found_drama

surreal moment on tonight’s drive home… sirens. lights. two cop cars later, a pizza delivery truck (!?) blows by.

(via Moock) You can now author Flash MX content on/for Linux. Roxxors my boxxors.

Via a Wired article: To cut a long story short, the tedious backup procedure was cavalierly dispensed with after Panther was successfully installed on two other machines earlier in the afternoon: a 1-GHz eMac and a 1.6-GHz PowerMac G5.

In both cases, the machines were first backed up to one of OWC’s excellent external FireWire drives. Panther was installed as an update to the current operating system, not a clean install, and the upgraded machines were up and running in about an hour. …backing up the iBook was foolishly skipped. Typically, the iBook was the only one of the three machines loaded with several years’ worth of digital pictures, music, e-mail, writing and other precious files. Little of it, naturally, was saved elsewhere.

Another good review, this time beginning w/ a foolish tale of [l]user-error (re: not backing up) … though one pauses to wonder why the installation would have gone that way.

Take Back Your Time Day was 10-24-2003. Who knew? I take comfort in the fact that at least I left 5 minutes early that day… Let’s try to make it a bit more *that* every day though…

Kickin’ it in Maine this weekend, ya’ll. And lovin’ it.

new addition: WordSpy yields treats like:

fat finger dialing  n. A telephone scam in which a company sets up a toll number that is one digit different than a popular number, so that the company earns money when customers accidentally mis-dial the legitimate number; mis-dialing a phone number in this manner. Also: fat-finger dialing, fat fingers dialing.

I want to be involved in a serious programming project. Bottom line. I want to be in on CVS somewhere and make meaningful contributions. Though that’s less important than the satisfaction of successfully brining a complex series of slightly-recursive nested for loops to some successful return. I want my ifs and thens in my mind to wind up elsewhere than the cerebral detritus. I want to be stumped and then figure it out. I want to condense 45 lines to 7. I want $variable $variables. I want something to break and know it was my fault and not have to pick up after someone else’s mess. Or if I am picking up after someone else’s mess, I want it to at least be interesting. I want to #* comment *# out a few things.

Mostly, I want the damn phone to stop ringing every 2 minutes.

Jesus actor struck by lightning: “The lightning bolt hit Caviezel and the film’s assistant director Jan Michelini while they were filming in a remote location a few hours from Rome.”

Uh… Um… Huh?

An article on Panther… Written by David Pogue (who else?) for the NYTimes… My 2 favorite lines:

FileVault uses an encoding scheme so thorough, Apple says, that a password-guessing computer would need 149 trillion years to break it. Just enough time for Apple to reach Mac OS X 11.

…and…

And Exposé is probably worth about $47.38 all by itself.

…Whatever that means.

From Ape Infinitum, re: iTunes Music Store: It’s all about recapturing second market revenue.

*shrug*makes-face*

Though I definitely fall in line w/ statements like: I wish I knew how to feel about iTunes. And/or “…people want to do the right thing [and go along with] good services at fair prices…”

First off, $0.99 per song is too much. When you don’t have unlimited personal rights with the file — fuck that. Limitations I know off the top of my head have something to do w/ the standard non-file-sharing jargon, 5x limitation on CD burns (DRM’d s/how), and limited sharing among PCs on your own local network. Easy hacks around all of these true — but I hardly see how those justify the price-per-song. It’s an “almost fair price” and little better.

Apple made it appealing to buy digital files. … More like, Apple timed the iTunes store launch at just the right time. In-w/-RIAA conspiracy theories aside, there’s no better time to launch these kinds of services. High profile hits on ordinary ppl by the Big Bad Music Industry make PAYING for digital music a very attractive option. To enough ppl that it’s starting to matter (BigChampagne’s comments notwithstanding).

So why if the PRODUCT, the COMMODITY of the whole musical-recording package… if that is so valuable and important to the consumer, why is digital music so attractive? The Alarmist at Ape Infinitum references ones ability to sell off CDs to used shoppes, to trade or give away… To buy and sell this commoditized package. If that is so important, why is it so attractive to download music? (Whether you paid for it or not?) Download a gig’s worth of music from Kazaa or Soulseek and you can’t sell that either. Pirate it and you’re not getting the case, the cover art, “the extraneous CD-ROM”… You can’t re-sell that either. You’ve got the idea of the music for free. Great. Wonderful. But if you’re downloading in that fashion, the above Alarmist argument is nowheresville.

Reference above: $0.99 is too much. It’s too much when you’re still (for the most part) paying into an exploitist system. You’re still mostly paying for record label propaganda (marketing), lawyers, contracts, executive salaries, snot-nosed 23 year-old graphic designers, poorly mixed gin martinis in the backs of rented limos to-and-from airports, and DRM R&D. If you’re lucky, 9 of your 99 cents are paying the artists themselves. So yeah, $0.99 is too much.

Asset re-marketing? Recapturing second-market revenues? Yeah. Or in this case, eliminating that second market. But this backlash seems silly. Just beat them at their own game.

$0.99 per song. Or $9.99 for a full album download. OR $6.99 to pick it up at that used record shoppe. And rip it down to a 192 mp3 and burn away.

Or are we somehow back to where we started?

You get something… And three months later, they release a new and much improved version. G4 processors up to 1GHz, slot-loading combo drive, Panther pre-loaded, 802.11g ready…