This was written on day 0 of the publicly accessible Amazon MP3

Before reading this, anyone who stumbles upon this post searching for Mac Amazon MP3 Download Problems:

1) Quit Amazon MP3 Downloader
2) Remove the file ~/Library/Application Support/Amazon/MP3 Downloader/DownloadQueue.amz
3) Call 1-888 802-3083, tell them you can’t download your music and have them make the tracks available for download again
4) Download the amz file from “Your Media Library” (It’s in your account page under “Where’s my stuff?”)
5) Open the amz files and hopefully they will re-download

When I perused the Amazon Mp3 Store, I was very excited to see all they had to offer. I thought, great iTunes now has a decent competitor. As much as I love Apple products, I was going to use this service because it’s got a lot of things going for them; 256 bitrate, most songs are US$.89 to .99, and DRM free!

I downloaded their downloader (sic) and purchased an album through 1-click. After agreeing to their license agreement; no lending, no sharing, no showing other people, no humming the tune afterwards, don’t export this song to a country that is currently an enemy combatant of the United States, hail Amazon as your personal lord and savior, yada yada I was given an amz file. Bundled within this little encrypted text file is your order. The Amazon MP3 Downloader would interpret this and download the correct songs for you.

I opened the file and I was presented with the list of songs to be downloaded. Track 1… Downloading… Failed to connect… Track 2 Downloading… Failed to connect….

From the office… failure. This is clearly no HTTP/HTTPS app or else, my credentials for the firewall would have let me through, as in the case of the iTunes Store.

I get home and try the downloader again. Each track attempts to retry the download, all error out saying that it’s no longer available. I called up the Amazon MP3 customer support number, given to me from a lovely lady named Subrimani at the main customer service line.

A pimply faced youth, who assumed I had windows, instructed me to retry the downloads after he re-enabled the songs on his end. Apparently, they were all marked as already downloaded. No dice. I was lead to something called “Your Media Library” where I downloaded yet another amz file for the first track of the album. Upon opening the file, it disappeared and the Amazon MP3 Downloader popped up bitching about unavailability.

Confused, the customer service rep put me on hold. I surreptitiously downloaded all of the amz files just in case they were locked down again. Returning to the line, the PFY said to “uninstall the application from Add/Remove Programs, clear my browser cache, and restart my computer”. Not divulging my Mac status, I complied the best way I could knowing full well it would not work. I did not work.

I was then instructed to use another machine. As I fired up Parallels, I removed the Amazon MP3 Downloader.app, its preference file, and folder in the ‘Application Support’. Whilst downloading from direct links to mp3s in Windows XP, I took my leave of the customer service, cursing his powers of troubleshooting.

For my own edification and curiosity, I opened the amz files and was able to successfully download the MP3s in the Amazon MP3 Downloader.

STRIKE 1 – AMAZON PLEASE CONFIRM THE DOWNLOAD BEFORE MARKING IT DOWNLOADED IN YOUR SYSTEM
STRIKE 2 – AMAZON, TEACH YOUR CUSTOMER SERVICE REPRESENTATIVES TO ASK WHAT PLATFORM THE CUSTOMER IS USING

Along with the staggeringly early announcement starting at 5AM my time (Eastern Daylight Time), the “Mum is no longer the word” even in London was not much of a surprise. Once again the rumor mills clobbered stray bits of hearsay and cobbled together to make what was reasonably the right answer.

iPhone is coming to England on O2

Happily for those would-be jealous Americans (I being American but not so jealous) we find out that it is not 3G. Even more good news is that a lot of European countries bypassed upgrading their GPRS to EDGE in favor of rolling out UMTS/WCDMA or 3G. One thing that the English do have over us Yanks, is the 1.1.1 firmware, the iTunes Mobile Store, and the free wifi hotspot provided by Cloud.

Hardly an upset, but then again – I was partially awake when I was skimming the blog wires.

Steve himself and the CEO of O2, presented in the Regent Street store which made for an intimate setting which lent itself naturally to a question and answer period. Reading the questions posed, I was wondering if the spin doctors and the SJRDF technicians saw these coming and prepped the CEOs.

England’s weird marketing and business practices forbade the discussion of hard numbers and subscriber information of O2, but under pressure of someone asking about contracts and “unlimited data usage” we found out that there is a compulsory 18 month contract and 1,400 internet pages per day would break the deal as part of the fair usage agreement.

Steve said the 8GB phone will be £269 (~USD$550)
No confirmation on the GBP£30 unlimited capped data plan but it seems to require a post-paid plan of at least GBP£35
No confirmation of the Starbucks deal in the UK (wasn’t a big deal here, why would it be there…)
Steve fielded a question about unlocking and passively played the victim, what a shrewd genius.

surprise surprise… it’s not out yet…

O2 will announce the plans on Oct 1
Phones will come out Nov 9

Links:
Engadget
TUAW
Gizmodo

I was told by a friend that they ordered “teriyaki beef and wasabi potatoes” and a red flag went up.

Okay, “teriyaki” is Japanese – but it’s moved from a traditional cooking form to a flavor/seasoning that is bandied about like “ranch” is here. I concede teriyaki beef is still the provenance of the Japanese; as for wasabi mashed potatoes, I can’t be so lenient.
I am sure that mashed potatoes have been served in Japan for some time now but mixing wasabi powder [a dyed-green pulverized horseradish extract facsimile meant to resemble the rare root found in mountain streams Wasabia Japonica] into the spuds as a common practice? I think it is safe to say it is more likely that one might find peanut butter or Kraft Dinner in a Japanese pantry than seeing green spicy taters in Tokyo. [link]

So the question is – wasabi mashed potatoes is to Japan like:
the Croissan’wich® is to France?
the fortune cookie is to China?
the Olive Garden is to real restaurants?

Do other countries have spoofs of our food?
I asked snuff and we came up with:

-Louisiana Blackened Steak with Ranch Rice
-Chicken Fried Steak with Salsa Popcorn
-Meatloaf with BBQ Sauce Plantains
-Hotdog with Mayonnaise Corn

England’s smoking ban on July 1st has caused a sea change in British social interaction, but not in an obvious way. A percentage of the ten-plus million smokers in Britain [statistic from Action on Smoking], have been using their outside smoking time to catch up on their correspondence. According to Orange UK [via T3] people were multitasking by sending text messages while smoking. Naturally, sending messages to bitch about how they were cast from of their now smoke free hangouts to commune with the elements and other frustrated smokers.

Without divulging the actual percentage, the network saw a 7.5 million increase in texts within the two weeks of the ban. Given, this is the summer time, I wonder if this will make the cost of messages to go up or down, or if this will just be a seasonal phenomenon. Perhaps Orange, O2, 3, and T-Mobile will be smart and make TXTs cheaper in the winter months. Regardless of what happens, my hopes lay in the notion that England will start up the use of the cigarette holder to make smexting easier.