March 2007 Archives

An excellent post from the Consumerist which includes a letter of how one music fan became a "pirate".  This plays nicely into my DRM research.  It really made me frustrated and sad to read this.

"You don't understand," I said, "These files were not copied or pirated, I actually purchased them."

"Well" she responded, "You didn't actually purchase the files, you really purchased a license to listen to the music, and the license is very specific about how they can be played or listened to."

Now I was baffled. "Records never came with any such restrictions," I said.

She replied, "Well they were supposed to, but we weren't able to enforce those licenses back then, and now we can"

This customer service person is a complete idiot...is that what they train their staff to say?  ARGH!

By the way this is not piracy:

Since I've resigned myself not to waste any more time with the music business, I suppose I'll have to resort to purchasing used CD's & records, or having my friends occasionally make me a copy of one of their newer CD's.

No where in the law does it say you cannot copy a friend's CD.  I especially loved his analogy of the current state of music to drinking Coke:

I mean, could you imagine the consumer response if Coke could only be consumed from specific Coke-approved equipment, and then only in the specific ways that the folks at Coke wanted the product to be consumed. "drinking Coke with fast food is no problem, but we must warn you that your license forbids the mixing of Coke with any alcoholic beverages..."

As for my music updates, I'm still enjoying my Rhapsody service and mp3 player.  I've given up on library audiobook services though.  I request the CDs from the library and just copy them to my computer to put on my mp3 player.  I care not to share these files with friends, they are deleted when I'm done with them, they're just sanity savers...my time is more precious than wasting it on troubleshooting why these audiobook services don't work with my mp3 player anymore.

I've been following the blog some at techPresident which is a conversation about what the '08 presidential candidates are doing on the web. I found this particular post on online transparency as it relates to two scheduled house party events that both Edwards and Obama are incorporating into their campaign (both next week).

As the situation stands, Obama has 8 parties scheduled within 25 miles of my house in Franconia, Edwards has 1; Obama has 19 scheduled within 25 miles of Concord, Edwards has 2; Obama has 5 within 25 miles of Portsmouth, Edwards has none; Obama 11 in Keene, Edwards 3; Manchester 27 for Obama, 5 for Edwards; Nashua 5 for Edwards, 36 for Obama. You see where this is going.

That kind of inside baseball is generally under tight wraps, especially if you're the Edwards campaign. The staff and the field people know how many parties are planned, but they also know enough not to go blabbing it to anyone. Now they don't have to.

This is how intelligence has always been gathered - good information is readily available, sometimes just staring you in the face. And these days, there's a lot more of it.

A couple of things really jumped out at me when I read this. The first is this is going to be a presidential campaign like none we've ever seen. Every campaign has made some sort of effort to to draw in the internet crowd with their websites (some way more successful than others). The second thing that jumped out at me is the last line. There is a lot more information out there, some of it is not too hard to find either. Our society is better for this too...especially when you're talking about politics. Transparency is a beautiful thing.

I've been thinking about redoing my blog design. I believe I've had roughly the same format for at least 5 years now...at least since I was on Typepad and that was about 2 blog hosts ago anyway.

This will probably be a slow process, maybe a summer project since my class schedule is a bit crazy right now. I'm taking cataloging this summer and it's webcentric so I'm crossing my fingers for a semester not so crazy as this one.

I'd like to widen the columns for sure...I might not change the colors since I'm quite fond of blue. I like the banner only because it's one of the few things I created myself in Photoshop that I've been proud of (despite my limited Photoshop skills)...it'll change a little bit but it'll probably be similar.

Then again, maybe I'll do something completely different...spice life up a little bit. We'll see how I feel when I buckle down and do it.

I have been doing a little updating on my Wayne State site recently. I didn't get all of my assignments linked from my reference class last semester yet and I'm trying to think about how to preserve my multi-user computing class website on my student site...I might have to preserve my cgi and perl pages on heidigoseek instead of the lisp server. I enjoy fiddling with all of these websites, I wish I had more time to do it though.

I just noticed this post on Library Stuff about SI's new specialization in Social Computing. I had stumbled across this specialization earlier last week actually...I was browsing around the course descriptions looking for anything that I might be able to transfer over to Wayne State (nothing jumped out at me to be honest).

I hate to be cynical...but the truth is that since I'm less pessimistic than I used to be, I'm now forced to be cynical. What kind of job would I be able to get with a degree in MySpace?

Not that the concept isn't cool...a class or two on the subject might be nice (and even interesting), but a whole specialization? I'm not so sure about that.

I'm certainly not knocking SI, Michigan was my first choice in grad schools for about 2 years before I started at WSU...the two programs are as different as night and day and this is more proof of that. There used to be 4 specializations for Michigan's program and now there are 10 (plus one that allows you to make up any specialization you want). It seems had I gone to Michigan I probably would have a hard time finding my focus there...I know me, I definitely would have a hard time finding my focus there.

Of course, I also think that some of the best ideas in social computing are not coming out of the academic setting either...they're coming from average people with a few friends and some time to kill.

This essay on LilyPond music notation software was discussed at a2b3 today. I read it just now and I'm just all amazed by it. Not just amazed that somebody tackled the issues of the popular music notation software out there, but also did it as open source! I had no idea such a thing existed!

I'm truly excited about this, not just as a computer geek but as a musician. Software like Finale and Sibelius are just insanely expensive. LilyPond does most everything that Finale does and even looks better. The drawback (which I don't even think is a huge deal being a computer geek) is that you don't have the GUI with LilyPond, entering notations is completely text based. When the file is saved it then saves a pdf which will have the nicely formatted notations available for your to print. Of course for me it would be like programming code and even the GUI on Finale isn't all that wonderful either so I could even prefer this.

Now a story...several years ago I performed in the orchestra for the musical Titanic. For whatever reason there were 3 flutes in the show and a real lack of flue music (3 flutes is highly unusual but it doesn't matter when you all get paid the same). Without going into a huge discussion of how musicals are scored, just know that the woodwind parts are pretty screwy. Each reed book can contain anywhere from 2-4 different instruments and trying to sort that all out can be a huge mess (the scoring makes sense for Broadway, not for community groups). There were several times when I didn't play long periods during the show so I decided to transpose a few of the clarinet parts (mostly to stave off the boredom). I downloaded Finale Notepad which is a free, but limited version of Finale. The program was so limited that I couldn't change time signatures or keys during the song file, I ended up using scissors, tape, and whiteout to actually make a readable piece of music out of the darn thing. What I would've have give to have known about this program then!

If you're a music type, this is worth checking out. I think the interface could take some time to get used to but I bet it wouldn't be hard with a little practice.

I came across this article on ExtremeTech about how people can go about problem solving their own computer issues.

Troubleshooting tech problems is really no more difficult than solving problems in any arena.

I agree, but that might just be because I'm relentless at getting to the bottom of my computer issues. My recent computer troubles were physical, otherwise any issues I've had with my system have been solvable for me. A combination of good logical reasoning and excellent internet searching skills makes it possible to figure things out on my own almost 100% of the time.

I have tried to put myself on the other side though. I try to imagine what it's like to be completely baffled by computer problems...some people are so freightened by computers that I believe it gives them anxiety attacks. This is not an easy thing for me to do but I think it's helps to make me realize that not everybody in the world can put things together like I can.

Working in a public library is a huge reality check too, I'm not stunned by the number of people who are uncomfortable with computers anymore. Although it is my hope that I see less people baffled by technology in the future than I do now.

I see computers as wonderful tools. I also see them as investments of my own time and knowledge. On a personal level I want to know that I am able to troubleshoot this machine that I spend every waking moment fiddling with and spent so much darn money on. I guess I also gain some person fulfillment when I can find out what's wrong with it and fix it.

Of course I realize that there's a lot of people out there who would rather have other people try to solve their problems (another reason why there will probably always be libraries and librarians in the world!), but I would hope that anybody who wants the responsibility of owning a computer (or anything for that matter) should also want to know how to fix it when things go awry. Maybe someday?

Ann Arbor District Library has truly the most beautiful MySpace page I've ever seen.

Of course in true AADL fashion they took theirs one extra step further...they've added a "search the AADL catalog" feature. Is that cool or what?!

Group Recipes is a social networking site around food. I've only been on it since last night but I'm already really into it. You can share recipes or restaurant reviews with your friends or search for different food to try.

I can see myself getting a bit addicted to this one. I like to cook and I almost never make the exact same recipe twice (if I do then I know it's good!)

And to top it off the site is very nicely designed.

I was having all sorts of blog problems last night, including not being able to post this update about Clipmarks, which I installed and tried to use. I like parts about it but it's really not going to work for me so I don't think I'll continue using it. Two posts that I posted using Clipmarks screwed up my blog and I don't feel like trying to figure out how to make it work.

There were a few other things I didn't like about it too:

• Clipmarks adds a border around their posts which was messing up my blog by pushing my right border off. I couldn't find a decent way to get rid of the border. I also wished it wasn't so large.
• The toolbar was slow to load and slow to clip.
• I couldn't specify tags on the posts through the browser box.
• I couldn't choose a category for my posts either, this would have to be done by logging into my blog admin after I posted.
• My profile page never showed me my clips whenever I was logged in. It looked like it was stil some sort of intro page that I couldn't get out of.

I really like the idea of Clipmarks, there might be something else out there that does a better job and less bulky.

My blog needs some maintanence here and there though, I've been neglecting it these days. I want to add some new services to the sidebar and try to move some things around.

I realize I hadn't written in my blog for some time. Almost two weeks ago I had to take my computer in for repair and I've been playing catchup with email and feeds (well mostly email, feeds are still a mess).

My computer is home and happy, and hopefully I'll be motivated to post on the blog again soon.