·:[ Stream of Consciousness… ]:·
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Sorry about that folks -- Live365 did a bit of system maintenance and it brought down my stream.

All better now!

Do you remember that scene for Jurassic Park where they are wandering through the jungle and find dinosour eggs? “How did they do that, we’ve made them all females?” one of the party asks incredulously… “Nature always finds a way.” answers the sage Dr. Grant.

Such is the case with DRM (Digital Rights Management) systems.

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Wow! (Yes, I do say that a lot) This is another of those wonderful surprises I get now-and-then. The latest from NYC based Sweet Suzi Smith, Unbroken, came across my email inbox today.

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I've just finished uploading the last of 584 new tracks into the Dreamland Blues Radio playlist. This is a complete rebuild of the playlist from scratch. I've re-encoded all the tracks and 'normalized' the levels. What this means to you, dear listener, is a consistent volume level of all the music tracks. I can't speak for the 'ads' because I don't control those. Take a second and let me know what you think! I value your input! Thanks for listening! T.

Yes, I know the Now Playing list over at Dreamland Blues Radio is in reverse order. ;-) I've just been too busy to have a look at fixing it. This 'serial startup artist' stuff is really time-consuming, sleep-depriving work! T.

I’ve been struggling with a growing problem lately; an inability to concentrate on a task. It’s particularly frustrating for me as I have spent a large portion of my career ‘noodling’ through large, complex problems and creating the systems to bring organization to chaos, efficiency to randomness and value where none existed.

I initially thought that it was due to my work environment. I am the only technology-centric person on my company and therefore receive a constant stream of ‘My computer is doing something wierd…’ interruptions in my day. That, coupled with numerous development projects active a given time have split my time into increasingly smaller increments of focus. So much so in fact that I’ve restructured my work scheduled to spend 3 days a week working from home to remove the ‘interruptions’.

It’s not working.

Granted, this is only my second week of the new schedule but I still find myself flitting between projects, email, IM, phone calls, not to mention household chores that are now only 3 steps away from being done. This post is a good example. During the course of writing these few paragraphs I have checked email twice, responded to an IM and attended to iTunes a few times to adjust my music.

I had thought it was an overabundance of input, too many interesting courses for my mind to pursue. My interests span a wide spectrum and I have the desire to explore them all. I felt that I lacked the discipline to focus on any given one for an extended length of time.

Turns out, I may be able to blame the Internet:

The Atlantic Online | July/August 2008 | Is Google Making Us Stupid? | Nicholas Carr

The idea that our minds should operate as high-speed data-processing machines is not only built into the workings of the Internet, it is the network’s reigning business model as well. The faster we surf across the Web—the more links we click and pages we view—the more opportunities Google and other companies gain to collect information about us and to feed us advertisements.

WOW! I was lead to the Detroit group Atomic Fireballs by a post on one of the 'geek news' sites I frequent. I thought it odd that they would post something like this so it must be impressive. Wow. read more

The movie studios have traditionally spread out the release dates for PPV, cable, DVDs and download in an effort to maximize the dollars they are able to extract from customers. Apple have announced that they have agreements in place to allow them to offer movie downloads via iTunes coincident with the DVD release.

I believe that this is the first step towards the compression of this timeline. The endgame being only one or two release dates for movies; theatrical and all others. As the entire movie industry moves to digital techniques from camera to screen there is little impediment to a ‘big bang’ release methodology. Mark Cuban has been advocating this for some time.

http://gizmodo.com/386026/apple-to-sell-movies-on-dvd-release-day-confirmed

UPDATE: Here is a piece from Variety with a bit more background.  I especially like the quote at the end from a Fox exec.; ‘What we do want is pay-per-view to replace rental.’…  Interesting…

Hand-wringing About American Culture - Are Americans Hostile to Knowledge? - New York Times

The ‘Protect America Act’ (clearly a use of the term ‘protect’ with which I was unfamiliar) is due to expire soon.  The Senate is considering it’s replacement and today the Senate failed to pass an amendment that would have removed the immunity granted to the telcos for all manner of illegal activities under the guise of ‘protecting our freedoms’.

Just be sure I have this right…  the Government asks the telcos to perform illegal wiretaps while waving the ‘it’s your patriotic duty to comply’ flag.  The telcos succumb to the ‘pressure’, roll over and illegally dump the contents of the ‘tubes in the Government’s lap.

The public (the folks they’re trying to ‘protect’, right) get wind of it and start raising a stink.  The Government responds by retroactively granting immunity to the telcos so the ‘public’ can’t sue them and get the details of just what was going on.

Do you feel protected?  Well, do you punk?  I feel hoodwinked!

Senate caves, votes to give telecoms retroactive immunity