Today's notes...

When I got home today and picked up the mail, here's what I found:

1 package from a Babies 'R' Us, for Jane's baby shower next month (I assume - I'll let her open it).

Issues of IEEE Spectrum, Network World, Infoworld, and Reason.

The Martha's Vineyard Gazette. One can fantasize...

Catalogs from some curtain company and LL Bean. And a card for Jane from some friend of hers.

Credit card bills from Amex and a Mastercard we have. Looks like we've been well-behaved in the last month. The Mastercard bill included "courtesy checks", just in case we wanted cash easy. How thoughtful.

A privacy notice from GMAC. Like they aren't going to just give my name away to all comers. Sheesh.

A solicitation from Capital One for a loan to pay off debt. Oops, other than the aforementioned car and our house we have none.

Three separate solicitations, otherwise identical, for MBNA pre-approved credit cards. The dumbasses don't even realize that we're already customers - I love what crappy CRM software can do for a company.

Basically, we get so much snail-mail spam that I was half scared to carry it all upstairs over the last month while I was restricted from heavy lifting. It's amazing. And you can't just throw away all the solicitations and credit-card checks - identity theft is easy enough without making it easier. Last year we bought a nice cross-cut shredder - all the credit card checks go through it, along with anything overly identifying in a solicitation.

I do something better with the rest of it, though. All the MBNA mail (and anything we get like it) gets identifying information torn out and shredded. Then I carefully tear up the rest of it, along with any extra inserts, and I put it back in the postage-paid envelope and send it off to the junk mailer.

I figure it's a win-win. I only spend a couple of minutes a day, and I get to vent my junkmail rage. The USPS, which has fallen on hard times recently, gets much-needed mail revenue from the junk mailer. And my actions cost the junk mailer money. And to quote Diamond Dallas Page: "That's not a bad thing - that's a Good Thing".

First day golfing tomorrow afternoon. Yippee!

Gibbs update

My blog was mentioned in Mark Gibbs' column about a month ago, and he mentioned that a prize would be forthcoming.

Nothing thus far. Just thought I'd mention that.

Golf season's almost here!

It would have been here already, actually, except I had that pesky umbilical hernia surgery two weeks ago. I had my follow-up appointment today, and the news is this:

- I can be a little more vigorous in my activities now. But not too much more. I can lift around 15-20 pounds at once instead of the 10 I was restricted to, but I should still kind of take that slow for a couple more weeks.

- I can start playing a little bit of golf (did I mention I love golfing?) - working on the short game and such for the next week or two. Then I can start swinging the bigger clubs.

- My navel will continue to look strange for another month or two. But it's healing fast. There's a bulge where the muscles were stitched together, and a couple of pinhole-looking things at the bottom where the scope went in. Boy it was a tiny pair of incisions.

- Unfortunately, I have no excuse to avoid a few of the things around the house I have dreaded. So I will be spending a decent chunk of tomorrow putting up "window treatments" in our second living room (we have two of them - it's a funky house design) and in the baby's room.

Baby's room update: a friend of Jane's painted Winnie-the-Pooh scenes on the wall in the baby's room. It looks great. Unfortunately, I'm sure he won't appreciate it until he's about 20.

Fun story of the week: last night, around midnight, we noticed police bubblegum lights flashing outside our bedroom window, on the side street. I looked out, and there was a car that had been pulled over with a patrolwoman at the car inspecting it, while her partner remained in the police car. A few minutes later, they let the car go and went off back on patrol.

This morning, I noticed a Budweiser box in my backyard. I thought nothing of it (though it's not recycle week), and went to work. When Jane went to work a little later, she noticed it too, and went over to prod the box. It was full of Bud bottles.

Apparently, I'm guessing the folks in the car probably were underage and ditched the case. I pitched it out - though I've been known to drink a beer or ten, I don't like regular Bud too much and lord knows where that case had been.

Come visit my friend Rob and I at the MIT Flea this Sunday!

Yet another reason the RIAA sucks

Okay. This past Friday, I went and had the Combo Drive upgrade installed in my TiBook (amazingly, the Apple Store in Peabody had an extra when I dropped in there Thursday evening while running errands for my wife - they put it aside for me to pick up the next day). I've burned a couple of things that were waiting to be done - I'd accumulated some burn material over the last couple of months, and my Acomdata external Firewire drive didn't work right with MacOS X 10.1.3 (FYI, I plan to bring it to the MIT Flea next week if anyone is interested - other than the 10.1.3 issue, it's a good drive). So I burned a disc of packet traces I'd taken when I was at one of my sister companies last week (I'll Fedex it to them tomorrow), and then I started thinking about what else I needed to burn.

Then I remembered that I haven't been able to find my copy of "Mink Car" - the most recent TMBG album that I bought last fall. Well, since I'd ripped it right after buying it, I just went and burned myself another copy. Though I'd only encoded the album at 160k, that's fine for car use. So I un-ripped it back to audio format out of iTunes, and I'm going to put it in my car to replace the missing one - which I'm sure is just buried in a pile of junk somewhere here in the house.

Anyhow, the point here is that I went out and legally bought that disc last fall. I own it. I have the right to re-purpose it as I see fit, provided it's for my own use. Keeping a copy in my car is a very legitimate exercise of that right - provided I don't then turn around and give someone else my original (not a problem at the moment, since I can't find the darn original).

They want to take that right away, though - whether by copy-protecting my disc or by criminalizing the behavior. Either way, they want to take my fair use right and remove it.

And that's just wrong, folks. Do something about it. Let your Congresscritters know how you stand on these issues. Support politicians and organizations (like Digital Consumer) that will help you get your views across. Support the EFF - they help defend the groups, companies, and people who are being unfairly targeted by Big Media. Most of all, don't buy music that supports them. there are artists who are coming up with more consumer-friendly ways of doing business. Support them when you find them.

As a side note - the stereo in my car does damn near everything else - it's a shame that it doesn't support direct MP3 playback, too. And as I rip the rest of my album library to iTunes, I need to remember to rip it all at a minimum of 192k. The higher the bitrate, the better it'll sound if I have to un-rip it.

Ow.

Oof. I'm writing this little update note on a Saturday afternoon because I need to take it slow for a couple more days. I had an umbilical hernia repaired yesterday, which actually went very well, but it's kind of sore.

But hey - the bright side is that Percosets can be fun, especially when you take one every six hours like instructed. As a result, today is officially "lounge around in my bathrobe day".

Better to have dealt with it now than to either interrupt golf season or do it after the baby's born, I figure.

I told you this was boring!

If you're reading this because Mark Gibbs mentioned it in his column today, I meant it. I, like most bloggers, just write my blog for friends and family to read, and only because the space is free and easy to administer. When I ran a blog precursor on my own website (about 5 years ago), I eventually stopped writing it because updating the page and all the links that went with it was a pain in the kiester.

Blogs are fun, but generally meaningless. If you're interested in what someone has to say, they're a neat way to get a little insight into them (lord knows what people who read mine think), and an occasionally entertaining diversion. Que sera, sera.

By the way, I didn't know Mark was giving away any prizes (I'll update this when I get whatever it is). I just responded to him because I like the column and thought a comment was in order.

Catch-22 (the joys of site certificates)

I tried to renew my company's main SSL cert recently. The one that secures our intranet site. When I registered it 2 years ago, I was the admin and technical contact. It seemed obvious, as I was the one who managed the domain and both built and ran the server.

In the meantime, the CA had changed their policies, apparently. They now require separate people in those roles. So when I tried to renew, they bounced it, because our application lists me in both roles.

The problem, as I see it, is that they already accepted me once, the schmucks. I could give them two contacts, but that's defeating the point of me being the admin, now, isn't it?

So meanwhile the discussion is heating up, the deadline for the cert is approaching, and odds are I'm going to be finding a new CA for my SSL certificate. This sucks.

On a brighter note, I actually felt our baby moving last night. Wow.

My Apple comment du jour

Five years ago (nearly), I wrote a little piece for my since-deprecated rant pages that threatened doom and gloom for Apple based on their apparent decision to kill the cloning business that had sprung up under the previous regime. I actually had a few very animated e-mails pass back and forth between Steve Jobs and myself over the topic (once upon a time, I had a very tiny bit of juice in the Mac biz). Needless to say, he won the argument - it was his company to run, after all. I predicted that Apple would fizzle out to nothingness as people like me replaced Macs with Windows NT boxes.

Oops.

Well, I got one part right. I did replace Macs with NT, but it was because I went to another company that had never seen a Mac before. All we had was Windows. No biggie. What did I get wrong?

Well, I made a big mistake. I forgot the passion that Apple owners have for their machines (well, I didn't forget it, but I discounted it). I forgot about the installed base of everyday users - not the corporate types and power users who went to the cloners. But most importantly, I forgot about the Apple X factor - Jobs himself. The guy just has a knack for producing boxes that capture the imagination of users.

Just when it looked darkest for Apple, as they looked like they would be resting on the ho-hum beige G3 towers that weren't even as nice as the aborted G3-based clones, Apple brought the iMac out of nowhere (a Jobs skunkwork project) and hit a home run. And Apple went from being a lame PC company to a superstar of industrial design and the trendsetter of the PC industry (in a return engagement).

Since then, they have kept the press fawning over the comeback story, and product after product has emerged to acclaim and sales success. They did have some missteps - the polka-dot iMac was lame, and they kept the second generation model around a little long, the Cube was a fiasco, and they are having all sorts of trouble getting fast enough chips built by Motorola, but they are out of the wilderness and making money again. Even Slashdot now covers Apple news (at apple.slashdot.org), and OS X is getting props from all over.

Go figure. No pundit is perfect, especially not amateur ones like me.

In other news, we now have our baby registry on-line through babiesrus.com (Amazon, actually - it's a fulfillment deal). Just over three months to go!

Rhinoviruses suck

Granted, this is a no-brainer. But I am currently in the thrall of one (day 3) and quite annoyed by it. I suspect that rhinoviruses are a conspiracy led by the tissue companies.

However, I did not get it as badly as my wife did when she had it last week. As much as this cold is bugging me, it's a lot tougher on a woman who is late in her second trimester. Pregnancy seems to supress the immune system enough that colds have a nastier impact while they last.

So I'll write more stuff in this journal in a few days once my head is out of the rhinovirus fog...

Another reason why the RIAA sucks...

In the news today, the RIAA is blaming music piracy for their decline in sales. My comment is below:

Bull$#!+

The reason their sales are down are myriad. First of all, most of the new music today sucks. Consumers are starting to realize that the process is broken, and that most music showing up nowadays is overpromoted derivative crap. There is no current overwhelming musical trend, the way grunge, for instance, was huge in the early '90s, or boy bands and barely post-pubescent girls were in the latter part of the decade. Most "artists" now are overproduced and overmanaged, and it shows in the diminished quality of the material. Consumers are finally waking up to it some.

The other huge factor in the decline of sales... Hmmm... Might it be... a recession? Perhaps?

When people have less money (or perceive that times are tougher), they will spend less on certain luxuries. CD's are a luxury. There is more competition for the diminished dollar, and so I refer you to the first part of my rant above. When the music sucks and people have less money to buy it with, they're going to pass up on music in favor of other pursuits.

What music there is is horribly overpriced. In the late '80s, before the shift to CD was complete, most vinyl albums still cost well under $10. CDs were newer technology, and so the price point got set higher - most people could tell there was a difference in quality and so they put up with the higher price. There's no excuse left now, though - it costs less to manufacture, store, and ship a CD in real dollars than it ever did to handle LPs. Factoring in inflation, there is no reason a CD should ever cost more than about $12 to the end purchaser. The only excuse is greed.

As for me, I bought five CD's last year (TMBG, a couple of Lyle Lovett discs, an old Hank Williams disc, and Springsteen's live album). My wife bought two (U2 and something else). I downloaded a couple of dozen songs - most of which I already owned on old vinyl and a couple of which were "pirated" singles. I also ripped all my CD's into iTunes, threw it on a server in the house, and now I can stream my jukebox to any room I want at home, which is neat.

Okay - I've fessed up. I have, among other things, a downloaded copy of Natalie Imbruglia's "Torn" (what can I say - she annoys me but I can't get that damned song out of my head!). Put the cuffs on. But seriously, I offer my tiny, relatively weak voice to the din in the vain hope that someday a record company exec will read this and have an epiphany:

If you (the RIAA and it's member companies) continue on your present path of being as consumer-unfriendly as possible, I will eventually be pirating all my music. Just to spite you. I can afford to buy it but I won't because you suck.

But if you do the Right Thing, lower prices (hell - just stop raising them!), stop putting out the same old drivel, and make it easy and inexpensive for me to buy music, I will buy a lot more of it. That small portion of your profits that can be attributed to me will go up. A lot.

Which is no big deal by itself, but I'm pretty sure that I'm far from the only person who feels this way.