Blessed by the Potato

Well, it’s been a slow week in the blogosphere (I can’t believe I’m using the blog jargon now… ugh).

Most of my Canadian friends/regular reads still seem to be reeling from the election (Conservatives? Balance of power in the Bloc’s hands? Seriously? What’s wrong with kids these days). I, myself had almost a week off from the web page, following having something very uncomfortable shoved in a place where things do not go back in, which was itself followed by the flu. I smell sick now, and I hate that (it also usually means I’m in for a big nasty week-long flu). That is what’s keeping me up at the moment, writing truly uninspired blog posts that will haunt my archives, forever wishing that I could expunge their uselessness. DJ_Paradise has been putting up a few entries, but still hasn’t added my live journal account to his friends list, so I still can’t post comments (though I’m not even sure live journal sent it out; I got so many errors registering and all that there). I don’t know what exactly he’s up to, but he’s talking about government forms and storing his stuff, so I’m thinking he unwittingly signed up for a military tour of Afghanistan, or he’s getting a job in another country. Netbug’s been dead silent, and we’re still waiting on Baum’s update (with pictures!) after his trip out West.

Thanks to Michael Giest (whose blog I’ve been checking weekly since I was sent there by the CBC to learn more about the Sam Bulte scandal) I found out that a Canadian record company has stood up to the RIAA prosecuting teens for downloading music in the states, offering to pay the legal fees of the hapless teenager in his fight against the RIAA. Makes me want to go out and buy that BNL Christmas album after all. In a similar vein, here’s a funny parody of the MPAA warnings prior to watching a movie on DVD. Interestingly, the RIAA is demanding that the boy, who has 600 “suspect” songs on his computer pay $9000 in damages ($4500 if he pays by a certain date, without fighting it in court). That works out to $7.50 (US) per song. I know that they like to charge more as a penalty than they would to sell legally in the first place, but that’s pretty ridiuclous. I completely disagree with their insane crackdown and abuse of the American legal system to begin with, but this is just going over the top. If they made the fees more reasonable they might actually get people to pay the royalties. IIRC, a song from iTunes runs about $1. A fine of $1-2 would not be too unreasonable, and it would have the added bonus of not requiring them to serve up the bandwidth to provide it. All they have to do is surf the user’s shared folder on Kazaa or whatever filesharing program they’re using and send them a bill. Then instead of being total dicks and suing a few kids at a time for a few thousand each, they could hit thousands of people with bills for a few hundred. At those prices, people might be more willing to pay, and they could even make the whole thing fire-and-forget (let the users decide which songs they need to pay for — after all, they might have ripped an MP3 in their shared directories from a CD they already own and shouldn’t pay twice).

Back to the topic of blogs: I’m really abusing the “uncategorized” category for my posts. I didn’t really know what I’d be talking about with this website when I was setting WordPress up, and even after having 40-some posts up now (yowzah!) I still don’t know what sort of categories I should set up. I had planned on making Rants a separate section (similar to how Recipes are handled now), but most of them have fitted neatly into “insanity”. School & Gaming are obvious, but that still leaves a lot of other uncategorized posts, and as Wayfare told me she learned in library school “everything has a classification, if you use a ‘miscellaneous’ or ‘uncategorized’ folder, you fail.” If anyone sees a pattern or three to reorganize my posts (I can resort them post hoc) feel free to let me know.