Dirty Text.

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Once you've had a free lunch, it's hard to justify paying for it ever again.

Napster debuted five years ago, in 1999.

For those of you not around for Napster's initial appearance, it wasn't the pay-to-download service that it is today. When it first appeared in 1999, it was one of the first peer-to-peer file sharing applications available.

Unlike Kazaa, on which you can find, not only music, but movies and applications and more viruses than you can shake a stick at, Napster focused solely on the music, taking advantage of the newly developed MP3 format that allowed people to shrink their digital audio files to about a tenth of their uncompressed size.

This made the files much, much, much easier to illegally download over the Internet.

Obviously, a lot of people thought this was a pertty cool idea. And started downloading the files. Lots of them.

Obviously, the US recording industry wasn't thrilled with the whole thing, and promptly sued the freaking be-jesus out of Napster. After a short but valiant struggle, Napster collapsed, disappearing from the face of the 'Net until it's reappearance last year as a legal, pay-to-play MP3 download service.

Not that Napster's demise had *any* affect on music downloading. It's death simply meant the appearance of more applications. AudioGalaxy, Gnutella, eventually the Kazaa that we know and love/loathe today (depending on how you feel about popups and spyware).

The lawsuits are still being flung around, because the RIAA doesn't like the idea of people getting their music for free. And that's a fair complaint. But the thing they never really got was that, even in 1999, it wasn't solely about getting free music. It was about getting *digital* music.

People wanted small, portable MP3 files that they could store on their computers (with their rapidly expanding storage space) instead of dozens or even hundreds of CDs, cluttered around their office / living room / study / wherever-the-heck-you-decide-to-put-your-computer. And as much as Napster might not have been the legal way to do it, it was, unfortunately, the *only* way to do it.

Even if you wanted to pay the recording industry a buck or two to be able to download a song legally, you couldn't. And it took years before you could.

They were more interested in filing lawsuits than they were in providing a legal alternative for digital music. That was a mistake. A big mistake.

The only real big-name options for legally downloading music -- Apple's iTunes and the newly legalized version of Napster -- appeared just last year. That's four years of people getting used to eating a free lunch. Now you expect them to pay just because you're asking nicely?

Don't hold your breath.

On top of that, if you want to run either Napster or iTunes, you'll need a computer running at least Windows 2000 or Windows XP. Windows 98 won't cut it.

Any particular reason why not? Windows 98 runs Kazaa just fine.

So, if you're running Windows 98, you can choose to either download music for free, or spend $250 to upgrade your computer so that you can download songs at $.99 apiece. Which is makes more financial sense to you?

Here in Canada, even if you *do* have Win2K or XP, you're going to have to move south of the border if you want to use either service. Napster won't run at all in Canada, and iTunes -- while you can open it up and do music searches and listen to 30 second clips of the songs you're looking for -- won't sell you a song until you have a US mailing address.

Pardon my language, but...what the fuck?

Are you planning on shipping me the MP3? Were you going to send it to me on CD, maybe? Or print it out in binary so that I could turn around and retype the song into my own personal computer?

Who the bloody hell cares where I live? It's a stupid digital song, made up of stupid 1s and 0s, that I can download in less than a minute over a high speed connection. Now just goddamn send it to me!

Five years since Napster invented the music disitribution method of the 21st century, and the music industry executives still don't have it figured out.

It's no wonder that people are still happily scarfing down their free lunches...

I am he as you are he as you are me.

Which would be more pompous...

To assume that I am the only who feels this way?

Or to assume that everyone does?




PS: Happy Easter

Are you there, God? It's me, Manuel.

Okay, let me explain why I think the whole notion of "prayer requests" is completely absurd.

First off, we'll have to assume that God actually exists. Because if he doesn't, then prayers of any kind become automatically absurd, and thatmakes my argument far too easy, but it also wouldn't be convincing in any way to those who *do* believe in God.

So, first off, we assume that God exists. Okay?

And we're going to also assume that praying actually has the potential to alter someone's fate. If I'm dying of cancer -- hypothetically -- then we can assume that there's a chance, even a slim one, that the power of prayer alone can push that cancer into remission and allow me to live a long and healthy life.

Now, if I pray all by myself, maybe nothing happens. Either because God doesn't hear me, or because he thinks I'm being selfish for asking to live, or...whatever, he's God, I'm sure he has his reasons.

But if a whole bunch of people who've never met me and know absolutely nothing about me pray for me, *then* God will listen and grant their wishes.

Huh?

Doesn't it seem likely that God -- and remember, we are assuming that he exists -- would take into consideration where the prayers were coming from? I mean, if I use someone who's never met me before as a personal reference on my resume, it's going to have very little bearing on whether or not I get the job. And if someone who doesn't know anything about me, and about whom I know nothing about, is praying on my behalf...isn't God going to kind of wonder why? And why would I count those person's prayers? How does that person praying know that I'm worth praying for? Is he doing it just to be a nice guy? And is that enough of a reason to have God change his mind about whether or not I should die of cancer?

Of course not.

It's absurd to think that a prayer is going to have more *oomph* just because 200 people who know absolutely nothing about me pray for me at the same time. It's like you're trying to trick God into granting your prayers, fool him into agreeing to it just by the sheer power of the numbers you have supporting you, and not because there's any actual reason to grant those prayers.

As I've said a few times, absurd.

Science, religion, cheeseburgers.

I was supposed to write something about science and religion today, because I didn't do it yesterday, but then a kind soul commented on that very column over at MyCariboo which, yes, prompted a response from me, and now I'm not sure how much more I have to say about the topic.

I guess the thing is this. In a nutshell.

Some days, I look out at the world and think that it's absolutely monstrous that some have convinced themselves that all of this -- all this brilliance and beauty in the world, in the universe, the very fact that any of us exist as all, that we exist as we do -- could have all just happened accidently.

Do I think there's a creator? Yes, I do. Do I know his name or what he looks like? No, I don't. Do I think I have to go to any particular church or recite any particular prayer in order to get on his good side? No, I don't. Do I think that any particular organization of religious intent has all the answers? No, I dont.

Does that mean the answers are unreachable? No, not necessarily.

It's my belief -- and this may be either naive or overly-optimistic, or even both -- that there answers out there to the questions we seek. I think if we work at it, we can find them. I also think that we'll find them a lot faster of stop worrying about labels. As I said in the column, does it really matter that much if science happens to stumble across something that feels a little too much like religion? Would it really be the end of the world, say, if a religion decided to shift around its central belief system in order to accept the existence of something like the dinosaurs?

I think we're too stuck on making sure our science stays scientific and our religion stays dogmatic to ever really get to the heart of things.

Which is too bad, really. Because that assumes that it's more important to be sure that you're asking the question in the right way than it is to actually find the answer.

And I just don't believe that.

Well, slap me with a pancake and call me Earl.

Tony Pierce linked me today. Which is not only incredibly generous of him, but it's also -- without a doubt -- the coolest moment of this young blog's life.

I only wish that, you know, I had some slightly more interesting content kicking around here when he dropped by. Kind of embarassing, really...

I should have posted something about science and religion today, but I didn't. Look for it tomorrow.

Naked Canadians are the best kind.

Raymi is Canadian. She doesn't post to her blog with anywhere near the regularity that Tony Pierce does. When she does, it's sometimes incoherent, it's sometime beautiful, and it sometimes contains half-naked photos of her. This is not a bad thing.

Happy April Fool's Day.

April Fool's Day Gallery

Tony Pierce is the Shizzle Dizzle. Fizzle.

Addition to the link list #1 -- Tony Pierce. Gotta start with the man himself. Hands down, the best writter blogging today. How he manages to post upwards of three or four times a day and still make every single word he writes resonate is a mystery to me. If you're not reading him, you're making a huge mistake that must be rectified immediately.

Facelift.

So it begins -- the step-by-tiny-step adjustment to the layout of this page to start pulling it away from the generic template. I'm droping (or, as of this writing, trying to drop) a list of links over in the right hand area.

Wish me luck. My HTML knowledge is circa 1996, soooooo, this might get ugly.

Incoherence.

It's been...uh, a little over a week since I started this stupid thing. At no point in that time have I felt like I was even remotely coherent while communicating through it. Even now these words feel too thick and malformed even as they push their way through my head.

I don't know why that is.

Shut up and listen to me, goddammit.

The thing about blogs, I think -- actually, the thing about any form of self-publishing -- is that you have to have a bit of an egomaniacal streak. You've got to assume that what you have to say is important enough, insightful enough, witty enough for others to take time out of their schedule to come and read whatever it is you've got to say.

It's like the vanity press -- people who pay a printing company to print their own book, either because they haven't bothered trying to get it published in the traditional way, or because the traditional way got them nothing but a kindly worded rejection letter. The problem is that sometimes there are very good reasons for an editor to be there, either saying "Cut this part out," or "Can you make this section longer?" or "This whole thing is a gigantic piece of shit. Please don't waste my time."

If I don't assume people are coming to read this, why on earth would I bother to try to post something at least once a day? On the other hand, why on earth would I be pompous enough to assume that anyone would feel the desire to visit this page once, yet alone on a regular enough basis that I should bother to update every day?

Ah, blogs are stupid.

See ya tomorrow.

Um, g'morning.

It is, for the record, my intent to put some kind of content in this blog each and every day. Except for Sunday. And it's not that I'm particularly religious, I just wanted to have one day of the week that I didn't have to think about something to post here, and that seemed as good a day as any, and besides, after work, and then the Sopranos, I'm usually to brain dead to compose a sentence, not to mention a dozen.

So, anyway, yeah. This is the post for today. Hoo-rah.

I vant to sahk yuhr bluhd.

Okay, so there's no such thing as Vampires, right? That's something we can agree on?

Okay, good.

I'm not sure exactly what it was the really grabbed my interest about these "Real Life Vampire" web sites, and those people claiming to, in fact, be those real life vampires. It was partly, I think, their sincerity and in it, their desperation to be something different, something mysterious, something bordering on frightening, instead of just being a plain, boring human being, like the rest of us.

It was also, I think, the extremely exclusionary nature of this vampirism's design. You couldn't be turned into a vampire by anyone else -- no bite on the neck would send you down that long, dark road to damnation and immortality. You either were one, or you weren't. And if someone who wasn't already part of the club came knocking at the door, wanting to join, the only answer they got was, "Sorry, you can't."

If you weren't already a vampire, there was no joining up later.

It would seem to me -- and this, of course, is just a guess -- that these "Vampires" were the sorts of people who found themselves excluded from groups earlier on in their lives and who now adore the ability to be able to exclude others from the group that they have since created for themselves.

Just as entertaining to me is listening to the vampires complain about how gosh-darn difficult it is to be a vampire. How the sun hurts their eyes, how their "more empathic nature" makes them more prone to depression, how...blah blah blah. It all comes down to the same thing: "Poor me."

Which really isn't different from a lot of people. A lot of people aren't happy with their lot in life. They don't like their job, they don't like their girlfriend or their wife. They don't like their computer or the CD they just bought or their car that has started to make funny sounds while driving to a job that, have I mentioned, they don't like very much.

But these vampires...oh, they've taken it a step further. They have even more things to get all angst-y about. The sunlight, their empathy, that insatiable appetite for blood...oh, you couldn't *possibly* understand the pain I'm going through right now...

You're just...you know...a *mortal*...

We all want to be unique. We all want to be our own individual selves, separate from the rest of the world. When we walk down the street, there isn't one of us who wants to be just another face in the crowd, our identities disappearing in the sea of ordinary, average, every-day people. We all want to be remembered after we've died, 100 years after we've died, 1000 years after we've died. And we're all trying to figure out some way of maintaining that individuality, to make sure that we are and will always be unique beings, and not be forgotten.

And most of us -- vampires included, I would think -- are still looking for our ways of ensuring that.

Oh, the glorious weed

I've spent the better part of the last year in an on-again / off-again struggle to quit smoking. It's not fun. I kind of wish I'd never started in the first place, but I do recall a lot of years spent enjoying the process of smoking, so I guess as long as I can dump the habit before lung cancer sets in, I'll be happy.

It's been eight days now without a cigarette -- without even a puff -- and I think I'm doing okay.

I'm on the patch, and that helps. I know it's worked for some people, and not been so successful for others, but it seems to be working for me. It sure helped last year, when I managed to dump the habit for three months before starting up again.

The thing with starting again is that, it's never a matter of suddenly finding yourself smoking a pack a day again. It's slow. Insidious. You cheat here and there, stealing a drag off someone, or having a whole cigarette to yourself one afternoon. You've quit for so long, you think you can get away with it. One quick smoke isn't going to send you back into the land of addiction again.

And it doesn't. But it weakens you. And you start to think, "Well, if I can handle just one, I'm sure I can handle two." So the next day you have two, and the day after that you have three. And after a few weeks of that sort of thing, you discover that you're smoking a pack a day again.

It sneaks up on you.

The patch is good for the cravings. At least the physical ones. The psychological ones are a different matter altogether. I don't miss the smoking -- and when I do feel a faint craving, I think about the taste or the way my throat would feel some mornings or how I realized after quitting just how badly smokers stink. And that'll usually take care of it.

What I do still miss -- and what I can't figure out how to get rid of yet -- is the craving for the crutch.

When things get bad or stressful or I find myself feeling a bit lower in mood than usual, that's when I really want a cigarette. Not because I have a physical craving, but because...that's just what you do when things get bad or stressful or you find yourself feeling a bit lower in mood than usual. And I haven't yet found a crutch that works as well as the smoking.

Still, eight days...that's not bad. It's a good start. And I feel better about it this time around, because I don't want to taste that again, I don't want my throat to feel that way anymore, and I definitely don't want to be carrying the reek around with me everywhere I go.

But the crutch...the crutch...

That's what's going to kill me.

At least it won't be lung cancer.

I should write about this

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Because they can...

Guardian Unlimited | The Guardian | Things get worse with Coke

Whatever it takes to make a profit, I guess. Up to and including selling tap water.

Good enough for now.

So, what's this all about, anyway?

A few weeks back I wrote a column a little different than most. It didn't talk much about computers or the Internet. Instead it was a rambling, introspective narrative that was written during a power outage.

I received a few comments about it, and most cases, the people commenting didn't quite *get it*. Now, granted, ultimately that reflects on me as a writer, and would indicate that the column probably could have been improved upon. But it also got me thinking that, sometimes, it would be nice to comment about the column itself, in a medium outside of the column. Kind of like the commentary track on a DVD.

So that's what this is for, in part. On top of that, if I can get into the blogging thing, it might prove to be a place for me to write about things that aren't appropriate for the column, or use language that isn't appropriate for the column. Or just post links to things that I think are cool.

We'll see.

Right now, to be frank, I don't much know what this is going to turn out to be. All I know is that, for the moment, it's here. Let's see what it becomes.

So...test number two

Hi again. Just testing the look of this blog with a few more lines of text in it. I'm not 100% sure that I like this look and layout, but I'm also leaning on the lazy side of things I don't much feel like designing a blog layout from scratch. May still look around the 'net for a template to use, other than this one. We'll see.

This is a test message. Hi mom!

Hi. This is a test message. That's why it's so short.