In what is no doubt hailed as universal victory, our federal legal process has determined that internet file sharing is legal in Canada. Unexpected, but welcome news.

Maybe now that at least one country has set some legal precedent, the retarded, greedy music industry associations will listen to the evidence that file sharing is not responsible for CD sales being down. More likely, is the fact that they keep producing, slam-selling, and overcharging for shitty music designed for mass consumption, rather than valid, artistic works.

Does anyone really think that Britney Spears will be remembered alongside Beethoven (who could arguably be called “the first rockstar”) in 300 years? I really don’t. And they wonder why a lot of people aren’t paying for their music… I haven’t heard anything worth paying for in a long-ass time, let alone paying too much for it.

Really, the industry associations missed the mark on this one; half the people downloading this crap aren’t even CD buyers anyway, so where is the lost profit? I know I haven’t bought many CDs in the last few years, and the ones I have aren’t exactly what you’d call major-label offerings (independent music, Japanese imports, stuff by artists that encourage downloading). Which brings up another point; start producing stuff I like again, and at a price I’d consider paying, and maybe I’ll actually pay. Is $12 per disc instead of $24 too much to ask?

The independents say, “no” so why shouldn’t the big companies? You can’t tell me that they are justified in offloading to the consumer 25% of the entire disc in advertising and promotion fees. When I buy a new Days of the New record, which will barely get any promotion at all, I don’t want 25% of what I paid go to promote some dumbass rapper or pop diva whore. So I ask again, RIAA fat cat: why the fuck should I pay for it? It makes no sense, and until it does, I’ll happily continue downloading.

Posted by Ron as Computers at 5:03 PM EST

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Not even a full day after I officially started my layoff, and I got called upon to finish up a service call that was not completed. Will I ever get a weekend? (I worked 6 days a week previoulsy)

Once I’ve had a little while to lounge, there is, naturally more work to be done; I have to go to the EI office and bring them all my relevant papers; I have a date with the garage for my poor, ailing beast; I have some tests to go for that I had been putting off; need to get new glasses.

Oh well, it sucks to still have to work while laid off, but I guess it helps keep me out of the proverbial poor house.

Posted by Ron as Work at 1:42 AM EST

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I now am officially unemployed. Hello free time, goodbye spending money.

Posted by Ron as Work at 12:51 AM EST

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I had the most messed up dream the other night. It was something like a spy movie I think. I don’t remember anything that happened specifically, except the part where the main character, this really hot, independent, capable, female spy got naughty with some guy (which wasn’t really me [unfortunately], at least, I don’t think so).

I remember there was, besides the sex, some shooting, and some kung fu. Something about a cottage in the woods, and/or possibly a cruise ship.

This dream came to me the night before, or the morning of, the day I wrote about yesterday. What’s more, there was this cool song on the college radio station that I had never heard before. It was “Someone Like You” by New Order. Turns out that it was a fairly appropriate track for things that I had just imagined (spy movie soundtrack?) and also things I was about to experience.

Posted by Ron as Miscellaneous at 4:16 AM EST

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The other day, I had some of the most awkward moments of my life, thus far: I was at work, and some guy came up to inquire about used motherboards, and while I was showing him, I noticed his girlfriend standing just around the corner. I had to do a double, or perhaps triple take. Not because I thought she was “hott” or anything, but because she looked a lot like my first. Tell me that’s not awkward. The worst part was that I wasn’t even sure it was her or not!

The more I think about it, the more I’m convinced it wasn’t but I still feel foolish. I know she saw me looking at her strangely, and not just because my glasses were broken, and hence, not in use. It looked almost as though she expected me to say something, or that she might at any time. Just my luck, she’ll be reading this and call me out on it.

The boss and another customer were standing about the whole time, and afterward mentioned something about it, no doubt because even they, who were not paying attention, must have noticed my odd grimace.

My boss asked, “Is she someone you know?”

“Someone I tried to forget,” I replied, “I’m not sure… she could have been one of my ex-girlfriends.”

That’s when the customer made some remark about my having this “rolodex of past conquests” or somesuch (amusing) nonsense. That’s when I explained the possible significance of this person. They both agreed that it was pretty bad that I couldn’t remember and wasn’t sure, especially considering my age, so it couldn’t have been that long ago. I guess 8 years is enough time to forget someone…

Posted by Ron as Miscellaneous at 3:03 AM EST

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Sometime last week, while cleaning them, I broke my glasses. It sucks because now I can’t really wear them, and yet, I need them. As it was they were five years old, which, for spectacles is quite aged; there’s a reason the Ontario government health plan provides for replacement every two years. However, I haven’t been covered under that plan since I was 21, and my employment, or lack thereof, did not renumerate sufficiently to purchase more. Except, now I have no choice. Oh well, I have been wanting new ones for a long time now. Blessing in disguise, I guess.

Posted by Ron as Miscellaneous at 1:24 AM EST

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There was a time not so long ago when I never would have said that. However, I’ve been running a very dark, brooding D&D campaign, on and off, for about two years now and I’m beginning to grow tired of running it. That isn’t to say that it isn’t fun, certainly everyone else is still enjoying it, and I am as well, but it’s getting near the end.

I really want to finish it, and do it well, and so I will. There have been some pretty major setbacks along the way, like the loss of my hard drive, which was, of course, where I kept almost all of my notes, thoughts, plans, etc. Despite that, it’s holding together not too badly, and there aren’t too many consistency problems, surprisingly. I guess another part of it is that one of the players is getting tired of it and it really really shows.

This player used to call me up all the time and ask if we were gaming or not, all excited. Now he breathes a sigh of relief when we don’t game. Not that it matters, since he blows off the game most of the time anyway. I have no problem with that; we aren’t forcing anyone to play by holding a crossbow to their head, but it is just a little demoralising. Now we’re like the backup plan.

The final element is that it now feels like a big responsibility. My cousin plays with us too, and that is a big deal for him since he looks up to me I think. Don’t get me wrong; I like to be able to do something good for him, somebody has to. Another of our players lays on the guilt when I must call it off any given week. Surely he must be able to occasionally find something else to do with his Saturdays. And then there’s Meghan… that always adds pressure to perform.

I guess, as much as I love doing it, I need a break from game-mastering. Then again, when I’m nice and laid off, taking a little vacation, maybe that will recharge the old creative batteries. Who knows. I’d hate to think that the 3.2GB worth of RPG material that I’ve recently downloaded from eMule will be going to waste…

Posted by Ron as Games at 1:46 AM EST

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The other day at the office, we had to backup some guy’s failing hard drive to our server, which is a fairly routine operation. Normally, even when a drive is on its’ last legs, we can get it up and running and get some paydata off of it. That is, assuming Windows XP will survive the process.

The other day, it simply refused. XP would absolutely not boot with this particular hard drive connected, in any jumper configuration. The drive worked just fine in Caldera DR-DOS to run PowerMax (Maxtor’s drive utility suite), and even returned no errors after running a comprehensive test. XP still refused to work with it, bluescreening and rebooting just before the GUI loads, every time, like clockwork.

That’s where the penguin comes in. It just so happens that we have a copy of Knoppix lying around for just these types of occasions. It’s a little outdated now (Knoppix 3.1) but it still performs. After booting into Knoppix from the CD, I mounted one of our FAT32 partitions and then mounted the customer’s drive (thankfully Linux isn’t afraid of reading from NTFS partitions). The data copy went almost smoothly, but only because one of our hard drives conked out during the process. So I bone-headed my way through it by rebooting and trying again, this time with much success.

I have only one bitch about Knoppix, and it’s something that I really hope I don’t run into problems with under a full version of Linux: the refresh rate. My eyes are pretty touchy to that sort of thing. I can notice the flicker at 75Hz. At 60Hz I get a headache within a few hours (kind of a problem in my job). Let me tell you, this was running at less than that. In fact, it looked a lot like some hellish Interlaced mode. 42Hz perhaps… Ugh. That hour of copying did me in.

Please tell me that it can be adjusted. Please. When I ran the 3.3 version at home I got 60Hz at least, but nowhere could I find an option to adjust it (then again, I’m a n00b). Nor could I figure out how to change things such as resolution or colour depth. Now, that stuff isn’t the end of the world, but without a refresh rate adjust, I’ll never run it on anything without an LCD screen, where it isn’t as noticeable.

Posted by Ron as Computers at 1:16 AM EST

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Last night, I had the best sleep I’ve had in months, no exaggeration. That, after having not slept much at all the previous week (losing your bloody job will do that to you), felt like absolute nirvana. I got in about 11 hours of dream-encrusted restful slumber and felt, if not like a million bucks, then at very least like a platinum credit card.

My dreams ranged from the bizarre (IBM had set up a facility in the basement of the house of a friend of mine), to the typical (sex), to… well, there were so many, and I’ve forgotten many of them now. I think there must have been one about war as well; I’ve been playing a lot of Wolfenstein, Silent Storm, and reading about Shadowrun / firearms. That is a sure-shot recipe for violent dreams.

Come to think of it, just the night before, I dreamt I was in Toronto, victimised by the media-hyped gun violence there, except that I had with me my grandfather’s WWII trophy: a German officer’s Luger pistol. The catch: it has only one cartridge left and there were like 3 or 4 punks holding me up. Luckily, only one had a (visible) firearm…. I never got to see how that one ended.

Well, here’s hoping for another good night of sleep…

Posted by Ron as Miscellaneous at 3:24 AM EST

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One of my primary goals in ‘getting the goods from the mule’ was to try to obtain some stuff that I had lost when my hard drive died. I have managed to some degree to do so. The beginning of this entry goes back quite a bit…

One late night, back in Napster’s heyday, before they got their asses sued off, I was browsing through someone’s shared directories, which I had noticed both an unusually high concentration of material I liked, and a ridiculously fast connection (a T3, I believe).

So I grabbed a bunch of stuff on a whim that sounded like it might be good. If I recall correctly, I had been looking for arranged soundtracks to older videogames, and in particular, one called ‘Arcana’. This person, whose name/handle I have long since forgotten, happened to have some of such material, as well as some tracks bearing the name ‘Arcana’ that I did not at all recognise.

This of course, only makes me more curious, so I downloaded all of it. As I was to discover, there were about three full length CDs worth, and it was not a game soundtrack, but a musical group. I had never heard anything like it before.

I found great inspiration for various creative endeavours of mine through listening to their works, and since ‘the crash of 03′ have missed it greatly. I’m quite happy to say that thanks to the ‘mule, I’ve re-acquired all of the stuff of theirs that I lost, and more. And, all at better bitrates and/or quality than before. One of the albums was done in a format that I’d never heard of before; the .APE format, which is a lossless compression technology. Neat stuff.

Posted by Ron as Music at 12:44 PM EST

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