French

Well good heavens, I haven't even been blogging for two weeks and I find myself agreeing with the French. Not so much on the Apple and iPod thing - I mean, you know the rules when you sign in at the door. (Or you should at any rate - it's not like anybodies been quiet about it.) But I'm saving my "Apple Sucks" rant for the day when I really need it. My iPod is still My Precious on the 9 days out of 10 that it runs right. And we know that Jobs doesn't want it to be 1985 again, certainly never 1987, so I still have hope that Apple will pull its collective head out of its firewire port before I have to go buy a Creative or some other less Trendy player. And how about that Disney / Pixar merger? Does that look like it's gonna be cool, or what?

Erm, I seem to be wandering off point here...

*cough*

I'm not particularly in favor of wholesale music / movie / smurf piracy. I think there's a big difference between burning a disc for Dad (back in the day I'd have made a cassette) and making your 500 CD collection available on the internet.

I'm sure that by the letter of the law (is that phrase copyrighted somewhere? Do I owe somebody $0.95?) my HD has some gotchas. (For the record my name is Patrick Sereno and I live at 11834 N. - never mind...) I feel (and the Man tends to disagree with me, even though legally and with precedent he doesn't) that when I buy a movie or a CD that I should be able to take it apart and play with it. We live in an amazing age. I can add actual endings to all of those Jerry Goldsmith tracks that have killer themes but just kind of wander off into an action cue. (Not only do I have no idea where the paragraph break should be, I have no idea if that's how I spell "cue".) I can take the wonderfully clear remasters of the Star Wars soundtracks from 1997 and remix them into the original album order from 1977. Because I can! (Did you forget this was the Land of the Geeks?)

But The Man says - NO! You shouldn't be able to even copy that CD onto your computer! It should be as is! What? Sell you the same kind of CD you're trying to make and you'll buy it? Who the heck would want that? What, three nerds in a basement? Phhhht! But if you do this, you're costing us millions! Yeah, we know it's 2006, but we don't want you to be able to be as creative with our stuff as you were in 1982! ("Moooooommmmmmmmm! Stop the DOG barking! I'm trying to RECORD something off of the TV! I am NOT being WHINY! Awwwwwwww!!!" - happy days.)

It will be interesting to watch when the Next Big Thing goes public. DVVD-q or whatever. The entire MGM library on a sugar cube. And how desperately The Man will try to lock it down. Interesting times (not a Chinese curse, btw).

I'm about to start ranting about FBI warnings and interminable video introductions that you can't skip on DVDs (I'M TALKING TO YOU PARAMOUNT!) so I'll cut this short. (Shorter?) (Heh, Tallguy Productions is cutting it short. I crack me up.)

Have a good weekend everybody.

EDIT: Aw, frak. It's Thursday, isn't it. Isn't that just about the worst feeling in the world? Grrr. Arrrgh.

p.s. The spell check on Blogger doesn't know the word "blogging" Ahhh, what an age.