Gripes

If anyone actually reads this regularly, they might have noticed the utter lack of posting for the second half of August. It’s not normal, at least since last year, for me to do that. I decided today to sit down and just blog before work, since it might help.

Right now, I’m depressed about a lot of things. I have that feeling I used to have when I was living with my aunt, trying to figure out how I’m going to pay my bills month to month with her. I decided early this month that I was going to try to clear up my student loan from when I went to a school that doesn’t even deserve a mention, given the way they treated me.

To start paying off the loan, I had to pay an initial lump of $500, according to them, and then pay $50 a month after that. The tradeoff is, as long as I keep paying on time, I get my Title IV eligibility back during the payback period. That makes me eligible for federal grants again, which is wonderful. Problem was, $500 basically eats my savings, since I’ve had extra expenses this month.

I feel… violated, heh.

But, if it means that I can clean up my credit record, then great. I’ll get it done, period.

Yesterday, while hanging out with some of my dorm mates who enjoy WWE Wrestling, I heard that Chris Benoit, his wife, and his child were found dead, but with no details.

Being that I had my laptop on me at the time, they all asked me if I can try to get them some more information about what happened. Unfortunately, despite drawing and summoning all of my resources, and even using the Wikipedia booster gave me almost nil, other than confirming that it was not another angle for the show like Vince McMahon’s ‘death’. That was one thing they wanted to know. The information about how it all went down wasn’t available to the public at that time, so unfortunately, they wouldn’t know.

Fast forward to today. I come in to work, and accept a couple of hours of VTO. I check TMZ.com to see if they had any information about Benoit’s death, and was surprised at the article they had published. Lately, at least to me, there’s been a lot of murder-suicide cases, with someone slaughtering the whole family that’s on hand, and then offing themselves so they don’t have to account directly to us as humans for their sins, their crimes, and their transgressions.

This is, perhaps, a bit too disturbing, how people just think like this.

I know what it’s like to want to die, but, I guess I don’t understand why someone feels they must also off family members that are dear to them at the same time. It makes little to no sense whatsoever. I’m just wondering if anyone, be they a star, or maybe sub-par, will ever logically say to themselves, “Oh man, I’m in too deep. Let me talk to someone before I drown myself in this problem.”

I was just wondering, is all.

[tags]Chris Benoit, WWE, Wrestling, Death, Murder, Suicide[/tags]

I remember when I first got an internet connection at home.
I paid for it almost in its entirety, from the phone line, to the dial-up package, and the computer itself. The family only helped me out in getting a monitor for that computer, and that was fairly cheap.

I discovered sites like Riffage.com, which would offer a free MP3 CD with much of their music on it to anyone who asked. The music was generally from independent artists, but I liked being able to try out all sorts of different music, to see what I liked.

Shortly after my dad died in 2000, and my aunt moved in, she brought the wonder that is called Cable television. With the cable line, we could also apply for high speed Cable internet. So I wheedled my way into talking her into that. Once I got that high speed connection (and a new computer, since the first one was dated), I started hearing about Napster (again).

I had heard of it while I was on dial-up, but it wasn’t really usable then. I tried getting songs, but it would take an hour or so for a single song to download. That was the beginning of my piracy days.
I gave up for a while in 2000, and in early 2001, when I got on high speed, I jumped on board the Napster train again. Shortly after I jumped on with the [tag]Napster[/tag] train again, it was being killed by the courts. [tag]OpenNap[/tag] was born, I was on board, and it was still going off and on.

I started discovering other ways to download music, to start absorbing more and more illegal music, such as [tag]Piolet[/tag], [tag]KaZaA[/tag], [tag]Morpheus[/tag], and numerous other programs and methods. I did it to feed my hunger for all sorts of new music at an ‘unbeatable price’. I hated the idea of buying a CD then, because I’d buy one, and only like two songs on a 15 song CD, but spend $15 or $20 to buy the disc.

I would fill my hard drive with pirated music, burn an MP3 CD for myself as a way to back it up, and delete that from the hard drive. Then I’d keep downloading. I’d end up with 15, 20, 40 copies of the same song with different tags (which became annoying to me when I switched over to Foobar2000 as a media player, and even more so when I started using [tag]AudioScrobbler[/tag] (now [tag]Last.FM[/tag]) at the end of ‘03, but I’m ahead of myself by a little here).
I didn’t care about the fact that the [tag]RIAA[/tag] wanted people like me to stop pirating then.
I was more upset that people couldn’t use proper tags on their music, and properly attribute their music to the original source.

This, as well as my shipping out to Job Corps at the end of 2002 began my downhill descent from my music piracy high.

When I got out of Job Corps, and got back onto a full connection, I was annoyed that a lot of my old haunts were either no more, or of low quality, or were infested with crap.

So, I started looking into legal ways to buy music.

iTunes was fresh on the block, and Pepsi was running a heavy promotion with them at the time, offering free downloads under most bottle caps.
I was [tag]downloading music[/tag], legally, and happily, and even buying the stuff when I was out of freebies…

And then I met [tag]Digital Rights Management[/tag] ([tag]DRM[/tag]).

I almost wanted to pirate again when I first ran into it, thinking that it’s wrong to be told just what I can listen to my music in or on. Then I found out about various methods to circumvent this ‘protection’ scheme on Windows, and well, I went back to buying my music, but without that layer of nagging permissions.

What annoyed me initially was the fact that though I paid for the music, I couldn’t listen to it in [tag]Foobar2000[/tag]. To listen to the music, I had to stay within the [tag]iTunes[/tag] app, even after paying money for music, just to listen to a few good songs.

What kind of sense did that make? I mean, gee, I paid for it. I wanted to listen to it, along with some of the legit free music I’d found, on an [tag]MP3 CD[/tag] while I was out and about. That wasn’t going to happen.

I eventually heard about AllOfMP3, and tried it out. For a while, I was fooling myself, saying “Well, gee, I’m paying for the music, though under another country’s laws, so I guess these artists are being paid like they’re supposed to.”
I bought much music with AllOfMP3, as well as having discovered worlds of music, sometimes remixed that was given away for free to anyone who came by to request the download.

Eventually, my credits on [tag]AllOfMP3[/tag] dried up as they started blocking payments from the USA, so I let that go with a wet flop.

Then, thanks to PayPerPost, I heard about a site called Amie Street, and fell in love with it.
The music’s got a great price tag on it (inexpensive, but legal, and from anyone trying to get their foot in the door, so to speak), and I’ve found a few pretty good artists there.
That, combined with my listening to [tag]Jamendo[/tag], [tag]Pandora[/tag], [tag]SomaFM[/tag], and [tag]OverClocked Remix[/tag]es, plus a few purchases from Sprint’s Music Store are what comprise my music listening points now.

Imagine my annoyance when I get an email that shows how our government, and how the music industry continues to squat on the faces of people who want to legally listen to music!

I spent two days composing my thoughts here, just to get you over to Save Net Radio. I’d appreciate it if you head over there, and help us save something that keeps me legal.

Thanks.

Day Seven:

Dear World.
I am sleepy, bored to death with the training (because I’m not learning from it as much as I’m learning from actually seeing the work done, and being given a chance to try it), and just want a soft bed to lay on for a day.
My energy is depleted severely, and I’m starting to get a little testy with people.
I am barely managing six hours of sleep now, and it’s taking a toll on me. I can’t seem to compensate for it, with my awkward hours and needs for now. In fact, I’ll have to go donate blood plasma to have the cash I need for riding the bus in the morning.

All of this stuff is just truly frustrating me. I just want to make money, so I can have a home to call my own again, and a good internet connection.

A couple of days ago, I decided that I needed a way to offer a subscription to my blog’s content for the non-RSS, non-LiveJournal crowd.

I had heard mention of an email marketing tool called Zookoda, which is a free tool that hails from the Great Down Under (that being, Australia). It’s an interesting tool that allows one to set up a mail list that can mail daily, weekly, or monthly updates of your weblog’s content in a fairly easy manner.

You’ll notice that on my sidebar, I now hold a subscribe box, as well as a chicklet to show how many subscriptions there are to my content on Zookoda. My feeding it will be slow for the next few weeks, as I start work, but it was remarkably easy to set up.

There are a few things that drive me a bit nuts, including the prolific usage of stuff we don’t really use in XHTML (<b> for example), and some code missing things that are important (alt attribute on images :)), but other than that, it’s really not bad at all. In a month’s time with Zookoda, I hope to be satisfied with the way it works, get many people interested in subscribing to my list there, and have everything the way I’d like it.

Photo: Ashley Drive at Cass Street, as seen from the North-West corner, Tampa, FL.
Map: Provided by Google Maps

This intersection is the absolute bane of those of us who commute on foot here in Tampa, FL.
Ashley St. (left) is a two way street, with southbound traffic coming freshly off the Interstate only a block north of this crossing.
Cass St. (right) is a one way street, just entering downtown Tampa.

Ashley, going southbound, has four lanes going straight across, and a single turn lane. The northbound half of the street has two lanes going normally, and a turn lane that starts a block earlier.

Cass Street has four lanes, with one of them dedicated to turning left, and one other a split left-straight lane.

The issue with this is,
When you try to cross Ashley Street on foot, using the pedestrian signals, and you’re headed East, it’s nearly impossible to do, because of two things:

• The people turning from Cass to Ashley seemingly ignore pedestrians until they’re about to hit one. This gets to be annoying as all hell.
• The crosswalk indicator goes from Walk, to a flashing Don’t Walk in a matter of mere seconds (About five seconds, to be specific).

Heading West is only marginally better, as you get the chance to get across the street a little early, due to slower traffic headed North, combined with entering the crosswalk early, before the Walk signal is illuminated.

The entire street needs improvement with its walk signals, but this spot is most relevant to me since I cross here, or a block north, to go to the Public Library.

Argh, indeed.

I’m giving myself three minutes to vent on things.
This session, it’s about code.

We’re in the AJAX and XHTML age.
Please spend a little more time on going through your code, to make sure it can pass through a validator.
Missing one or two things, but generally getting the rest right is to be expected, and doesn’t bother me.

What gets me is the ampersand.
People seem to forget that in XHTML, the ampersand needs to be escaped, or changed into an entity.
It’s not just the ‘&’ by itself now. It’s now an ‘&amp;’ when you’re putting links in that perform queries, like the social bookmark plugins generally do.

Please, please, just remember to do that, and it’ll spare me an extra five or twenty errors per page when I try to validate it.
Thanks.

[tags]XHTML, PHP, WordPress Plugins, Ampersand, Valid Code[/tags]