thoughts for a thursday

Instead of worrying about the RIAA sending you a lawsuit, why not pay for privacy? In the end, though, maybe we can legitimize P2P. I don’t know. I always think it’s kind of funny when people try to quash file-sharing on the internet in one way or another, technically or legislatively. It’s funny because what they fundamentally want to prevent people from doing is sending bits to one another, and that’s all the internet does anyway. They want to turn the internet into television, pushing out all the products to you that you should buy. They hate the fact that the quivering masses out there have the ability to push stuff out to, and they especially hate it when they payed for the creation of that stuff. It’s understandable. They just want to make money like any reasonable corporation.

I’m not worried, really. It may be true that corporations are better at purchasing legislation than the American people, but in the end not even as corrupt a government as we have will turn their constituents into criminals. As more and more people realize that for essentially zero marginal cost they can make a copy of their CD, their DVD, their video game, you can bet your DMCA they’re going to do it, regardless of the law. It’s so easy. It doesn’t *feel* illegal. And even when they think of whom they’re screwing, they don’t Imagine it’s Peter Jackson or Eminem. They think of Sony Entertainment and BMG, and who gives a fuck about them, anyway? People just want to listen to music. If it were easier to pay for it, people would. People are lazy.

But it’s too hard to pay for it. Even though, to copy a DVD, I have to rip it, decrypt it, and remove region encoding (30 mins), then I have to trasncode it to fit on a DVD-R (1 hr), then I have to burn the finished product back to a DVD-R (20 mins), which costs me $1 in materials and quite a bit of time, it’s still more compelling than going to the store to spend over $20 for something which will entertain you for at best 6-7 hours for the duration of your ownership.

One of two things is going to happen:
(a) nothing. people will continue to be treated as criminals by media companies with no concern for customer satisfaction beyond the profit motive. Piracy will get easier and easier on old technology (CDs, DVDs, TV) and new technology will get more and more restrictive. It will be a constant arms race between pirates and content producers, and everyone will lose.
(b) someone will figure out how to make money by selling something worth buying. If I could buy a DVD movie for $7, I would do it in a second. I *know* they could make money on it. If I could by a CD for $7, I’d do it in a second. It’d be even easier to make money on that. CDs and DVDs cost pennies to manufacture. Cut prices drastically, and recover production costs in staggering volume.

I don’t have a lot of hope for b. But who knows? Enough ranting, I need to swap my next Netflix disc in to my Mac for ripping…

visceral hatred is bad for you

This morning I was listening to NPR. One of the lead stories was that George Bush is starting up his campaign in earnest now. He visited some car parts place called “USA industries,” where , I kid you not, the crates were painted in red, white, and blue. Then he went to a park for the ground breaking of a Sept. 11th memorial. Then he went to a different part of the same park and raised $1.7M for his campaign.

Now, I know a lot of people use blogs as a place to hash out political greivances, and, some might claim, have meaningful political debate. I’m here to say that this place won’t be one of them. Too much of what I feel about the political process and everything that swirls around it is negative. I hear about John Kerry, and I feel worse. I hear about Bush, and I feel worse. I’m frustrated by the apathy, the lack of sophistication, and the lack of independent thought that we as a populace possess. And life is too short for that much negativity.

I’m selfish. So, instead of focusing hard on issues and making myself an activist like I should, I’m going to just educate myself as much as I need, and try to focus on the things in my life that make me happy. This includes, but is not limited to, cooking and eating good food, playing outside, reading, playing video games, and plotting an eventual move to Scandinavia.

spam selling spam

One of the interesting things about running a server and owning a domain is getting all sorts of spam trying to sell you services promoting your site or brand, or offering to design logos and websites for you. This morning I got the most ridiculous of the spams I’ve seen yet: a spam offering spam services. It’s good to know that, if need be, I can send 3 million emails an hour. For your edification:

BULK ISP –DEDICATED SERVER
Providing you with 100% total bulk email and hosting solutions

BULK ISP offers:
Bandwidth: 1.5 M/S Upload and Download
Unlimited Email addresses “POP 3 Boxes”
Host up to twenty of your own websites
You can use it also as an smtp server to send your email
80 Gig hard drive Pentium 4 was build to send millions of emails
Send up to 10 million Opt-in emails a day 

Guarantee 30 days of service month to month no contract

FREE 24 hours 7 days a week technical support

Full access to the server using terminal service or Pc, anywhere or any other      remote access software you prefer

Set up time is two hours

The server comes with the following:
MOTHERBOARD:  Intel 
PROCESSOR:  PENTIUM®-4  1.8GHz 512K CACHE
MEMORY:  512MB PC2100 DDR ECC REGISTERED
HARD DRIVE:  IBM 80.0 GB EIDE HD 7200RPM
CASE: Super Micro 2 U Rackmount
CD-ROM DRIVE: C52X max.
OPERATING SYSTEM: WINDOWS 2000 SERVER / WINDOWS 2003 SERVER/ Red hat 7.3/ mandrake / or whatever OS you prefer

You will also receive two years free membership with www.ewasher.us to clean your emails  

Prices are as low as $2000 a month with $100.00 set up fee.  Please call or email me when you are ready to begin.

150,000(messages)/hour – $1,500.00   total     
300,000/hour – $3,000.00                 24/7 Free Phone and email technical support
600, 000/hour – $6,000.00
2 million/hour – $12,000.00
3 million/hour – $16,000.00   (UNLIMITED CAPACITY LICENSE)

EMAIL LISTS
We also offer you a 100% guaranteed deliverable semi opt-in email list.  Our emails go through ewasher to ensure their delivery.  If any of the emails bounce back we will replace them with emails that are deliverable free of charge.  You will receive 30 million emails for only $5000.00.  These will be yours to own.

netflix is neat

So… since we have a tendency to rent a movie or two every week, I decided it would be cool to join netflix. The idea is you queue up a bunch of movies that you want to rent, they mail you up to three at a time, and when you’re done with them, you mail them back. You can do this as many times as you want for $20/month. So, we break even if we rent more than 5 movies a month (which I’m pretty sure we do). Also, since netflix is based here in the bay, I figure we’ll get the movies lickety-split. It also doesn’t hurt that I have *cough* a DVD burner.

One of the cool things about netflix is they allow you to rate all the movies on their site, and based on your ratings, they suggest future movies that you might want to rent. This is pretty cool, and I totally spent an hour and a half clicking through hundreds of movies and rating them. Now it recommends for me “the best of the muppet show” along with “apocalypse now redux.” Hmm.

In other news, my mother has shipped me all my old scuba-diving equipment from Austin. In combination with my brother’s, which is already here in CA, the idea is not to pay through the nose for the basic stuff (mask, snorkel, fins, boots, gloves) that they require you to have for the Open Water Diver class, but refuse to rent. If we were to buy all the stuff, it would be about $200-300/person. Blech. In any case, after this we will be duly trained/refreshed for our upcoming excursion to Mexico which I am so looking forward to.

buy me this

This is the coolest thing ever!

http://www.xat.nl/enigma-e/desc/index.htm

Leslie can attest to the fact that when I was in Baltimore with her, and we stopped by the NSA museum, I was ecstatic to get to touch and play with an original Enigma rotor machine. Right behind it were the bombes that the English in Bletchly Park to crack the original code (they were led by Alan Turing himself).

Maybe the next time I have $150 lying around.

this page is coming to you from palo alto

If you’re reading this, then I’ve succeeded in moving www.overt.org over to the new server! Also, gallery now lives here, too. I’m trying to incrementally move things over to avoid any big explosions. In the next few days I’m going to do the trickiest switch: moving everyone’s email over. I’ll make sure to let everyone who uses overt for email know before that happens, though.

a new overt

So, the time has finally come for me to move overt to another server, one I actually pay for. I ended up picking ServePath (www.servepath.com) for hosting, and it seems to be working out well so far.

The process of moving all the mail and web and what not over to the new server is somewhat arduous, which is why I left a couple of months for it to happen. It’s been consuming a lot of my free time recently, but it’s really a kind of recreation for me anyway (no, really).

When the time comes to actually make the switch, I’ll figure out a plan for letting everyone know about any possible downtime.

wine tasting in santa cruz

Today we went wine tasting in Santa Cruz. This might come as a bit of a surprise to those of you who already know that I don’t really like wine. Still, it seemed like something local and fun that we could do to get out on the weekend and breakup the monotony.

If you know anything about American wine, you’re probably wondering, “Why did they go to Santa Cruz instead of Napa Valley? Isn’t Santa Cruz just a bunch of old hippies and surf bums?” Both good questions. To answer the second, Santa Cruz has not only hippies and surfers, but also expensive boutiques and a some wineries (quite a few, acutally). To answer the first, we were too lazy to drive all the way up to Napa. Some day we will.

The place we went to is called “Bonny Doon Winery.” Now, I should say before I go any further that Santa Cruz styles itself as the “anti-Napa,” and proudly flouts conventional wine-making wisdom. Most of this irreverence was lost on me as someone who doesn’t know any of said conventional wisdom. But in any case, we had a lot of fun. The way it’s set up is each week they pick a new selection of wines (seven or so), then you come lean on a bar and a helpful staffer walks you through each one, describing it. They started us with a pink wine that was actually very good called “vin gris de cigare” which means “gray wine of cigar” (tricky, eh?). It’s called cigar because it’s a type taken from a place in france where it’s forbidden by law to land flying saucers (“cigars”) in vineyards. Ha! Very funny, isn’t it? We then went to a sushi white wine, which I also actually liked, then through some darker red, bitter stuff that I can take or leave, eventually finishing with some dessert wines. First, some sparkling red stuff so sweet that it could have come from a coke machine; it was aptly described as “a strawberry nehi spiked with vodka.” Then a rasperry concoction (framboise) that we actually drank out of chocolate cups (themselves aptly called “snobinettes”). We ended up with a bottle each of the pink, the white, and a fancy red.