I had an idea at the Wideawake concert that hit me so hard I wasn’t paying attention for the last 2/3rds of the concert. I was so consumed that I left my wallet at the parking garage, and didn’t realize it until I had driven all the way home. I’m genuinely excited about this. Amazon.com owns it. That’s funny.
The concert was good I guess. I now own one more CD. So that’s pretty sweet.
I’m going to A&M tomorrow for their Island Party.
I’m now officially ready to leave Austin.
So I’ve now registered myself for pain on TTh. ROSE wouldn’t let me register for the honors course, so I now have a class from 6:30 to 8 at night on Tuesday and Thursday. I sure hope Prof. Plaxton is interesting, otherwise it’s going to be real tempting to not go to class on Friday (or Monday) since I only have that one class and it’s from 3-4.
In other news, I’ve been contemplating starting up the men’s counterpart to the women’s freshman bible study at Stone. It’s pretty striking the difference in participation at churches between men and women, and I’m gonna try to do my part to fix it.
Burger’s 352 had a test of doom returned. He doesn’t curve until the end of the semester, but he said that the approximate curve would be A is 80 and above, B is 60 and above, C is 45 and above. So that’s pretty brutal. Oh wait, I forgot to mention, those scores are out of 150! I did ok.
So in the past few days it’s come to my attention that despite my best efforts at making this page as uninteresting as possible, and rarely updating, people read it. So that’s not necessarily what threw me off but the set of people who read it. Apparently when you give people an email like blackhole@davemclain.com (spammers feel free to use that one) that they think “I wonder if there’s anything at www.davemclain.com” which in turn leads them here.
If you’re one of those people, I’d like to encourage you not to read the archives, I have no idea what’s back there. I do know that the oldest entry is from August 20, 2003 which last I checked was a long time ago, and I was still in Sacramento. There are entries like June 19, 2004 which is very brief “I went skydiving. Video is here.” And there are others that are very long. I think one day I’ll actually go back and read them and wonder how on Earth I ever got to where I am today. And of course the answer won’t be anything on Earth.
I register tomorrow at 11am, Schedule is here I won’t be taking the night 345, but rather the morning one. This schedule has much potential. I’m contemplating applying for the job that Austin will be vacating due to graduation, since my MWF lends itself to employment.
Anyway, I feel real conflicted about the end of the semester. Part of me wants to just get in the car and go to Seattle, and part of me wants another 4 months in Austin, TX. I keep seeing things that I would like to start, but with only 28 days, 20 hours left just doesn’t make sense. But, man I am ready for May 1st.
DRM is bad.
I put my pricepoint for music at something like 25 dollars a month. It was around 50 dollars a month before I bought the iPod, but since my music collection is around 10,000 tracks (48.66 GB) and less than 1000 of the files are legal, I have a problem.
To remedy this problem with the iTunes Music Store (iTMS) would cost me something like 3000 dollars since I don’t listen to most of the music in the library (3000 is 3/4ths of the songs on the iPod). I am completely unwilling to spend $3000 dollars on music. That’s 2 powerbooks. That’s money that could support a ministry. That’s “real money” at the college level.
Enter Napster. For $10-$15/month (oooh, consumer surplus) I could have access to their whole 1,000,000 track database, which is easily searchable and provides a pretty good download rate. Sounds like a great solution. Except for their bone-headed use of Microsofts DRM’d (Digital Rights Management) proprietary .wma format. Never mind that the solution has my rights managed by Microsoft, or that the solution would prevent me from using it on Linux or MacOS except through a back-alley python hack. It doesn’t work on the iPod. I would be willing to give them $120-$180/year, which like my cell phone bill I would likely pay to them for the rest of time, but if I can’t use my current mp3 player I won’t use their service.
So now I’m faced with 4 options:
Why Microsoft is stupid with regards to DRM. This paper has the best opening paragraph.
Discuss amongst yourselves.
It sure has been a long time since i updated this last.
I’ve got about 5 miutes before I have to bounce out of here. basically I’m feeling pretty busy what with classes, IPAP, Austin Stone esp. Webteam, BYX, ACM and the minor stuff. I’m excited at how everythings going, but terrified that it’s all gonna come crashing down.
Anyway, today I randomly redid my themes on my laptop, so it now looks like this. I also have been working on a better navigation menu for the Stone website, found here for contrast to the way it is now go to www.austinstone.org.
Anyway, I’m out.
