confusion

My transformation into a peanut is coming along nicely. J███████ told me I had the social maturity of a peanut a while back. And after today at work I have the mental capacity of peanut too… Ugh!

Last night I met my friend R█████ from Lockheed Martin for dinner in the District. He is staying, for a few days, with a relative who lives near Woodly Park. So after struggling to find a parking space near my apartment (there is some kind of convention at the hotel a few blocks away and so parking is… shall we say a bitch!) I headed up to Woodly Park.

First off; Why does the weather suck in DC? First it’s too damn cold, then it’s like oppressively hot and humid? There are about three days a year of a comfortable compromise. Yesterday was not one of them. When I walked up to Woodly Park I was sweating like… well for lack of a better phrase—a stuck pig. I hate the summer, no matter what I do I am too hot. And I hate being too hot. I prefer being too cold—I can always warm up by adding layers, but in the summer, when I am
too hot I can only cool down so much by taking layers off and not breaking some law.

Anyway, we had a good dinner talked for a while and had a few drinks at an Irish Pub. Then we walked to Adams Morgan for a few more drinks. At one point we were no more than three blocks from my apartment but we headed back to Woodly Park. I did not want to let R█████ walk around the District by himself—I doubt he would have gotten lost but I live there he does not. By the time we got back to Woodly it was after nine and time for me to head home.

The moral to all this came this morning: I woke up with a horrible headache, not a true hangover, it mostly the effects of dehydration from the drinking and sweating while I walked. I should have had some water to drink before I went to bed. Anyway, a few glasses of water and the headache was gone, what is not gone is the stiffness in my legs. I must have walked about six miles last night and I have not done that since walking from Islington to Trafalgar in England. I go running at least a couple times a week and my legs are a little tired the next day but not sore so I did not figure I would actually be in pain from all the walking but man, was I wrong! So the moral we where looking for is: need more walking…

[nb: continuation of previous post] Well, Jim’s dongle didn’t work. (Oh god that sounds dirty! Bad, Bad! Head out of the gutter!) His dongle was incomparable with my hardware. (Maybe I should just stop now! —No.) So in flusteration I started playing with my stuff. (This is getting worse and worse!) So after a few minutes and a little help from a very large Hinkle Chef’s Knife (Visions of Lorana!) My dongle works again—well kinda. You have to pull down on it (Mind in gutter again!) to get it to work so it will have to be replaced at some point since it keeps dropping the connection. (Hark! Is that King Missiles Detachable Penis I hear playing?) Bottom line: After much thrusting with my knife and pulling on my dongle the data is flowing in spurts for now…

Yea, after all the trouble of setting up the network card last week I went and broke my Internet access this weekend. Somehow in all my gracefulness I ripped the dongle [info.astrian.net] (see definition #3) out of my PCMCIA card. Jetzt ist es kaputt! No work!

I borrowed an old dongle from Jim at work and will try it, but it’s not a 3Com dongle and I don’t know if it will work. I doubt it. If it does not work I will most likely go out and buy a wireless system which I have been eyeing any way. We’ll see.

An now I’m going to say dongle over and over. Why? Because it’s such a cool word! Just say it! Dongle. Feel the way if rolls off your tounge. Dongle. Much better than ‘little network cable connection connection thingie.’ Dongle. Dongle. Dongle. Dongle. Dongle. Dongle. Dongle. Dongle. Dongle. Dongle. Dongle. Dongle. Dongle. Dongle. Dongle. Dongle. Dongle. Dongle. Dongle. Dongle. Dongle. Dongle. Dongle. Dongle. Dongle. Dongle. Dongle. Dongle. Dongle. Dongle. Dongle. Dongle. Dongle. Dongle. Dongle. Dongle. Dongle. Dongle. Dongle. Dongle. Dongle. Dongle. Dongle. Dongle. Dongle. Dongle. Dongle. Dongle. Dongle. Dongle. Dongle. Dongle. Dongle. Dongle. Dongle. DONGLE! (kinda like the Spam Spam song no?)

Mein Dongle ist kaputt. It even sounds good in German!

The other night I was out at a pub with a friend and at one point the conversation turned to music. We where talk about good CD’s to buy and at one point he mentioned Dido. He said he needed to go get her album ‘No Angel,’ that he had been listening to it for a year and it was so good that he needed to buy it.

Been listening to it for a year and it’s so good he needs to buy it. That’s where the RIAA is right. When the Napster case was big news all the ‘free the information’ people and the broke college students argued that when they downloaded music they would trash what they did not like and buy what they did like. The problem is that once you start downloading you find a lot of things you like and you cannot afford them all, or even the few you really mean to buy don’t get purchased because something comes up and you spend the money on something else. Over time you become lazy and complacent with the whole system, the idea of buying the music you are listening to either never occurs to you or you just shrug and say ‘but I have it and it was free.’

This laziness is what justifies the RIAA’s argument concerning the file sharing world. When I first got a high speed connection I downloaded programs and music left and right. Just like every other college student, it was the height of Napster. I did buy CD’s—a lot of CD’s as I have always done but I also downloaded a ton of mp3’s (and programs) which I did not own, I never payed for them. And while I am no friend of the RIAA or MPAA and do agree that CD’s are too expensive, the money goes to the big business not to the artists, etc, etc, etc. The bottom line is I did not pay for the music (or programs.)

After a while I stopped downloading everything but live techno—no copyrights, and even stopped that after a while (I stopped downloading non-free programs because I switched to Linux and they don’t work.) I don’t have any of the mp3’s from CD’s I don’t own, except for the un-copyrighted stuff today.

Music piracy has always happened—at least since tapes came into being. Albums, Tapes and CD’s have always been copied, but copies on tape ware out. Now downloading mp3’s or ripping a friends CD is easy and the quality is good. It’s easy and it’s cheep and in our ethnic vacuum we become lazy and disrespectful of the ideas of copyright. And while the implementation and execution of copyright and trademark law—of all intellectual property law, may have become a toy of large corporations and their lawyers. The ideas behind the laws are supposed to promote creativity and innovation. By not keeping the promise to buy the music we download and like we break the spirit of the laws.