Jots and Tittles

Courtesy of xkcd.

Consider it a PSA.

That is all.

-Jaya-

Wonderful news: I have a website!

Well, not quite.  But I do have a domain name and will, over the course of the next month or so, go about setting it up and making it pretty and whatnot.  For now, just be aware that someday you will be able to find me at www.thefaithfuldaughter.com, and while there's nothing but a placeholder template there now, eventually I hope to begin branding myself as the kind of Christian writer editors want to publish.  Prayers that this venture goes well are always appreciated.  There is a lot to learn, and I've complicated things for myself by trying to do it using Linux, not Windows.  But I'll figure it out.

Speaking of Linux vs. Windows, I finally figured out how to make Wine work, so the odds of me going back to Windows in the foreseeable future are pretty much nonexistant.  However, I haven't quite got all the kinks worked out - RoughDraft works splendidly, for example, until you try to check the word count, at which point it tells you there are 0 words no matter how much you've typed.  That will be a big problem come November.  But I have a while to work it out, and right now I'm just thrilled that I've got proof of concept.  So that's very exciting.  I'm not planning to ever pay for an operating system again (yeah, right - now that I've said that I'm sure to wind up having to buy something someday... and I might be willing to buy me a Mac).  

In other exciting news, this quarter is about 10 days from being over, which is good because I don't think I could have taken much more of it.  I really disliked my Theology and Pop Culture class (it was like my undergrad Communications and Pop Culture class, except with Jesus.  Boring!), wasn't particularly enthused with Systematic Theology III (although I have a major crush on the Orthodox Church... if you can say that about a church.  Seriously, I half want to convert.  The symbolism!  The spirituality!  The sincerity!  The orthodoxy!  I'm in raptures!), and Spiritual Disciplines was an intensive, so it flew by far too quickly to make a lasting impression.  I still have a 10 page research paper to write and a take-home final exam to complete, so I'm not out of the woods yet.

Oh, and did I ever mention that I got a job?  I did.  I'm working at Penney's, in Men's, and... well, it's retail.  Huzzah.  I've had worse, though ironically for better pay... but whatever.  That's life.  Hopefully it's not permanent.  The job, that is, not life.  Though this life isn't permanent, either.   ...stop me before I get all theological on you!

And that's about all the news.  I should probably go to sleep so I can get up and go to work tomorrow morning.  And then go to Ault tomorrow night to help out with the Youth Group, yaaay!  ^^  Good night world!

-Jaya-

I find it amusing that some people couldn't give a straight answer to the simplest of questions if their lives depended on it.  Sometimes it seems like there are some interviewees who, were I to ask them whether they were even alive, would not be able to answer simply "yes" but would have to give some convoluted string of meaningless words: "As I have not been able to ascertain up to this point a meaningful understanding of what it is to be alive, I can only speculate that I perceive the rain falling outside and therefore operate under the assumption that I have not yet ceased to breathe."  REALLY? You think you could cram a few more syllables in there that have nothing to do with the question I asked you?  That'd be great.  I think you could give me a bit more BS before you get down to not answering my question.  I really don't think that was your best effort.

This guy from Microsoft is one of them.

First of all, I can hardly believe that Microsoft is trying to revert to Digital Rights Management (or DRM), in England or anywhere else.  The basic point of DRM is to restrict one's use of legally purchased media (usually videos and music) and thereby control piracy.  The end result is often frustration: I purchased a couple of songs from Wal-Mart's website a few years ago and quickly regretted that decision because, thanks to DRM, I could not convert them into the proper format so I could put it on my iPod, which was the whole reason I bought them in the first place!  This is not an uncommon problem.  Many, many people who have purchased media protected by DRM have found that when they wanted to move thier media from one of their devices to another (say, from their computer to their mp3 player), they could not do so because of DRM restrictions.  Others have found that, when their computer crashed and they had to get a new one, they had to re-purchase all their media (even if they had backed it up) because they could not transfer it to a new device.  Understandably, this led to a general public dissatisfaction with DRM-restricted media and an increase in media piracy - perhaps it's illegal, but at least you can actually listen to the music you download illegally.  To be honest, I would not fault  a person like the young man who spent over $200 on baseball videos (and who, thanks to DRM, will never be able to view them again because the server from which the DRM receives permission to let those videos play is being shut down) for downloading them through other, less legal means.  He already paid for them once, after all, and through no fault of his own will lose the ability to watch them - even though he's not getting his money back.  I think he deserves to have the videos he paid for.  Nobody would argue with me if I said that Wal-Mart had come to reposess all the DVDs he'd ever bought from their stores, and I thought he had a right to keep them since he paid for them.  How is this different?

But I digress.  My point here is, this Hugh Griffiths guy never once actually answered the questions asked him.  Now, I know that I tend to be rather verbose when answering questions, but I flatter mysef that my verbosity is because I am actually giving a thoughtful answer to the question rather than simply saying words and hoping that nobody notices that they have nothing to do with the question asked.  And yet in this interview, the questionner continues to ask the same question in a variety of ways (namely: why would anyone in his right mind buy from MSN Mobile Music and deal with the DRM hassle when they could buy the same music elsewhere for cheaper and NOT deal with the DRM hassle?) and Mr. Griffiths continued to skirt the question and essentially make himself look like a fool.  Good work, Microsoft.  Out of curiousity, can ANYONE explain to me what the potential benefits of buying music from MSN Mobile would be?  Why on earth would I want to pay extra for music that I can't listen to when my phone breaks and I have to get a new one?  Especially when I can get it elsewhere for less money AND be able to transfer it to my computer so that when my phone breaks and I have to get a new one, I can transfer all that music that I already paid for onto my new phone and save even MORE money?  If there were some benefits that came with spending all that extra money I could perhaps justify it, but those would have to be some freaking amazing benefits to outweigh the drawbacks.

Honestly.  I think it's pretty obvious to everyone (except for Microsoft... but clearly they're clueless as to the workings of the average person's mind) that this isn't going to go over well, and that eventually one of two things will happen: MSN Mobile will drop the DRM nonsense and go another direction to justify insanely high prices, or MSN Mobile will drop the prices and keep the DRM, leading to its evental demise since no sane person will buy something with DRM knowing full well they'll have to buy it again when they switch phones.  Either way, I forsee the death of MSN Mobile in the not-to-distant future, and thank goodness for it.  May all DRM die the same death, the sooner the better.  The harder (and more expensive) you make it for people to enjoy their media legally, the more people you will push to piracy.  That strikes me as counter-productive.  Here's a radical thought: how about working WITH your customers to develop a mutually satisfactory system rather than employing this us-versus-them tactic which only serves to destroy customer relations?  It's pretty simple.  We want media that is inexpensive, easy to access and easy to back up.  And if we want to share that awesome new single we found with our friends, we should be able to do that, because that's free marketing and you should be BEGGING us to do that!

To be fair, there are places (such as iTunes and Amazon.com) which are offering DRM-free downloads of music (which is a big part of why MSN Mobile is going to fail spectacularly).  That's a step in the right direction.  I still think that the best solution is to work with torrent sites and other such popular pirating avenues to make media legally available through such mutual sharing sites, and make it as close to free as possible.  The internet isn't going away any time soon, and these people are going to have to adapt or become obsolete.  Music is going to be available to people for free through illegal means if it's not made available to people for free through legal means, and trying to persecute every thirteen-year-old in the world who downloads the latest big hit is simply not a viable option.  It's time to come up with another model.  Personally, I am in favor of the concert model in which artists receive their money from going on concert tours and other such sources, not from album sales.  To be quite fair, it's not like they will starve to death based on the loss of album sales.  They have far too much freaking money as it is.  They ought to be recording music for the love of music, not for the love of money, and if they can't seperate the two then they aren't mature enough to handle it anyway.

And that's quite enough ranting from me for now.  I have a paper to get back to.  I just thought I'd take a nice break and vent.

Perhaps the next time I take a break I'll talk about my thoughts on Microsoft's approach to software and operating systems and suchlike.  That might be fun.  =D

-Jaya-

So, I was running to the Weber building before Goddess Religions today so that I could print off the review sheets for the final, which we were supposed to go over during class (we didn't; I was mad).  Apparently, however, I had not zipped up my backpack all the way, and it was hanging open.  As I walked, I felt my laptop slip into an increasingly awkward and uncomfortable angle, and when I began to take my backpack off, the unthinkable happened - my laptop slipped out and before I could register what happened, it crashed to the sidewalk in the middle of the Oval.  It seemed to happen in slow motion, the laptop slipping out, its corner hitting the sidewalk, the lid coming open, the aftermath of my poor computer sitting forlornly on the pavement, its lid half-open as though gasping for breath.  I knew that ThinkPads are supposed to be tough, but I was still afraid that I had just ruined a new laptop and would be faced with the incredibly awkward situation of explaining to my parents why I needed either extensive repairs on my computer or a new machine altogether.  Still, I was running late to class, so I scooped it up and shoved it back in my backpack, assuming I'd find out when I got to class whether it still worked.

I printed off my pages and made it to class with just minutes to spare, sat down and started setting up. I held my breath as I pressed the power button and waited for it to wake up (I don't shut it down before class, but put it to sleep because it's up and running faster on arrival that way) - and it was fine.

Yep, that's right.  My laptop hit the pavement with enough force to embed a pebble into its casing (I have proof because there is, in fact, a pebble embedded in its casing and if I had a way to take a picture and upload it, I would), and there is absolutely nothing wrong with it except for the few scratches and dents on that one corner.  I'd said before that the reason I got a ThinkPad to begin with is because I take my laptop everywhere with me and they are known for being durable, but this sucker is a friggen TANK.  Jump on YouTube for a few minutes and watch some of the videos for stress tests of Lenovo ThinkPads - the one linked shows them crashing one into a wall at 35 mph, you can watch on the high-speed footage as the casing bent like a shirt blowing in the breeze, and they were still able to get the data off the thing.  The keyboard is built so that spills go right through and come out through the bottom (which came in handy once...) and you can walk on the keyboard without doing irreparable damage - yes, there's a video of that, too).  I wouldn't recommend abusing it that much, of course, but accidents happen, and this laptop is strong enough to handle them.

For those of you who are wondering, I have a Lenovo ThinkPad Z61m, purchased just this fall after my old Toshiba Satellite (the link takes you to a similar machine - I couldn't find the exact one but this gets linked for being closest and having an image from ANH on the screen) finally went to the digital version of the happy hunting ground - let me tell you, I was almost relieved when it finally put itself out of my misery!  The ThinkPad is faster than the Toshiba could ever have hoped to be, weighs less, has more than twice the RAM, is more reliable, and (obviously!) is more durable.  I would like to have one of those fancy touch-screen laptops like my mom has, but those things are notoriously fragile, and I need something that can withstand some punishment because with as much as my laptop travels, punishment is bound to happen, like it did today.  Looks like I found the right machine for the job.

We - meaning Troy and I - are thinking of partitioning the hard drive this summer so that I can dual-boot Vista and Linux, probably some form of Ubuntu, and learn my way around it.  I have wanted to learn my way around Linux for some time, primarily because it's open-source and often free, like most of the software I use (Firefox, Pidgin, and Open Office are the three big ones, though even the stuff I have that isn't open-source is free: iTunes, AVG, Spybot, Ad-Aware, etc.), and that often means that it's more customizable and more stable, both of which I like.  While there might be some software I use that isn't made for Linux (RoughDraft and Q10 come to mind, which is sad because I've really enjoyed using them), there are almost always alternatives that will do just fine for me (YWriter4 is a program I have used and actually did like, though it is more practical for editing than the frantic drafting that comes with NaNoWriMo).  The problem with Linux is that it takes some getting used to, and its users often are expected to know more about computers and programming than I do.  (That is, of course, a generalization which is bound to be false in some cases... but still.)  So, in order to learn my way around Linux, I'd have to learn a thing or three about computers - which is totally fine with me, and I'd like to know more, but it'll take some doing.  Incidentally, that's why I'd like to start with a dual-boot of Vista and Linux, because that way if there winds up being something I can't figure out on Linux, I can switch over to Windows and do it there - and I can do NaNoWriMo in RoughDraft or Q10 as I would prefer to.

Now, partitioning my hard drive is kind of a big deal, and I'm CERTAINLY not doing it until I've graduated and can stand to lose use of my computer for more than five minutes in case something goes wrong (though everything is getting backed up in Gmail and on my external hard drive and my iPod, if there's room, because I don't want to lose it!).  But it's a thought for the future.  And, who knows?  Maybe the next computer I have will be one I've built.  Wouldn't that be sweet?

I never thought I'd turn into the computer-savvy geek that apparently I want to be.  But working with Rosie has shown me that I've got a head for the basics of this stuff, and while there are some things that are beyond my ken right now, there are plenty of other things I can handle on my own perfectly well.  Besides, building my own computer and running it with a free operating system using a bunch of free software is way cheaper than going the store-bought route, and I'll wind up with a better machine, customized for my personal needs.  I'm all kinds of down with that.

Anyway, that was a nice little break from homework.  And now, back to the papers!  There are still plenty begging to be written! *frantically writing*

-Jaya-