Monday, July 12, 2004

99¢ PowerBook

It’s a brand new day and the start of a fresh week. I’m sleepy.

100,000,000. That’s a lot of zeroes, my friends, and Kevin Britten bought the 100th million song from the iTunes Music Store. Congratulations, Kevin! You lucky son-of-a-… I’m not bitter, I attempted only once for one of the 20GB iPods awarded to purchasers of each 100,000th song downloaded between 95 million and 100 million songs. And last night, after coming from a friend’s house, I got online and checked to see where the total was resting at. 99,983,476. Of course, I had to at least try for the 100th million. I waited 5 minutes, as the Apple homepage was refreshing automatically every 5 minutes with an updated song count. 99,992,529. Great googley-moogley. Almost ten thousand songs sold in 5 minutes. Obviously, they were now going fast and the next refresh of the page would show that the 100th million song would be sold. I cruised through the store, found a nice little ditty by Bond and waited until around 2.5 minutes went by. Unfortunately, I either waited too long or click 'Buy Song' too early. Either way, my name isn’t Kevin Britten, I don’t live in Hays, Kansas and I am certainly -not- getting a 17-inch PowerBook (among other prizes) for 99¢.

In one short week, Apple managed to sell 5 million songs. That has to be some kind of record, some where. As a rough estimate, that is (before tax) $4,950,000. And that is saying all purchases were of single songs at 99¢ each. Close to 5 mil. Now, the grand prize also included a gift certificate for 10,000 iTunes songs. Again, at 99¢ each, that comes to $9,900. So take that from the 5 million sales and you still have close to 5 million dollars. There are some very happy marketing people right now.

I am really sorry about SPeCks. There is no way I can forget about them, but I am just not able to find the time to make new comics. There is a ridiculous amount on my plate right now and as the comic was just a hobby, at best, anyway, I simply can’t find the time to do it. Also, I am not satisfied with the direction the comic is currently taking. Not story wise, well, maybe a little, but mostly with regard to how I am presenting the comic pages. I think I can make it a bit more manageable, because right now, it is an absolute bear. And that is another reason why I don’t have time to do it right now.

I -LOVE- Orisinal’s website and their games are very, very fun in their simplicity. Except for Hungry Spiders. Spiders are always horrible little death bags. Even if you are killing them. *shudder*

PS: If you post a comment as anonymous I obviously can’t see who you are. With that said, posting “Dude, where you been?” doesn't help me and you are unlikely to get a more thorough answer. Also, knowing that you posted from a machine in Flushing, NY does not help me either. And for the love of bandwidth, stop refreshing on the same page. Gimmie more than 5 minutes to see that there is a comment to respond to. 18 page refreshes in 3 minutes from the same IP is just insane!

3 comments:

Missy said...

It was not me to post anonymously. I would never do that. I wish you won the powerbook - then I would have a powerbook :-)

Anonymous said...

FYI: I wasn't refreshing to see if you'd answered the comment. I was on a public computer that was crashing, so on my end, the page wasn't actually refreshing.

And for your geographical edification: Flushing is in Queens, NY. Near Astoria.

terry said...

I see. Queens College, then, is it? Is that to mean Rochester is also near Astoria? Either way, thanks for stopping by. And to answer your question, it was 5 days between posts because I had nothing particularly interesting to say… or just forgot to post.