I just set up a calendar with gmail, so if any of you want a minute-by-minute update of what I’m doing and you have a gmail address (and I care about you), let me know and I’ll let you in on it. Plus, you should all use it too so I can see what you’re up to! Oh, and I told Dana that my email address would be here and it’s not and putting it here is easier than making it fit somewhere else, so: jbrooke23@gmail.com. Other than that, heading to Hannibal for a couple of days to quench my boredom with some Rachel time!
Glad That’s Over…
Well, I finished the last of my Fontbonne classes last Thursday and just checked my grades and will be leaving that part of my education with a 4.0. Now, my mom could verify this for you, but I’m pretty sure I haven’t had all As since about 2nd grade and two semesters in a row is pretty crazy. The really terrible part is that this was the most expensive, but easiest educational endeavor I’ve ever encountered, and it has been frustrating the whole way through. You could check the archives of my Blogger site to really see, but I guess in the end, I’ve just been lucky before with Hannibal and Truman and hopefully I won’t keep being disillusioned with higher education in the future…
Glad That's Over…
Well, I finished the last of my Fontbonne classes last Thursday and just checked my grades and will be leaving that part of my education with a 4.0. Now, my mom could verify this for you, but I’m pretty sure I haven’t had all As since about 2nd grade and two semesters in a row is pretty crazy. The really terrible part is that this was the most expensive, but easiest educational endeavor I’ve ever encountered, and it has been frustrating the whole way through. You could check the archives of my Blogger site to really see, but I guess in the end, I’ve just been lucky before with Hannibal and Truman and hopefully I won’t keep being disillusioned with higher education in the future…
The Music Industry
So the new Switchfoot album came out on Tuesday and Brooke and I decided to buy it. Well, I was looking it up online to see how much it cost at various places and I noticed that the CD is copy-protected. This means that Windows users can find it difficult to copy the music on the CD to their computer, let alone to another CD. After discovering this, we decided that it’d be cheaper to just buy the CD through Wal-Mart’s music download service (Brooke had done it before…), getting the CD (plus an extra “promotional song”) for $9.44. This way, it’d not only be cheaper to buy the CD, but it’s also already be in a digital format, making it easy to burn the CD (as we would have done anyway).
…well…we downloaded the album and got all the tracks. Brooke listened to the first one to make sure it worked, and it did. Then she tried to burn them. Wouldn’t work. Kept popping up various copy-protection error messages. Not. Pleased.
I ended up having to call Wal-Mart’s music service to ask what was up. Apparently, to burn the files, you have to download them to your computer, then open up each one in Windows Media Player, thereby prompting the download of a license for EACH SONG. So I had to sit there and open up each song manually in WMP…and then could only burn it using WMP (not Nero, or some other CD burning software). Not. Pleased.
So we jumped through the hoops and got it burned. Now, I’m ripping the album into .mp3 format using a program called CDex, which is a). completely free and b). can get around copy-protected CDs. In order to get around it, you need to make sure that you put the CD in your computer and DON’T run the “autoplay” software…’cause when you do that, it installs some license crap on your system, preventing you from copying or ripping the album. Just open up CDex and rip it into your preferred format…
This crap also comes up at the same time that the music industry is trying to get Steve Jobs to raise the prices of music downloads at iTunes. There’s a full article, but to quote a key part:
“To have only one price point is not fair to our artists, and I dare say not appropriate to consumers. The market should decide, not a single retailer … Some songs should be $0.99 and some songs should be more. I don’t want to give anyone the impression that $0.99 is a thing of the past … We are selling our songs through iPod, but we don’t have a share of iPod’s revenue … We want to share in those revenue streams. We have to get out of the mindset that our content has promotional value only.” — Edgar Bronfman Jr., Warner Music Group CEO
So, Steve Jobs said last week that the music industry is greedy for trying to raise prices on iTunes downloads…and Bronfman gave the reply seen above. I think Jobs was proved right, eh?
Mr. Bronfman, the minute you stop paying talent-less “musicians” millions of dollars a year just so that they can continue living extravagantly, then I’ll consider listening to your comments… The music industry apparently has plenty of money, otherwise “artists” like Britney Spears, P. Diddy, Jennifer Lopez, and Jessica Simpson wouldn’t be raking it in every year. How about you drop their salaries to something reasonable (like…hell…$200,000 in a year…sound good enough?) and use the extra revenue to a). stop complaining so much, and b). find some good artists to promote… Otherwise, you and your company don’t need that kind of cash…it could be better spent feeding a third-world country…or hell…this country…
God vs Evolution
“There are gaps in science everywhere. Are we to fill them all with divinity? There were gaps in Newton’s universe. They were ultimately filled by Einstein’s revisions. There are gaps in Einstein’s universe, great chasms between it and quantum theory. Perhaps they are filled by God. Perhaps not. But it is certainly not science to merely declare it so.”
— Charles Krauthammer, Time Magazine, August 8, 2005
I posted another essay posted in the “Articles” section above…check it out…
There seem to have been more than a few articles about this subject over the past few weeks. There’s a show that’s going to be on the History Channel on August 7th called “Ape to Man: The Evolution of Evolution,” indicating that interest in the subject is still as strong as ever.
We talked about teaching intelligent design (……creationism…) in our public schools in my Evolutionary Thought class this past semester and came to the conclusion, much like anyone who knows anything about science, that it’s a dumb idea. It’s one thing to teach it in a Catholic high school, but to teach it in our public schools is entirely wrong. What happened to a separation of church and state?
Anyway, it’s a good essay…check it out…
I'm old…
It’s very amazing what the folks at the Columbia Daily Tribune can dig up on a person… Apparently, I was in an article on June 25, 1995…a full 10 years before my wedding… Scroll down the page to the June 25th listings…
Thanks, Dad, for pointing out this embarrassment… 😛
I’m old…
It’s very amazing what the folks at the Columbia Daily Tribune can dig up on a person… Apparently, I was in an article on June 25, 1995…a full 10 years before my wedding… Scroll down the page to the June 25th listings…
Thanks, Dad, for pointing out this embarrassment… 😛
The **AA can suck it…
So yesterday, I worked on a laptop here at the HelpDesk (everything was in Japanese…so it was a little interesting navigating Japanese Windoze XP…) and noticed that the girl had WinMX installed, which is a P2P program… Now, I heard about WinMX, like, Freshman year…back in the days before Napster was shut down (old-skool Napster, not this new “legal” crap), so I didn’t expect anyone to still use it… Then, the same day, I see this article.
The gist of the article is that the NPD Group recently released statistics saying that Apple’s iTunes music service is used as much as popular P2P services. It is actually ranked second (surveying the number of users on the service) in programs used to download music …behind WinMX… Kazaa, Limewire, etc. are all apparently used less than iTunes to download music…and eDonkey is not even on the list (even though you can log into it right now and find 4 million users…as opposed to the 2 million users on WinMX…). The real kicker here is that the RIAA and the MPAA both use the NPD Group for their statistics…
So yeah, essentially, the **AA pisses me off tremendously… I actually did a speech on this subject for (you guessed it…) speech class a few years back, so that research pissed me off even more… As the article points out, the NPD Group uses old school statistics to survey data and extrapolate for the general population…but you’d think they could, oh, I don’t know, actually log into the services and see how many people are using each service at a given time? It seems these fools do everything they can to distort the facts (namely that they aren’t losing money at all due to file-sharing and that they are, in fact, perhaps even gaining revenues…) just to keep ahold of a system that has been in place far longer than it should have been… I’m thinking that the era of CDs in stores should be over and everything should be electronic as soon as possible, ’cause these lawsuits, etc. against people like Gertrude Walton is silly…
…and now I'm not alone…
So yeah, Brooke decided to try being trendy like me and made herself a blog (I think she was just bored, really…) using Blogger.com (since Xanga is stoopid…)…therefore, you should check it out.
Otherwise, I’m leaving shortly for my fourth Dave Matthews Band concert, which will be in St. Louis. Brooke, Kristen, Adam Waudby and I are all going, so it should be a fun trip, although the driving will probably get annoying. Needless to say, I’m quite excited for this concert, especially since their most recent album is very different from previous offerings…I’m anxious to see what it sounds like in a live setting…and believe you me, I’ll let you know tomorrow…
…and now I’m not alone…
So yeah, Brooke decided to try being trendy like me and made herself a blog (I think she was just bored, really…) using Blogger.com (since Xanga is stoopid…)…therefore, you should check it out.
Otherwise, I’m leaving shortly for my fourth Dave Matthews Band concert, which will be in St. Louis. Brooke, Kristen, Adam Waudby and I are all going, so it should be a fun trip, although the driving will probably get annoying. Needless to say, I’m quite excited for this concert, especially since their most recent album is very different from previous offerings…I’m anxious to see what it sounds like in a live setting…and believe you me, I’ll let you know tomorrow…