I finally materialized a teenage dream and went to see Depeche Mode live last Friday. It was everything I expected even more. They sounded incredible and Dave Gahan’s voice was as good as ever. It could have been the acoustics at the amphitheater but the live performance of the songs was better than the studio versions. Martin Gore also sang 2-3 of his songs and did a great job of it.

Depeche Mode -Ford Amphitheater in Tampa, September 4th 2009

At the concert I felt like I had to go see them again the next day in Fort Lauderdale. May be I should have…

I took a few videos. The quality is not that bad considering I took them with my iPhone.

Their “Tour of the Universe” continues to Mexico and then back in Europe. This could be the last chance to go see them live.

10 Youtube URL Tricks You Should Know About

I cannot live without my iPod, much less without my iPhone! The “I am a Mac, I am a PC” commercials on TV are so adorable… Sometimes I rewind my DVR just to see one of those commercials again. In these moments I tell myself “Show that evil empire Microsoft how things are done!”.

But then… I must have been brain dead for a while! You see, what got me is that I have always been for a free market and fair competition. And what Microsoft was doing was not right. No two ways about it. Apple was the company that materialized those feelings and stood up to Microsoft. Naturally, I (like many others) fell for it and blindly screamed “Go Apple!”.

It turns out that I have supported a company that became worse than the one it had set out to defy.

Apple said that if you want to have an iPod, you can only use it with iTunes and if you want to buy music for it… guess what?… you need iTunes for that as well. Same applies to the iPhone with the only difference that you have to be an AT&T customer. Oh yeah… and all these songs you might have bought from Apple, you can’t put on any other mp3 player but on an iPod, unless you remove the DRM protection.

On the computer front things do not look much more different. Mac OS X can legally run only on officially approved Apple hardware and vise versa. If you like the OS, well your only chance is to drop some major cash for the hardware as well. This goes over and beyond what Microsoft has ever attempted to do. After all you can run Windows on anything you feel like.

I am a huge believer in FOSS and Apple has shaped to be the absolute opposite of this philosophy. Even though their OS is built on top of FreeBSD and NetBSD, and they have ported a number of Linux applications to Mac OS X, they have not contrubuted back to the community at all. They even officially announced that iTunes will not be released for Linux. I would like to think that the only reason for this is because they know that Linux users are not going to tollerate DRM content anyway.

I have always developed web applications mostly from scratch- I create the databases, write the code and make the design. But today, as you can see, I started a personal blog. And rather than making the site from scratch I resorted to using a popular blog/cms solution.

I should have known what to expect. After all I used to do web development on a MS CMS 2001 platform  at some point in my life, but it still caught me be surprise. I had forgotten how clumsy things can be. On the one hand you still have to program any customizations you have in ASP, PHP, Java or whatever the case might be, and on the other you have to get familiarized with the API of the new CMS solution to accomplish even the simplest tasks.

I guess there is no silver bullet… I gained some by not having to do the simple things myself- the design, the programming of the standard features that I would need for a blogging site but I also lost some, by having now to get used to this new environment that feels like a suffocating wrap around me.

There is always some learning curve… even for the smallest things.