So the CD I was waiting for showed up. The CD I was gonna rip to put on my iPod. well I'm starting to think I should have waited and perhaps downloaded it DRM free from iTunes (the CD is from an EMI artist) because my CD is defective, by design... The CD I received is copy protected. There is even a little warning saying it may not play in all CD players because of this. Audio CDs traditionally conform to a standard known as redbook. This CD does not. So it may not play everyplace, hence defective.

Now what I want to do with this CD is illegal because of the wonderful DMCA... Which I've bitched about for a number of years now. But I'm pretty sure this is one of the first times it's actually been in my way and face. The DMCA doesn't really provision for Fair Use. There is a bill introduced by Rick Boucher and John Doolittle this year which would help to weaken the DMCA and hopefully be a start to reform on copyright law and the DMCA. You can support and read more about the Fair Use Act of 2007 at the Eff Action Center.

It's become more and more common over the years but more and more companies and associations treat their consumers like criminals rather than customers. Unfortunately this also turns them into criminals by the standards of the damned DMCA as it forces consumers/users/someone to bypass copy protection schemes to use the media they purchased the ways they want to use the media they paid for.

Late last month I lost my voice and my keys. Well my keys have never been recovered so I've been with a partly functioning car alarm. It arms it self and locks the car I can't disable this with out having to take apart the dash and dis connecting the "brain" of the alarm... As it is I have to use the valet switch to disarm the alarm every time I get in. I can't get a new fob as the company who sells the alarm sucks doesn't sell replacement fobs/remotes for the particular alarm that I have. Even though they still sell the alarm I have.

So this week I plan to get a new alarm installed later this week. One with two remotes/fobs, from a company that I purchase a replacement or extra if I need to...

So a couple weeks ago I ordered a CD. I'm still waiting. Granted I could go download the track or two that I really want from iTunes or even the whole album. But then I'd be paying twice for music, it's already gonna be a bit tight financially this month.

I also want the track used in this awesome photography video. But I'll wait and get the whole damn album. I could get some of their stuff from iTunes...

I will be glad to support this small group/label that doesn't seem to be out there in a huge way nor under the umbrella of the RIAA. Which I think is evil, not to mention disruptive to the creative process. Which could explain why the music industry for the most part has been in a viscous cycle of turning out crap artist after crap album and then suing the crap of college students and little old ladies for piracy....

Frontline did a show on The Way The Music Died in 2004...

Took a few photos of Melanie last night. Some were decent after a bit of magic. But the magic was worked with my desktop and my wonderful 19inch widescreen LCD. Uploaded the pictures to flickr, took a look on my laptop, while they were the same photos they didn't look it. I attempted to make things better on the desktop and re-uploaded them and again still looked wrong on the laptop. By wrong I mean they lack contrast and depth. So I tried to take a look on my CRT monitor again flat and bland...

While I'm sure the problem on the laptop is a lower contrast ratio and thus lower contrast and making images appear lamer than they really are in many cases. The CRT on the desktop is attached through a rather old crummy KVM that locks up and noticeably degrades image quality. I have a problem sending images out that I know look so poorly on my other screens cause I know many of the people viewing them have screen that more like my laptop screen or my CRT...

The root of my problem is the photos just weren't done right from go. I could most likely work more magic and get things looking better, which I still may do. I should have tried the flash, maybe in slow sync mode...

I just canceled my vox account. I hardly posted there and it was yet another account to remember a username and password for that really provided me with no benefit that I don't or didn't already have in some fashion. Vox is a great great platform and allows for sharing of music, video, books, right from go and has improved greatly since I started using it last summer. But I just don't use it enough.

Also I've been more paranoid/cautious lately of the accounts I have. I trust vox for the most part, they are owned and run by sixapart the same people who first made movabletype then went on to buy typepad now and the livejournal. All really good platforms. But I've been becoming less and less comfortable having my data in someone else's databases.

Everyone is tracking everything anymore. Google knows what you searched for last year. Safeway knows you buy 12 rolls of TP every month and can guess from your buying habits that you have a kid and an approximation of what you make in a year.

Also I'm tired of account after account after account to do anything. I've setup a basic method of being able to get to my bookmarks that I have on my laptop at home from anyplace. It's one way. So I looked into finding a tool that lets me sync bookmarks. I found a few... One is old and outdated and won't work with the browser I'm using. The other needs an account to be setup and who knows whats being done with the data I may generate for them. The other is from Google and I don't know if I want to give them anymore personal data. So I think I'll be sticking with my primitive method for the time being.

I suppose all of this is part of the down or dark side to living in the information age. More information being stored and turned into usable data about nearly everything. Which isn't necessarily bad but at the same time holds potential for abuse...

Frontline did a great show a few weeks back titled: Spying on the homefront... Which is well worth the watch...

I've had an iPod since January now. I've only bought one album on iTunes so far and downloaded a few of the freebies and some freebie videos too. But I just can't bring my self to pay for (any more) DRMed media. The album I did buy I also bought on CD. So they got my money twice.

I tunes actually has some of the most relaxed Digital Rights Management out there. Lets you burn it to as many CDs as you want and play it as much as you want and you are not stuck to a subscription service like the offerings for the other online music stores. The subscription services allow you to download pretty much anything you want but if you stop paying your monthly fee you can't play any of the music again and I doubt you can burn it to CDs as much as you want if at all.

I mean really love the idea and ability to just download a song or album that I want right then. For some odd reason I just like to have the CD. I love my stack of CDs even though I rarely touch them as I have every one of my CDs in digital form and play them back anyway and anyplace I want to. If something happens to my CD I still have the music if something happens to my drive that the music is stored on I still have the CD. Sure I could make a back up of the iTunes info every so often but thats more work than my preferred current method.

Even though iTunes and amazon both offer DRM less music for download (for a premium) I'm still not attracted to this near as much as I am to owning a CD. Which perhaps makes me materialistic and/or wasteful/selfish by using more time, space, packaging and resources to get the CD.

It's not a price issue. It's often, but not always, cheaper to buy the album on itunes other times it's cheaper to get it from someone in the amazon market place or used from the local.

Perhaps it's just the control freak part of me. Being able to sort the CDs how I want in a nonsensical-nonalphabetical manner and being able to store them where and how I want. Having the control to play them or their digital copies back in different devices and places with very little effort...

This looks like it could be fun.

Gonna make another donation on Tuesday but this time it's just blood.

I've got around 180 hours of time off and another 16 hours of floating holiday for a total of 196 hours of time off coming to me, for those playing at home this is just shy of 5 weeks. Some of you peoples in interwebsland may be thinking I'm crazy for not taking some time off. Well I've got nothing to do with it. I'm not gonna take time off just to sit at home on my ass. Now you say "then go someplace!" while there is no shortage of places I'd like to go I've got some problems with that the first of is that I don't have the money to go someplace cool, second if I did nobody I know has the time or the money to go with me. So I shall sit on my time off and save my money and perhaps venture to someplace new in the future.

I figured it was time I did something more than flap my mouth or typing at a keyboard. I donated some money to the EFF today, a group that helps defend our digital rights from fair use to privacy. I've believed in what they do and represent for a few years now, because I believe the same things.

I've started shopping around for a new alarm for my car. As my fob is lost and I can't buy a new fob with out buying a whole damn Alarm for my car I'm just gonna get a whole new Alarm from a different company that I might be able to get a replacement fob from later on. Hell having two to start with would be a step in the right direction....

I've defeated the mystery alarm. Mostly by just deleting registry entries that appeared to deal with reminders and alarms then rebooting and putting a new alarm time in the slot location where the ghost alarm had initially been set.

I used to use two tools at work. A web-based application called Seibel and Lotus Notes.

Seibel was the tracking program for pretty much everything. Notes was E-mail and knowledge management. Then we bought this other company. Then we started to use outlook. Then we started to use some in house tracking program which no longer integrated with our phones, so we had to install another application handle that. Most recently we started to use another program for knowledge management. Not to mention when we changed tracking programs some of our other tracking that was handled by Seibel stayed in Seibel and other parts went to another application.

From two tools for nearly everything. Two windows IE and Notes. Now we must launch at least 4 applications to get anything done.

Notes and Seibel had their quirks... But I'd rather use two highly functional applications rather than five, six or more that are semi-functional...

I really need to work on my people/portrait photography. Shot a bunch at Cat's graduation today but a lot of the pictures are 'meh' if you ask me. Light was low and I didn't use the flash. I most likely should have used the flash at times and perhaps gone with center weighted metering for a lot of the shots. An off camera flash would be a good investment but more than I'm willing to spend at the moment not to mention I most likely wouldn't have used it...

So I shall attempt to take more photos of people and other living things.

Today Catherine graduates from Willamette University Law School in Salem. So today I'm going to her graduation. Gonna take my camera and see if I can capture any magic.

This is an event Chris would have been attending as well but he's in Hawaii on vacation with his family and girlfriend. Wonder how the dives are going...

Came up with a flickr game yesterday. Find a random person not in your contact list. Then without using the back button find your way back to you via their contacts and their contacts contracts and so on. Back can be used if you get to a contact with no contacts.

I got an email yesterday to participate in an interview to provide input for products for a consulting company working for one of my favorite software vendors, VMware. They are gonna give me $100 at Amazon to do an interview for 45 min over the phone.

The Mystery Alarm is still going off on my phone every day at 1:20pm. Even after removing everything I could find that would have anything to do with the alarm and rebooting the phone. I'm gonna try a couple more things but if that fails I'm going do to something drastic like reload the firmware...

A week or so ago I set an alarm on my phone for 1:20pm. I was changing the settings for the alarm when it went off. It has gone off every day at 1:20pm even though the time and days for that alarm have changed a few times and even disabled. So I've taken to Deleting registry keys that look to be related to the alarm. The problem is it takes a full day to find out if I've fixed it or not. Which is very annoying. I may end up doing a restore of some sort on it if I can't get it sorted.

In my short life computers have gone from a novelty to have in a home to ubiquitous. Even a car ten years old has more computing power than the Apollo space ships and some cars now have more computing power than a desktop computer 10 years ago. Hell my phone has more storage space and ram and is about four times faster than the $1500 486SX my dad brought home in 1994. My phone is also faster than the first computer I built that was a 166Mhz w/MMX in 1998.

Internet is everyplace now. No longer does one have to dial up to get internet. It's just there it's on. With open/free Wifi networks popping up everyplace and mobile phone providers providing internet plans for people on the go. Again the internet on my phone is faster than my dialup 56k modem was in 2000.

Most cash registers have been replaced with computers. Door keys have been replaced with proximity/swipe cards at hotels and many companies. In some city's parking meters have been replaced with a kiosk to print a parking sticker in your window. Many restaurants now page people with cheap short range coaster like pagers when a table is ready. We can chose what we want to watch when we want to watch it with DVR and On-Demand services. A decade ago the promise of the information super highway promised some of these things.

Data coming at us has become much more ubiquitous as this revolution has happened. It's happened so gradually and smoothly few have really noticed.

Many of us now step in to our cars and it will tell us what the outside temperature is. Not what the temperature is at the top of a hill with a weather station that the meteorologist uses to tell you what the temperature was the last time it sent its information in. Most everyone I know has a thermometer on their wall telling them at the very least their indoor temperature but often the outdoor temperature as well and the time which would be no more than a second off because it receives a special radio signal from a clock Colorado that is far more exacting than most of us can even fathom. Those of us who don't have an indoor outdoor thermometer that displays with the day/date/time in a lovely digital format hanging on our walls we go to any number of websites or install some application that will tell us what the outdoor temp is at that weather station just up the road, along with stock prices and the latest headlines.

We can buy GPS and cars with systems that can route us around traffic jams. Or we can see the information about traffic jams on our cell phones and hand held devices to make a choice of how to get around the traffic to get to the lake on that 102 degree day with a little delay as possible. Some radio stations and all satellite broadcast Artist and Song information in a fashion it can be displayed on radios equipped to see the data so you know who your listening too all the time.

I no longer personally know anyones phone number other than my own. Because I have devices that know the names and number for me. This as it turns out isn't always a good thing as I discovered last summer.

I have grown quite used to having all sorts of data that doesn't even require my finger tips to access. I'm also quite used to having all sorts of data at my finger tips. I want more data broadcasts to me, filtered down and displayed on a near continuous basis, of course taking context and location... I'd like to see gas prices scroll by for the zip code I happen to be driving in. I'd like to have a mirad of historical data on hand regarding climate for any place I happen to be. I don't mean looking the data up I mean having a button with current info then another for years past and another button for the forecast for tomorrow and the next several days no digging for it, no googeling, no hunting data down and noaa, just the facts for where I'm at...

Update: Today's rocketboom goes well with my post today and/or vise versa.

Most people who spend much time with me usually end up commenting on my weight and what/how I eat. Back in high school one of my good friends drew an illustrated diagram of my internal workings which included a hollow leg and several mechanized systems a mountain dew processing and storage system as well as a sugar processing and storage unit as well. Nitemayr seems fairly convinced I have an internal fusion engine that runs me. I'm one of the lucky people who eats as he pleases and little to no repercussions from such things aside from some cavities. I'm not over weight I'm in fairly decent shape and it doesn't take me long to get into shape.

But I've noticed recently how much sugar and junk I really do take in. I used to have a few cups of hot chocolate a day and a few cups of swiss miss spiced apple cider but with 2 packs of cider mix. I'd also sometimes have a Soda or something else. I can think of many days where I got a couple candy bars from the vending machine. Not to mention eating anything else sugary that happens to be in reach.

I'm not going to give sugar up. I'm not going to go out of my way to avoid sugars. I'm going to limit my intake. I'm not going to be measuring or tracking it specifically. I'm just not going to have candy bars just because I have enough change floating around, I won't have 3-4 cups of deliciously flavored sugared up water a day... Instead it may be a cup of Lipton tea with honey for a sweetener or find some fruits instead of a candy bar.

Why the change one may ask. To which I could link to someones article about refined sugars being bad or an research saying something else or list the health benefits and or costs savings of my plan. I stead I will answer with another question. Why not?

Did my laundry today, and all the bedding and towels. Then I washed and vacuumed my car...

I also went for a quick a mile and a half run. Still waiting on others to find out if I'm going to be doing the Cascade Run Off. I could go it alone but I don't think that would be near as fun.

Yesterday was the Derby Party. Got a few decent photos of the horses that live at the location of the party. They are up on flickr

After work I picked up a new low beam bulb as mine went out last night while on my way to hang out with Chris. While I was on that side of town I got an estimate for getting the bumper that holds the fog light that fell out fixed, thats gonna be right around $800. I've got to call my insurance people and then make arrangements to drop it off at the body shop... So I'll deal with that next week.

I own and use more computers than most families in the country. This means I have files scattered about nearly all of them. This is sometimes good cause when one computer fails or gets redone I haven't lost all of my files. Sometimes this is bad because when one computer fails or gets redone I'd lose some files, not always but it has happened.

So I plan on consolidating files from my various machines near and far. Sorting through them, and setting up some sort of backup scheme. Maybe an off site backup if the file size is reasonable, or partial off site depending on the files. Something I dunno yet. This task may take a few days to completely work out.

I just watched a demo about netflix new online movie watching service. That alone was nearly enough to get me to sign up for netflix.

Then again I could just go with joost with an invite from nitemayr for a while and hope the guys at the Xbox Media Center and get it going on the Xbox eventually.

I was delayed to work by a couple hours today because of a bone...

Last night noticed my rear left tire was quite low low. First thing I did today was take it to Les Schwab tires to get fixed. Turns out they found a bone, apparently this is a bit more difficult to remove because it just keeps breaking, unlike a nail or a screw which would just come out in a piece or two from what I would imagine.

This just brought more questions for me. What I want to know is what kind of bone was it? Cat? Dog? Rat? Bat? Bird? Human? Otter? Nutria? Squirrel? Fish? Other? Was the bone part of a foot, a wing, a hip, arm, pelvis, maybe a claw? Am I responsible for the death of the critter who's bone had punctured my tire? If not how long had it been dead and did it meet it's death by the tire of another? How long had it been dead? How long had the bone been in my tire? Did the bone come from the freeway, a grocery store parking lot, side street, or maybe the parking lot at work?