Sam Carr’s Dog Speaks

I happened upon a digg post about The Pirate Bay being interviewed by the BBC and it made me sad to see so much ignorance-by-choice lumped into one small page.

If a musician crafts a song and decides to share it with the world through album sales, and the first person to buy a copy makes it available to the rest of the world for free, that is piracy. If another person cruising the internet finds the song and grabs a copy without having first purchased it, that is piracy. If a third party knowingly and willingly makes arrangements for this transaction to be made, that is also piracy. It doesn’t matter that the captain of the pirate ship didn’t board the other vessel, rape any women or even see the loot or know what it was; the captain is a pirate. Of course, you can throw Photoshop or Office or whatever “created for profit” blob of 1s and 0s you want to in place of the song and the idea is just as valid.

I have to give an example of the inherent mentality of even the guys that run The Pirate Bay. Peter Sunde, one of the four main pirates running the site, said this:

Nobody is crying that people who used to go around selling ice to people do not have a job anymore because of the fridge…

zomgwtfbbq?!?! Do you think there is the possibility that just maybe it’s because nobody is stealing ice? People are making it themselves with a tool that was made for that purpose. Nobody is saying you can’t use the computer to make your own movies, music, software, etc. Nobody will go around crying about the people you put out of business by making your own property.

I do understand there should be limits to what can be considered property. Inevitable progressions of data manipulation processes should not be patentable. This includes, but is not limited to, turning 1 into 0 by subtracting 1 from itself. It may seem absurd to even consider patenting this process, but sillier patents have been approved.

It’s not that I never join the ranks of the eye patch wearing online horde, I’m just tired of constantly hearing people use ‘freedom of data’ or ‘freedom of information’ as a mantra for the rationalization of theft. I do realize that laws governing property are never going to be ‘right’. I also believe real estate should not be property, but that is a discussion for another time. In fact, the only thing that any laws can actually do is try to impinge upon people’s freedom and sometimes succeed for good or bad. In many cases, laws are used for horrific travesties of justice; in most cases, they are a necessary evil put into place to actually protect freedom.

Don’t get me wrong, I am a true anarchist at heart even if not always in actions, as the flip side of that coin is death; absolute peace is only possible, though not assured, in death. It’s late. I’m tired. Too many tangents roaming in out of he fog… you get my drift. respect:good::piracy:bad (and I still think piracy is the wrong word to be used for this type of theft)

I have finally got all the hiragana down. I can run through the online flash cards for 104 characters in random order with 100 percent recognition and I can write the hiragana in a,i,u,…ka,ki,ku… order or a,ka,sa,…i,ki,shi… order with only a couple of short mental farts.

I’ve even gone as far as learning about half of the katakana already. They are much easier once you learn the hiragana. I’ve also stumbled upon some really nice sites for learning elementary kanji. I’m now hoping to be familiar enough with the entire kana to start reading Japanese texts later today. I may not know what I’m reading, but at least I’ll be on my way to building my vocabulary… hehe.

This is an extremely stimulating mental workout. YOU should try it! Seriously though, if you only know one language, you should start now down the road to communication.

I think I just had a bit too much on my plate, so I decided to do something about it. I set the plate on the ground for the dog and decided to learn a foreign language. The main countries I want to visit some day are Belize, Australia and Japan. Belize is an English speaking country and I think I could fake my way through Australia… hehe. That leaves Japanese to learn.

Well, I’m a few days into my studies now, and I think I’m coming along nicely. I’ve got 30 of the basic 46 hiragana down pat. I’m using computer flash cards I built with html and writing the kana as far as I know it by hand constantly. Of course, I’m learning words like neko (cat), aka (red), and such as I learn the kana. I’ve also got a pretty good grasp of sentence structure, though I’m still a bit lost with particles. Give me a few more days and I’ll have hiragana and katakana down. I’ll keep studying vocabulary while learning the kana and be ready for 1st grade kanji within a week. Of course, in order to be considered literate, I’ll need to learn about 2000 kanji. That is the degree of literacy required of an elementary school graduate in Japan. I suppose I’m on my way, as I already know about 10… hehe.

Along side my lessons, I’m remodeling my kitchen. I’ve redone the cabinets in a glossy white and gave the doors a distressed white eggshell finish. I’ll be putting glossy black hardware on these soon. I put a white tile back-splash behind the stove, and I’m now putting white tile between the upper cabinets and countertops. I’ll continue the white tile around the room between upper chair rail and lower chair rail. I’m putting white wainscoting below the lower chair rail. The walls are now yellow (above the upper chair rail). I’ve installed new lighting in the ceiling, two sconces and a few under-cabinet lights. Soon, I will be installing the copper pot rack I’ve had for over a year. I’m installing a light natural stone tile on the floor. It should lead nicely to the hardwood floors I uncovered and refinished in the rest of the house.

Now, tell me. You think I’m not loosing my frig’nipplin’ mind?!? LOL! Actually, I did finish most of my projects before jumping into this past weekend with a change of pace. I’m down to just one studio project that isn’t wrapped up, though another will be starting in about a week. I’ve got most of my web design projects pretty much wrapped up except a little bit of pro bono work (I’m on it, Shannon!) and some of my personal sites. I don’t foresee anything keeping me from finishing my kitchen within a week or so and learning Japanese enough to speak with a bit of fluency within a month or so. OK, so maybe I’ll still sound like a struggling gaijin, but I should be able to at least carry on a conversation about the weather, music and web design by then.

Until next time… this is Marvin Zindler with EEEeeeeeyewitness News. I don’t think we’re in Houston anymore, Tico.

Alright, I’ve decided to try w.bloggar on my windoze pc. It seams to have everything I could need to keep my blog up to date without any hassles from what I’ve read about it online. We’ll see. It doesn’t take much. I’d like to be able to see my categories, different blogs, and all my existing posts and be able to modify any of them from here.

I used a carriage return before this paragraph. I’m not sure if w.bloggar automatically creates paragraphs when I use a carriage return or not. I’ll throw a couple of paragraphs in without paragraph tags to see. In fact, I’m gonna delete the paragraph tags I’ve already got here to see if it posts carriage returns as paragraphs. Then, I can check out it’s editing of existing posts once I know how it marks pages up (or not).

Well, judging from the preview window within w.bloggar, it throws break tags into the mix if I use a carriage return. I’ll just stick with using my own paragraph tags in the posts.

It would be really nice if this program would use ’strong’ tags instead of ‘bold’ tags when I use the included markup tools. Sadly, it uses ‘italics’ tags instead of the proper ‘emphasis’ tags as well. Heck, maybe I should just take the 15 seconds necessary to log into my blog using a browser and publish that way. At least then, I know I’m getting to use all of the features my blog has available (besides remote publishing… hehe).

By the way, I don’t see anywhere to input a heading in this thing. I did when I had it aiming at my b2evolution site, but not with my blogger site. Oh well, here goes everything.

I just added the Performancing extension to my Firefox. I just want to see how it does at adding posts to my blog.

I’m also typing this up in it’s ’source editing’ mode, so the page will come through the way I want it to (hopefully). I’ll have a look at what it does with technorati tags in a minute, but I already see it’s integration with del.icio.us is pretty minimal at best. It simply logs into your account so that you can manually add bookmarks and lets you see your tags.

Enough of this; I’m gonna send this through and see what happens. This paragraph should be styled as white text on a maroon background, by the way.

Everyone that knows me also knows that I love my Macintosh computers. Recently, I’ve been in the process of buying my parents a computer system in order to pull them out of their Windoze rut. I know they will be totally blown away by the new found freedom and happiness that this will bring them.

It all started with my old beige 266MHz G3 desktop unit. I haven’t even touched this computer for years and so began fixing it up with extra RAM, a bigger hard drive, and all the other components necessary for contemporary usage. While browsing around ebaY for peripherals and enhancements to make my parents’ conversion an even more pleasurable one, I just happened to accidentally purchase a 266MHz Macintosh G3 All-In-One. I just threw down the starting bid (which the installed hard drive was well worth) and ended up getting my parents a serious upgrade. This is an inconceivably good computer for the price at which they are going these days. It is basically a beige iMac with 3 PCI slots. It will run up to OS X.2.8 natively and OS X.3.7 (the newest version to date) with XPostFacto, which is a small boot program to run OS X on ‘Old World’ (ie. ‘beige’) Macs.

I then stumbled upon a ridiculously low price for a 333MHz Beige G3 MidTower. The fever was setting in. I couldn’t help it, and my parents already own a bigger monitor than the AIO’s, anyhow. In most respects, it is the same as the AIO, but has no monitor built in, is a bit faster, will accept more RAM and has room for more internal drives.

While setting this up, it dawned on me that this was the last of the ‘Old World’ Macs ever made. If I could just… yep, there it was. In all it’s shining glory (and for a price I just could NOT pass up), there was a ‘Blue and White’ 350MHz G3 on ebaY that would run OS X.3.7 natively and had firewire, USB and all the goodies that I would like my parents to have in their first Macintosh computer built right in. I just received this today and will be setting it up as soon as I finish this post and log off of here.

So, less than $200 later (for all 3!!!), I find myself with a wonderful machine for my parents, an All-In-One computer for the kitchen (an extremely glorified recipe book/ egg timer/ pantry inventory and grocery list/ DVD player), and a home network router/ web server which will allow my Dual 533MHz G4 to be devoted to making music and my 500MHz G3 Pizmo laptop to be devoted to web development and browsing. Of course, I will still browse the web and make music on every one of them… hehe. I believe it is in my best interest to sign off of here now and get this thing packaged up and out the door BEFORE signing on to ebaY again. I feel the need for a nice cold drink to bring this fever down. Salut!

As a side note, but in no way insignificant, I just found a small freeware/donationware app for OS X (which also works in *nix) yesterday that has totally changed my workflow for the better! It is called Desktop Manager and allows multiple desktops without multiple monitors. It has a very small footprint and is absolutely the best productivity enhancing application I have found for the Macintosh to date. To find out more and try it out for yourself, get over to VersionTracker and search for ‘Desktop Manager’ in the OSX section. There are a lot of good reviews and ratings that will convince you to try it out if MHO hasn’t.

I love this time of year, but not for the typically touted reasons. I like it that Mother Nature is all but asleep, which allows us (those of us on a never-ending quest to tame and arrange her for our own pleasure) to occupy ourselves with indoor endeavors. My yard is a glorious mixture of reclining fawn overgrowth and hibernating seed. Come Spring, I will surely be all but in thrall to it once more, but for now, I am peacefully lulled by the low murmer of a few ventilation fans and the occasional rustle of a hard drive spinning up or down.

I received a new bass guitar for Christmas that will surely raise the amount of time I spend with my composition. It is an Ibanez EGA 900 in flat silver finish. It has magnetic and piezo pickups for an outstanding amount of tonal variation. It is also constructed of luthite, a substance developed specifically for the tonal qualities it allows musical instruments that are composed of it. Actually, I haven’t received it yet. It is currently en route via delivery truck and should be here any day. I am absolutely thrilled to be given such a devastatingly beautiful instrument, however undeserving I may be.

I have been toiling away on my newest web project for the past few months, and it is nearly ready for the mass marketing of a major site. It is Illinois Underworld, which is a web site for the unsigned original musicians of Illinois. It is a place where they can sell their wares as well as advertise their upcoming shows and share knowledge with each other. As I know many of these musicians in my local area, it will be nice to have a place to meet and discuss ideas relevant to promoting and furthering our common interests without the need to adjust or compromise personal schedules in order to meet in the real world. There are still a few parts of the site I need to iron out, and a few that aren’t even implemented yet, but it’s coming along. Feel free to check the site out and let me know what you think here.

I will try to keep on top of updating this journal in the future, if for no other reason than to help me organize my thoughts and schedule in a visible manner. I have some great plans for the next year, and believe writing about them as they develop will certainly help me to visualize changes to plans and routes to goals in a more effective manner.

Central Illinois Artists Project is a site I am currently working on for Central Illinois artists. I do so because I am one… hehe. I suppose it will mainly be for original musical artists at first, as that is my primary interest and it seems a lot more feasible in the short term of things to keep it simple. Anyhoot, I just wanted to share that. There’s still a tonne of work to be done on it, but at least it’s coming together now. I’ve been working on this for over a year (in my ’spare’ time… heh), and I’ve owned the domain for about two. I hope to have at least the artists able to build their own band page within a week. After that, I will let a few of the locals know it’s usable. They should be able to share their concert schedules, pictures, music clips and whatnot.

If my writing seems a bit erratic, I believe it’s because I only got an hour of sleep last night. I’ve been off work for a couple of weeks with a bad back, and the sleep schedule has gone pitooueyyy.