Ok, everyone, play nice while I’m out of town.
We’re heading to Arizona and California for a two-week vacation, hitting Disneyland, Grand Canyon, San Diego Wild Animal Park, and as many missions as we can find. We’ll also be visiting family, including some members I’ve not seen in decades and others I’ve never met, not to mention none of them have met Ang and Alex.
We’re outta here.
I pre-ordered the new Foo Fighters double CD set when it was first listed on Amazon over a month ago, and it showed up today. Wanting to listen to it on my Rio Karma, since that’s what I usually listen to, I tried to rip the CD. It wouldn’t rip because it’s been “protected” by Sunncomm’s digital restrictions. About five minutes later, I found exactly what to do to rip the CDs that I paid for so I can listen to them.
Of course, it’s faster to just go to Usenet and download them after someone else has gone through the trouble of reconfiguring their system to use their own music on their own computer, and then shared it illegally with the world. Interesting that it’s faster and easier to do the wrong thing than it is to exercise the fair use rights that I’m told are mine by legal precedents and Constitutional lawyers. Great.
Oh, and did I mention that the copy protection didn’t protect it from being copied? Just want to make that perfectly clear.
Ang’s Rio Chiba, after getting a replacement batter cover, appears to be suffering from a well known defect – its circuit boards are somehow not lining up right and this causes it to be stuck trying to upgrade its firmware (which is the most current version thank you very much). Naturally, the player has a 90 day warranty (the shortest in the industry) and it’s 6 months old.
It’s too bad this is such a delicate player, since it was so neato. Anyone know of a durable flash-based MP3 player? Cheap is good. 🙂
Update: Thanks for all the suggestions, but the board is physically loose, so no amount of reflashing the firmware or reseating the battery will help. The actual printed circuit boards are disconnected in a physical electrical way.
We had our court date this morning for finalizing the adoption. Alex is now officially and legally my son. Naturally, we got one more dose of “you should have paid thousands of dollars for a lawyer” this morning, but not too bad. Apparently even the judges aren’t sure what to do without lawyers leading them along. Weird.
I finished archiving my digital music onto DVD (replacing the dozens of CDs I’ve got lying around). It took up fifteen DVD-ROMs, all 12339 tracks. As of this afternoon, I’ve got 12782 tracks on my hard drive, since I found a 12-disk set of Sinatra songs and a few other albums that seemed like I might like ’em.
Now to teach the woman how not to delete 3000 tracks from my Karma to add 150. Geez. Took me two hours to refill the darned thing.
The semi-return of the Friday Five.
1. How far do you currently live from the place where you were born?
About 5000 miles.
2. How many times have you moved in your life?
18
3. What was the shortest move, in terms of distance? The longest?
Shortest was probably moving from the apartment to the house in Sierra Vista. We just cut through a parking lot and drove half a block. Easy. The longest was moving from Korea back to Texas – almost 7000 miles.
4. Have you ever moved for school? Love? Work?
Sure.
5. Did your family ever move when you were a child? How did that make you feel? (either moving or not moving)
Where do you think the first ten moves came from? Didn’t particularly like moving, especially the “new kid” syndrome at school.
Want some blackberries? We’ve got a ton of ’em again this year. Thanks to the relatively heavy rainfall and reasonable temperatures (for the most part), we’ve got a bumper crop of blackberries – we’ve made a half-gallon of jam, a largish cobbler, and the Boy has eaten a ton of fresh berries. They’ll be gone soon, though – one of the shorter harvest seasons for our backyard garden. Next up – tomatoes!
I can’t help but assume that Microsoft is adopting XML as the default file format, not because they love open and interoperable formats, but because OpenOffice has received Oasis certification of their open and interoperable XML formats already.
I think it’s good that Microsoft feels threatened. I think it’s bad that they are offering their XML schemas with “royalty free licenses” to all and sundry, because that just encourages further lock-in to MS products. We’ll see how it plays out, I suppose.
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