Month: January 2007

Biting the hand that feeds you

I’m tired of doing business with companies that treat their customers like dirty criminals.

Read this: Teen Accuses Record Companies of Collusion (Associated Press)

Robert Santangelo… claims that the record companies, which have filed more than 18,000 piracy lawsuits in federal courts, “have engaged in a wide-ranging conspiracy to defraud the courts of the United States.”

The papers allege that the companies, “ostensibly competitors in the recording industry, are a cartel acting collusively in violation of the antitrust laws and public policy” by bringing the piracy cases jointly and using the same agency “to make extortionate threats … to force defendants to pay.”

I know I shamelessly plug eMusic a lot on this site, but right now they are pretty much the only responsible online vendor that actually respects both their customers and the artists who work to make the music.

I know that a lot of good artists are on the “big four” music labels that mistreat their customers so much. Instead of buying online and supporting DRM, there are a couple of things you can do:

  1. Check their record label status on RIAA Radar.  This site will tell you if an artist is a member of the RIAA, a conglomerate of labels that promotes practices like harassing and suing their customers (even after they’re dead), infecting music with fair use-limiting DRM, and slashing artist royalties. (Just to be fair, the labels shouldn’t hide behind an advocacy groups. The following labels actively support such practices: EMI, BMG, Sony, Warner, and UMG)
  2. Buy it on CD. This promotes a DRM-free avenue that shows labels that you are willing to pay for music you like, but won’t accept DRM limitations.

If you’re still actually reading my whining, you may be interested in what the Electronic Frontier Foundation has to say. They’ve got a good guide to DRM and have proposed a method to actually reduce piracy and get artists paid.

Apartment?

So it’s time to either snag a prime dorm on campus (current residents have priority) or go for an apartment. Most people just run to the apartments after freshman year, since they’re cheaper. I added it up… Room and board here is $770 a month. If you’re just looking at the room charge, it’s almost $400, which is close to normal rent around here… But $375 a month for food? I really don’t think I eat that much.

Money isn’t the biggest issue, for the most part. (Support candidates who support education!) But there are still ups and downs to both sides:

Apartment Benefits

  • (Somewhat) more responsible roommates / neighbors, as the worst have moved on to either fraternities or the university-magnet apartments. Since last week’s events, this is a big plus for me.
  • No evil network administrators tyin’ my torrents down!
  • Whatever I want to eat (I am getting seriously bored of Corbett cuisine.)
  • I can move in for the summer. For me, this is pretty important, since I would otherwise live at my mom’s for the summer. Mom’s is great, but it is out of the way. I like being in the middle of town.

Dorm Benefits

  • Literally 5 minutes from class or work
  • Consolidated bill- no utilities or risk of bad budgeting
  • Never have to cook
  • A lot more social, which is good since I still haven’t planted the deepest roots in Colorado yet.

Right now I’m on the fence, leaning towards apartments. But who knows?

Suggestions, people. I’d love ’em.

Private Posting

I have been journalling for a long time. A few years back, I replaced the private journal and put this baby up: 100% public. If you have a net connection, and I haven’t blacklisted your IP as a spammer, you can read 3 years worth of my thoughts (unfortunately, I don’t think that I’ve had much to say for over 500 entries). It rarely has been a problem for me, because I’m a fairly open guy in general.

These days, though, I have found myself second-guessing what I write here. I’ve always had to consider the impact of my words in the public forum that is the internet- is family going to read it? Can I really blog about something that’s going on with one of my friends? What about work issues, or something around school?
Keeping my mouth shut has been good for me in the drama avoidal department, but these days I feel like I’ve been censoring myself a bit to do so. There are things that I want to talk about, but not with the entire internet. Sometimes, I don’t even want a lot of people I do know to read about something.

I could open a private livejournal or something, but I don’t like making people sign up for things. So I’m just going to start putting passwords on private posts. I’m going to start out with two levels:

  1. General Protection (Level1): This is just stuff that I don’t want strangers, teachers, employers, or the gossip down the hall hearing about. Leave a comment and I might (might!) e-mail you the password.
  2. Elevated Protection (Level2): This will be used for stuff that I don’t talk to most people about, but is pretty important to me. I’m not handing these out to everyone. If I decide to give you this, I’ll e-mail it when I give you the Level1 password. (oh, and I’m not handing these out to family.)

It feels weird, I don’t want this blog to turn into the “You’re-not-invited-to-my-party” situation. Really, whoever you are, I appreciate that you are reading whatever it is I have to say, and I don’t want to make you feel unwelcome. Please don’t be offended if I don’t send you a password; I’m not holding anything back that I haven’t held back before. I just want this blog to be a medium with which to express myself, and I want to deepen that opportunity- but I am not going to express 100% of myself to a complete stranger.

People viewing this blog through LiveJournal, Xanga, Facebook or RSS: You will have to click the link to my real website to view a private post.

Thank God the week is over.

Wow. For me, this was just a really crappy week.

I’m really not in a bad mood… Or discouraged…. It just sucked. No hard feelings. And frankly, I don’t think I’m gonna go into it, I think I’m tired of hearing myself whine, so I won’t force it on anyone else.

But there is good news, as well, in the form of a new 500GB external hard drive. It’s big, it’s eSATA, and until I get a desktop that supports that kind of connection, I will only experience about 1/6 of its speed. It’s also loud as heck. But it’s 500 gigs.

10 Years for Taboo?

Read this article. It’s shocking, infuriating, and amazing.

17 year old Genarlow Wilson was a good kid in high school: on the football team, being scouted by college coaches and taking fine arts classes to broaden his horizons at the same time.

One day, Genarlow went to a college tryout and the coaches were impressed.

Two days later, he went to prison on a ten-year sentence. His crime? Consensual oral sex with a schoolmate. He was 17, and she was 15. Both minors. The legal name for this crime: aggravated child molestation.

Nobody believes it wasn’t consensual- not the prosecutor, the girl, or Wilson. But he has been in prison for two years already.
The kicker: if they had actually performed sexual intercourse, the crime would only be a misdimeanor, not a felony.

What is the source of the issue? Maybe it was race. Appeals to the trial went up to the Georgia supreme court, which denied amnesty 4-3. 4 white, 3 black. At the same time of his “aggravated child molestation,” a white teacher got 90 days for actually molesting a minor.

The sad thing is that even if some of it is fueled by race, a lot is still just social paranoia: the charge for oral sex is worse than the one for sexual intercourse. I am an extreme proponent of prosecution for actual sexual offenders. I believe that if you actually rape someone, your member should be cut off. But this guy is gonna be labeled a sex offender for life for what he did. If he were to get out of prison, he couldn’t live in the same house as his sister.

We spring too quickly on supposed “offenses”. Someone stepping across the 18-year line, say, a 17 and 19 year old. In some states, if you get caught peeing in a public park, you are forced to register as a sex offender for life. Depending on the state you live in, this may entail:

  • Not being allowed to live near schools, parks, stadiums, malls
  • Not being allowed to have contact with children
  • Legal requirements to sit in separate pews than children at church
  • Having your information disclosed to neighbors whenever you move
  • Required permission from a probation officer to leave town
  • Much of your personal information listed publicly online (2 registered offenders have been murdered as a result of this listing.)

I have no problem with actual rapists and perverts being subjected to the above. But should someone like Genarlow Wilson have to go to prison for ten years, and then be denied basic civil rights for the rest of his life? And what about other crimes: there is nothing keeping an ex-murderer from living near a school or sitting next to me in church.

This is what happens when government legislates societal rules. Even if the offenders deserve their punishment, other innocents are going to get caught in the unjust hands of our justice system.

Promoted

So I make it a point not to blog about work much, lest I be dooced or otherwise draw the wrath of the drama demons. But I figure this is worth mentioning, since it’s kinda big-

I am now Security Team Lead at work. It’s a big fancy title, with the responsibilities and abilities to be blamed for more stuff that come with it.
Quite obviously I’m excited – it’s nice to be moving up in what I anticipate to be my career field. But overall, it is big and intimidating… I have a lot to learn. But it’s probably like learning to swim: the best way to learn is to be thrown into the lake and be forced to learn, and learn quickly.
So w00t? w00t.

I also just upgraded to the latest version of WordPress, my blogging engine… And I must say that I can’t believe what passes for a stable release these days. It’s buggy on my end, writing posts and stuff… the WYSIWYG editor is missing images, so I have to handcode if I want to format anything… and a lot of the scripts are still really buggy. 2.1 came out of beta way too early, and I’m not the happiest that they passed it off as stable. Usually I’ll trust Open Source stable builds, since they’re community edited and quickly patched.
But for the 93% of you who aren’t Alan, all this means for you is that there is a possibility that something might not work right. Like viewing from Xanga or something. 
UPDATE: I was an idiot, and blamed WordPress for something that was my fault – it’s called clear your cache. F5, stupid, F5!
(This I discovered after a couple of hours restoring backups, messing with FTP servers, merging old files… And it was all a tiny browser issue! Avast!)

Recent Acquisitions

Here’s some stuff that I’ve been putting in heavy rotation recently:

Moby - Play
Play – Moby
I don’t listen to much electronica, but this guy is pretty popular. This album actually samples a lot of folk and blues, so it’s very interesting. Downloaded on eMusic subscription.

A Fever You Can't Sweat Out
A Fever You Can’t Sweat Out – Panic! At The Disco
These guys are pop-punk, if anything. I recently tried to find some current acts that I like (instead of my typical pre-1980 tastes) and this was the only attempt that didn’t thoroughly disgust me. Their lyrics are less than amazing, but at least they’re a musically original group playing on the top-40 stations. Downloaded from iTunes.

Percolator
PERCoLAToR – Jim Weider
Very similar to Steve Kimock, with more mellow guitar lines. The rhythm guitarist (Mitch Stein) and the drummer (His Awesomeness Rodney Holmes) are from SKB, in fact. Downloaded from eMusic subscription.


Dub Side of the Moon – Easy Star All-Stars
A really good reggae cover of Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon. Usually you don’t mess with the classics, but this one is actually really good. Downloaded from eMusic subscription.

Begin to Hope
Begin to Hope – Regina Spektor
Think Tori Amos, but not annoying as hell. OK, there’s more to Spektor, a Russian Jew with an absolutely heavenly soprano and an interesting approach to the piano. Good late-night music. And hey, since she’s from Russia, I downloaded her album from there as well (wink wink, nudge nudge, say no more).

Three Quartets
Three Quartets – Chick Corea
Great jazz improv, with monster drums care of H.A. Steve Gadd. From the eMusic collection.

El Semestre Nuevo

I’ve been to all of my classes now… So here’s the recap:

  • Spanish Lit (L310S) is a good class for 9:30 in the morning. Basically the combination of this class and the one I took last semester (L300S, which is basically Spanish Composition) equals Sra. Zinke’s crazy Spanish 9-10 class back at PPA. Except easier. It just amazes me that she was able to teach high school juniors the college junior equivalent class! Anyways, the prof is less than impressive. He’s not a native speaker, so he speaks really slowly and I found myself dozing off mid-class. But it should be fairly easy- a third of the stuff we’ll be reading is known territory – stuff like La Casa de Bernarda Alba and No Oyes Ladrar los Perros.
  • Business Law (BG260) was the dreaded class – a lot of the business core thoroughly disinterests me. But once I went into class, it wasn’t bad at all. The prof also teaches in the vet med school, is a Certified Public Accountant, and attorney, and a business prof to boot. On the side he manages startup companies and sells them to big companies like Google. So his approaches may be interesting, but the class might still end up being dry.
  • Business Stats (ST204) is an easy-ish math class with lots of busywork. At least most of the homework will be online and the prof doesn’t seem to suck.
  • Application Design & Development (BD240) is a continuation to last semester’s BD210. Object-oriented VB.net stuff. The prof is interesting and I enjoy working on homework that actually interests me.
  • Introduction to Eunuchs – er, UNIX. Same thing, effectively. (CS155) This is a 1-credit class for 5 weeks. Purely for fun and self-edification, no degree requirements fulfilled. After that class is over, it carries over to two C++ courses, which I am considering adding.

It’s really weird how I’m growing to like my business classes. Overall, I don’t want to become some guy in a suit whose life goal is maximizing company profit. But my business law prof had an interesting point to make about tech innovations: usually, it’s two geeks with a revolutionary product, but no knowledge of how to turn it into a successful business venture. A third businessman usually must be brought in to provide capital and entrepreneurial support –  be it Steve Ballmer backing Microsoft, or Andy Bechtolsheim backing Google. My CIS degree covers half programming and half business, so I might be able to eliminate the third man. Intriguing.

In other news, Barack Obama and Tom Tancredo both created Presidential Exploratory Committees yesterday. One I am jumping for joy about, and the other disgusts me. Guess which is which.

Oh, and I got my phone back. Not that I talked much on it in the first place.