540 rubles

So, Erika hooked me up to this Russian website which hosts a bunch of MP3s. Cheap, too. They used to bill my credit card in American money, like $20 or $30 at a time, and then you could buy songs for like 10 cents. The price per song has jumped to 15, and now 19 cents each, but that's still pretty good.

Actually, now they're not in cents, but rather these "c.u." which may or may not stand for "customer units". But whatever. The thing is, the prices are now being dictated in Russian money. I went with the lowest re-load amount they offered, which was "20 c.u." for 540 rubles. Unknowingly I just went ahead and clicked for that choice. Then it hit me, what's the exchange rate? Yikes! Well, it turned out that 540 rubles was $20.97, and then I had a 21-cent (one percent) fee for the international transaction.

Let's just call it "coulda been worse...."

As for the MP3s? I still have about 25 out of my 250 audio tapes that haven't been re-done as MP3s. At first, I used to run a wire from my tape player into my Mac, and made mp3s that way. The quality wasn't always the best, depending on how worn the tape was. All of my Beatles stuff sounds great that way....one reason I did that is because I was raised on the American albums -- so to hear the original British CDs is weird, because my mind cues up the next American song in my head, only to have it be something different playing next on the disc. (Each side of an album ends up being a 15-minute "song", rather than me splicing apart the 6 songs into separate files -- that's why it's important to keep the as-in-my-head order.)

So I did a Tesla album from '91....filled in missing songs from Def Leppard's Hysteria, and then took some greatest hits from Eddie Money and George Thorogood and put them on one CD. (Neither of these guys have enough famous songs to really issue an album completely of hits, anyways -- songs on the original tapes that weren't famous to begin with, and not worthy of being included.)

One last weekend bit....our on-demand is working again from Comcast, so we bought Stranger Than Fiction last night -- Will Ferrell and Emma Thompson and Dustin Hoffman. I give it a B- to a B, but no higher than that.