Category: Life

Okee so I started my own Frappr! page to get an idea where the people that visit this site come from.

Simply click on the following link and add yourself!
http://www.frappr.com/jmcardlevisitors

“Shortly after learning of the New Orleans plan for free city-wide wireless internet, Bellsouth Corp. withdrew an offer to donate a damaged building to be used for police headquarters. According to the Washington Post, ‘Bill Oliver, angrily rescinded the offer of the building in a conversation with New Orleans homeland security director Terry Ebbert.’”

Full Story Here.

I understand that Bellsouth interprets city wifi as some kind of competition(ISPs have tried to make those illegal, with some success). That said, I don’t see Evian pulling donations because the same government provides free water.

WiFi is no competition to dedicated DSL lines. Network congestion makes the speeds significantly inferior. Plus, Internet is becoming a necessary ammenity. All that to say that reguardless of the government’s move, BellSouth’s customer base is well secured. To pull this donation because of such a misguided and selfish motivation is one of the coldest things I’ve witnessed a company do publicly.

Yep, I’ve been oddly quiet for the last few weeks. It’s been hectic over here, and it shows no sign of stopping.

Coming up now is exam time! So more quiet-ness for me!

I’m getting tired of this. I’m an anime fan; and I also try to support those who make works I enjoy. Therefore, I purchase import DVDs of the anime I really like.

Unfortunately, this is the 2nd time where I’ve been shipped bootleg products. How do I know? Well, the DVDs have video quality which are far poorer than the rips I downloaded. FAR poorer. In fact, it appears as if these are Telecine/TS-Rips [dunno how anyone could pull that off when DVD-Rips should be available].

I say this as the person conducting the rip has to adjust multiple times the camera/telecine-machine to make all the video visible. The subtitles also contain the text “dvd_animation@yahoo.com”. Even fansub groups don’t even go so low as to stick their own promo info in the subs in the middle of the show.

I’m pissed off because the money I spent will not go to the authors. It will go to the person who made the bootlegs. Googling the above address, it appears as if these discs are manufactured in Hong Kong. The other time I got ripped off (and I do consider this being ripped off), was when I purchased a copy of CASSHERN (a live action Japanese movie). What I got today in the mail was the Love Hina TV series.

How do you get rid of an insane level of copyright protection on a standard music CD?

You make session 2 (which contains data in this case) unreadable, leaving Session 1 (contains audio in this case) unadulterated. With just the audio session, the disc behaves as a normal CD on computers, letting people *gasp* turn them into something playable for their iPods.

Session 2 is on the outer part of the disc, and can be made unreadable by a single piece of sticky tape. Or a marker. But the people who discovered this easy way of bypassing Sony’s horrible DRM scheme, preferred tape.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I’ll go laugh for half-an-hour.