I don’t know what’s been happening over at Blogger (the Web service I use to make entries in and maintain this weblog), but the trouble seems to have passed. Unfortunately, it’s time for me to hit the gym and run some errands, so today’s posting will be somewhat delayed.

In the meantime, here’s some interesting reading:

• Let’s Eat Rice! I get kind of twitchy if I don’t have at least one meal with rice per fortnight. Dad can hold out for about three days, I think.
• I always give the street kids a cut of my busking money, but someone’s done one better and set up an interesting charity site called ModestNeeds.com.
• Remember the big story about the Microsoft/Unisys Anti-Unix site being hosted on a Unix server? They’ve very quickly moved it to a Windows server. So quickly, in fact, that the following ports on it are open: 21 (FTP), 25 (SMTP), 80 (HTTP), 110 (POP3), 443 (HTTPS), 1433 (SQL Server), 1755, 1801, 1972, 1975, 2103, 2105, 2107, 3306, 3372 and 5900 (VNC). This is the high-tech equivalent of locking your front door with a deadbolt, but leaving a few windows and a doggie-door wide open.
• My friend Adina’s sister Lisa, who lives in Israel, has this little writeup about what it’s like there right now — not from the point-of-view of a military analyst or a news reporter, but just an ordinary civilian, like me, and (presumably) most of you. I’m very thankful that the worst of my problems seem to be hunting down a job, finding a new roomate to help absorb some of the rent, my “club” accordion needing some minor repairs and the fact that this cute girl didn’t show up at my gig last Saturday.
• Bringing karaoke to everyone: Taito, the company that revolutionized the videogame world with Space Invaders, is now going to revolutionize karaoke. Using the CSound programming language, they’ve developed technology that will enable a karaoke machine to adjust the pitch of the music to match the user. Supposedly even the most tone-deaf person will now seem to have perfect pitch.
• Hey mister, I really like your free concert…Custom — yeah, the guy who does the song Hey Mister is playing at the next New Music Tuesday (April 9th) at the Horseshoe Tavern, which is conveniently located right around the corner from my house. And yes, as with all New Music Tuesdays, there’s no cover.
• Lindy vs. Lindi: When homophones collide! Yup, this Saturday at C’est What (SE corner of Front Street East and Church), you can see both Lindy, the gentle giant of folk rock and Lindi, the sweet-voiced, skimpy-dressin’ cabaret singer with the firefighter cute accordion player.

And now, I’m off to the gym to make myself Toronto’s most buff accordion player, although I suspect that’s not saying much.

Because I can’t wait for that Jesus artist to get around to doing one with an accordion player…

…I decided to take matters into my own hands. The Lord helps those who help themselves, right?

If you don’t know what I’m talking about, perhaps you should see the original artwork.

Michael Frasse has an interesting essay on the Arts and Farces site called When Elephants Dance that covers the battle between the entertainment industry and everyone else. Here’s some stuff from the essay:

When elephants dance, it’s best to get out of the way. That’s exactly what’s happening now as the entertainment industry — the recording, publishing, and motion picture industries, mainly — attempts a worldwide intellectual property power grab with two distinct targets. Think of it: a coup and a lock on all published content in the same year, amazing isn’t it?

Target number 1 is the average customer: anyone who purchases software, an audio CD, an electronic book, or a movie on DVD. The entertainment industry sees customers as pirates, plain and simple. In their collective mind’s eye, we all have a wooden leg, eye patch, and a filthy talking parrot on our shoulder. While the Constitution grants customers certain rights with regard to copyrighted material, the entertainment industry very much wants to separate us from those rights.

Target number 2 in the sights of the entertainment industry are technology behemoths like Microsoft, Intel, IBM, and Apple. These companies, in the perverse worldview of the entertainment industry, make the tools — computers mostly — that allow customers to practice their piracy.

He covers a lot of ground in the essay: copy-protected CDs, Internet radio, copyright, moral rights, the DMCA, the CBDTPA and the entertainment industry’s “soft money” donations made to the Hollywood ass-kissing senators who introduced it:

And finally, he proposes these measures:

• Revert the term of copyright to 14 years, immediately and retroactive to all existing works.
• Recognize moral rights in the works authors create, like every other civilized country on the planet. Make it immediate and retroactive to all existing works.
• Prohibit any corporation from owning a copyright. Corporations create nothing; they’re consensual hallucinations and exist at our pleasure. I don’t know about you, but I’m not much pleased any more.

Make sure you check it out.

More musical notes

O Crest Whitestrips Where Art Thou?

From this story in the New York Times (free registration required):

The Grammy success of “O Brother” (a total of five awards), the album’s subsequent No. 1 ranking on the Billboard chart (above Brandy and Alanis Morissette) and its impressive sales of 4.4 million copies have all seemed to send a message to the country music industry.

Well, the album did send a message, and that message has been received and marked: Return to Sender.

…

If there’s one culprit in the current state of country music, it may be Crest Whitestrips. Yes, Crest Whitestrips, the new dental whitening system. Because when you point a finger at Crest Whitestrips, you’re pointing at Procter & Gamble, the product’s maker and one of the largest purchasers of radio advertising time. And the major advertisers are the people who really control what you hear on the radio, especially country radio.

You can keep your Garth Brooks. I’m listening to this guy instead.

Lollapalooza returns?

1991 was a really exciting time for music. It very clearly marked the end of what I what I used to call “The Great Music Drought” that began in the latter half of the ’80’s, when Cheese Metal bans walked the earth and formerly respectable outfits like R.E.M. and U2 started putting out crap ballads (“They think that ‘slower’ means ‘deeper”, my pal George used to say).

In 1991, the Machester scene brought a fusion of guitar pop and dance. Techno was just getting started; even then The Prodigy were already cranking out some catchy tunes, and Messiah was doing the rock-meets-electronic music thing long before The Crystal Method. Raves were still interesting and new, and I have the goofy hat and pants to prove it. In the Pacific Northwest, a bunch of bands were mixing the best elements of punk and metal, while farther south, groups like Jane’s Addiction and the Red Hot Chili Peppers were doing the same with funk and metal. Father east, bands like Sonic Youth and a new group calling themselves Smashing Pumpkins were doing wonderful Hendrix-esque things with guitar noise. Near and dear to my heart, groups like Ministry, KMFDM and Nine Inch Nails were proving that the keyboard was not a wimpy instrument. Before today’s obsession with bling-bling, hip-hop was mutating into interesting strains, what with Black Sheep, Del the Funkee Homosapien on the West Coast, Public Enemy, Boogie Down Productions and Das EFX on the east coast and Urban Dance Squad and MC Solaar out in Europe. Hell, even the pop fluff was better — give me Black Box over Eiffel 65 any day. It was a great time to be a DJ, which — funny enough — I was.

1991 also marked the first year of Lollapalooza, which had a pretty varied line-up: Siouxie and the Banshees, Ice-T and Bodycount; Nine Inch Nails, Butthole Surfers, Living Colour and Jane’s Addiction, all on the same stage. The ’92 lineup was still pretty decent, but by the last show in 1997, its lineup had already skewed towards cheese-metal, and we were yet in another Great Musical Drought with Korn on one side and Britney on the other.

Now it seems as though Lollapalooza will be coming back in 2002. And this time, Clear Channel — the people who brought you homogenized broadcast radio — will have something to do with it.

Argh.

Between what’s going on with my two lines of work — computers and music — I may have to go looking for a new career. Maybe children’s television.

Almost forgot…

Happy Passover, everyone!

And it’s Easter Weekend coming up, so Happy Easter too!

Wait till they start doing it to CDs with good music

Although one may view it as karmic punishment for encouraging Celine Dion to keep recording more audio diarrhea, it’s still bad news: there are reports that the copy-prevention (or copy-protection, as the Techniban like to call it) on Celine Dion’s latest waste of polycarbonate screws up Macs. The CD won’t eject, it messes with the way the computer subsequently boots up, and may even mess up the drive’s firmware.

The ironic thing is that a Mac was very likely used in the recording of her latest album.

For those of you who are in Canada and shop at HMV (or if there’s a CD shop in your city with a return-for-exchange, no-questions-asked policy like HMV’s), I suggest you buy a copy-protected CD and then exchange it. At HMV, when you exchange a CD this way, they make a note of the reason for the return. Say it’s because you don’t approve of the copy protection; you have the right to play CDs on the computer, and fair use laws allow you to make personal MP3 copies and mixed tapes and CDs. The record companies might not care much for their customers, but they do listen to their retailers.

Thanks to Cory at BoingBoing for the heads-up.

Sorry for skewing technical…

…but I am a computer programmer after all. I promise, there’s some funny slice-of-life stuff coming soon. Promise.

By the way, this Sunday marks the end of the first quarter of 2002, which means it’ll be time for the AccordionGuy Quarterly Report, complete with point-form presentations and charts, but still more fun that most quarterly reports!

American Techniban

Politech

We live in what the Japanese call a joho shakai — an information society. In such a place, technology and politics are bound to interesect; when they do, you can read all about it in Declan McCullagh’s Politech site. Declan, who lives in Washington, DC and is the Washington bureau chief for Wired News, covering the stories where the Beltway meets the Valley. He’s also a renowned photographer whose work has appeared in several magazines (and on his site).

Operation Enduring Valenti

In a recent posting to Politech, Declan points to a great essay by Richard Forno called Operation Enduring Valenti. The name of the essay refers to Jack Valenti, president of the MPAA (Motion Picture Association of America), the guy who fought against VCRs, claiming that they were to the movie industry as the Hillside Strangler was to women. The latest “Hillside Strangler” against which Valenti is railing is digital technology. I’ll let Forno sum up what Valenti’s up to:

Under the guise of ‘preserving America’s intellectual capital’ and supported by the funding of the entertainment industry cartels, they seek to sustain the entertainment industry’s Industrial Age business model (and monopolies) in the modern Information Age – where such models are rendered obsolete by emerging technology. By doing so, these elected puppets of Hollywood will continue earning campaign contributions and ensure their job security.

Perhaps we should call this group of Emmy-Award winners the “American Techniban” movement, given their fanatical views on technology, evolution, and society.

Valenti’s MPAA, along with their buddies the RIAA (who not only hate stuff like Napster, they don’t even like it when you make your own mix tapes or CDs) backed an evil law called the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), which makes it illegal to even discuss the inner workings of copy protection, and instead of protecting copyrights has been used as a club against free speech online. Now they’re pushing the Consumer Broadband and Digital Television Promotion Act (CBDTPA), which will make it illegal to make or sell hardware or software that doesn’t have “government-approved” (and remember, many goverment officals are in Hollywood’s pocket) copy protection. In his essay, Forno points out something very important about the CBDTPA:

It should also be noted that with the exception of one executive from Intel, every person invited to testify on the proposed CBDTPA was from the entertainment industry….there were no artists, musicians, producers, or consumers invited. So much for this being a ‘consumer-friendly’ bill.

In other words, the entertainment industry just wants you to keep your mouth shut and your wallet open.

Fucknozzles.

Accidental Genius

Etymology time! The root of the word “decide” come from a word meaning “to kill”. Every time you make a choice, you kill off other possibilities. This is the problem with letting the government and the entertainment industry decide what kind of technologies are legal: by simply declaring a piece of technology illegal because it could be used to infringe on copyright, what other uses for the technology are you killing? If the entertainment industry could go back in time about eight years, they’d have lobbied to make the home computer either illegal or at least legislate it into a retarded box that you’d use for only for typing and viewing ads for movies and albums.

Back in the early 1980’s Apple Records (the Beatles’ record company) and Apple Computer came to an agreement that Apple Computer could keep their name as long as they stayed out of the music industry. At the time, no one forsaw home computers and music intersecting outside of the soundtrack for video games. However, with the invention of MIDI (Music Instrument Digital Interface) in 1983, it didn’t take long for computers to be used as composition devices and as backup musicians. Apple Records could’ve taken the bastard route and tied Apple Computer up in lengthy legal proceedings, but instead chose to — ahem — Let It Be. And a wise decision too: Macintosh computers were the muscians’ computer of choice in the ’80’s, and more so in the ’90’s with the advent of hard disk recording, which allowed for more versatile, higher-quality digital recording gear that took up considerably less space than bulky tape machines (just try and find a decent recording studio without a Mac these days). This not only made life easier for big artists in their studios, but opened the door for many musicians who got their start making recordings on home computers in their bedrooms or small studios.

The computer is but one of many devices that had a life beyond the original intention. The transistor, a much smaller replacement for bulky vaccuum tubes, was originally designed for smaller computing devices for the military. A U.S. manufacturer used the transistor to make smaller hearing aids. However, in the 1960’s, a clever but small Japanese company really got its potential and starting manufacturing radios small enough for you to carry around, creating the portable music device industry. That company? Sony. Check out their long but fascinating history here; the Walkman story is here.

(Lightning would strike again with Sony several times, most notably with the Walkman. Sony was in dire financial straits at the time, and the board of directors was telling its president, Akio Morita, to concentrate on profession video products. They nearly killed the Walkman: Akio, baby, what’s with the tiny tape player that can’t even record? And no speakers? Are you crazy?)

Wired has a good story on how inventions grew past their original intentions. Among them: how the phonograph was originally meant to play back telephone messages, the mechanical clock was for regulating the prayers of monks and how Viagra was originally for stopping chest pain instead of delivering boners aplenty.