Category Archives: Tech

Ah, more good stuff on

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Ah, more good stuff on the online music thing.

Apparently the rocket scientists in the music industry are preparing to “adjust” the prices of online CDs and singles. The basic gist is that a CD download will cost more than the physical CD from a store.

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That’s stunned silence, in case you can’t tell. What the heck are these people thinking? Where does this make sense? One example qutoed in the article is almost $4 more if you download it. Sure, sign me up. Let me pay more for it, not get any artwork or media, have it polluted with digital copyright protection so that I can’t play it anywhere I want, and so I will have to burn it to a CD anyway (that I have to buy myself anyway, and pay an extra tax on). Yep. That’s good business right there. Them fellers are smmart.

oh, yeah, maybe jacking the price of a whole album is stupid, so maybe let’s force people to buy a bad song when they buy a good song. I wish I was joking, read the article.

man.

I don’t know what happened,

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I don’t know what happened, but “Dick Rizzo’s Chippendale Dance Academy(tm)” was closed when I showed up. Something about Revenue Canada, and the police.

Huh, oh well.

What else is happening? Not much, just the normal stuff I suppose. Cael is over 18lbs. Jordy is beautiful. Quinn is neither beautiful or 18lbs. Nikki is beautiful and very very patient with me. Let me explain.

I signed us up for ZIP.ca, which I highly recommend to anyone. The Globe and Mail did a piece on it recently, since it just opened for business in February. It’s a local company started in Ottawa, which is way cool. The deal is simple, sign up, choose some DVD movies on the web site and they will start mailing them to you, you can have 3 movies at a time for as long as you like. Then when you’re done send one or all of them back and they will mail you the next one in your queue. No late fees, no shipping charges. And it’s $25/month. For some, that’s outrageous. For me, that’s a savings of approximately $700-800 per month on late charges. Approximately. It’s a ballpark figure. Give or take.

So anyway, give it a try. Any Canadian resident can sign up. If you get mail, you can get movies. They offer a 2 week free trial so have at it.

I usually don’t like to offer advertising space for companies for free on the blog or anywhere, but really this is a sound business plan, well executed, and it’s likely to save me lots of money. Why not? The vast audience of Vallentyne.com lending it’s financial muscle to this company is quite a boost to a struggling startup I would think.

Ah. Wednesday. On another technical

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Ah. Wednesday.

On another technical note I have given Darcy free rein on the Vallentyne.com server farm to put some Cornstock-related pictures and content. I’m sure I will regret that really soon now.

Most of the pictures from this year’s Cornstock come from Vallentyne.com, near as I can figure. Ah well, glad to help.

So, still no posts from anybody here besides me. I hope I won’t have to resort to any desparate plea to come back now that the darn blog is working again. That would be pathetic.

I’m not desperate or anything. Or bored. Really.

Hey boys and girls. Template

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Hey boys and girls.

Template change for Random Ramblings, just to keep things fresh. What the heck. Is it good? Is it bad? I think it’s easier to read anyway. Or is it? It shows up mighty small……

Geek alert yet again. Just

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Geek alert yet again.

Just got Office 2003 beta 2. I must say that just when I think the mail client can’t get any slicker, it does. I’m amazed how much better it is.

Anyway. Here’s another thing. Why is it that the big record companies won’t take my money? I have very modest needs and from my perspective they should be easily fulfilled. I want to pay for music that I can download and use as I see fit. That’s it. But I’ve looked around and you can’t do that, apparently. There are always strings attached, and that doesn’t work for me. You can get music from bands you don’t know, and I’m sure it’s fine stuff but I don’t really need to be scraping through a boatload of crap to find one good band or song. I know what I like and what I have heard, and I want to be able to buy that from the people that own it. Ideally, I would just give the artists the money but that’s not usually possible.

I don’t want to buy a CD for $20 in the pursuit of one song. I used to, sometimes, but now that I’m older I won’t. I do want to pay for music I like, all napsters aside.

I don’t think I’m being unreasonable, does anybody agree?