This is neat! If the election could be determined by MySpace friends, Barack Obama would be kicking ass!
Just a plea to people who add candidates as MySpace friends...please vote too!
February 2007 Archives
"From your 81 subscriptions, over the last 30 days you read 2,900 items, starred 106 items, and shared 0 items."
Wow, that's a lot of stuff. The only thing I have trouble doing is going through my starred feeds and doing something with them. That requires time I don't have.
I love it! I went to check out if they changed around BarackObama.com since I was there last (yesterday), and they have! The website has all sorts of neat social features. Blogs, event planning, even links to YouTube, Facebook, and Flickr!!! I can't wait to add my pictures from today's event to my Flickr page now :) More importantly I can't wait to see everybody else's because I couldn't see the stage at all...
It was awesome to be there, despite not being able to see much. The energy from the crowd was absolutely amazing. We got there at 9:00 am and the place was already packed...an hour before the speech was to start! I just couldn't believe how amazing everybody was though.
My feet were sufficiently frozen by the end of the event and we found a tiny Mexican cafe near our parking garage where we went to wait for Alex's parents (and warm up with some coffee, food was excellently cheap and good too!) There was limited seating and of course a lot of people coming in and out of the parking garage, I noticed a lot of other people had the same idea. What I loved was one particular table where one man had been seated he had invited another couple to come sit too. By the time we left there was yet another couple there that hadn't been there before. I don't think any of these people knew each other prior to this so it really made me happy to see that we do have a community spirit left...people in the community who weren't there were genuinely happy too (at the restaurant and the museum). I think everybody was just a little bit happier today!
After our lunch Alex and I went strolling back by the old state capital where they were now tearing down the stage. I took some pictures of some Lincoln landmarks and then we walked down to the library and museum. I went into the library this time (we didn't get a chance to go in before) and then we visited the museum again. The exhibits didn't change at all but it was good to see them again. I felt like I saw everything differently than I did over a year ago when I went. I also knew a little bit more about Lincoln since I had read Team of Rivals (a long but awesome book if you like Lincoln and history) this past summer. It was a perfect way to end our visit in Springfield today.
Now we're at Alex's parents for the night and I should be conentrating on my DRM research and getting a list of articles to assign to my copyright classmates on Monday...
Alex and I are taking a little road trip to Springfield, IL this weekend. Saturday is when Barack Obama is announcing whether he's running for President...we decided we wanted to go.
We were procrastinating on actually deciding if we wanted to go this weekend but we finally decided for sure yesterday. We'll stay at a hotel for one night on Friday (they were filling up as I was making my reservation this morning!). The press conference is at 10:00 am, and if there's time we'll probably try to go to the Abraham Lincoln museum again while we're there (I love that place!) Although I'm sure there's other things to do in Springfield that I'm just not aware of...
Then we'll probably stay with Alex's parents in Bloomington on Saturday and head home on Sunday. I have a crazy amount of work to do too so we'll see how this works out. I'm leading class discussion on DRM in two weeks for my digital copyright class and I need to come up with about 6 or so articles for the class to read. Since I may be without sufficient access to the internet while I'm gone I might have to look for those this evening. This evening we also need to pack. Usually we do this at the very last minute but I work until 5:00 tomorrow so that means we won't be heading out until after then...that means we won't even be in Springfield until midnight or later. I also want to clear the pictures off my camera before I leave...I've been taking a picture a day but I haven't been posting them so I have some work to do with those. I need to have plenty of space on the camera for the pictures from this weekend though :)
I was befuddled when I saw this on TechCrunch:
Apple Opely Supports Death of DRM
Apple would have been the last company I'd have guessed to write an open letter to the music industry asking for DRM to go away...
Here's what I found most ironic. I started reading one of my research paper resources on DRM last night. The current book I'm looking at is Digital Rights Management: Protecting and Monetizing Content by Joan Van Tassel. Her approach is clearly one of support for DRM and its uses in digital content, however she does lay out all sides of the issue. Van Tassel calls Apple's business model "a bright spot in an otherwise gloomy landscape." I suppose the content industry might not agree with this assessment after Apple's current plea. We'll have to see how this one plays out though.
I suppose Apple had no choice with its DRM to gain the support of the music industry, but that still doesn't explain why their DRM also has to lock users out of other digital content services (see my post yesterday on downloadable audio books.) Of course Microsoft has its own issues too...Plays for Sure doesn't always and I really believe that the Zune is going in the wrong direction with its DRM.
I have to admit that this all plays really nicely into my research :) I love it!
If you've been following along you know I've been taking 2 classes this semester. I love both of them. The first one is sitting in front of a Sun machine with Solaris installed and playing for 3 hours. The second one is talking about digital copyright for 3 hours. How can anybody not think that's fun?! I know I'm a bit of a geek :)
Going back to all of this music stuff I wanted to comment on how much I love Rhapsody. I get unlimited music downloaded to my mp3 player for roughly $15.00/month. I love how easy it is to use and I love how I can get most any music I want on there. Coupled with my Sansa player it's quite awesome. I was thinking recently at how I probably never want to buy music again. Of course I don't own the music, it's completely subscription (unless I buy the track), but at least this way I know if something were to ever happen to my computer then that won't matter since I didn't buy anything. I also thought about how much my music tastes change over time. At least I can rifle through my old CDs to see what I was listening to a few years ago, that's a bit nostalgic but I really don't listen to those CDs anymore. Rifling through music files on your computer loses some of that nostalgia...for all practical purposes I suppose I would rather just find it and load it and save the space on my computer.
That's Rhapsody, but this weekend I decided to try out a downloadable audio book from the library. The library I work for uses NetLibrary, which I haven't tried yet. I found a book that I wanted to read through Ann Arbor's audio book service, which uses Overdrive. The download process was a bit confusing but I think I managed to do things in the right order. I was a bit annoyed that Overdrive made me download additional software to my computer though...I think that was strike 1. Everything transferred to my mp3 player fine (I guess I was doubtful). I was going to listen to the book on the way to school yesterday though, and when I hit play on my player it said I needed to sync it to activate the subscription! Huh? Sync it to what? I have a Windows Plays for Sure mp3 player but I do most of my music management through Rhapsody now.
Before my digital copyright class I was sitting with my computer and talking to my classmate, she said to try syncing it through Windows Media Player. I had thought about this in the car too. I did have my cord and player so I tried it before class...it still didn't work. I then put it all away and decided to mess around with it later.
Conversation during class usually jumps around to different topics and somehow libraries offering digital content came up. My teacher mentioned that the most worrisome thing about digital content and libraries is that libraries don't own the actual digital file. Of course the issue is preservation. Libraries work through vendors to allow access but in actuality the vendor is the one doing the collection development of digital files. They can put in or take away any content they want.
Of course that's when it hit me. Libraries offering digital content, like downloadable audio books might not be such a good idea, at least not without some control over the content themselves. The library is doing the same thing I'm doing through Rhapsody. Rhapsody makes sense from a consumer perspective, and I'm choosing the subscription route because it makes sense for the way I am listening to music right now. Does it make sense for libraries though? I know libraries are there to offer us access but I also trust that librarians are making informed decisions on content...not vendors. I also want to trust that libraries are in a position to preserve materials that they feel should be preserved.
Wired tackled this issue in one of its blogs. The non-librarian perspective on this is also quite interesting. My own DRM experiences and some experiences I've heard through our own patrons for NetLibrary have made me think twice about whether libraries should be endorsing DRM and services that only work through specific players. Not to mention the difficulty most people have to go through just to get the service to work for them.
Of course there's no easy answer for any of this. My research topic this semester is on DRM for my digital copyright class so maybe I'll come out of it with a completely different opinion...but I doubt it. Chances are I will be more educated on what we're dealing with. I think the future of accessible digital content through libraries is at stake...that is a big deal.
Ok, so I haven't ordered it yet, I have to get my financial aid money first but I'll be ordering it as soon as I get that. I ordered an external hard drive this weekend...something we desperately needed anyway. I want to transfer things to that and clean up my current computer so I'll be prepared for my new one.
I'm really psyched about getting Windows Vista too, I don't know why but I just want to play around with it!
I would also be nice not to have to carry this 8 pound beast to school. The new computer I'm looking at is a couple of pounds smaller but even a couple of pounds will help. I think I almost threw my back out yesterday...I need one of them bag on wheels things, but honestly I probably won't ever get one because it makes people look like they're at the airport and not at school.
I know this has been floating around for awhile, but I finally got the motivation to watch it right now.
It's great, it made me smile. :)
Oh my gosh! THIS prevented me from getting to work on time this morning! I-94 was closed entirely and they were routing traffic off on Rawsonville Rd. Since I normally come home Rawsonville I decided to just skip the interstate mess and take the backroads...of course I was already supposed to be at work by the time I got onto Rawsonville. Wouldn't you know I also got stopped by a train taking the backroads. I got into work at 9:00 according to my car clock and 9:10 by the clock we usually open the library doors by. I was running around like a mad woman trying to get everything open. I don't even want to get into how the rest of the morning went, it was pretty much crazy for the next couple of hours.
So because some moron decided to pull up his sock while driving my entire morning started out crap! Thanks!
Luckily everybody is ok, it sounded like a pretty crappy accident...
