network with others. But it’s addicting, and that’s the part I’m thankful to be done with when it comes to football. It’s like a soap opera, and I’m sure a lot of people feel that it’s just as useless. Week after week you want to see how your “guys” are going to do against the other team and if you miss a week, it almost feels like you weren’t a part of that week’s drama.

Cons:

• Being a fan takes up a lot of time
• It uses up time that could be spent on more productive endeavors
• Sports never end—there is always a sport that’s “in season”
• It’s unhealthy

Pros:

• It’s fun?

Don’t get me wrong, I’m a HUGE baseball fan and that’s one sport I’ll never “rid” myself of. I’ll always be a fan and will always read the sports pages every day, talk about it passionately, and waste a WHOLE BUNCH of time with it.

But where is the line? How much is too much?

This post was included in the Money Hacks Carnival.

Still looking for a gift to give this holiday season? If you’re really stumped and have no idea what that special someone would like, why not surprise them by giving them the greatest television show I’ve ever seen. Better than Lost, better than Mad Men, better than Sex and the City, and yes—even better than Seinfeld.

Welcome to The Wire.

Here’s the best part: a lot of people still don’t know how good this show is. It was on HBO and it ended in 2008, after five incredible seasons. The other great part? The complete series came out on DVD earlier this month, which means you can now give the whole thing to someone you really care for (not just anyone, mind you) all in one fell swoop.

If you can’t afford it, don’t fret. Here’s what you do: you buy the first season and give that instead. After that, they’ll buy/rent the rest on their own—guaranteed. The show is that addictive.

OK, now that I’m done talking like a salesman, let’s get down to the nitty gritty about this show. This is my review of my favorite show of all time:

The Wire is the Greatest Show Ever

There are shows that take you by the throat and smack you upside the head with a great first impression and fool you into thinking that it’s a fantastic show. Then years and seasons later when you’re arranging your life around watching this show, it hits you: Why? The show hasn’t done anything but ride on the coattails of that first impression and settled into a nice comfortable groove afterwards.

Or some shows, like The Wire, keep you intrigued with how “real” they feel. When someone asks you what The Wire is about, you try to explain. “It’s a cop show, but wayyyy better.”

“Cop show” doesn’t do the show justice.

But then, as you’ve had your heart broken over and over with every TV show out there (like Lost), you start to see cracks. You start to wonder if the so-called “reality” at the core of this show isn’t anything more than just straight-up pessimism. Imagine the worst possible thing that could happen to a series of characters and that’s what happens on the show.

McNulty, Bubs, Michael, Omar, Duquan, and on and on and on it goes. As you’re nearing the end of season five (the last one) you start to feel that familiar dread and you want to fight it. “Not with this show. Not The Wire. Please, no.”

Then you watch the last episode of the last season, and you’re glad you had your doubts about The Wire. Glad you put it through your most stringent standards — that you weren’t blinded by the whims of one man who worked as a cop reporter for all those years and decided to start writing for TV. That you were conscious, that you doubted, that you fought the good fight the whole time. All the way to the end.

And then, it ended and the truth was revealed. you were right to follow your instincts: this is the greatest television show you’ve ever seen.

It is reality, it’s the way it is — that much is obvious even to a middle-class white kid that’s never stood on a street corner like that before (and doesn’t want to).

The dialog, the reality of it, the characters come to life.

The first few episodes weren’t a great first impression—it just felt like a very old, dated cop show. Then, after the first couple of discs, I got hooked and couldn’t get enough. As the characters would say, I got a taste and now I was hooked.

Hooked on McNulty and his self destruction, his freeing himself of himself.

Hooked on Bubs, the only real ray of hope in the whole show.

Hooked on Duquan and Michael and how they are simply part of a cycle.

Hooked on Bunk, my man. Probably my favorite character, especially early on.

So many characters that you have to come to terms with that you’ll never see or hear from again: the admiration for Daniels, the pulling and rooting for Omar. The first guy we rooted for was D’Angelo, then Poot’s friend and then Michael. You start to think of them as long-lost friends instead of TV characters. That’s when you know this show is different.

If you’ve already seen the show, you know these things already. This is nothing new. But I have something for you too: here are a couple of really cool links that fans should check out that I really enjoyed:

• Mix a little Freakonomics with The Wire and what do you get? This series of posts my economist/gang expert Sudhir Venkatesh titled What do Real Thugs Think of The Wire? He sits down with real gang members to watch the show and gets their impressions. I read Sudhir’s book on gangs in Chicago and it was pretty incredible what he did spending time with them back in the day. Any fan of The Wire has to check out these posts.
• Slashfilm has a three hour podcast/special of various critics discussing the show. What they liked and didn’t like, etc. Listening to it so long after watching the last episode brought back some great memories. It’s an interesting perspective on the show—more from a critic’s standpoint, although most of the guys are obviously fans.

OK, that’s all I got. If you’re a fan, please let me know if I got a good grasp on the greatness of the show in this post. If you’ve never seen it, did I sell you on it or did I just blab on about it like a schoolgirl?

Either way, if you still have a gift to give, you can’t go wrong with giving the gift of drug dealing and gang violence that is The Wire.

Enjoy.

P.S. This post is featured in the Movie Monday Blog Carnival.