DRM is a pain in the ass; it’s that thing Microsoft and Apple and most hardware/software vendors are using to make sure their precious music and videos aren’t stolen and copied around in the computer age, and it works on the virtue of making everything non-DRM hard to do.
I don’t mind it so much on an intellectual rights protection level - people should be compensated for their work, and if you want to get around it you work harder - but it sucks on an implementation level. It has already been talked to death all over the web, but in summary: DRM lets hardware vendors force new hardware on consumers (stuff that’s “DRM compliant”, whereas old hardware conveniently isn’t), forces consumers to purchase the same work multiple times on multiple platforms, and can affect the quality of your system depending on how aggressive the vendor is pursuing protection (from Microsoft’s “check 30 times a second” DVD playback to Sony’s hidden rootkit…).
In my quest for a good MP3 media player, I checked out the combination that Jeff recommended a few weeks back: Foobar2000 and MP3tag, the former being a Windows-based customizable media player for all sorts of audio formats and the latter being a database-like MP3 tag editor. After a week and a half of use and a substantial amount of time spent in customization, my verdict is that I’m crazy for spending my time doing this.
MP3tag is for for people who like their songs to conform to one naming convention and embed pointless information within, including artist, contributing artist(s), producer, distributor, first time heard, awards received, and popularity-if-played-at-a-junior-high-prom. Most of its utility is available in modern media players, but I suppose the dedicated interface to tagging makes mass tagging songs (like my current project to re-tag all my songs in their native language as opposed to funky translations and adding genre and album info) more efficient. I doubt most people will go through the trouble of re-tagging their songs, so this app is hard to recommend for everyone.
Just passing along the good news here. Looks like Berkeley’s experiment last semester with opening webcasts to the general public worked well for them, and they’re going to continue the free online lectures at http://webcast.berkeley.edu/courses.php. On one hand this is a great refresher on material that’s a good 4-5 years old (for some of us anyway), an opportunity to check out a world-class university, or simply receive some high quality education; on the other hand, it feels more and more like the $8,000/year that students now pay in tuition is really for that nice piece of paper at the end.
Oh, and the lectures are, for some unfathomable reason, in Realplayer format. Since Realplayer is known to be cancerous and detrimental to your computer’s health, check out players like Real Player Alternative for your playback needs.
The office holiday season is like the workplace’s winter break; people take vacations, half the people aren’t in the office, the remaining few tend to goof around and arrive late/leave early since little work is getting done to begin with. After New Year’s, everybody comes back but there’s still a general euphoria, sometimes accompanied by dread knowing that very soon, the office will be back to normal and work will have to be done. Experience has pegged this holiday leftover time to end around mid-January…around now.
But this Christmas I was introduced to a board game by the name of Puerto Rico. I had previously grouped board games into a few broad categories - childish luck-based games (Monopoly and The Game of Life), deep strategical two-player games (Othello, Chess and Go), and party games designed to make people look smart and/or act dumb (Pictionary). Jeff assured me, though, that this game involved a lot of players, and required a fair bit of skill and thinking with little luck (e.g., rolling of the dice) involved.
I used to think I wasn’t a very competitive guy. I was mellow, made friends by helping them with schoolwork and casual games, and usually just went through life satisfied with my own progress and happy for others in their successes.
Then I realized I enjoyed overcoming challenges (I’m going to drop the grad-school-application tone now), and that whether I wanted to compete, others felt they were competing and more often than not I was ahead, usually taking a natural position as the teacher or mentor and sometimes I obtaining “big brother” status from cute girls. I’m not even good at many things; I just refuse to do things I suck at.
As for not trying things I suck at, a bit of thought and self-reflection made it increasingly clear that I’m pretty bad at losing. Specifically, I hate it when I lose when I’m supposed to win (e.g., letting a lower-ranked opponent beat me) or when I lose by a huge margin from a giant gap in skill and play (i.e., getting destroyed). I also don’t take much enjoyment in destroying opponents, but at least I can console myself with the win, whereas the bitter aftertaste of sound defeat lingers in the mind.
I just spent 3+ hours reorganizing my MP3 collection; it’s one of those things I like to do every few months to keep everything in order, and I think I’m already pretty anal with the metainfo tagging and filenames (I basically go through and tag all my files in a temporary folder before I officially add them to “the collection). I’d like to think Apple’s announcement of their iPhone prompted me to relook at my music, but admittedly it’s the looming Econ. paper that’s making me do stuff I wanted to get done…three months ago.
Incidentally, I’ve discovered that the MP3 player QCD (), now defunct and no longer in development, is a nice tool for retagging MP3’s and setting rules for filename formats (mine is simply [artist] - [title].mp3). Nothing irks me more than some funky Bach ~ (Allegro in g MINOR) ~ BWV1053 ~ [ripped by CDRipper] metainfo tagging mess.
