trisweb.com

“In addition to downloading, 16% of all those surveyed say they now store their downloaded music collection on CD-Rs or hard drives. The numbers are skewed towards the younger listener: Roughly one-third of music fans under the age of 25 store their music collections this way.”

The younger listener actually knows what that thing that holds all those files in his computer is. The old people just can’t get past using floppy disks I guess….

From Steriophile Magazine

I just downloaded this tiny distribution of Linux called Damn Small Linux (DSL, not to be confused). It’s 50MB, no more, no less, so it fits on a business-card CD. And it boots from that CD. And sets up display, sound, all your ethernet hardware, internet connection, mouse (even USB), mount points (other drives), etc. etc. in seconds, literally. And then it boots up to a graphical desktop (which I’m pretty sure I can take a screenshot of, convert to JPEG, and upload with the included FTP client). I am currently listening to a Top-40 stream with XMMS, with a few tracks from my Windows C drive (which mounted incredibly easily, considering it’s NTFS formatted).

And get this—the web browser I’m currently using isn’t included on the CD. There’s a little script that downloads the entire Mozilla Firebird package (which happens to be my favorite web browser), installs it, downloads the Flash 6 plugin, installs it, and runs Firebird. Everything worked. Very cool. This has to be useful for something sometime. Imagine, when your C drive won’t boot, plopping in a Linux bootable business card and fixing the MBR after looking up how to do it on the net and listening to the tunes that are still (hopefully) on your C drive. Very impressive. Which reminds me, I gotta get Linux back on my spare 6 gig hard disk… I am such a geek. B-)

In other news, I have to go feed the rabbits, the puppy down the street, and myself. Then I have to clean the house… argh. Later. ::

I just saw Seabiscuit—very good movie, I highly reccomend it.

But that’s not really what I want to talk about right now. I just want to quickly comment on a certain minute-long clip that was shown before the movie—it was the MPAA’s ad against movie piracy (“Movies: they’re worth it.”). I was appalled. But not at the Ad, nor the premise. I agree with the MPAA. Movies are worth it, and pirated movies probably do cost the industry quite a bit of money. But I wasn’t appalled that they were advertising against piracy. Nor was I appalled that they charged me $9.50 to get in the theater to see the movie; nor that they charge half that for a coke and as much for nachos.

No, I was appalled that they played the music to ‘Contact’ in the background while running that ad. Contact… it makes me laugh, it’s so ironic….

“See, in all our searching, the only thing that makes the emptiness bearable, is each other.”

“I was part of something wonderful, something that changed me forever; a vision of the Universe that tells us undeniably how tiny, and insignificant, and how rare and precious we all are. A vision that tells us we belong to something that is greater than ourselves. That we are not, that none of us are alone.”

::

It’s been a while, so here are a few things to pique your interest.

• First of all, a little something from Slashdot’s random line generator at the bottom of every page:
  Genius, n.: A chemist who discovers a laundry additive that rhymes with “bright.”
  I cracked up.


• Second, umm… oh yeah. I found this really cool program. It’s not a game exactly, but, well, you just have to see it. It’s called Celestia, and it’s an open-source galaxy exploration program, which is basically like those sophisticated “planetariums” which are really just movies of solar-system flythroughs projected on a giant dome. Well, this program is better than those. You have to see it.


• Thinking about vacation… apparently our hotel in Avalon fell through (as in, the place looks crappy as hell and their manager just got fired for letting people live there for free), so who knows where we might be going. All I know is that I move in in less than 20 days. Summer is always too short…


• Speaking of which, there’s no way I’m going to get close to finishing a certain project I’m working on before I go back to school, and there’s no way I can continue to work on it while in school, because my workload is crazy as it is. Oh, and then there’s band. Heh.


• I sign up for the rest of my classes next Friday. I can’t find anything I really want to take that I can take though. I guess I’ll just have to look harder.


• Anything else? Probably not. Check out /., it’s more interesting. Or Sourceforge, I find something great and free every time I go there.

To: info@recallgraydavis.com (RecallGrayDavis.com < go here first)
Subject: Important Questions!

For the last 6 years or so (ever since I got my first computer… a 486DX 66 MHz… running Windows 95) I have used Internet Explorer as my default browser. A few weeks ago, I discovered a new project from Mozilla.org (the people who bring us the Mozilla browser, which is basically Netscape) called Mozilla Firebird. It has now stolen the throne from IE on my computer.

There are many reasons I switched, but I think the one that everyone will appreciate is its speed and efficiency. One of the reasons I always used IE and not Mozilla was that IE felt much lighter to me; it loads faster, closes faster, and the interface is a little less bulky. Firebird got this right; it loads faster than IE, loads pages faster (thanks to the Mozilla rendering engine), and the interface can themed and skinned to look any way you want (even like IE). It’s usually stable, doesn’t crash bad, and browses great. One of my favorite features is tabbed browsing, which speeds things up a lot. You want to read a page but want to finish the paragraph the link is in first? Open it in a new tab. It’ll load in the background and be ready for you to read.

One of the other big things is its excellent CSS support (maybe you have to be a web designer to appreciate this). IE doesn’t render some things correctly, and a lot of things just plain look bad (like, borders that are supposed to be ‘dotted’ are actually dashed, and they distort when you scroll). Firebird has a seemingly perfect CSS rendering engine. It sticks exactly to the specs and looks great.

I’ve been using CSS a lot recently. In the spec, it’s envisioned that it be a way to completely separate the design of a page from its content, and I like it. I’ll have to redesign my blog now, and my web sites, and never go back. ::

Just breathe

Another day…

~Telepopmusik, “Breathe”

(It’s better with music, but the lyrics got to me for some reason. Maybe I need sleep.)

Another day… ::

Is this the first time I’ve ever posted a slashdot link here? Hmph. Interesting.

Whatever, here you go: Star Wars Galaxies controversy discussion...