While driving to work the last couple of mornings, the light was beautiful – all dark graphite clouds gilded with the surprising brightness of morning. The quality of light is different throughout the day, liquid and tinged with gold, something that is characteristic of these few fleeting weeks before the ghostly gray light of winter sets in.

Yesterday was an important milestone in the distribution of music via the Internet – Apple opened up their iTunes Music Store to Windows users, providing those of us beholden to the evil empire access to their wealth of music and sensible economic model. Apple had earlier indicated that this service would not be available until the end of the year; this allows them to deliver earlier than promised (an anomaly in the world of technology, and software in particular) and to drive additional adoption of the Windows version of the iPod in advance of the holiday season.

Something I do not understand is how Apple decides when to designate a song as “EXPLICIT”. Leonard Cohen’s Suzanne (the first song to make it into my shopping cart, how self-centered, right?) is tagged with this, but Loudon Wainwright’s song Whatever Happened to Us, which contains the line “You used to say I came too early, but it was you who came too late” is not.

The iTunes store contains about 400,000 songs. That’s only $396,000 at $.99/song. This could be a very bad thing. Some of my favorite songs (e.g., Tom Rush’s “Urge for Going”) are, unfortunately, missing which will keep the credit card debt from becoming too astronomical.

Music: My shopping cart currently contains:
Suzanne, Leonard Cohen
Angel from Montgomery, Bonnie Raitt
Desperado, Linda Ronstadt
Hasten Down the Wind, Linda Ronstadt
Someone to Watch over Me, Linda Ronstadt
Love Has No Pride, Bonnie Raitt
Over the Rainbow, Judy Garland
Hallelujah, Jeff Buckley