Well...

Those promised blog posts didn't really happen.

Stupid hard drive failure.

Not to make excuses, but our laptop's hard drive crashed about a week ago. For the curious, I usually spend the first week of a vacation to "exhale" whatever stresses I might have accumulated, and then use the second to "get to work", whatever that means given the circumstances. Sometimes it's doing homework. Sometimes, as here, it's stuff that I assign myself.

So with a defunct laptop, and, counting a trip to the library, only one chance at Internet until today (we're back in Sarnia now), I couldn't write the blog entries, or accomplish the other computer-based goals I had set for myself for the trip (i.e., mixing some audio, cleaning out my Inbox, etc). And it's unlikely these will get accomplished during the next week too, for what I hope are obvious reasons.

Not like anyone was eagerly waiting for the blog entries anyway. Or that anyone will even read this sentence. Ah well.

P.S. If anyone's curious, the computer that crashed was five years old, ran XP, had a mere 128 MB of RAM, and -- worse yet, perhaps -- 16 gigs of total hard drive space. If anyone can commandeer such a system in 2008, it'd be a nerd like me, but sometimes things fall apart on even the most cautious users. You have been warned. That said, I made a backup before we left, so it's not as bad as it could have been.

P.P.S. Re: the last sentence before the post-script: some comments here would be nice! I suspect that there's at least a couple people reading this. So, in the hopefully-immortal words of Chris Martin, "If you love me, won't you let me know?" I have little free time as it is, and I'm not going to waste it on a thoughtful, insightful blog series if no one's going to read it.

Stay tuned! (aka "My Blog: Seven Months Later")

So my last blog post was in January, and this fact isn't as hard to believe as you might think. A second semester that was absolutely killer in terms of homework (picture this: American History + ISU, Physics, English, and Law), a more-than-melancholy trip to Pennsylvania immediately after my Law exam, and a busy couple weeks here in Brights Grove [sic], meant that this blog shrank to far less than what I had imagined for it.

Next week, though, I'll be heading back to Pennsylvania for what should be a slightly more normal visit. During this time, I hope to not only finish off some of my summer goals, but to write a series of long-overdue blog posts, on topics including my recent experiences and mindset, the presidential race, Windows Vista, ABBA/Chess/MAMMA MIA!, the New Facebook, and beyond.

So don't touch that dial! Before you know it, this pathetic little blog that no one reads will turn into a slightly less pathetic blog that a few more people read.

-JVD

The Glass Menagerie

Let this be a lesson to the lot of you...we stay in hotels frighteningly often (at least once every other month), so I myself have just learned a valuable lesson. (And from FOX News, no less -- who knew?)

Urban Legends Reference Pages: Hotel Drinking Glasses Expose

The environmentalist in me takes great issue with this, actually, because it sort of forces you to use the disposable cups. On the other hand, my Nestea addiction travels with me, and that stuff comes in recyclable tin cans. Of course, no hotel that I've ever been to has had a recycling bin in the room....

 

P.S. OK, so I've sort of neglected this blog, and for that I apologise. Writing more frequent posts is indeed one of my New Years' Resolutions; however, I might have to keep neglecting it until exams are over.

Should media make killers 'famous'?

"Just think tho," wrote the 19-year-old Omaha shooter in his suicide note. "I'm gonna be (expletive) famous." And he was, at least for a while.

This is something I was wondering about, after seeing all the media buzz that accompanied the recent mall shooting in Omaha: the killer had wished that, through his rampage, he would become famous, and guess what? Thanks to all the media coverage, he did indeed become famous.

This excellent article discusses what CNN, CityTV, and FOX News would fear to imagine: where news doesn't have to be sensationalised or personalised: but sensical and sensitive.

The whole concept can be best summed up by its quote from columnist Michael Mayo, who refused to mention the killer's name:

"I want to deny him what he wanted, the way he denied life to eight innocent victims."

I guess I can't be trusted...

...to not buy anything. Thing is, today is Buy Nothing Day. In a gesture of good will and non-conformance -- because, (a), I'm a non-conformist, and (b), it's Black Friday and 25,000 children die every day of poverty -- I signed up for the associated Facebook event, having been invited by a friend (good thing you know who you are, because unfortunately I don't).

Easy enough, I thought. I never buy much anyway. Chances are -- Black Monday be damned -- I won't buy anything on Buy Nothing Day.

But today, during music council, our "Music Minion" t-shirts were distributed -- for $5 each.

So I bought something. On Buy Nothing Day. When I had already said that I wasn't going to buy anything.

<sarcasm>

Shame on me. On the other hand, at least there's 365 other opportunities within the next year to defy consumerism.

</sarcasm>

...

But shouldn't we be doing that everyday? I mean, you look at things like this and it should be obvious why the terrorists hate us, in a continent where more money is spent on pets than is donated to charity. When will we learn?

...

P.S. In case your head isn't reeling yet, yes, 25,000 children do die of extreme poverty each day. Think about that for a second, before you ask for that PS3 or iPod touch for Christmas.

"Riot Gear!" - Max Mobley's column for Crawdaddy!

Crawdaddy! bills itself as the premier magazine for rock music criticism. Makes sense, given that Rolling Stone is more preoccupied with taking photos of a womanizing Kid Rock than it is with talking about, say, the political ramifications (or, sadly, the lack thereof) of Neil Young's Living With War record.

What's more, Rolling Stone essentially sleeps with the enemy, where "the enemy" translates roughly to "the recording industry". Crawdaddy! does nothing of the sort, and leading the pack is the brilliant Max Mobley and his biweekly column called "Riot Gear!". You might have seen on Facebook that I posted a link to one of his articles, this one (profanity warning!) on the drawbacks to MP3s and even CDs in comparison to analogue media like vinyl, and called "There Once Was A Note":

So then you take this cold and perfect [digital recording], and you strip away things that were there in the performance and the production so you can make it smaller—because if you make it smaller you can carry more of them with you. [...] It’s the sonic equivalent to pizza rolls. It tastes a bit like a real pie and has some of the same ingredients, but nobody’s fooled—unless pizza rolls are all you know, ya poor bastard. And so I pity the mp3 generation every bit as much as I envy them. Working in music production and pro audio, I will probably grow angry with them, too. Because what am I going to do with this expensive gear designed to provide subtle nuances that first will be captured coldly, then stripped out entirely so the listener can hear the tune on a bus?

Good stuff. But there's too much else here to leave unmentioned, like his post from Oct. 24th about the struggle of buying CDs under the noses of the record company "weasels":

I stopped downloading when my favorite sites went away or started charging actual money. And downloading never stopped me from buying CDs. In fact, I bought more because I got to test drive the band. I certainly can’t leave the decision of who to buy up to the weasels. They like crap! [...] But like my contemporaries, and many consumers, I dig the packaging. I want to hold the disc and read the booklet, check out the album, not just a file of a single. I still believe an album has a beginning, middle, and an end.

And an article about the history of making music more portable, and the sacrifices necessary:

Cassettes also gave birth to the mix tape. Take your favorite vinyl, your brand new cassette deck, a blank tape, a sixer of beer, and a broken heart, and you could create an epic sonic drama that defined who you were and why your ex-girlfriend should come back. In the ‘70s, mix tapes probably saved more relationships than Dr. Joyce Brothers, Pauline Reage, and Phil Donahue combined. Now it’s as though the music market is one big mix tape. Hello MP3, goodbye album. Hello quantization errors, goodbye rumble, wow and flutter. Hello digital, goodbye vinyl, goodbye tape, goodbye rock star. At least vinyl lives on as a bastardized musical instrument, which I find very rock ‘n’ roll since rock music is art’s most infamous bastard child.

Anyways. All his stuff rocks. If you, like me, won't settle for the current state of music -- where the artistic experience equates all too often to listening to an iTunes track at 128Mbps, without any sense of individuality -- then you should check out his stuff. The music industry is in turmoil, and neither side seems to be pursuing an environment that allows creativity to flourish. Thus, the music industry needs more people like Max Mobley.

Harry Potter: the best fantasy books that never were

This is something that I've always believed, and Ken Jennings (of Jeopardy! fame) seems to agree, though in an incredibly articulate way: the Harry Potter books, despite what booksellers and naysayers might have you believe, are not fantasy books at all, just glorified detective novels. Remove the "hocus-pocus"-esque elements of Harry Potter, and what you're really left with is Where in the Wizarding World is Lord Voldemort?, where, as Ken will tell you, Harry, Ron, and Hermione are the new Mystery Inc., using thestrals instead of a VW van to roam around solving mysteries.

Anywho. If you've never read the Harry Potter books, this should give you more reason to do so -- there's too much good stuff there than should be ignored. I also think the series is slightly prophetic, but I'll touch on that in another post. In the meantime, check out the mad literary discernments of Ken Jennings:

http://ken-jennings.com/blog/?p=526