Jared W. Smith

Jake Peavy helped get the Padres off to a fine start, shutting down Barry Bonds and out-pitching Barry Zito enroute to a 7-0 shutout of the San Francisco Giants. I don’t think the Padres could have asked for a better start to the season with solid pitching and generating a great deal of offense against a dangerous Barry Zito. History shows, though, that Zito is not at his best on Opening Day, so I’m willing to chalk his performance today up to an aberration. Keeping Barry Bonds in the park is always a beautiful thing, too, especially after the spring he had.

One down, 161 to go…

I brought WordPress up to 2.1.3 just now — a round of security updates were released for it. I recommend it for everyone who’s rolling their own WordPress installation (the hosted service already got the changes).

A little rainstorm has popped up over the peninsula. One could say these are the first “popcorn thunderstorms” of the year. It’s going to be awful summerlike today and tomorrow, with expected highs in the upper 80s, but Thursday will bring a rude awakening with lows in the upper 40s and highs in the 60s. That should be amusing.

I really recommend you all stop by the Wachovia Auditorium at the Beatty Center for Business and Economics Thursday night, as Peter Applebome from The New York Times will be stopping by for a lecture about how the Times is embracing — and struggling with — the blogosphere. I’ll be there — I hope to see some of you as well.

Looooong night tonight, with the whole 10PM shift and all. Catch you all later…

I’ve done a bit more work to the look, tweaking it up here and there. The home page saw the addition of the three posts prior to my latest, so you can get more of a read on what’s going on. Additionally, I’ve set it to where the date blurbs next to each post are clickable; clicking them shows you the posts made on that particular day. It’s kinda neat. :)

But yes, the work continues…and now to start studying for a test. I napped earlier and that’s the undoing of my sleep schedule (yes, sadly, so early in the week, too…)

SCORE! BetaNews has some great news: The BlackJack is getting Windows Mobile 6! That’s fantastic, fantastic news. That was a major reservation of mine when I was debating whether to buy it or not, so I’m sure glad that my investment will be protected. :)

I think Big Music is finally starting to gain a shred of sense on how to do business in the digital age, as one of the big labels, EMI, is going to offer DRM-free downloads at iTunes in May. Neowin:

EMI Music today announced that it is launching new premium downloads for retail on a global basis, making all of its digital repertoire available at a much higher sound quality than existing downloads and free of digital rights management (DRM) restrictions.

Eric Nicoli, CEO of EMI Group, said, “By providing DRM-free downloads, we aim to address the lack of interoperability which is frustrating for many music fans. We believe that offering consumers the opportunity to buy higher quality tracks and listen to them on the device or platform of their choice will boost sales of digital music.”

The tracks will be priced at $1.29 a song, so about 30 cents more than your traditional DRM-laden iTunes track. The price increase is definitely fair when you consider they double the quality (256 kbps is very, very close to CD quality) and, more importantly, give people the freedom to play the songs on whatever player they choose.

No matter which way you look at it, this is at the very least a minor victory. It’s nice to see a major label FINALLY get the picture and retool itself to the market. Let’s hope the other RIAA labels follow suit and see that DRM slows, not grows, their digital business.