Sleep Spent

Keith Olbermann forcefully tells it like it is on the issue of the death of Habeus Corpus.

Was that so hard?

Hello,

I apologize for all of the confusion on our part regarding the “At The Point” album. The distributor that we receive this album from asked us to pull the album temporarily and then re-delivered it to us. As you speculated, it was re-delivered with a new ID following some changes the distributor made to the album. When an album is re-posted with a new ID, our system detects it as a brand new album. This is the reason you were unable to download the album as you expected-our system read your request as a request for a new album and not the album you previously downloaded. With the large amount of albums we receive daily, an issue like this can occur on the site. I’m not offering this as an excuse- instead, I wanted to make sure you received a fair explanation as to what happened.

You are correct in stating this this was an issue completely outside of your control. Because eMusic acts in good faith in regards to its redownloading policy, I have added 17 courtesy downloads to your account to compensate you for the full album. I have set these downloads to expire one year from today so you don’t have to feel pressured to use them in the short term. As long as you remain an active eMusic subscriber, those downloads will be available for the next year.

We’re deeply sorry for the frustration and inconvenience you encountered in trying to resolve this issue. We hope this is a reasonable resolution for you.

Regards,

Erick
eMusic Customer Support Team

Thank you, eMusic, for doing the right thing.

A few months ago, Matt Nathanson released At the Point, a live album. I bought it on eMusic, but due to their lack of rollover song downloads, I had only 13 downloads left. (There are 17 tracks on the album.) So I bought 13 of the 17 tracks. When I got 40 more DLs in my account the next week, I was shocked to find that the album had been removed. I e-mailed them about it and their response was, “tough luck.” I was a bit miffed.

I checked back about a month later, and whaddaya know, the album was back! So I downloaded the last four songs. But when I looked in my Downloads list, I saw only that I had purchased the last four tracks, not the original 13. “Odd,” I thought.

So after living at my current apartment for five months, I am making a change. The master tenant here, my roommate Jia-Lin, told me on the 6th that she’d be moving out “by the end of the month,” which turned out to be yesterday. I have been looking hard for the last week, responding to a million Craigslist ads. It took me awhile to find the right place, but I’m glad I held out. Just tonight, I made a verbal agreement to move into a place on States Street by the end of the month!

The living room has an amazing view of the Castro and Twin Peaks, it’s just been remodeled with new wood floors downstairs and new carpeting upstairs. My bedroom is large, though it doesn’t have a view. There’s heat and double-paned windows. There are 10′ceilings throughout, so I won’t be heating air I never use. There’s a massive kitchen with tons of cabinet space. The landlord, who will also be living with me, just got a bunch of furniture and a 50″ plasma TV.

So I’m stoked! It really couldn’t have worked out better. It’s $150 more than I spend right now, but it’s not much farther from a Muni stop and it’s going to be an infinitely nicer living situation.

I’ll be organizing a housewarming party once I move in and we get settled. And I’ll get some pictures up as soon as I move in.

Look out! Nick’s coming to the Castro.

On Caltrain, I think, on Thursday.

I don’t care so much about the phone. The real loss is the SIM card, because I don’t think I’ll be able to get a replacement from Cingular so I can keep using my old plan, which was $30/mo with more minutes than I needed. All the new plans are at least $40/mo, and most of them have fewer features.

Bastards.

Ever since my parents came through with $5000 for me when I needed it in London, I have expected to pay them back. I wasn’t sure how long it would take; turns out to have been just shy of a year.

It’s done! DAMN does it feel good to not owe them anything. They said they weren’t even expecting to be paid back; even better. :-)

Next target: student loans.

So, it has come to my attention that people really like my Song of the Week. I’m flattered when this takes the form of a few downloads. However, when I start getting people downloading songs over and over again, I quickly run into my ISP’s 25GB/month bandwidth limit.

Many months ago, I put a $250 deposit down towards my London Study trip. It was so long ago that I had completely forgotten about it. In fact, I thought the money had been incorporated into the program fee.

Not so! I just received a $250 check in the mail!

Jordan’s advice: “don’t spend it all in one place.” With two major and many more minor expenses over the next month and a half vying for attention, that should be the least of my problems. :-)

(Of course, I gave the program $250 when the dollar was at about $1.5/£ and I’m getting it back at $1.9/£, so they made roughly $52 on the transaction. Oh, well.)