A cell phone may be good enough to solve two problems

In relation to this article, and this article -

The cheap organizer works, but synchronizing data to it is a pain as the cheap software that comes with it isn't designed to grab data from the Palm Desktop software I already own, or in fact from any PIM software. You get to pay money for that upgrade, and if you don't you can either manually enter your contact information or try to figure out their file format - and I haven't had time for either.

I bought a pre-paid cellular phone, a Kyocera K9 from Virgin Mobile. The I paid $14.99 for software and a cable to synchronize it with my PC, turns out that it can contain 100 contacts and a schedule - so we'll see how that works. I'm not holding my breath, though, because what little I've learned of the software says it plays nicely with Outlook and Outlook Expres, and I don't use those.

My suspicions are that the cell phone will be better than the organizer - after all, I can actually make a call to the person in the directory; whether it becomes "good enough" only time will tell.

Sounds Good Enough to me...

I've copied my LPs and some of my tapes to .wav files, split them into tracks, and put them on my hard drive. Now I'm about to convert them to MP3 or Ogg format. I see a lot of posts that purport to tell me how many bits per second I should go for - but you know what? I'm not sure it matters. For an old dinosaur like me, who probably ruined his hearing at Who / Allman Brothers concerts by standing too close to those stacks of Marshalls, the music quality doesn't matter so much. I hear what I hear and that's it. So, I'll probably go with 96Kbps or 128Kbps because I see a lot of people doing that, but I could probably get by with 56Kbps, because with the type of music I'd carry with me and the state of my ears, anything that sounds more-or-less like the LP is going to be "good enough" for me.

Good Enough and The Long Tail

"The Long Tail" is a very interesting concept, partly about how companies can profit by selling to the many thousands of people who want marginal things, rather than just the millions who want the most popular things (as I understand it, but I may be less clear on it than I think).

This fits in with the "Good Enough" philosophy because a lot of things which are "good enough" for me (or you) aren't going to be big hits, necessarily. Think cheap pickup truck versus SUV, or seeing "The Spanish Prisoner" instead of "Spider Man". There's still money to be made with the items that aren't "hits", because they're good enough for a lot of people, or because there are enough people in that niche market to make some money.

One niche market that I'm looking to be served is in video or television content. For two examples: I'd like to be able to legally buy all the epsiodesof Max Headroom, and I'd like to be able to legally buy copies of several different commercials from over the years. I've not yet found any legal way to purchase these that's affordable. Those are niche markets, because Max Headroom wasn't a commercial success and because most people don't want to watch commercials anyway. Yet, if the people that owned that content made it possible to buy, I'd wager there are lots of other people that might purchase some of it.

PS: Here's a LazyWeb request: if you know of legal sources for the above, let me know by posting a comment here.