My first telemarketer!

Sep 3, 2002 · 1 minute read

I feel so honoured…

Elizabeth Dole Will Defend Our 2nd Amendment Rights!

Sep 3, 2002 · 2 minute read

I do wish she’d stop sending me letters. Firstly, it’s not as if I can vote, and secondly, just even holding a picture of her hugging George W. Bush makes me feel slightly ill. Hopefully, they’ll stop after the election. Oh. It’s only the primary in September. Silly me.

My frirst Amazon survival package arrived today, containing more books than I have space for, and the uncut version of Leon (including Mathilda's first assassination. Pre-teenage Killer goodness). Plus, the first DVDs from Netflix arrived. Now all I have to do is find the time to read/watch them all.

Fight! Fight! Actually, it does seem as if they're asking for quite a bit of money, but I imagine Labour will not want to get in a position where the papers can cry out about a 'Winter of Discontent'. On the other hand, that sort of payrise would put a significant hole in Gordon Brown's spending plans, especially when all the other public sectors decide that if the firemen can get away with it, they might as try and see what they can get.

Two fun Slashdot stories. The first brings up the hope of Ogg support in Apple's iPod soon, while the other one is a fun vision of the future that Microsoft and the RIAA/MPAA would like to have. Let's not let it happen.

An unforeseen problem

Sep 2, 2002 · 1 minute read

It’s been pretty dark and dismal here for the past few days, so I’ve been locked away in my room, working away on my various assignments. Today, the weather has changed somewhat - brilliant sunhine is now coming thorugh my window. Which would be nice, but it completely obliterates my view of the computer monitor. After fiddling with the blinds for about ten minutes, I managed to get a nice interference pattern, but still couldn’t see the screen properly. The weather is telling me to Stop. So I’m on a break.

Okay, so I know they're not going to be reading this, but congratulations to Roy and Rosie, two friends from back home, who have just got engaged. Yay!

Blog entries are a bit short at the moment, mainly because I've been locked in my room. Things should get a bit longer from tomorrow...

Marking Woes

Sep 1, 2002 · 1 minute read

Marking is hell. I have tremendous respect for teachers who have to live with it everyday. When they’ve done everything right, it’s simple; you just check off all the little boxes, and move on. When they get something wrong, you have to gaze at their code for several minutes, and work out just why their code doesn’t terminate and prints infinite amounts of ?s onto the screen. I hope people will find my comments helpful.

Now this is interesting. I don't have my copy of The Nation's Favourite with me at the moment, but I'm fairly sure that she's beginning to approach the audience levels that Mark & Lard were attracting. Yet she gets a £333,000-a-year deal for the next three years? Let's hope that Mr. Parfitt's tenure at Radio 1 is coming to an end; he's managed to undo most of the work that Mattthew Bannister did to rescue the station back in 1994. And no, I'm accepting 1Xtra or 6Music as an excuse, excellent as they are.

Dying.

Aug 31, 2002 · 1 minute read

War & Peace is out in December. Along with The Children’s Hour, according to current MGM rumours. I will be taking a lot of DVDs home with me, it seems….

Fitter, happier

Aug 30, 2002 · 2 minute read

While I’m still stuck trying to get the sockets to work, never mind the web server part that I have to build on top, the cheque for $800 that I have in front of me goes someway to reassuring me that I haven’t made a terrible mistake. Bribes are always good.

I decided to skip the trip to the mall on the grounds that it didn't have everything I needed to buy, and I wouldn't forgive myself for spending a whole day there (my self-loathing is up there with Matt's), so I shuffled off to the dead mall again to buy some food and something to calm my oh-so-annyoing wisdom teeth. I also managed to pick up a jug, so I can make some Kool-Aid now (regular drinkers will know that the correct measurement of sugar is essential for obtaining something drinkable; too much and it's far too sweet. Too little, and you remember just why the US Navy uses grape flavour to clean pipes in submarines). I think the KitchenWorks shop I got it from is either over-staffed, or having a very quiet time of things; I was followed around, just in case I needed help, and they even offered to hold my ten or so bags whilst I was getting money out of my wallet. Back home, they'd just laugh to themselves as you were getting more and more tangled.

Right, I'm off to make a camera...

Treading Water

Aug 29, 2002 · 1 minute read

Three nasty assignments, a stack of marking, a general feeling of failure, and the week’s not over yet. The fact that I’m being paid tomorrow doesn’t really cheer me up that much, either.

Typically, the course I'm taking simply to fulfil the requirements for the Master's/Ph.D. programme turns out to be the one I'm enjoying the most. It's probably due to the lecturer, who is one of those great lecturers (there are a few at Manchester, as well) who loves almost every aspect of their work, and they're just dying to tell you all the great things that you can do with what they're teaching you. And today he invited us to a tractor pull. Next week, he intends to explain the Fourier Transform in a way that mere mortals can understand, and I can't help looking forward to it.

Whilst I should probably be working/marking tomorrow, I'm imposing a trip to the Mall; hopefully gazing at the Macs will raise my spirits a little. The Netflix account is for the same purpose. The first DVD arrives on Monday, apparently...

Nothing to say

Aug 28, 2002 · 1 minute read

I’m gutted that Radio 1 is cancelling the Evening Session. Granted, I haven’t listened to it for a over a year, but it was an important show, being one of the few national shows where new acts could get airplay. The news that Peel is going to an after-midnight slot in the next few months just furthers the impression that Radio 1 is sending anything not chart-worthy to the night-time ghetto (Thanks to simon b for providing the news, and also for providing great summaries on his website about the UK music scene, so I don’t have to pay extortionate prices over here on imported magazines).

The Tao of Jack McCoy

Aug 27, 2002 · 1 minute read

I shouldn’t really like Law & Order. After all, it’s a show that has an unrelenting and fixed format, a cast that seems to change from season to season, and ‘rips stories from the headlines’. So why is it my favourite crime show? The answer is Jack McCoy, A.D.A of New York, played by the excellent Sam Waterston. He’s the complete antithesis of the stereotypical ‘good guy lawyer’; this man will stop at nothing to get his conviction. He’ll bend every ethics law (and break several), trick defendants into incriminating each other, break witnesses down on the stand, use inadmissable evidence in creative ways; basically he’ll go to any length to get a conviction. It’s hugely entertaining. I know that he wasn’t the original DA (Channel 5 started the show in the UK from the 1997 series), but without him, the show would be just like every other crime show on the television. Okay, so the alcoholic Irish Catholic bit is a little clichéd, but he does it so well…

The Decline of the Music Industry

Aug 27, 2002 · 4 minute read

Today ends in a ‘y’, so it must be time for the music industry to release another report showing a downturn in music sales, and to start shouting: “See!!! You’re killing music! Give us the right to hack into your computer!”. They were noticeably quieter last week, when a different report said that music downloading probably hasn’t hurt music sales in the way the RIAA claim. Still, music sales are down, and have been declining for several years. If it’s not the fault of file sharing, then what is to blame?

• The recession - There's an economic downturn happening all around us. Americans are not spending as much as they used to, thus they're not buying as many luxury items as before.


• The End of the Baby Boomer Conversion - From the record labels' point of view, the CD market was a fantastic idea, as it meant that everybody had to go out and re-buy all their albums, replacing the original vinyl versions. This probably helped push CD sales for over a decade, as people slowly worked through their collections. But what happens when practically everybody has done this? The sell-through of back catalogue will go through the floor. This happened in 1996. Strangely, the record companies don't mention this anymore. The downturn started before Napster.


• The Music Industry is rotten - due to sweeping changes in regulation, one company owns most of America's radio stations. The majority of independent labels are nothing of the sort; they're vanity labels for corporations who want to present a 'Gen-X' front. The major labels are resorting to vapid talent shows to make a few quick hits, a big-selling album, and a fast slide into obscurity. So far, they seem to be doing okay with this strategy, but each time they do it again (as in the difference between PopStars and Pop Idol sales), their returns get smaller and smaller.


• Finally, CDs are too expensive. The RIAA can whine about how CDs are cheaper than they've ever been in real terms, and that it's naive to say that a CD only costs 10c to produce. True enough, but consider this: as far as I know, the most expensive pop album ever produced is Michael Jackson's Invincible, at a cost of $30 million dollars. The list price is $18.98. If we look at a film with a similar budget, say Austin Powers 2, and look at the DVD of the film, we can see that, for a dollar more, we get commentaries, a whole film, deleted scenes, interviews, music videos, and more besides. On the CD, we have a maximum of 74 minutes of audio. You can see why the DVD market is skyrocketing, whilst CD sales plummet.

What can the record companies do? Well, they could reduce the price of CDs, try and re-introduce some excitement back into the industry by allowing small record labels to flourish (and not buy them out when they look profitable), and making the CD package more enticing, e.g. by including DVD discs of the album/single's videos (they don't cost much to press, and they're already paying for the production of the videos already, so why not make use of them?) Will they do this? No. Instead, they want to pass laws that will allow them access to anybody's computer that they suspect is being used for file-sharing, and take measures to stop them. They want to lock up their customers, preventing them from doing things with their music that they've done for years. They'd love to force a new format upon us, to get the Boomer Effect back; but their efforts so far have failed miserably, as people are still feeling the pain from the vinyl-to-CD transfer. It's not their fault. Oh no. It's our fault. We should be grateful we can pay $20 for the new teen-pop sensation, coming straight from the baiting-pit of the smash hit TV show on Fox. We should be grateful that the watchful eyes of the RIAA are upon us, waiting to strike if we commit the sin of copying a music track to our computer, and we should be grateful that the RIAA, and its friend the MPAA, will make the computer safe for us nice little consumers.