Say Coffee

An old friend had a link to this on his blog and I thought it was funny so I went and filled out the form and here are the results...

Your Linguistic Profile:

45% General American English

35% Yankee

20% Dixie

0% Midwestern

0% Upper Midwestern

What Kind of American English Do You Speak?

Ashlee Simpson

I'm not sure why but I keep finding myself watching episodes of "The Ashlee Simpson Show". I find her voice irritating; she sounds like an immature little girl and for the amount of money she makes, she ought to sound more like an adult. Frankly, I want to see if she has two e's on her birth certificate because I think that's a marketing sham. And yet, maybe I have this morbid obsession with torturing myself because anytime I come across the show on MTV I find myself watching it. In any case, I came across this website the other day, thanks to Google AdSense, and I thought this was funny enough to make a post on my blog. So, if you find Ashlee Simpson to be an annoying individual, then go sign this petition.

Styrofoam Cups

I have an obsession with drawing on styrofoam cups. I'm not sure what prompts this behavior but after drinking a beverage from one, there is an 85% chance that I will doodle on the cup. I think the material makes a great canvas for creative output.

Goodbye Johnny

I didn't know Johnny Carson well. I hardly knew him at all in fact. I was much too young to have seen him hosting The Tonight Show. But I've heard of him, I'm told he was quite funny. It was sad to learn of his death, especially since not more than a week ago we learned he was David Letterman's secret jokester. He seemed so full of life then, it makes you appreciate just how fragile life can be. So I say, farewell Johnny, you'll be missed.

the problem with digital rights management (DRM) technology

Recently, where recently is defined as a time in the not too distant past, I read an interview with Bill Gates that was linked from Slashdot and it got me to thinking about the current state of digital media and the efforts at protecting intellectual property with DRM technology. I had a discussion about this with a friend and came to the conclusion that the problem with digital rights management isn't that it exists, or that people are pushing it as a solution, or even that people are using it. The problem is the paradigm by which it's being used. If we are to follow the logic that Bill Gates laid out in his interview and the logic that the music industry uses to make it's case for this technology, we would be able to make the logical conclusion that all things are intellectual property and therefore should be protected.

Case in point, the major reason that the MPAA argues it needs to protect CDs is that people are able to compress it to a file and share it over the internet, making millions of duplicates from just one CD, costing the artist, and more importantly the recording company millions of dollars in lost revenue. By that same logic, when I go to the store and purchase furniture, and choose to one day sell or give that furniture to a friend, that translates into lost revenue to the furniture maker because my friend didn't make a purchase from the company. The problem of course is that we can't protect a couch with DRM the way we can protect bits on a computer, but no one makes a big deal out of this scenario because I can't make millions of duplicates of the furniture and distribute them the way I can with an mp3 file.

The conclusion I came to, though I'm not yet sure how it could be implemented, is to add metadata onto every bit a computer ever writes. If we can distinguish this bit from that bit, we can easily determine if a file has been written more than once and invalidate one copy of it. It would be hard to make a case against DRM technology that worked in such a manner because it does for electronic media what being tangible does for a couch. It prevents the file from being mass distributed and eliminates the valid argument that the MPAA makes for why it needs to protect it's intellectual property.

ebay stinks and I don't like it

Sometime last week, January 13th to be exact, I attempted to purchase two tickets to see Wilco at the 9:30 Club in Washington DC. I figured it would be a rather painless experience. Afterall, I've purchased concert tickets online numerous times in the past without much difficulty and this was a Wilco concert. I don't know many people who have even heard of them. Well, much to my chagrin, neither was the case. Apparently Wilco is HUGE. I don't mean just huge but FUCKING HUGE. To make matters worse, the 9:30 Club has decided they want to sell their tickets through tickets.com, a big mistake! Big mistake! I get to the site 2 minutes past 10:00, the tickets were to go on sale at 10:00 and I'm immediately placed in a "virtual waiting room." As if waiting rooms aren't bad enough, this one had no magazines! It was programmed to check back every 30 seconds to see if it's your turn to go see the doctor and of course I waited and waited and waited and waited some more. Until about an hour later when my friend pointed out to me that the shows were sold out and the tickets were already going for $200 each on EBay. So I thought to myself, thank god we have EBay! Without them how would scalpers make a living?!?! So I'd like to send a big FU to EBay for providing a service that makes scalping not only easy, but extremely profitable and ruins the concert going experience for the rest of who aren't lucky enough to get 30 tickets to a concert at a venue which is lucky if it can hold 1000 people. Thanks EBay, I appreciate it!