I just wanted to see how well the interface to wordpress worked from my BlackBerry. Pretty well so far…

Yes, I cracked and moved to Flickr. If you hadn’t noticed, Gallery broke AGAIN! This time was the the incident that pushed me over the edge. Having been a software developer, I know it isn’t that hard to write software that doesn’t corrupt the database every 6-months without fail. I’m not quite sure why Gallery can’t get it right.

Anyways, update your bookmarks/feeds to point to Flickr. I have updated my sidebar to pull the feed from Flickr now. Watch for me to re-upload a lot of content to Flickr over the next few days. I’m also having fun with the geo location features so check that out too.

The CRTC really needs to start opening up the market for cellular communications a little bit more. Why? Because simple economics and this example show that increased competition in this realm can only help the consumer.

For some reason the Rogers-Fido acquisition was approved at a time when Fido was aggressively cutting prices to gain market share. Wikipedia excerpt:

As an example, Fido canceled their flat rate data plan shortly after the acquisition, and with the Rogers/Fido GSM monopoly, wireless data access is very expensive in Canada ($100 / 200 MB at the “best” rate).

This left the Canadian market with only 3 major players—a similar thing happened with Clearnet back in the day. I’ve also heard down the grapevine that Rogers has an exclusive contract that locks down GSM until 2012. Way to screw the consumer.

…you should not be allowed to copyright a number. It goes against the entire idea of copyright where you are trying to ENCOURAGE creation and innovation. Furthermore, preventing “curcumvention” by claiming you can’t publish a number is equally as absurd*. Therefore, the DMCA causing this is crazy. If you can copyright a number the I claim ‘e,’ ‘i,’ and ‘pi.’ Too bad… NASA can’t do anything now without paying me.

*You know what is really absurd? Giving media giants the legal power to take away the rights and protections granted to the consumer.

Update: This site has an example of why an integer as a circumvention device is absurd.

From here:

There’s also a great youtube video (song) that came out today.

I came across this post from craigslist a while back. It’s pretty funny. Here are some of my favorite parts about why girls should date geek guys:

• They’ve got brains. Come on now, how can intelligence be a bad thing?
  
• Sex. Yep. Sex. I’m not really familiar with this myself, but I’ve friends who’ve been intimate with geek guys and it’s raves all around. They say a virgin wrote the Kama Sutra… all that time thinking about sex, imagining sex, dreaming about sex, (they are male after all) coupled with a desire to make you happy? Use your imagination.
  
• They’re relatively low-maintenance. Most can be fueled on pizza, Twinkies and Mt Dew. No complicated dinners needed here, so if you’re not the best cook, eh. Can you order a pizza?
• They’re usually very well educated. Physics majors and the like. See #5. You won’t have to listen to him blathering on about his car (ok maybe a little), he’ll have loads of other interesting things to talk about. Politics, world events, how much the chicken burgers down at the local place rock, so long as you douse them in hot sauce…
• And the final reason why geeks and nerds make great boyfriends: They actually give a damn about you. Not how you look (though that’s a plus), not how skinny you are, not how much make-up you primp yourself up with, but they like you for you. That kind of thing lasts longer than “DaMN baby you got a fine ass!!!” Believe me.

Cheers Eve.

I’m starting to feel guilty about this because it’s been happening so often…

Unfortunately I didn’t post this one on my blog but I did talk to many friends about how I didn’t understand how changing daylight savings would save energy. The reason I didn’t understand how it would save energy is the exact reason why it DIDN’T SAVE ENERGY:

For example, households may draw less electricity for lights at night, but will use more power in the early in the day as they wake to darker and chillier mornings.

I’d like to see how much this actually costed the economy due to the confusion and tech changes that were needed.

From the press release:

Apple has announced that iTunes will make individual AAC format tracks available from EMI artists at twice the sound quality of existing downloads, with their DRM removed, at a price of $1.29/€1.29/£0.99. iTunes will continue to offer consumers the ability to pay $0.99/€0.99/£0.79 for standard sound quality tracks with DRM still applied.  Complete albums from EMI Music artists purchased on the iTunes Store will automatically be sold at the higher sound quality and DRM-free, with no change in the price. Consumers who have already purchased standard tracks or albums with DRM will be able to upgrade their digital music for $0.30/€0.30/£0.20 per track.  All EMI music videos will also be available on the iTunes Store DRM-free with no change in price.

A great step forward but I’m not a fan of the DRM-free “tax.” The sound quality increase won’t be noticeable by most  but lets say it’s worth 5 cents. This means that they are charging an extra 25 cents for the DRM-free aspect. One way to look at it is that EMI is essentially expecting that 1 out of 4 DRM-free tracks will be pirated off to someone else. I’m not sure that this is really a valid charge to pass on to the consumers who pay for their music. Remember, DRM doesn’t stop piracy.

Either way, one step at a time…

With a great piece of investigative reporting, BBspot has released the RIAA Decision Flow Chart: