Category: Unrelated News

EMI to offer DRM-free music!

This is great news. I checked the dates of all the announcements I could find. They are all dated today, not April First like Google’s big announcement.

The deal with EMI is that they have offered to sell their entire catalog of digital music without DRM for 30 cents more than the normal price of $0.99. Besides losing the DRM (which keeps you from using your music on all of your digital music devices) you gain a higher quality song. They are doubling the bit rate of the song to 256 instead of 128.

Anyone who has purchased EMI music through the iTunes music store will be able to upgrade their music to this unbroken format for the $0.30 price difference. I realize that this is a 30% price increase and that I would never be excited about anything jumping in price that much, but this is a great step in the right direction.

I have previously posted about DRM and EMI’s talk of dropping it.

This is supposed to be available in May. I may start doing some purchasing then.

Happy April Fool’s Day

This morning when I was preaching for the church service I mentioned that today is called Domingo de Ramos (Palm Sunday). Our son leaned over to my wife and asked her what that meant. She explained that it was called Palm Sunday because when Jesus entered into Jerusalem the people believed he was the Christ as fortold in the Old Testament. He had come to be their king. They laid out palm leaves for him to enter the city as a king.

Our son thought for a minute and then leaned back to my wife and asked, “Then how did it come to be known as April Fool’s day?”

I’m leaving town!

I can’t stand it any longer!

Ok, maybe not that drastic. I am going to the second largest city in the state, Valladolid, for a week. I will be helping a medical missions team from Monday to Friday. They are needing translators to help in clinics they are doing in some villages.

It is the second largest city in the state, but it is still not very large. The city we are in, Mérida, has almost 1,000,000 people. The city where I am going is about 50,000. Considerably smaller. I don’t expect there to be a Wal-Mart.

I don’t know how much I will be posting over the next 2 weeks. I will be in Valladolid for this next week and then to Tampico the week after. Tampico is on the Gulf coast north of Veracruz. I will be with a group of other missionaries planning our camp for the summer. I should be able to do some posting from there. I will try to get some pictures for you.

Good-Bye Tom Riley

If you are a follower of Adventures in Odyssey, you will know the name Tom Riley. The voice actor who played him was Walker Edmiston (real name: Ed Walker). Edmiston and Hal Smith were the two main actors in the original season of Odyssey who’s characters are still around. Hal Smith played John Avery Whittaker. Smith died in 1994 and was replaced by an amazing vocal twin, Paul Herlinger.

Walker Edmiston died in February. I had learned of his death shortly after he had passed away. But, today I heard a great tribute to him and his voice talents by the Adventures in Odyssey crew. Let me encourage you to take 20 minutes and listen to it. Especially if you were familiar with the Tom Riley character.

What I found out in my reading on him and his life was that he was blind since boyhood. I did not see from what age, but some wording I saw made me think he was not born blind. I did not know that he was blind when I listened to the audio tribute. Knowing that makes one of the lines he says in the program very humorous.

Since they no longer podcast the Adventures in Odyssey (I am not sure they ever officially did), I have not listened to it in a while. I don’t know how they have handled his death, or if they have gotten to it yet. He had such a unique voice, I am not sure if they will be able to replace him like they did with Hal Smith.

Just some interesting reading about Walker Edmiston:
IMDB Entry
Article citing his death
An interview he did in 1974
Wikipedia entry on Walker Edmiston
Wikipedia entry on Ed Walker