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Alias 4.0

Over a year ago when the 2003 TV season started, I blogged about Alias rebooting for the third time.

After sitting on my TiVo for over a week, I sat down and watched this season’s premiere and the current episode. We’re now on to Alias 4.0, another reboot to start the 4th season. I enjoy the show, but it’s getting harder to suspend my disbelief after all of the plot holes that open up every time they decide to start over.

This time, we find Sydney, Jack, Vaughn and Dixon have been transferred to a black ops division of the CIA. (The show can now just ignore the whole workings of the CIA). And guess who they’re working for – Sloan! We have now recreated SD-6, but sanctioned by the CIA now. By the end of the 2nd episode, Weiss & Marshall are working for them now.

I’ll give them some credit – continuing plot points are still there, with the tension between Sydney and Jack regarding her mother, Rombaldi, and Vaugh and Sydney’s romance. I’ll give it a try, but I’m at the end of the line. I’m all for watching a well done espionage with a beautiful heroine, but at least try and keep a plot for more than one season. I understand that people didn’t watch the show because they couldn’t follow the plot if they missed an episode or two, but dammit people, buy a TiVo. That’s my favorite part of shows like Alias & 24.

Gates just doesn't get it.

Gizmodo has their interview with Bill

Gates Part Four: Communists and DRM up.

Bill Gates, Microsoft’s chariman has been getting flak for some comments at CES where he equates those who don’t favor copyright and DRM as communists. He more than proves that it’s Gates himself that doesn’t get it in the above interview.

Look Bill: No one questions that artists should be compensated for their work. Period. The fact that some of us may choose to create content, say, a blog, and not want to be compensated, and want to share it, is our choice. And when we do choose that, we can choose to use the Creative Commons licenses to share our work.

God forbid a music artist, or the spoken word, or the written word want to be given away at the artists’ discretion. It’s worked in the programming world, and more and more examples in the media world have started.

Viva la revolution.

Is the Sherman era over?

Will tomorrow be the day Mike Sherman loses his GM responsibilities?

Will he be able to transition to “just” being a coach?

Will he be happy if he doesn’t get a contract extension as he enters the final year of his contract next year?

Will he even be our coach after next season?

I guess we’ll find out some of these answers tomorrow! Change is good. We don’t need more disappointment from the Packers. Sherman’s record is amazing, but his lack of success in the postseason is very disturbing. I don’t question his drive, his motivation and his will to win. But when is it too much for one person? It will take change to get to the next level, so change is good.

Firefox

In Firefox news, share has increased to 21% of all browsers. Take that, Microsoft!

I know personally, I’ve signed up 6 people who are using it now. Not a lot, but I’m doing my share!

Over on Silwenae.com, I’ve given Bizet admin access, and he went nuts posting. And I made him download Firefox on his main machine, after he fell in love with it on his backup box. Next thing you know, he’ll be blogging!

I will get a Mac.. someday

And that day is getting closer.

Today marked the start of MacWorld, and in typical Steve Jobs fashion, he unveiled a slew of new things. I won’t get into all the cool software, but Jobs did unveil the iPod Shuffle, a flash drive iPod, and more imporantly, the Mac Mini.

A headless Mac G4, you buy this wonderful little piece of technology, and bring your own monitor, mouse and keyboard. It is tiny, cute and semi-powerful (for a Mac). It lacks a decent video card, but who games on Apple machines anyway.

I think this is a smart move for Apple – with the success of iTunes, they may be able to pull off their Switch campaign yet. Starting at $499 for a G4 1.25 gHz with a 40 gig HD, to $599 for a 1.42 gHz with an 80 gig HD, you can upgrade ’em to DVD burners, wireless as well as bluetooth. Introduce yourself to the power of Unix in a cute form factor.

Hit the above link for lots of pictures at Gizmodo, or visit the Mac Mini page at the Apple Store.

Why DRM is Evil, and what it means to your DVD Collection

Cory Doctorow discusses why you can’t legally back up your DVDs and who is to blame. Suffice to say, DRM, Digital Rights Management, is evil.

Cory Doctorow, European OutReach Coordinator for the EFF, is a science fiction author, DRM expert, and blogger.

One of my favorite authors on the evils of DRM, he once even gave a speech, at Microsoft, on the evils of DRM. From the speech, introducing himself to the crowd, he sums up what he does:

I work for the Electronic Frontier Foundation on copyright stuff (mostly), and I live in London. I’m not a lawyer — I’m a kind of mouthpiece/activist type, though occasionally they shave me and stuff me into my Bar Mitzvah suit and send me to a standards body or the UN to stir up trouble.

NearlyFreeSpeech.net

This may be better suited for my technical blog – and speaking of irony, I was going to link to it, but silwenae.com isn’t responding. I registered paulcutler.org to test out Nearlyfreespeech.net, a webhosting company. I had first heard of Nearlyfreespeech when Bugmenot.com came under fire. Bugmenot is a website dedicated to providing logins to sites that require registration, so you can bypass giving your personal information to sites like Wall Street Journal, New York Times, or most newspaper websites. Nearlyfreespeech hosted them after Bugmenot was dumped by their current host.

Webhosting is an odd business. Prices have come down dramatically in the last few years, and most webhosts are just resellers rebranding others services, like ThePlanet. They offer control panels to make it easy for non-technical folks to get their websites up and manage their email. Nearlyfreespeech isn’t all that different, as their servers are colocated within one of those type of hosting centers, but they differ in a few areas. There are no monthly fees – you pay for the bandwidth you use over time, minus any credit card fees after you give them a deposit. There are no frills – it’s not for newbies. They actually give you more control over the sites you use, but you need to know what you’re doing.

Most webhosts will give you a set number of things: email accounts, how much bandwidth you can use, subdomains (xxxx.paulcutler.org with xxxx being a subdomain), how many databases you can have, how many other domains you can host on your site (for instance, with silwenae.com / pixehost as my webhost, I can have 5 more domains, as I have movietuesday.com and jholzer.com hosted there as well), etc. Nearlyfreespeech basically says do what you will, just pay for your traffic, with one exception. They don’t do email, just web hosting.

As I was talking to Fazin yesterday, who helped with a database import problem I was having, he pointed out the lack of email. This is a challenge, as silwenae at silwenae dot com has become my email address for everything over the last few years. I’m pretty interested in migrating from pixiehost to nearlyfreespeech, but now I have to research email options. When silwenae.net was up in it’s heyday running a linux distro called e-smith, e-smith had awesome email integration built in. But when I decided to run my own true linux server out of the house, as opposed to a distro that made it very easy to setup (with caveats), email hosting is something that is complex that I didn’t go with as I taught myself sysadmin stuff. From running Fedora Core, to now Ubuntu, I’ll need to figure that out as I debate my options for email, but that’s another post for a different time.

So far, I’m happy with nearlyfreespeech. It’s always been up, I can have multiple users, and for someone like me who just runs hobby sites, it should save me some money. (No matter what I tell myself, silwenae.com and such will never be big traffic generators). Silwenae.com on pixiehost is currently down again – even my wife who was hosting her site with them transferred to a new host. Now I need to get off my butt, get the silwenae.net server in my basement up this weekend, figure out my email and then start transferring websites.

The 2nd best Christmas Present I received

The 2nd best Christmas Present I received was a book from a co-worker: The Daily Adventures of Mixerman, by Mixerman.

The book tells the story of Mixerman, a sound engineer in Los Angeles hired to mix a new up and coming band’s CD. This dysfunctional band, signed to the label after a bidding war, has been locked away by the music label for 2 years to write a “radio hit”. Everyone in the book is anonymous, including the author, to protect the band’s identity. From Willy Show, the big time producer, nick named because his contract to produce the album isn’t done and he doesn’t show up for a week, to the aptly named Dumb Ass, the drummer who can’t do anything right.

The book is a hilarious look at everything that can go wrong in a recording session, and a behind the scenes look at the music industry. Originally posted almost as a blog in 2002 (before blogs were cool), the book contains all of the blog entries, and the missing final entry. It was easy reading, and will keep you laughing the whole way through.

Radio Goodness

A long time ago, I blogged about Rev105. Without rehashing all of that history again, Rev105 is being re-created by Minnesota Public Radio. The purchase of WCAL, St. Olaf’s classical radio station, was met by animosity in Minnesota, as MPR bought out the classical competition in the city. But MPR’s vision for the new KCMP is a radio station dedicated to local music. Following the template of LA’s KCRW and Seattle’s KEXP, 89.3 KCMP will have a focus first on the local scene, and then dedicated to playing music no one else does.

How is this re-creating Rev105? Well, their station director is Steve Nelson, the former co-host (with Brian Oake now on Clear Channel’s 97.1) of Rev105, who left after some time after the Capital Cities buyout to go to NPR. Steve was also a founder of Radio K 770, and has been on their board of directors for quite some time. Thorn, KCMP’s music director, was the afternoon drive-time DJ on Rev105. And their newest DJ is Mary Lucia, who hosted nights on Rev105, and mornings with Brian after the buy-out and Steve leaving.

MPR is hosting a blog dedicated to the launch of KCMP as they prepare to go live. No go live date yet, but my anticipation is building.

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Back Again

And the trend continues of taking websites down and bringing them up.

This time, I’ve moved my blog from silwenae.net to the newly created paulcutler.org. Why you may ask? I wanted to try out nearlyfreespeech.net in preparation for moving hosting companies. That’s a different discussion topic all together. Thanks to Fazin once again for the technical support in making it happen this morning.

So much stuff to blog about since the downtime: MPR’s new radio station, politics, Packers meltdown, and the Badgers too, books, and other stuff. More to come soonish.

I also have a technical blog running on silwenae.com with updates on my travels and travails through my servers.