Red Velvet Lounge

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Wednesday, December 31, 2008 - 14:01:40

The Revolution Will Not Be Downloaded

     I was so proud of myself when I came up with this title. Of course, then I Googled it. It turns out that it’s already the title of a book and at least 20 articles in various media outlets. That’s one of the bad things about the globalization of information. It used to be If I came up with a funny quip, I knew someone else had probably already thought of it, but so what? Now it’s provable. But I guess that only matters to people like me anyway. So let’s get on with this. I wanna talk about downloading. Specifically, “illegal” downloading. Even more specifically, the illegal downloads of copyrighted music and films. It’s funny to me how acceptable it’s become to just steal a copy of a movie. It used to be a shady transaction in an alley, somewhere downtown. Nowadays I have a guy who comes to my place of business once a week with a giant folder full of bootlegged DVDs for sale. $5 each or 7 for $20. The times they are a changin’…

     He deals mostly in telesyncs and screeners, that is-movies shot with a handheld video camera in a theater. He also has some DVD rips. Now I have come up with a little scheme of my own. There is this program called StationRipper and what it does is it records streaming music from the internet and it neatly deposits (and tags) the MP3 songs onto your hard drive. And for Christmas I got a 1 Terabyte (1,000 Gigabytes) SimpleDrive. So now I’m set. And StationRipper lets your record 60 internet radio stations simultaneously.  So theoretically you could have a song being dropped onto your hard drive every second until it’s full. Then you could get another hard drive and fill it… Music music music. And it’s all free. So you see, there are some good things in life. Think about this the next time you’re in a bad mood.

Posted by Jeremy Colburn at 02:01 PM | Permalink | Comments [0]

Wednesday, December 10, 2008 - 23:05:53

Cop Cars and Nurse Caps

     I liked the old police cars better than the new ones. Remember when they had the downtown skyline on the side in blue. Now they're just black and white. What up with that? Are they trying to be old school? Also, what happened to the hats? I’ve seen every Police Academy movie and they always wore hats. I’ve never seen a cop with a hat on, except for the highway patrol guys with the big cowboy-looking hats. Is it going to go away like the nurse hats? Remember when they wore those folded white hats? Last year on NPR they did a segment about older people who had retired and had all this “suddenly useless” knowledge. It was the saddest story I’ve every heard. There was a nurse talking about how she used to have to fold her hat a certain way every day and iron it. It was a very specific way of folding to get it to fit properly on the head. She has no one to teach this to, or at least, no reason now to teach it. It made me wonder about the little things in our midst that go unnoticed. But when they’re gone, they disappear forever unless someone talks about it. So I’m talking about the police cars. I liked the way they were before. Please change them back.  

Posted by Jeremy Colburn at 11:05 PM | Permalink | Comments [0]