Red Velvet Lounge

     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.