mike says things sometimes

I pre-ordered this.  Yes, I’m a nerd. But it comes with a free t-shirt dammit!

ME2 action figure 4 pack.

Playing it again. Doing my last class left to play, Sentinel run through. Still very fun. Yup.

So yeah, I still play music sometimes.  Sometimes its my own, other times its not.  Here’s me playing a Megadeth song.

Liar Vox

and here’s a video of me mucking about playing it

I completely regret ever purchasing video from the itunes store now.

So i like a good consumer I updated my itunes to 9.2 today, and after it completed, 88 files are missing, 564 tv shows are showing as unplayed, and some of my music is now gone.  Thankfully the music had already been copied over to my Zune library, but the problem is that I HAVE NO IDEA WHAT HAPPENED. Its just gone.

Frankly though, my greater concern is the fact that even if I want to move to a computer’s product, like oh say….Zune, I can’t take my media with me.  Due to drm and failure to adhere to standards, Apple has assured that I will forever have to use this apple TV they don’t really want to support to view the files.  The container Apple uses for MP4 is an M4V with AC3 passthru, which is an unsupported hack to the MP4 codec container, therefore most other software won’t read it.  Combined with the DRM, you are locked forever into using this thing, no matter how laggy and crappy it is, since Apple doesn’t wanna actually upgrade the device. 

The lesson I’ve learned here is this, if you want interoperability and you want to insure your investment in media isn’t destroyed by a shitty software update….PIRATE. 

And they wonder why they can’t beat piracy?

So Townsquare Las Vegas was having an easter event today, and I thought hey, the kid would have fun with this.  So you have to register early for the hunt as it was supposed to be a limited number of kids each time, so we got there just after 10am.  Got her registered, and waited the 4 HOURS till the hunt.  In the meantime, she played at the park there and had some fun.

At just after 1:30pm, we head down to line up, and there’s a TON of people there without the registration armbands, just lined up for a free for all.  Apparently following simple instructions is beyond the majority of people at these events.  We ended up near the back of the line behind a bunch of these people who didn’t register and refused to get out of line.

Eventually, they call a start to the hunt, and these people pushed and shoved their way in, and my daughter got stuck in the back.  She managed to get a few eggs, but not many.  Now we were under the impression based on what they were saying that there was supposed to be candy and stickers in all the eggs, and a few would have tickets for larger prizes.  Well, after the event we opened the eggs, and got NOTHING.  Not a damn thing.   Way to fail guys, thanks for the fun day.

So anyone who knows me knows I’m all into the arguments against what the RIAA/Record Labels are doing, and have followed many a Techdirt post about it.  Recently, I was catching up on some heavy metal news, and found an interesting remark from Michael Amott of Arch Enemy/Carcass regarding album sales.

“Now the majority of fans rather download albums for free, now you can go see how many downloads there are for The Root Of All Evil. It’s a lot more than what the Soundscan figures are for CD sales. That’s just the reality of it, I’m not one of these guys who’s going to sit around being bitter about it. It’s like "Ok, this is the situation", so you just change your business model a little bit. But you know, new music is very important to me and we’re still writing new music. As I said, last night I wrote a new song.” 

The full interview can be found here.

Now this is a fine example of a guy who GETS IT.  People WILL download, there is nothing you can do about, except adjust your business model and move on with life.  The last sentence I believe really strikes home against the core argument that the Labels like to make, that when there is piracy that people will not make music as they have no incentive.

The incentive to make music is this: MUSICIANS MAKE MUSIC.  Its what they do, its in the blood.  Piracy or not, musicians will make music, and they will want it to be heard by as many people as possible.  Any musician who says otherwise has forgotten why they began making music in the first place.

(10:11:46 AM) mike.becker: here comes the pain, i’m gonna try and watch the official video of the "we are the world" remake
(10:11:48 AM) mike.becker to see how bad it is
(10:12:39 AM) mike.becker: wow, the reverb
(10:13:11 AM) mike.becker: these people’s voices and styles do NOT go together at all
(10:13:31 AM) mike.becker: OH GOD BARBARA STREISAND
(10:14:33 AM) mike.becker: this is really bad
(10:14:51 AM) mike.becker: and i’m pretty sure i just heard Auto-Tune
(10:15:17 AM) mike.becker: ok, now i’m SURE i heard it
(10:18:50 AM) Chris: lol
(10:19:21 AM) mike.becker: OH GOD T-PAIN
(10:19:47 AM) mike.becker@ and Jaime Foxx doing a ray charles impression
(10:19:50 AM) mike.becker: WTF SHITTY RAP?
(10:20:20 AM) mike.becker: is that LL COOL J?
(10:20:35 AM) mike.becker: this makes my brain hurt
(10:20:54 AM) mike.becker: what the fuck is all this rapping?
(10:21:01 AM) mike.becker: and who’s the guy screaming?
(10:21:03 AM) mike.becker: WTF IS GOING ON?
(10:21:18 AM) Chris: we are teh world sucks now

Oh hey look, I’m a moron and when I did my redesign I gave no links to my other pages. GO ME GO. Anyhow, I’ve half assed fixed that by adding pages on the side. I also added twitter on the side, cause I actually post stuff on there.

So for the last week or so, my Embarq DSL has been acting wonky. Multiple outtages, now stretching into multiple DAYS worth of outtages, and they seem completely unable to resolve this.

I’ve finally given up, and am trying out Clear WiMax.  Since my DSL was stagnant at 3MB/768kb anyhow, Clear is saying they can offer 6MB/1MB Home AND Mobile internet for LESS than I’m paying for Embarq’s DSL service, and I’m getting it for half off for 6 months.  My equipment should be arriving this afternoon, so hopefully I’ll actually have internet again at home tonight, and then I can just cancel embarq’s craptastic service.  I’ll post some updates as to how Clear’s service is.

I just really wanted to mention how much I <3 the win7 installer.  I’ve got a GX620 optiplex in the house that I realized had no cd-rom, and wouldn’t boot from a flash drive, so i copied the win7 install files from my flash drive to an NTFS formatted usb hard drive, and it installed wicked fast.

Win7 is full of win and love and butter.