So while watching the Simpsons it was the episode of the Stonecutters. At the end they make the comment about “Only two members of this club have special rings” then Bart and Lisa blow these odd whistling rings. This sprang the question of playing a kazoo with farts. So off went a mass text that read.

Wanted: proof that the kazoo can be played with the ass. Anyone know?

Off to 20 people… and because I’m a klutz with my thumbs, it sent twice. Not to worried about it since messages do that sometimes anyhow. Well here’s the answers that I got back.

Try it
Lol… No i dnt knw bt thtd b funny as hel 2 c
I would think a good rip will get you a b flat
LOL OMG hun ur 2 funny. i love ya.
Sorry don’t know anyone that can do that. U gonna try it and let us all know?
How about someone who can kick their own elbow (this person meant lick)
The issue is that the part you blow through is the large side. And you have to hum, not blow.
I don’t have a kazoo but am willing to try.
Duh. You did
*****s pretty good at it (name redacted)
Dnt hav any! hehe
No i dont.
No
No idea

Thankfully I seem to know screwed up people that will amuse me.

So we all take pictures right?
**yes you all nodded didn’t you**

Do you know your rights when you take a picture? If you’ve ever stopped shooting when told to than I’m going to guess you don’t. Well please go read your rights and use them. Also extrapolate on them. Remember that if it can be photographed than you are IN PUBLIC and should you do something stupid you cannot relay on any form of privacy to protect you. Also the same rules would apply to cops. If it can be legally photographed you can be busted for it.

At the same time when dealing with pictures remember the license that you grant them. Please read the MySpace TOS, Flickr (pretty easy), or YouTube (tell me, a google gives a high SNR). Thing is, you should look at the liscense that you use to put you pictures on the web. Pick the one that is least restrictive and host there. If you must, host them your self. Hide the copy right using CSS. Don’t let yourself get sued because you used something that you shouldn’t have. Don’t let fear keep you from using something you could have.

“I don’t understand how ’survival of the fitest’ went to ’save the fat, dumb, lazy’.“- A buddy

He’s right though. How DID we go from survival of the fittest to protecting and prolonging the life span of the dumb and dieing. If you look at the rest of the animal kingdom you notice something that for the most part is normal among the. They let the weak die off. You don’t see a pride of lions keeping the old ones alive, you see the old one wonder off and die. Same way with the sick ones. They leave, and go die alone and in piece and don’t infect the rest.

Then you have us. the ‘intelligent’ beings of the plant. The ones that have become the top of the chain. We some how can’t learn this simple lesson from the rest of the animal kingdom. In our finite wisdom we have decided that we need to protect the stupid with warning labels. We need to protect the lazy with all forms to enable them to be lazier. The horrid twist is I’m typing this while finishing McDonalds and on the back of the fry box is this little icon that reads “it’s what i eat and what i do“. I’m sure there is a mess of phrases that you could add to that to make it funnier.

Simple fact of the matter is that we have gotten to the point that we reward laziness. That we reward stupidity. We really might be headed towards Idiocracy some day soon. Sad thing about that movie, I loaned it to someone. They watched about 10 minutes of it and couldn’t stand it because of the stupidity.

Humans, the only time we think it’s ok to kill is out of malice, anger, and spite. We seem to forget that sometimes it can be done out of love, care, and hope.

Also known as DRM or by the proper name it is Digital Rights Managment. Or maybe it is just a Damn Retarded Method of annoying your customers and unless you work for a media company you’ll probably agree. They like to argue that DRM is a must for digital media since you can make perfect 1:1 copies and a copy of a copy doesn’t degrade the quality. Also with the advent of the Internet you can share them at a really nice speed. Now that we’ve got the “but what about just coping tapes” argument killed we can move on as to why DRM and this mess is suddenly a problem and a waste.

(more…)

Time and time again I get asked about mp3s and how to deal with them. This might have something to do with having a sizable mp3 collection and the fact that I keep it very well maintained and clean. What will happen typically is someone will get a new mp3 player, and not surprisingly want to add music to it. Now I love mp3 players, I really do. I just hate how they deal with media most of the time. For me it has always made sense to organize my mp3s as follows.

\Artist\Cd\Track-Title.mp3 -or-
\Artist\Cd\Track-Artist-Title.mp3

Thats how they’ve always lived on my hard drives, it makes using just about any media application a snap. I can quickly and easily locate and load a cd. Now when it comes to things like iTunes, Windows Media Player, and the newer Winamp you get these nice library functions. This can make for a mess if your mp3s are not organized or were not ripped properly. You see these application rely on the ID3 tag to get info about the file, and (possibly) the file name to some extent. Or course when you throw things on your mp3 player, they like to use the ID3 tag.

(more…)

After having the pre-order slip sitting in my wallet for oh so damn long, Super Smash Brother Brawl released. For some reason I’ve been looking forward to this game and awaiting it’s launch. After a few delays… I has it. Get home toss it in my Wii and “Disc Read Error”. First thought, call Gamestop and ask if anyone else has had issues and about swapping discs. This really is out of the question for a few reasons. One being that I always give them crap for trying to sell me a disc warranty. I don’t like the pre-order crap they push and let them know that I’ll pre-order when and what I want. Lastly I think the strategy guides are retarded and have no issues tell them that.

Anyhow a quick Google later and SURPRISE! Turns out that the Japan release had the same issue. Sometimes the game just don’t work. The solution, send it back to Nintendo and get it fixed. There are a mess of guesses as to what causes this issue, but they seem to center around it being the first dual layer dvd disc game. Well given the abuse my Wii has taken… I admit I giggled there… I’m surprised it plays any discs. I have occasionally had disc read errors. But Brawl has given me more than any other disc has.

Didn’t stop me from playing the game with a few buddies for about 8 hours though.

It’s sad to think that a fair amount of the influences on my musical tastes come from a handful of people. But it’s a bit scary to think that two very distinct people had a HUGE influence on how digital music took off and worked. One of them has been on the cover of WIRED magazine, yet failed to make a recent list. I’m not sure the other has ever got much of a mention in WIRED.

Ask yourself, where would your mp3’s be without Shawn Fanning. They’d be on someone else’s computer and you’d never had accessed them. This is the guy that originally wrote Napster. Back before it was a pay service. This was the application that brought mp3 sharing to the masses. Suddenly what had been done over other channels was easy enough for the average person to access it and to find the music they wanted. It worked, and it worked so well that the law suits came and down it went. But he was small potatoes compared to the other guy, of course I’m talking about Justin Frankel.

What did this guy do? Very simple, he made Winamp, and later with someone else developed SHOUTcast for streaming music. After all what good are mp3’s if you don’t have a robust player to play them? Eventually he was bought out by the cooperate drones and hired by AOL. It was there that he wrote Gnutella, a step forward in P2P. I’m going to guess you’ve not paid a large amount of attention to the protocols that are used by your applications, but if you’ve ever used Limewire, Bearshare, or iMesh (to name a few). You have used his design.

Maybe I’m wrong. But if it had not been for these two guys, mp3s and file sharing would probably have never taken off like they did. At the same time, had napster never been forced to filter mp3’s someone may not have made a wrapper for it. They may not have decided to develop a new method. Never know. But one thing I do know, had these two not done what they did Apple wouldn’t have a group of people so addicted to digital media that they’ll buy over priced mp3 players.

My reply to TJ’s Rock Music Owes…