With stuff like this going on, you have to wonder if the mainstream music industry has pretentions to replacing the Mafia in its business practices. It seems that the major music licensing bodies (ASCAP, BMI, and SESAC, among others) have been shaking down restaurants, coffee shops, and other places where people can gather to listen to music, either over the radio or played live. Some of the songs played at these places were covers of other songs, which it used to be legal to do so long as you didn't turn a profit off of it, but no longer. Specifically …
Jean and Chandler went home early yesterday morning, something that's taking Lyssa and I a while to get used to. They're almost like family to us, and it feels weird to come home after work and not have anyone there. We're now able to take Lucy out of the office and let her spend the evenings in the living room because Chandler isn't here anymore. He's a good dog, to be sure, but he's also never seen small rodents before and we couldn't take a chance.
Lucy, to her credit, wasn't unduly shaken up by Chandler's presence. She knows that …
Earlier tonight, Lyssa, Jean, Jason, and myself stood in line at the local movie theatre in NOVA to see Transformers on the silver screen.
Before the spoilers start, I can only say that It Was Good. I've got a geekbone so big, that I don't think that I have to tell you what I'm pressing the spacebar with.
Go. See. This. Movie. Everyone's been ranting and raving about the animation, and as well they should. The detail on the Transformers was simply amazing. I think I read someplace that Optimus Prime alone had somewhere in the neighborhood of 20,000 …
It seems that the Motion Picture Association of America is adding some new tricks to its arsenal to use in its war against movie piracy: They've started to set up phony file-sharing sites to sucker people. The idea is that you sign up for the site (giving them both e-mail and IP address) and go about your business while the web server records everything that you do. Eventually, they'll have enough evidence to come after you in court for movie piracy.
The site mentioned in the article has gone down since the story broke, but the question is now, "How …
Even though the Cruxshadows are still on tour, they've been hatching plans while on the road to release another single from their latest album, Dreamcypher. Specifically, they'll be releasing a couple of remixes of the song Birthday along with some new (and some live-only) material on 4 September 2007 through Isotank Records - you can preorder it from here. Frankly, part of me isn't surprised that they announced it yesterday, which just happened to be the birthday of their frontman Rogue. In a weird, strange, "Am I doing enough in this lifetime?" kind of way, it works.
It's not quite as good as a Faraday cage (or better yet, not putting up wireless access points at all) but it'll definitely be on the radar of IT and infosec professionals in the near future thanks to some very high profile network intrusions that used wireless networks as their beachheads: A thin, transparent film that is not only impact resistant, but filters RF emissions, so that signals from outside can't get in, and more importantly, signals inside can't get out. Supposedly, this stuff's been in use on the government side of things for a while now, and it's just …
I haven't been following the Scooter Libby case for a couple of weeks because everything else has been keeping me busy, but I did find out in passing that he was found guilty of perjury and sentenced to two and one-half years in federal prison and a fine of one-quarter of a million US dollars because he lied on the stand about the outing of Valerie Plame as a CIA operative. Then something interesting happened: George W. Bush commuted the imprisonment portion of Libby's sentence, leaving him only with the fine to deal with. Given his position inside the beltway …
Second of all, I finally put the pictures from the True Colors Tour up, featuring the Gossip, The Dresden Dolls, Deborah Harry, Rufus Wainright, Erasure, and Cyndi Lauper.
We're not entirely sure of how this happened, but Rialian's closet somehow spontaneously developed an accordian.