Today I was at the beach, practising volleyball for the HOPE volleyball thing. We had just finished a 2 hour practice and I was minding my own business, drinking a delicious grape slush-puppie in the car. I whipped out my blackberry to check my email and whatnot while I was sipping on my beverage. I decided to call my dad to let him know I was going to drop by to pick up some stuff from their house. Suddenly while I was on the phone a police officer tapped on my window.

Officer: Sir, could you turn off the car and hang up your phone

Me: Sure (A little confused as to what is going on)

Officer: Sir, we had a report that you doing some crack in here

Me: No (WTF!)

Officer: Please step out of the car sir

Then I spent the next 10 minutes talking to police and having my car searched extensively for cocaine. Hooray!

Apparantly some bystander had seen me drinking out of a straw a jumped to the conclusion that I was doing cocaine in a crowded beach parking lot in the middle of the day. Maybe using my crackberry had me looking like a spaced out junkie.

via Sabrina’s Blog – CrackBerry.

Good times… I guess I get to keep my engineering degree.

• iPods not allowing you to copy your music back to your hard drive. I don’t use my iPod to send my music to my buddies; what I do use it for is a backup system to ensure that my music never gets lost (if my hard drive crashes) but I have to hack it to get this functionality.
• Macrovision making it a pain in the butt for me to setup my home entertainment system in useful ways.
• Preventing screenshots from DVDs which doesn’t really matter since I can just crack the DVD but it’s annoying.

The reason for this post? I was just watching a DVD that I OWN and that I PAID good money for. I saw something funny, a marking on the ground that indicated where the actor should stand and was not meant to be caught on camera. I wanted to post this on my blog to share with others; this obviously falls under fair use if not journalistic freedom. Are we so paranoid of this evil thing call piracy that we’re willing to give all our freedoms up to a handful of major corporations? Is it really such a big deal to prevent the average person from doing what they want since the real pirates (in every instance) have ways around all known protection measures? “If I can read it, I can copy it.”

I’m very annoyed. Here’s the error message I got and am just too lazy to rip the DVD for one screenshot:

OfficeMax has this cool site where you can upload a picture of yourself and create a dancing elf. The really cool thing is that they’ve integrated an automated call in number that allows you to record a message which your elf will say while dancing!

Update, 9:50AM: Ok, I’m a loser, here is another one I made with Star-trek characters. And another one I made with The Office.

Industry Minister Jim Prentice has just announced that the government will put in place measures as part of the forthcoming spectrum auction to encourage greater competition within the Canadian wireless market. Prentice acknowledged that Canadian wireless pricing is too high, particularly for data. Accordingly, they will set aside a significant chunk of spectrum – nearly 40 percent of the auction – solely for new entrants and mandate tower sharing.

Of course this is legislative but combined with the $15 post I made a few days ago we could really be seeing the start of a large change in the Canadian wireless industry, one with less gouging and more choice! I think I’m going to faint.