In case you were wondering what a LifeGem was:

A LifeGem is a certified, high quality diamond created from the carbon of your loved one as a memorial to their unique and wonderful life.

The LifeGem diamond is more than a memorial to visit on the weekends or place on a shelf… it is a way to embrace your loved one’s memory day by day.  The LifeGem is the most unique and timeless memorial available for creating a testimony to their unique life.

We hope and believe that your LifeGem memorial will offer comfort and support when and where you need it, and provide a lasting memory that endures just as a diamond does.  Forever.

I’ve decided that I like David Bowie’s new Heathen album. Bowie has changed his image again, this time to ‘aging pop star doing something kinda cool.’

The thing is, though, that if I had bought this album, it wouldn’t have nearly the appeal. Getting it piecemeal over gnutella makes it much more fun.

Oh, and he does a decent cover of a Pixies song (Cactus). I can only imagine how happy Frank Black is.

Speaking of gnutella, just tonight I got an mp3 of King Crimson covering the old Genesis tune ‘Watcher Of The Skies,’ and it’s soooo much better than Genesis’ version. Now you know.

“He handed me the pipe full of dank green, now grey and ashen. As I toked, he sang to me:

‘Sing a song of six pence
pocket full of rye
Four and twenty blackbirds
baked in a pie’

I asked, in that inhaley way you do when you’re holding smoke in your lungs, ‘Why are you singing that to me?’

‘Dude!’ he replied. ’420. Baked. I want pie!’”

I just finished a major update to a REALbasic plug-in I wrote. I did it in a two-day binge of coding inspiration.

Previously, I’ve given my plug-ins away for free, because I enjoy writing them and the market isn’t that huge. In fact, it’s pretty tiny. Now I have in my hands a piece of code that has consumed more than a few man-hours of effort and expense. I’m torn. Free software for the masses? Or software licenses and hassle, but DOLLARS?

It amazed me that, a few versions back, someone who was using my software reported a bug. This wasn’t amazing because there was a bug (there are always bugs), but because he worked for a huge ISP in Holland. They were using it to create installers for their internet suite. Which means that, potentially, every Mac in Holland attached to that particular ISP has my software on it.

On the surface, it’s just a kinda cool thing. Dig even the tiniest bit deeper, and revenue from that plugin might have paid my rent last month.

I’ve come up with all kinds of potential licensing arrangements, and they’re either too simple to actually make me any money, or too complicated for anyone to want to use.

On the easy end, we’ve got something like buying a password to uncompact a password-protected archive. The password gets changed every few days. No muss, no fuss. And if one person buys the password, he can share it with his friends.

On the complicated end, we have time-sensitive licenses that last for, say, six months. They’re per-application, too, so your license code is tied to the application you’re developing. You pay an initial fee for your app’s use of the plugin, and if your app is successful enough for an update in six months (based in part, of course, on your use of my plugin), you can opt to extend the license at a reduced rate.

Somewhere in between is a subscription-based system where you get all updates for six months or a year or something. This is only valuable to a user if I write a lot of plugins and update them all the time. And given the binge-like nature of this last update, that’s not such a great idea.

I wish it could be easy. Each plan challenges me in a different way. I’ve been giving these plugins away for free because I don’t want to have to make this decision. Heh.

There’s this radio show, called This American Life. Each week they take a topic and present stories related to that topic.

This week’s topic: Testosterone

The circumstance of my life has given me plenty of opportunity to learn about the grip hormones have on the lives of humans. Even so, I learned a bunch from that radio show.

In a week or so, they’ll have the streaming audio version of the program on their web site above. Until then, find an NPR/PRI station and sit around waiting for it to come on.