In some ways, I’m sad to be away in a different country while this happens in the U.S. (Don’t worry, I voted via absentee ballot!) The joy welling up in me is something I very much want to share with my friends and family in the States, and it’s something that my Taiwanese friends very much respect and admire, but cannot understand, just as I could not hope to fully appreciate their hatred of their last president for betraying them.

Some Americans I know here in Taiwan are trying to withhold themselves from premature revelry, perhaps out of fear of jinxing Obama’s win. Yes, he’ll likely win, they say, but what if he doesn’t? They say they wouldn’t be able to deal with the disappointment.

But I look at it this way. Now is the time when the cheering should be loudest. It’s home team advantage. You give your man all you’ve got, and yell yourself hoarse as he comes down the home stretch. Trepidation now can cost the world so very much.

This weekend I was reminded of this lesson when I faced what was to me a deplorable lack of world understanding. It’s been ages since I’ve logged onto Facebook, but I thought I would give it a go and see if I could get in touch with any blueshifting friends—or acquaintances, I suppose, because I have an e-mail address for pretty much anyone I’d ever call “friend.”

I was met with the discussion that follows. Of course I couldn’t help but chime in. I warn you that at parts it reads like a series of YouTube comments, and at others like an introductory logic course.

At times in that discussion I think I was a real prick. That’s typical of me, and while perhaps not the best method, I do think there’s something to be said for shaming individuals into self-reflection. Some are more susceptible to this technique than others, of course, but I’ve seen some deep moments happen in other people when undergoing ridicule. I know I’ve experienced such magic myself.

Here’s to tomorrow. Raise your glass with me, won’t you? And don’t forget to debate!

You have got to be kidding me.

I was thinking I’d mosey over to their website, as much as I generally decry centralized media repositories, and see whether I couldn’t stream a bit of live coverage of the Olympics. Wishful thinking, perhaps, but the homepage seemed promising:

See that hopeful little tidbit about downloading clips in HD? Unfortunately that’s probably locked down with DRM, or at the very least a proprietary downloading application. Too bad I can’t tell you for sure, because the freaking page won’t load!

Does NBC really think it can keep going like this? This is the freaking Olympics. Firefox 3 was downloaded 8,002,530 times on the first day of its release, and still NBC doesn’t think it’s a priority that their website work with it.

Apparently, a WordPress theme, Flickr photostream widget, and a Twitter Flash badge aren’t enough to show off one’s personality anymore;

I felt that one. May 2006 live forever!

I’ve posted before about missing my pets, but tonight the longing is especially grave. I found a sweet GIF that shows why animals are so great. And also why they should be trained: to hone their skills in annihilation.

This experience for me was particularly moving because it combined the nostalgia of a looping-GIF with the timeless classicism of a little kid getting rocked.

The comments on the Digg page for it are actually funny enough to warrant reposting here.

• Stay down kid. Just stay down.
• Flawless victory.
• Dogs doing things to kids is sort of old, we see this shit on t.v. We need something more eventful and new like Kids and Badgers.
• Well that’s what you get for fucking around in the water kid.
• What the hell is the damn kid doing running around in a swamp in the first place?

That’s about everything that could ever be said about this gleefully looping slice of life. Oh, how I envy the historians of the future.

In case you didn’t laugh hard enough, please watch the same thing in reverse.

All is right with the world.

However, I was this time fortunate enough to bear witness to a beautifully crafted rebuttal, in which Linux apologists are likened to ditzy whores who are lovestruck with their two-timing beaus.

Every time I hear someone talking about a company pushing Linux on the desktop over windows I think of this woman I worked with who was having an affair with a very financially successful married man. Every few months she would get all excited because the divorce papers were finally coming through and she would be recognized as his wife. Then a few weeks after she would be crying because it was going to be “just a few more months”. Instead of recognizing the situations for what it was; She was just a cheap, easy lay and he was never leaving his wife, she clung onto the idea that she would eventually be his wife. Linux on the desktop is the mistress, windows is the wife, big business is the successful husband and unless the mistress puts a bullet in the wifes head the husband isn’t voluntarily divorcing his wife anytime soon.

Oh, man, burn.

This might be a bad time to bring this up, but have you heard that 2008 is the Year of the Linux Desktop?

If you need me, I’ll be trying to buy a handgun in this ridiculously socialist society I temporarily call home. Although I guess it would behoove me to set up Wine properly, first.

But what keeps me coming back to this is the list of search engine terms leading to this blog. As if I didn’t know already, I write about weird stuff, and that brings weird people to this blog. Thank god they keep their mouth shut, too, because I wouldn’t want to talk to any one of these freaks. (Although, to be fair, it does look like we have a lot in common.)

I think it’s official: I have the greatest blog in existence.

For all its uber-seriousness, you can’t help but laugh at the ridiculousness of black metal.

There truly is nothing in the world more absurd, sad, and awesome to me than black metal. I often impersonate a black metal enthusiast during daily activities, just because it makes my life seem way more intense. These two chaps understand that philosophy, and decided to make a video of black metal cookie baking.

That was pretty extreme. While the video was poorly edited (which is funny, because it’s ragging on low-production-value black metal), the final scene of the two guys running into the woods in their backyard, poorly concealed by either a fog machine or an out of control barbecue grill, made up for it.

After trolling around YouTube (ha ha, get it? black metal is about trolls!), I found some absolutely killer parodies of black metal music videos. Then I looked up the originals and realized it would be funnier to just show those. Enjoy.

Trollech – Ve stinu starych dub (view parody video here)

Immortal – Blashyrkh (view parody video here)

I want to cry and laugh at the same time.

As I’m keeping my daydreaming in check with visions of dirty plastic shards in my eyeballs, I see a police car on pulling up from a sidestreet, getting ready to turn out onto the same road I’m on. I consider braking for him, then realize that would just be suspicious, as well as implying that I’m his bitch, so I glance at my speed and keep going. After I’m past, I check my mirror, and the car behind me had yielded to the police car, all but stopping to wave him out. What a bitch, right? So the cop is behind me now, and I’m almost back to the pizza shop.

Then the lights on the cop car click on. No siren, just lights. I think maybe it’s not about me, but there are no cars ahead of me. No brains on my headlights or shards of plastic in my eyeballs yet, either, so I can’t imagine what I possibly could have done wrong. I start thinking that maybe in Germany cops flip their lights on to say hi, so I’m thinking about turning on all my turn signals and beeping the horn and stuff, to join in on the party. I play it safe, though, and pull over. He does too, right behind me.

I turn off my ride, remove my helmet, and pivot around to face the approaching cop, but without getting off the moped. I thought it best to stay put so he couldn’t gun me down and say I was making a break for it. The conversation went like this.

“Good evening, officer! What seems to be the problem?”
“Well, the problem seems to be that back there was a ‘right-before-left,’ and you didn’t yield to me.”
“Uh, a ‘right-before-left’?”
“Yes. Driver’s license, please.”
“Sure. Right.”
[10 seconds of frantic unzipping and pocket-patting]
“Um, you see, officer, I seem to have left my wallet back at the shop. It was in my jacket when I came to work, and then I changed into these work clothes. My license is back there.”
“You don’t have your driver’s license with you, and yet I just pulled you over while you were driving?”
“That’s correct, officer.”
“Identification, please.”
[Please keep in mind that it's actually a law that everyone in Germany must carry ID on them at all times. I use my passport for this purpose, and my passport was also still in my jacket pocket back in my locker at the shop.]
“Um… right. You see, that’s kind of with my license, in my jacket.”
“You have no driver’s license and no identification?”
“Correct. But officer, I work just around that corner, that’s where the shop is, I’d be happy to run and pick both up for you and show them to you. It’s not a problem at all, officer.”
“How fast does that thing go?” [gestures to moped]
“Um, 35km/h, sir.” [Fuck, that's a lie! It actually goes to 40km/h and he might know that! Why, why did you say that, Conor?]
“Oh really? I clocked you at 70 back there when you passed me.”
“What? No, officer, I’m sorry, that is absolutely not possible, the thing just doesn’t go that fast, it only goes so fast, it can’t go faster [my German is failing me]. You can drive it yourself to see, sir.”
“Alright. Well, look. Next time I see one of Joey’s boys out on the road, I’m going to pull them over. And if it’s you, you’re going to have your driver’s license and ID with you, aren’t you?”
“Yes sir!”
“Alright, then. Have a—”
“Excuse me, officer… could you just explain to me one more time what I did wrong back there?”
[looks at me incredulously] “It was a right-before-left! Classic situation! It doesn’t get anymore obvious!”
“Right. Yes, of course. Um, ‘right-before-left’?”
“Do you even have a driver’s license?!” [gets out ticket boot again]
“Yes, of course I do! Well… I have an international driver’s license, you know. I, uh, had to write a test for it. So maybe I—” [more lies]
“Yeah. Sure. Look, just get out of here.”
“Yes, right. Have a good evening, officer.

To be completely clear, I did not get fucked. No ticket, no reporting to my boss (as far as I know), nothing like that. He scared the shit out of me, but that’s about all the harm that was done. But what really had me freaked was this fairy tale traffic law he kept referencing.

After getting off work I told the story to some incredulous friends, and a German explained just as incredulously that I broke the “most basic traffic law in Germany.” I did some research, and it looks like most countries in Europe are using this priority to the right (rechts vor links) system.

Well, now I know. And you do too.

Update: I’ve been asked a thousand times to elaborate on this “right before left” law. What it boils down to is that if you’re driving along a road, and a vehicle pokes its snout out of a sidestreet, you have to yield to that vehicle, effectively slowing down to wave them out. You don’t have a stop sign, and neither do they. Cars pulling out of sidestreets are in my experience fairly cautious, but they do expect to be let out, so you have to be ready to brake.

This is obviously completely antithetical to the way right of way works in the U.S., namely that if you’re already driving, fuck everybody else, they have to wait for a clear spot in the line of traffic driving past them before they can turn out. The “right before left” system seems to add a huge emphasis on paying attention to other drivers on the road, and to changing conditions. It also reinforces an ideological atmosphere of caring for your fellowman, and in that sense, seems completely consistent with a rather socialist society, whereas the “fuck you, I’m driving here, wait your turn” system in the States is a bit more representative capitalist mentality.

Doesn’t that look like Castro’s brother won an Oscar? Or that the golden-man-baton of presidency was conferred upon him?

Ridiculous.

Dear Conor,

I’m so sorry to have to tell you this

[...]

Nokia-Siemens very unfortunately
[...]

funding withdrawn, therefore

[...]

no, and futhermore

[...]

you’re fucked.

Sincerely,

Well isn’t that special? The research project at the university I was slated to take part in, paid for by Nokia Siemens, has been nixed and my position as research assistant died therewith. This trip just got a whole lot more interesting.

I still haven’t received the necessary certificates by mail that I need to work at the grocery store up the street, but I hope to get them yet this afternoon. The nice woman on the phone told me they would arrive at the very latest today. Even if they don’t, I’ll stop by the store and let the manager know that all my paperwork will be sent along very soon, and that he should hold the position open for me. He had said I couldn’t start working until March 1 anyway, so I don’t expect this to be a substantial problem.

Oh, and the hostels thing didn’t work out at all. I visited four.

Update: I did receive something from an agency supposed to send a certificate for a prospective employer, but it wasn’t actually the certificate. Sigh. I suppose I’ll receive that tomorrow. I did end up going down to the store to speak with the manager. The “manager” was not the gentleman I spoke with last time, as this person today was actually younger than I am. I explained I’d already stopped by about the “help wanted” sign and spoke with the boss who said to come back about this time with all the paperwork finished. The paperwork is taking longer than expected. The kid didn’t really care, told me not to stress about it and to turn the stuff in when I can.

Source article

No source, unfortunately I just have the direct image link.

Source article (that’s paint, not puke)

I hope you enjoyed these as much as I obviously did.

03:13:48 Unknown_Player(1): if i stick songs on itunes from a cd, do those songs take up a lot more space than an mp3
03:14:07 I: that’s what an mp3 is
03:14:14 I: a song that was on a cd and was then moved to a computer
03:14:36 Unknown_Player(1): i thought you had to convert them or something
03:14:59 I: that’s also what an mp3 is, it’s a converted file of audio, usually extracted from an audio cd
03:15:16 Unknown_Player(1): oh, ok
03:15:24 Unknown_Player(1): my bad.
03:15:45 I: the reason people encode (convert) their audio is because a CD can store around 700MB of data, but if you rip it to mp3, it can be only 100MB or so
03:16:09 I: but it depends on the quality at which you rip… higher quality, bigger filesize, but it still won’t be as big as a full cd
03:18:29 Unknown_Player(1): oh. i duno i just imported a bunch of songs from cds
03:18:54 I: well good yeah that should work too
03:19:30 Unknown_Player(1): yay

Jordan commiserated, saying “I wish I knew what some people think goes on behind the scenes of technology.” This reminds me of a video my mother recently sent me, saying that I would probably find it very representative of the relationship I have with her. (She was wrong.)

Here’s to magic, eh?

Really.

Anyway, tomorrow I’m supposed to pick up a Christmas tree for my dorm floor for installation in the kitchen. Should rock.

I’ll be back online posting all sorts of wonderful news I didn’t get to tonight.

Till then.

The toolkit sets up an Apache Web server on the user’s machine. It also automatically configures all of the data and graphs gathered about activity on the local network to be displayed on a Web page, complete with ntop-generated graphics showing not only bandwidth usage generated by each user on the network, but also the Internet address of every Web site each user has visited.

Unless a school using the tool has firewalls on the borders of its network designed to block unsolicited Internet traffic — and a great many universities do not — that Web server is going to be visible and accessible by anyone with a Web browser. But wait, you say: Wouldn’t someone need to know the domain name or Internet address of the Web server that’s running the toolkit? Yes. However, anyone familiar enough with the file-naming convention used by the toolkit could use Google to search for the server.

Frightening, no? Well here’s the clincher, the way to resolving this whole mess:

The University Toolkit is essentially an operating system (xubuntu) that you can boot up from a CD-ROM. The package bundles some powerful, open-source network monitoring tools, including “Snort,” which captures detailed information about all traffic flowing across a network; as well as “ntop,” a tool used to take data feeds from tools like Snort and display the data in more user-friendly graphics and charts.

Gee, last time I checked, Xubuntu is an open source operating system distributed under the terms of the General Public License (GPL). That means that if the party utilizing the GPL’d code redistributes it without providing access to the source code, they’re in violation of license.

Do you get it? The MPAA is infringing on intellectual property rights. This is pure gold. After years of stamping their feet petulantly, demanding that consumers pay them tons of money, many times over (did you know it’s illegal to play DVDs in Linux?), they go and steal someone else’s work, completely ignoring the written license under which it was offered.

Interested parties were of course notified, and have successfully had access to the toolkit stricken from the MPAA’s website. (That’s a Slashdot summary of the event. Make sure to check out the comment threads for a few laughs.) Evidently, the MPAA was less than cooperative, so the individual—Ubuntu developer Matthew Garrett—notified the MPAA’s ISP and forced it to be removed that way.

MPAA don’t fuck with my shit.

(And yes, I did attempt to contact them by email and phone before resorting to the more obnoxious behaviour of contacting the ISP. No reply to my email, and the series of friendly receptionists I got bounced between had no idea who would be responsible but promised me someone would call back. No joy there, either.)

This is a common tactic of the MPAA and the RIAA, to serve ISPs subpoenas demanding IP addresses for individuals allegedly pirating.

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09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0
09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0
09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0
09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0
09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0
09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0
09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0
09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0

Oops.

In 1955, New York’s director of safety advised the state’s fire chiefs to seize fake Davy Crockett coonskin caps from stores. Made of shredded paper, the caps burst into flame “in seconds after the most casual exposure to a live cigarette or to any spark.”

Why were parents putting out their cigarettes on kids’ heads? Maybe it was a reaction to such a stupid hat.

By 1974, more than 1,500 toys had been banned by the newly established Consumer Product Safety Commission. Among them was a Smokey the Bear tent that was highly flammable….

That just sounds like a joke. Looks like somebody had a score to settle.

“[W]e run into proud parents who think their children are so clever that they can handle toys much too old for them.”

The toy industry disputed the statistics on rising toy injuries. “If a girl slips on a doll on the floor or a boy is hit by a baseball bat, it goes down as a toy-related accident,” said Aaron Locker, general counsel of the Toy Manufacturers of America, in 1974. “We estimate that only about 15% of the accidents can be attributed to a product feature.”

Right. So if your kid is eating his baseball bat, please abort the child and promptly sterilize yourself. The sugary sweetness of the lacquer on the wood of the bat was not intended as a feature, so don’t blame Louisville Slugger.

I honestly don’t see how anyone would assign blame when their kid is eating a baseball bat. I mean, who would admit that shit?

Robert Barnett, president of the company that made Jarts, a controversial lawn game using giant darts, said, “I’d rather be hit by a lawn dart than by a horseshoe.”

New reality TV show: Calling the Bluff: Holding PR Reps Accountable for Their Bullshit Claims!

I’d watch.

UPDATE: I believe the article link is only valid for a week. That’s a shame, but it’s how the WSJ does things. Eventually this Old Media model will go extinct and on that day I’ll be sure to repost the link, when it’s open for posterity.

How the hell are my kids supposed to learn about the dangers of lawn darts and setting cigarettes on their children’s paper hates if the article isn’t available to them?! History says I as a parent am not going to teach them.

Unless you count having them learn the hard way. I’d be great at that.

I’m going to skip the dissertation on feeds, application launchers, and smart filesystem organization. Today’s topic is the browser Flock.

Based on Firefox and thus open source, Flock tries to maximize integration with the social networking aspects of the web. It provides out of the box support for major networks like Facebook, Flickr, and Twitter, but falls flat on spiffier, still hipper sites like Last.fm. (The list of sites it doesn’t support is of course massive, but striking out on Last.fm was a mistake in my book.)

The integration for Facebook, Flickr, and Twitter is quite striking at first. Flock imported my cookies and passwords from Firefox (once given my permission to do so), then asked me to re-login to those sites “to take full advantage of the features Flock offers.” The primary feature is the “People Sidebar,” which is a dynamically updating list of all your friends’ activities online. For instance, as I was sifting through my feeds after getting home from class, I saw that a friend updated their status to “is in FUCKING LAS VEGAS, BABY!” Once I saw that, I clicked on the person’s picture, then clicked “Wall post,” and was able to write an immediate response to the status update. (I wrote something less than witty about Fear & Loathing.)

Here’s an unpolished mock-up of the People Sidebar from the Flock site:

For Facebook, this is a tremendous time-saver. It keeps the information coming to me as I go about my life, and doesn’t make me seek it out by actually browsing to the Facebook page. In the past 24 hours I’ve participated more in the Facebook community than I think I have ever, but I’ve spent probably 5 minutes total on the actual Facebook site, thanks to this slick and efficient interface.

Unfortunately, the People Sidebar wanes in usefulness in regard to the other social networks with which Flock is compatible. For instance, do I really need to keep up to date on my “friend” on YouTube? I didn’t even know I had any friends on YouTube, but apparently I do. Maybe my social circle is just such that YouTube isn’t a frequently updated outlet of their expression, and other users will indeed find this cool. Flickr, for me, is the same way: I use Flickr more for myself than for its community aspects, though I do plan to change that.

Flock does try to compensate for this weakness in the People Sidebar, though, with the Media Bar. This eye-candy-licious feature reads content streams from websites like YouTube and Flickr and displays them in an orderly row, not too different in appearance from the look of a Flickr slideshow.

Flock Media Bar:

Flickr slideshow bar:

Certainly has that über-glossy, black-saturated, Web 2.0-gone-Vista-then-Leopard look.

Flock was launched a year or two ago, if I remember correctly, and I remember quite a bit of hype around it, as Firefox was rocketing to popularity in the media, and it seemed suddenly like the age of browser profusion to lazy tech journalists. I tried it then and was thoroughly underwhelmed. The implementation of the Flock philosophy is worlds better in this latest release, the big 1.0.

Recently I’d read a couple glowing reviews of Flock, so I figured I’d give it another go. The selling point for me was the promise of blog integration, meaning that I wouldn’t have to navigate to a webpage and compose my entries via a clunky HTML interface. (I have some plugins installed to add a few AJAX loads, but by and large the thing is slow as hell.) This had me particularly excited because I was unfortunately never able to configure ScribeFire correctly for Firefox, though it seems I’m not alone in that.

However, this feature has fallen flat on its face. It doesn’t work for me, and it doesn’t seem to work for anyone with a self-hosted WordPress blog. Given that it does work well with Blogger and Xanga and other such freebie accounts, it makes me feel like Flock is more catering to n00bz. I don’t like that.

Another huge point in Flock’s favor is that it has without fuss accepted my most frequently used Firefox extensions, and maintained their functionality. I haven’t imported all my extensions yet, as I have a ton, but of all those attempted so far, there hasn’t been a hitch. That’s just marvellous, and I wish the same could be said about themes, but I understand why that’s such a different matter.

I’m going to keep using Flock for a while, if only to whine about things like Last.fm integration. I think that in a few months to a year, Flock will be a tremendously powerful browser. If they manage to keep the code trim and fit, unlike the hungry-hungry-Firefox, it’ll be a true winner.

I do wonder, however, about how much of this functionality can very easily be mirrored by way of Firefox extensions, thereby downplaying the importance of Flock as a browser separate from Firefox. By allowing users to copy features of Opera, for instance, Firefox has managed to grow its own marketshare at the expense of the often truly innovative Opera crowd. Richard Stallman would be pleased, I suppose.

I’m sure I’ll be posting more, especially if I manage to work out the blog editing feature.

The man does not argue coherently. Fortunately the post was at least copy-edited, because the punctuation is by and large orderly, but sadly it doesn’t look like a logician was brought in for consultation, which would have been a fantastic idea. This rant shows so very clearly why the record company empires are crumbling. He’s absolutely clueless.

These days people just assume that you need a number one single to have a number one album. But look at what’s really happening. Soulja Boy sold almost 4 million singles and only 300,000 albums! We let the consumer have too much of what they want, too soon, and we hurt ourselves. [emphasis added]

That’s right, instead of delivering a better product now that consumers are empowered enough to shop for what they want, the chosen course of action is to try to bully them into buying second- and third-rate complements along with the desired item. You call that smart business? Remember, we’re not talking CostCo bulk rates here, because an album varies notoriously in the quality of its tracks, not its quantity. It doesn’t become cheaper for the consumer to buy lots of music (although perhaps it should). The ability to buy singles just means that people are only paying for what they wanted all along: one track, because the rest of your CD sucked.

Yeah, it’s about the money, but it’s also about quality. Creating each album as a body of work that means something gives the consumer something better to listen to, It’s that simple. [sic]

OK, so much for the decent copy-editing. Here Jermaine seems to be saying that he knows what I want to hear better than I do, and that pisses me off.

Asking us to let other people mess with all our hard work like that is disrespectful. It’s like when you go an art auction, and an Andy Warhol painting is up for sale at $5 million, but a buyer is allowed to just by off the top right hand corner of the canvas for a hundred thou’

Apple, why are you helping the consumer destroy our canvas? We don’t tell you to break up your computers into bits and pieces and sell off each thing. When you go to the Apple store you may only need one thing, but you have to buy all their plug ins and stuff. You have to buy their whole package, even if you don’t necessarily want it, or your equipment won’t work.

This one really blew me out of the water. It’s really a horrible way to make a point. I understand that he’s saying the producers should be able to make the product anyway they want, and also simultaneously control the delivery of that product as well. Good for him. But using Apple as an example? They are practically the only computer business on the planet that isn’t friendly to customization according to customer specifications. Go to Dell, you pick and choose components. Better yet, go to Newegg, where you can buy just a hard drive, or a graphics card, or a mouse, or a monitor. That’s what I do!

So maybe a better analogy would be that the iTunes Music Store is to Newegg as Wal-Mart’s music section is to computer sales at Apple retail locations.

Additionally, the claim that an album experienced track by track “won’t work” is nonsense. In the article he compares CDs to books, saying book publishers don’t allow bookstores to break up books and sell them by the chapter. Well, that sure is the Old Media way of looking at these things, isn’t it? Last time I checked this century, the rules of New Media do indeed allow such discrete consumption. Take a look at this blog post, and even at his, for example of that delivery style. And when’s the last time you heard an entire CD on the radio? Probably around the same time you heard an entire book read there.

Sadly I haven’t been able to find much mainstream coverage of this article (it’s all over Technorati, of course), but Mashable has an excellent write-up.

Aside from a shocking lack of understanding when it comes to how an actual iPod works, it is also clear he missed the entire point as to why iTunes came into existence in the first place: piracy. Jermaine appears to think that if you simply stop selling music by way of iTunes, everyone will run back to the CD format with open arms, and never make an ‘illegal copy’ ever again. It is as if he missed most of the ’90s and never heard of Napster.

Thank you for saying it so well.

I must say, though, that I do agree with the fundamental claim of the original post: that a good album is more than just a collection of singles. It’s just too bad Jermaine’s in the business of quantity assurance.

Apparently some toolbag made a post about how the WGA is on strike and so in order to show solidarity with their cause, nobody should blog today. Because that helps somehow.

Fortunately there’s a really good rebuttal to it on Mashable entitled Blog Nothing Day: No Thanks.

I didn’t even have any content for today, so I probably wouldn’t have posted. But now I’m gonna. *Shakes fist*

I had to wear my contact lenses all day, which I hate. But I’ll be getting used to it!

I didn’t smash them or anything, I was just adjusting them on my head and the arm gave up and detached. They’re two years old, worn literally every single day (but not to concerts or other violent things). Had to happen eventually!

I’ll be saving up for a nice pair by Christmas sometime, I hope.