"My god, what is that smell?"

"That's the smell of desire, my lady."

"No, it... it smells like a used diaper filled with Indian food."

"You know, desire smells like that to some people."

Replace the word "desire" with "success", and you'll know how I feel today.

I finally got the screen printing to work yesterday. I feel like a genius and moron at the same time. I tried everything, and spent hours (and wasted some good currency) trying to figure out why it wasn't working. Turns out I had the wrong squeegie. It's used to push the ink through the screen, and looks similar to your every day squeegie used to wipe windows with. I was using one made for fabric printing, and so was designed to push more ink through the screen than other squeegies. As a result all the text in my design was getting 'blown out'. I bought a different squeegie yesterday and suddenly I am a screen printing maniac.

The main implication of this relevation is that the CD will actually be released in October. Yes, it will happen. No, I can't believe it.

Switching gears:

As you may well know Radiohead released an album last Wednesday. It's called In Rainbows and you can download it for any price you want. This article explains the economics, or lack of, of the pricing scheme and is an intriguing read.

Interestingly, the average price paid for the album was $8, which is the exact amount I paid. Why did I pay for something I could have (legally) gotten for free? I don't know, and that's kind of the point of the article. Part of me wanted to 'do the right thing', part of me was following the golden rule (since I would like people to pay for my music too, although maybe I was just trying to avoid being a hypocrite), part of me knew I was going to write about how much I paid and I didn't want to say I got it for free for fear of the social consequences.

I think the experiment shows, in some way, that market economies really work, since the price of $8 more or less jives with how music has been priced historically - ~$11-$12 for a CD with packaging (unless you're Sam Goody), so $8 without packaging makes sense. I think this shows that the whole music piracy 'problem' isn't a result of overpriced music. It's probably a result of poor quality music.

I'm just throw this out there. What if you could stream an album, or at least half of it, from an artist's site to sample the music, and then pay whatever you wanted (with perhaps a minimum payment of $3)? People would then be free to set the price for music based on its quality.