I’m getting ready to leave for Orlando tomorrow morning. I’ll spend the weekend there, and while I’m up there I plan to see Attack of the Clones on a digital screen.

Despite rampant piracy which forced the record company to release it several weeks early and disrupted their advertising campaign, Eminem’s new CD sold nearly 300,000 copies during the first long weekend to debut at number 1.

“We’ve never had a record debut at No. 1 on the SoundScan chart that hasn’t had the benefit of a full six days of sales behind it,” said Mike Shalett, chief executive of SoundScan. Yet Interscope Geffen A&M, the label behind Eminem, insists that illegal copies, made from one of three closely guarded master copies sent to manufacturers, hurt the release.

I believe most people will buy a CD after sampling several tracks by downloading MP3s, if it’s something they want to listen to.

Cody just killed a huge palmetto bug. For anyone who doesn’t live in Florida, that’s what we have instead of cockroaches. They’re basically the same thing except bigger & more disgusting. This one was the size of a small mouse.

Cody played with it for about 10 minutes before he finally killed it and he kept watching it for another 15 minutes to make sure it was really dead.

Homogenized Music [Slashdot: News for nerds, stuff that matters]

Someone finally said it: radio is crap. I almost never listen to the radio for music, since they never play anything I want to hear. I’m not into top-40 stuff – I don’t listen to Britney & N’sync.

Lately I’ve started listening to Miami’s new all dance music station, 93.1, but even they play the same songs over and over again. At least it isn’t top-40 pop songs.

Most of the time I just listen to CDs. I usually burn 80-minute music mix CDs to listen to in my car, so I don’t have to change CDs as often & I can listen to the songs I like rather than what the record companies think I should listen to.

Devin Powell’s car wouldn’t start this afternoon, because he left his headlights on all day while he was at school. So we pushed the little mercury all around the parking lot (and pretty damn fast too) before realizing you can’t start an automatic that way (apparently). So he got jumped. But now Layne can’t find out where those jumper cables jumped off to… [Jeremiah Rogers Weblog]

That was never a problem with my 1995 Toyota Corolla. I left my headlights on all the time, and as soon as I removed my key from the ignition & opened my door, it would automatically turn off the headlights. That was a great feature, and I got used to just leaving them on and not thinking about it.

Unfortunately, that changed with my 2003 Corolla. They added daylight running lights & it now has an alarm if I forget to shut the headlights, but they removed that auto shutoff feature. I’ll have to get used to thinking about turning the headlights on & off again.

Other than that, I love my new car. It’s bigger than the 95 model & a lot more comfortable.

Apparently it’s illegal to sell dildos in the state of Texas. Worse yet, having more than six dildos constitutes the intent to distribute them, so zealous dong ownership alone is against the law. No wonder Bush is such a tight-ass! [Adam Curry: Adam Curry's Weblog]

I knew Texas had the nation’s dumbest laws, but this proves it.

I just spent a few hours getting WorldBeatPlanet back up. BounceWeb had a serious hardware crash, resulting in loss of many accounts & all data. Thankfully I always keep backups of all of my code on my own machine. Unfortunately all of the content is in a MySQL database and my SQL backup was almost a month old.

This time I plan to set up a cron job to automatically back it up & send a copy to my machine. I’ve been able to do that easily with MacMegasite, since I can connect to their server remotely from mysqldump running on my own machine. However, bounceweb doesn’t allow remote connections to mysql, so I’ll have to set up a job on their server with their help.

I just bought a 2003 Toyota Corolla today, trading in my 1995 Corolla. If I kept the old car, it would have cost me $800 to fix the air conditioner. I had spent $400 on a minor repair just before I moved, so it was getting to the point where it cost too much to keep.

Awwww…. how cute!

[Yahoo News]

Digital Content Smackdown.

“In Hollywood Wants to Plug the ‘Analog Hole’, Cory Doctorow reveals key points of the ‘Content Protection Status Report’ filed with the Senate Judiciay Committee by the MPAA ÷ a document that lays out the Evil Empire’s Internet-destruction plans, which involve turning humble ADCs (Analog/Digital Converters) into content permission valves that would govern approximately the full range of ‘content’ use:

‘Under its proposal, every ADC will be controlled by a “cop-chip” that will shut it down if it is asked to assist in converting copyrighted material ÷ your cellphone would refuse to transmit your voice if you wandered too close to the copyrighted music coming from your stereo.

The report shows that this ADC regulation is part of a larger agenda. The first piece of that agenda, a mandate that would give Hollywood a veto over digital television technology, is weeks away from coming to fruition. Hollywood also proposes a radical redesign of the Internet to assist in controlling the distribution of copyrighted works.

This three-part agenda — controlling digital media devices, controlling analog converters, controlling the Internet — is a frightening peek at Hollywood’s vision of the future.’

You know what to do. If you don’t, read Cory’s report.” [Doc Searls Weblog]

Be an informed consumer. Read up on this stuff. Make your voice heard. Librarians especially need to consider how destructive such a future would be on our ability to circulate digital content (as in, we won’t be able to).

This is one of the stupidest ideas ever. If it passes, it will be a major disaster.

I just had a CD go bad on me: “Bamba” by Orchestra Baobab. The second song won’t play, although the rest of it does. I could either buy a new one or burn a copy. Luckly I have an MP3 of that song, which I found on Napster last year.

South Asia on the Brink of Nuclear War. The Indian Subcontinent may be at the nuclear 11th hour. Indian and Pakistani generals are talking about a limited nuclear exchange. One million troops stand eyeball-to-eyeball at their disputed border. Pakistan is believed to have 20 or 30 nuclear warheads and actually made them operational in a previous conflict; India is believed to have 100 nuclear warheads. Can they fight a conventional war without resorting to a nuclear exchange? What can the world do to prevent nuclear war? BBC latest. Invasion drills are being practiced. [kuro5hin.org]

Very frightening!

I took this picture a few weeks ago. This is the Middle River behind my home.

I took this picture of some visitors outside my patio a few minutes ago.

Copyright Terrorism. As Lane Becker wrote on Meg’s weblog, Valenti and his cronies are fighting “a terrorist war on the most important [Aaron Swartz: The Weblog]

They’re worried that the artists won’t get paid – absolute bullshit! Even though CD prices have gone up, artists aren’t getting paid any more than they did when CDs cost less. All of that money is going to the record companies, not the artists.

What we’re hearing from Valenti & others is the last dying gasp of a dinosaur that realizes it’s becoming extinct but is trying desperately to survive. The best thing that can happen is for record companies and the entire recording industry to no longer exist in their current form. Piracy and file swapping isn’t destroying them; their own actions is doing it. People don’t want to spend $19 or so for a copy protected CD from one of the few mainstream artists they like to promote with one or two good songs & lots of junk.

The terrorists have already won. At this point they don’t even have to do anything. We’re already living in a state of constant hysteria & panic fueled by the media’s feeding frenzy. As I’ve said before, 9-11 didn’t change anything. We aren’t in any more danger now than we were before 9-11. All it did was make us wake up to the danger that was there all along. We’re one step closer to living in a total police state, which is exactly what the terrorists want. When the last remnant of our freedom is gone, the terrorists can claim total victory.

Here are two headlines that illustrate this from my daily Sun-Sentinel news mailing:

BROOKLYN BRIDGE CLOSED FOR HOUR AMID HEIGHTENED SECURITY ALERT

The Brooklyn Bridge was closed for an hour this morning as police

checked out a suspicious package, one day after law enforcement

officials said the Statue of Liberty and the bridge may be

targeted by terrorists in future attacks.

UNPLUGGED METAL DETECTOR FORCES EVACUATION AT LAUDERDALE AIRPORT

A terminal at the Fort Lauderdale-Hollwood International Airport was

shut down this morning after at least one metal detector was found

unplugged in the security area.

Marc Barrot has the kind of weblog I want. One where you can see seven days at a time, but only today’s posts are expanded. Screen shot. It’s been quite a while since I’ve had such weblog envy.   [Scripting News]

It looks like the Ender’s Game movie is finally going to happen.

From Aint-It-Cool-News:

Well my spy tells me that Orson Scott Card’s long languishing in pitch hell adaptation of ENDER’S GAME will finally be finding a home with Warner Brothers. Not only that, but the director of THE NEVERENDING STORY and DAS BOOT will be directing. That’s right, Wolfgang Petersen has signed on to direct this epic of science fiction cool! Can’t imagine a better director for this film personally. He is brutal and human and great with kids. This could be a great film if they nail the script. I’m gonna dig for more details and see if I can get Wolfgang or Orson or Lorenzo on the horn to comment on whatever it is they are going to be doing with this. But ya know what… They got the right director, now all they have to do is have a great script and make a great movie. Simple. heheheh…

Orson originally wanted Episode 1′s talentless Jake Lloyd to play Ender, which would have turned it into a total disaster. Thankfully that isn’t going to happen now.

This is just TOO cute. “Cody” locked himself in the bedroom and kept meowing until I let him out. This is the second time he did it today – he likes to get behind the door and push it closed. Sometimes he gets it to lock.

And now Scoble. Holy shit. [Doc Searls Weblog]

Microsoft’s management has taken a hostile view of customers. Jim Allchin sees that we’re all ripping him off, so he puts in activation codes. His Hollywood buddies see that we’re ripping them off, so they put in digital rights management stuff. At the same time MSN views me as a pair of eyeballs to be “monetized” so they put spam and ads and other intrustive marketing techniques into my life.

Oh, and Microsoft views its developers, not as partners who will help give users like me better products, but as “warriors” who must be convinced to not use Java.

This is not the world I wanted to see come about. I should be able to buy a CD, turn it into digital files on my computer, and carry those files around with me. Soon, if this industry keeps going, I’m just gonna be marked as a criminal and I won’t be able to use my own property the way I’d like. Hell, I just took a really cool picture of a surfer in Hawaii. Imagine the day when it’d be impossible for me to share that with you because of the deals Microsoft and other companies are making (and what our government is putting into law).

As long as there are alternatives to Microsoft (like MacOS X) there is hope we can escape such a future.

When I buy a CD, I should be able to do whatever I want with it. I should be able to play it either on my computer or my stereo. I should be able to copy tracks to my computer to play whenever I want. I should be able to burn music mix CDs with tracks from several different CDs I own.

This is no longer about protecting artist’s rights. The artist hardly makes any profit from their CD sales, even at current inflated prices. Most of the money goes to the record companies and distributors. People are buying fewer CDs not because of file sharing but because of inflated prices and because record companies aren’t giving people what they want to hear. The record companies would rather promote a few artists while less-known artists making great music have a hard time getting heard.