Here’s a sweet song from Ze Frank about social networking, a la Facebook. You may remember Ze had what is still one of the only podcasts I watched religiously, so it’s nice to have a little taste of that again. He made some really catchy and funny songs on his show.
Anyway, enjoy. I saw this on Scoble’s blog.
One of the first RIAA music piracy trials hit the courts last week. There will be many many more, no doubt. These guys haven’t had an original thought since the early 1900’s, so you can be sure they will continue to sue their own consumers into oblivion with great gusto.
What’s killing me is: it’s puzzling, insane even, for an evil corporation to have chosen to have this case come to court first. They convicted a single mom, lower income than most, of American Indian descent. Yep, that sounds like a cold blooded, deranged criminal to me. It’s an enormous mistake for the RIAA to make. Of the thousands of lawsuits pending (there are more than 20000 of these things choking up the courts) they let this one get to trial first? Why not get a white middle aged nerd to stand trial first? People would easily believe the guy was a nerdly criminal of epic proportions, with terabytes of stolen files obtained by arcane and secret ways that the regular folks just wouldn’t understand. It plays on stereotypes, sure, but they have slimy marketing guys who do this stuff all day long. It would probably help their public opinion a lot. But instead we have a young single mom who makes no money at all. People just thought the RIAA was evil before, but now they are absolutely positive of it.
In any case (that’s a law pun, har har) they won the suit and the victim owes a humongous corporation $222 000 in damages. Yep, that should take her about 15 years to pay off, if she ever does. She becomes a martyr and a figurehead for the fight against these guys. A fight which the RIAA admits is a losing proposition. A fight that makes the artists they represent absolutely no money. Well done, folks.
Bowing to some slight pressure from some persons, I softened the background colour a little bit to take a bit of the harshness out. I think it still works ok.
Howdy folks,
Giving a new look a spin today, working out some kinks.
What do you think?
**Update.
Fixed the front page links and images with a little kind help from the theme author. Seriously folks, you can’t get help like this from actual companies. Thanks again, Will.
Living vicariously through my children is definitely one of the best parts about having kids. I am very excited about the possibility of Jordy saving up enough money for her iPod Nano soon, but that’s another story. The boys are also getting right into the sweet spot for very fun toys. Lego is one thing that will figure importantly this Christmas, I think.
It also doesn’t hurt that today’s toys are seven kinds of awesome compared to the toys I had. Here’s a good example, made by Erector. It’s a spy robot you build yourself, in three possible configurations. It’s got a video camera and microphone so you can see what the thing is seeing, and it has speakers too, for freaking out everybody including your dog. That alone is great, but the best thing is the connectivity! Oh my god, it’s controllable over the internet with WiFi! It’s motion activated, so it can take a picture and/or send you an email when it detects motion. It plays MP3s. It will return to it’s charger automatically and stay juiced up. It slices, dices, purees, you get the idea. The potential for mischief is limited only by your imagination.
My geek self is all riled up, I have no idea what I would use this for, but man it would be fun to play with. If I gave it to the boys, poor Jordy wouldn’t stand a chance. They could take the annoying little brother thing to a whole new level. If only the boys were a little older I could justify the rather hefty price tag ($300). As it stands today, this delicate little robot would be smashed by an errant Matchbox “General Lee” in no time. In answer to your next question, I’m still not sure if I would be buying it for the boys, or for me. A little of both, to be sure.
I saw this on Boing Boing Gadgets, and have been drooling ever since.
TV is changing. We are all in the denial phase, but the way we used to watch it is really gone . I saw this article today about somebody saying TV is about to have it’s “iPod moment”. That’s the moment where we stop caring about the stream of cable/satellite programming and just download what you want to see. At our place it’s already happened. For us, TV shows don’t come on as we watch, instead we know when they have been recorded on the PVR, and that’s when we plan to watch them. There’s no sense of the TV schedule that I used to have as a kid. I used to just “know” when the stuff I wanted to see was on and turn on the TV. If I missed it, well too bad. Now I have no fricking idea when a show is actually aired, usually. After I set up the timer on the PVR I’m done with the program guide.
We so rarely watch live TV that Nikki and I never know about new shows until somebody we know starts talking about them. We watch everything pre-recorded and so we skip ahead through the commercials and the network teasers without knowing what’s coming up. That’s the big problem with the new model. If I can’t find new content I will start to watch less over time (and have already). How will they tell me about new shows in a world where the program guide is internet-sized? I think maybe web-style marketing could help a lot. Blogs and YouTube could easily tell me about new shows that I might want to watch. But that wouldn’t work so well for non-web savvy folks. Then there’s the commercial ad problem. Nikki and I skip over almost every ad they show. That’s bad for advertisers, for sure. Technology will probably step in here at some point. One thing our Bell PVR does to make us try to watch the ads is it randomly changes the length of time the “skip ahead” and “skip back” buttons work on. Sometimes you can skip a regular commercial block with three clicks, sometimes it’s four. Often you overshoot and have to go back. It’s very clever since it makes you sit through some of those precious commercial seconds just out of frustration. I would expect to see more of this kind of technology in the future, hacks that make you sit through the commercials so the advertisers will continue to support the shows. It still won’t stop the hard core geeks from finding a way around watching, but for most of us it will be just fine.
I have noted this before, but it’s coming closer now, methinks. That’s a rather wordy ramble, sorry folks. Anybody happen to agree with this?