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“For the first eight years of our marriage, [Michelle and I] were paying more in student loans than what we were paying for our mortgage. So we know what this is about.

And we were lucky to land good jobs with a steady income. But we only finished paying off our student loans—check this out, all right, I’m the President of the United States—we only finished paying off our student loans about eight years ago.” -

—President Obama in North Carolina today on why Congress has to act to prevent interest rates on student loans from doubling (via barackobama)

telegeography:

Skype’s continuous international traffic growth has been remarkable. In 2005, Skype generated about 8 billion minutes of international Skype-to-Skype traffic. By 2011, Skype’s call traffic grew to 145 billion minutes. While this is modest compared to the 440 billion minutes of international calls routed via telephone companies in 2011, Skype is clearly by far the world’s largest provider of international voice communications.

Source: TeleGeography Report & Database

Yurika Sugimoto produced this graph of Manhattan Retail Rent in $PSF for our spring studio.

I had an opportunity to finally set up the turntable in my new house. It’s a Thorens TD 160 Mark II that I picked up in Ithaca back in the 1990s, either at a punk rock record store, an estate sale, or the salvation army. God only knows which anymore. This turntable boasts a fifteen year old Audio Note IQ-1 cartridge with its original stylus (two kids meant that I didn’t get to play it often enough… and the kind staff at Audio Note said if it sounds fine, it probably is) and brought up to my preamp via a low budget Musical Fidelity phono stage preamp. I put on a head to head of Röyksopp’s Junior which I have on both vinyl and CD. My CD player is an Oppo BDP-95 universal player, which is certainly highly regarded and easily bests many CD players that I’ve had before, especially since it plays SACD, DVD-Audio, and so on. We won’t even talk about how much worse a typical MP3 would sound. 

I won’t blame my beloved Oppo, but there’s only so much we can do with the medium of CDs. My trusty turntable still sounds fabulous and the imaging is better. The weird phasing bass synth on Vision One is much more pleasing with the turntable, its phasing and distortion much more listenable. It’s really incredible. So it goes sometimes. I’m still eager to phase out my library for PDFs on a book by book basis, but well, I see why vinyl is booming.  

At the Netlab, I’m always keenly sensitive to the fact that just because a technology is new doesn’t just make it better. Something to always keep in mind.