Why does it seem like all the music groups that I want to see are in Australia right now?  Guns N' Roses, Linkin Park, U2, and Jeff Martin are there.  Please come back to Chicago!

If you have not yet checked out the new Windows Live site, its now time.  Days ago Microsoft updated the site and its now more social than ever.  The new home page tells you what your friends are up to and shows you some headlines from the news.  The new profiles tell your friends what you’ve been up to and you can also add some your favorite things, for example you can add your favorite movies, music artists, and books.  Also, the new Windows Live Photos is a great place to store photos, with 25 Gb of storage.  In addition to all these great things on the web site, Microsoft has updated the Windows Live Essentials, which is a bundle of software that helps you manage your e-mail, photos, videos, your blog, and more.  I must say that the new Windows Live is great, but what I like the most is being able to access my Hotmail from Windows Live Mail, upload photos with the Windows Live Photo Gallery, and being able to post to my blog with the Windows Live Writer.  These tools are very helpful with managing my day to day activities on the internet.  I highly recommend to all my readers to check out the new site at http://home.live.com/!

I recently got a free month for Netflix as part of a settlement for a class action lawsuit because I was a member a while back.  Therefore, I have been enjoying some movies that I missed while they were at the show.  One of these movies that I got in the mail today was the Rolling Stones and Martin Scorcese movie, "Shine A Light."  I really like The Rolling Stones and their music, so I really enjoyed this one.  Now, I must say that The Rolling Stones are not getting any younger and they're age really shows, but not in the music.  They still can rock!  I think what was really nice about this movie is that they picked some songs that have not been heard in a while...at least not by me.  In between songs, I really enjoyed watching them at the beginning of their career saying things about where they'd be in the future.  There were also a few guest appearances by Bill and Hillary Clinton, Buddy Guy, Christina Aguilara, and Jack White III.  Overall, I think this concert movie was very well done.  My only complaint is that I would have caught this at the theater!  I give this one five stars! [caption id="attachment_285" align="aligncenter" width="240" caption="Shine A Light"] [/caption]

For those of you that don't know, MP3tunes is a service  that allows you to store your digital music collection online.  I have been a user of this service for a while now and I was saddened to get this e-mail: Dear MP3tunes Customer, Let me start by saying that as the CEO of MP3tunes I appreciate your support over the last few years. Your suggestions and patience have helped us build the Locker system we have today. We just launched AutoSync that makes managing your music collection easier than ever. As you may be aware, the major record label EMI has sued MP3tunes, claiming our service is illegal. You can read about the case here. Much is at stake -- if you don't have the right to store your own music online then you won't have the right to store ebooks, videos and other digital products as well. The notion of ownership in the 21st century will evaporate. The idea of ownership is important to me and I want to make sure I have that right and my kids do too. I would like to ask for your assistance in our battle for personal music ownership. We need your help because we are a small, 15-person company battling an international giant. They would like to make us spend all of our money paying legal bills. Here's what you can do to help: 1) Please upgrade to a Premium account. This week MP3tunes is launching 3 service levels. I hope you will consider signing up for one of the paid levels. This will not only help us pay for the costs of our service (machines, storage and bandwidth) but a portion will go to cover our legal costs in our case with EMI. 2) If you have a chance to talk publicly about our cause on your blog, with friends, reporters or even EMI personnel please do so. MP3tunes is working hard to design a secure personal music service. We don't promote sharing of music in any manner. We want people to legally acquire their music. But once they do, we think it's important that you be able to use it how you want for your personal use. The AmazonMP3 store says: "You may copy, store, transfer and burn the Digital Content only for your personal, non-commercial, entertainment use." and this is what MP3tunes allows you to do. You have my commitment that I'll continually battle for your right to store your music online and listen to it anywhere on any device. I hope you'll consider helping MP3tunes in our battle. Thanks. -- Michael Robertson CEO MP3tunes.com It appears as if the record companies are trying to take away all of our freedoms when it comes to enjoying our music.  It was bad enough that they did everything they could to stop people from sharing music and now they want take away our right to store the music, that we spent our hard earned money to buy, where we want!  Just because they can't figure out how to operate with their CD sales dropping, doesn't mean they have a right to dictate how people store and enjoy their music! Anyway, that's my rant.  If you took the time to read this, please spread the word to help MP3tunes!

Sometime yesterday Trent Reznor released his latest Nine Inch Nails album. According to everything I have read, Ghosts I-IV is an instrumental album and it is available on the NIN website as a free or $5 download. You can also order various cd packages ranging from $10 - $300. I ordered my copy for $10 and I also got the mp3 download with it.  Unfortunately, my download never completely finished and I am still waiting for an e-mail from the NIN store that will hopefully give me access again.  So obviously, I haven't gotten a chance to listen to it yet.  It will be interesting to see how quickly I get my issues resolved with the store!

Saturday, I got a new phone and I thought I would post some pictures of it. Its a shiny new Motorola Z6m ROKR phone. So far I absolutely love it. I was a little skeptical of getting a slider phone at first, but this phone had some great features that include ability to play music, a 2.0 megapixel camera, and animated wallpaper. So anyway here it is: Isn't it beautiful?