Gojulas Unbound

Never heard of her before, but I thought this video was very good, as is the song. Hope you enjoy it.

Do you believe there is intelligent life on other planets?

This is an insanely difficult question to answer. We have only one planet to go by, so it's hard to know if the occurrence of life is statically "easy" or not. But even if the creation of life was like winning an insane lottery with the odds being one hundred trillion to one, then there would be millions of planets with "life" on them in the universe.

But that doesn't mean intelligent life. Hell, what is "intelligent" life anyway? Something like us, or can we widen it to include dolphins and chimps, creatures like that?

The odds of intelligent life as we know evolving is so infinitesimally slim, yet the number of stars with planets is so enormously large, that the two met in the middle. So, yes, there is intelligent life on other planets. 42 planets to be exact. Regrettably these planets are so far away the light of their stars has not reached us yet.

Oh, and sorry for not posting in a while. No reason, I just got bored.

Internet radio, perhaps the most important thing to happen to music in the last 25 years, is about to be wiped out.

First, why Internet radio is in danger:
It was decided by Congress, at the urging of the RIAA, to treat Internet radio is a vastly different way then we treat broadcast (analog) radio. The RIAA's position was the Internet radio is essentially the unrestricted sharing of perfect digital copies of songs. Therefore Internet broadcasters need to pay restrictive royalty fees. Fees that broadcast radio does not need to pay. These fees could exceed any possible revenue that Internet radio stations could hope to achieve, and would wipe them out.

The holes in the RIAA's Luddite logic are staggering. First, the digital "streams" of music are NOT perfect copies of the original songs, they are re-compressed at lower bit rates, broken up into chunks (packets) and re-assembled by your computer. Next, while it is certainly possible to "record" digital streams, the main way to do so is to do a "loop-back" and record the ANALOG output of your computer. Finally, it is far easier to record FM radio. Back in the days of boom-boxes I used to do just that. Did the music industry collapse from all my cassette copies of radio broadcasts? Far from it, the industry grew.

This brings me to my second point, why Internet radio is so important:
Internet radio is democratization of music in its most perfect form. It breaks down barriers because the cost of entry is so low virtually anyone can become a broadcaster. FM radio has been consolidated into the hands of only a few corporations, and the music is selected not by the deejays but by committees intent on increasing ad revenue. Meanwhile Internet radio has completely opened the floodgates for every genre and sub-genre of music to find an audience.

There once was a golden age of FM radio. In the early 1970's a deejay driven format of radio called Album Orientated Rock (AOR), spearheaded by the Boston station WBCN, exposed listeners to non-mainstream music and local bands. Revenue from album sales rose. Now, in the age of consolidation, where it is much more difficult for deejays to exposed listeners to new music or local acts, these revenues have dropped.

Personally all the music CD's I've purchased for the last 5 years have been because I was exposed to the artists via Internet radio. My primary station is the Groove Salad channel of SomaFM, as well as the highly eclectic Radio Paradise. This represents hundreds of dollars worth of music I would not have purchased otherwise.

And let's be clear, Internet broadcasters are NOT looking for a free ride. They are looking for a sensible, equable solution, such as what satellite radio broadcasters (with their legions of lawyers) have negotiated. These stations are commercial free and depend on donations to survive. They would like to "share" these donations with the RIAA, but rather then the 110% they are asking they'd prefer something more reasonable, like maybe 10%.

If any of this makes you angry I encourage you to contact your congress person and the U.S. Copyright Office and voice your concern. It is still possible to stop these new rules and to negotiate a reasonable and fair rate.

To learn more check out Save Our Internet Radio. He does a much better job explaining this then I do.

The aircraft carrier John F. Kennedy is in Boston for one final visit before she is decommissioned. Back in 1988 I got a chance to tour it and it was really interesting. So it was a no brainer that I'd go this year too.

Now, I knew there would be a long, long line to see the ship, so I made sure my iPod was fully charged and loaded up some long podcasts to pass the time in line. I got down to the waterfront at 11:30 AM expecting to have to stand in queue for a few hours before boarding. WRONG!

So many people had shown up they started turning people away at 10 AM. A police officer I spoke with said that even the people who had gotten on line at the end might not make it on board the ship.

To add to the letdown for all of us "latecomers" (including tons of families with kids in strollers), there was no place along the wharf to view the ship. These areas were closed off for "security" reasons.

This is the only view I was able to get:

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The day was so nice (56 degrees!) and I already had by camera, so I walked around the wharf a bit and took some snapshots. I'm not a great photographer and I left the camera on Auto so the exposures are off, but I had fun snapping away. Afterwords I went to well known seafood place called No Name Restaurant and had fried shrimp. So, the day wasn't a total loss.

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I have more pictures on my Flickr page.

Simple, right? But can you spell them all properly too?

http://www.ironicsans.com/state21.html

Good luck. I can't spell worth a damn.

Wetcat6

I'm telling you, blogs were invented so people could talk about cats.

Case in point, the blog Rippin Kitten has insightful entry about people washing their cats. Priceless.

Over at Kitten War the cutest kitten wins. Wins our hearts, that is!

My final exhibit: bloggingcat.com. The tag line "I'm a cat and I blog" is just sad. Sad, sad, sad.

Oh, and lets not forget, next to stolen clips of the Daily Show, YouTube exists solely to host videos of cats doing... whatever. Case in point:

Margo and me.

Yay! I found out last week that the Junkies are touring again after taking a year off. Tickets for their Boston show went on sale Friday at 10am. By 10:01 I had my ticket. :-)

I was a fan of the Junkies, a Canadian alt-folk-rock band, back in the 1980's, an saw them live back then. I "rediscovered" them a few years back have have seen them perform live 3 times since then.

That's me and Margo Timmins, the voice of the Junkies, after one of those shows. She always trys to come out afterwards to sign autographs and speak to the fans. Just a little fanboy moment for me.

So, anyway, I'm excited. I've got a great seat for the show. The audience tends to be in my age group and is very appreciative of the band and their music, so I don't think I'll have to worry about the people around me talking during the show.

It is my new policy that if I have not posted any content on my blog for several days that I must post a picture or video of cats. This is based on my belief that 99% of personal blogs are people talking about their pets. Well, I don't have any pets, so this will have to suffice. Enjoy.

Japanesecat3601

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