Well, I was pushing shut a basement window today, and my hand went right through it. Nicked two of my fingers and a large shard dropped on my ankle. None of the cuts were as bad as they first appeared and should heal nicely. My window however is ruined.

We were debating whether or not to get new ones anyways, and this sort of seals it.

It takes me approx 1 minute and 45 seconds to go from my desk to the bathroom (use it, wash) and back.

I do this at a minimum of 4 times a day (sometimes more. I drink a lot of water/coffee/coke).

There are approx 260 working days in a year.

I am paid somewhere in the neighborhood of $21 an hour, although whether that is before or after tax I don’t remember, nor does it really matter I guess.

So:

7 minutes a day in the bathroom + 260 work days a year = 1,820 minutes a year in the bathroom.

1,820 minutes = 30.3 hours

30.3 hours a year in the bathroom on company time = $636.30 a year to go to the bathroom.

Obviously this number is grossly underestimated since I can sometimes spend around 30 minutes in the bathroom when I have a “long” visit, plus several short visits. Some days I take 1 short visit every 30 minutes (when I drink around 50oz of water, plus 4 cups of coffee, which I have actually done, although I’m sure this only happens about once a month. I chose 4 short visits a day because this is the absolute minimum).

Ok, I will openly admit, I have a tendency to have an extremely overactive imagination which, on occasion, will spew forth paranoid delusional theories about every day normal random coincidences.

Today’s conspiracy theory? Microsoft is paid by the “record industry” to play certain songs through windows media player more than others whilst WMP is on “random” mode.

Why did my mind suggest this to me?

Simple. I just bought 7 cds at Half Price Books that I have never owned before, as well as loading 8 (or more) cds into my computer to add to the current 8 gigs of music that I legaly own that I burned off of cds (again, RIAA, pay attention, that I own). lol…

Anyways, so I’ve got right around 10gb of music on my computer. I put EVERY SONG into one playlist, UNRATED. Which means the computer has no idea whatsoever what songs I like better than other songs.

Now, since these are new CDs, there is no way I can know which songs on the cds I like the best having not heard them all. So one would assume that out of the 3gb of music I have just placed on my computer, roughly 2/3 of this music I should have never heard before. So this means that I should only recognize 1 out of every 3 songs, correct? WRONG.

I have been listening ALL MORNING and have only “not recognized” maybe 4 songs (this is probably an over-estimate). Huh? How does that work?

On top of that, the songs I do recognize are (well, were, since it is mostly old music) extremely popular.

What’s going on?

I then notice that all of the songs have “ghost ratings” which means that M$ has taken the average rating from all of it’s users who have this same song and shown it to me in gray. I can then override that rating with my own, which will show up in gold/yellow.

This shows that there is indeed some sort of “internet connection” happening, highlighted by the fact that all of the CD covers/song titles/band names were downloaded for me upon ripping the music.

So, what is going on? Why am I not hearing songs I don’t recognize?

In reality it is probably because I just happen to know a lot more music than I would like to let myself believe, and that I really only wouldn’t recognize about 1/10 or 1/20 of my music rather than the 2/3 I thought.

In overactive imagination land it is probably because M$ is paid by the record industry to (during random playback) ensure that certain artists and songs are played more often than other artists and songs, and that the more “the industry” pays for certain artists/songs the more likely you are to hear that artist/song.

This doesn’t have to be an ongoing thing. M$ could have a price sheet that says “$10,000 to have your song have a 5x play rating, $7,000 for a 4x, $5,000 for a 3x, $3,000 for a 2x, $0 for a 1x”. Then forever and ever your song will have whatever rating you paid for. M$ then plays 5x songs most often, followed by 4x, etc. So that out of 22 songs 7 would be 5x, 5 would be 4x, 4 would be 3x, 3 would be 2x, 2 would be 2x, and 1 would be 1x (or something like that, could be out of 40 or 50).

This is a double edged sword. It is advantagious for the user as well as the CD company. The CD company pays for the invisible star rating, these are normally going to be the “really good” or the “really popular” songs. Then when you load a bunch of music on your computer and play it you are more likely to be happy with what is played, and the “industry” has a small amount of control over which songs you are hearing.

What’s in it for them? Why would they do this? To get you to buy the cd. Let’s face it, there are millions upon millions of GB out there of illegal music. Pretty much every nerd/geek/hacker/computer user I know has at one point downloaded/borrowed/gotten through less than legal means music.

So, if you know that people are out there listening to your music illegally, what would be the smartest thing to do? Make sure they listen to your more than someone else’s. Eventually, chances are, once they have the money, they will buy your crap. There are many many reasons people steal music. I won’t pretend to know what the number 1 reason is, but I would be my collection that somewhere in the top 5 is “I just can’t afford it right now”.

Can you picture some 30 something making 100k a year risking his net worth by downloading illegal music? F-NO. Not if he/she is smart. Especially if they have kids.

So, this means that it’s mostly just a bunch of young kids with nothing to lose really. Ok, so what happens when they grow up, and get something to lose (family, job, house, car, junk)? They start behaving a little better.

So when that happens, if you are the industry, you want to make sure that they keep hearing your music so that at this point they might go “hrm… I have a bunch of illegal music, what happens if RIAA comes after me? I lose… well… everything. So maybe I should clean out my collection and purchase my favorite stuff”. Well, their “favorite stuff” is probably going to be the stuff they heard the most. Which means the stuff with the 5x rating. Which is why “the industry” would pay M$ to play their music more than other people’s music.

Oh, and if you keep hearing Maroon 5 (with a 4x rating), then when they come out with a new CD you are more likely to buy it, which is why Sister Hazel never plays in your playlist, they didn’t pay the piper and now they have a 0x rating where Matchbox 20 has a 3x and plays almost as often as Jack Johnson and Snow Patrol who have a 4x, but not quite as often as Keane’s “Frog Prince” which has a 5x (while the rest of the Keane CD only has a 3x, which is why you don’t hear any of their other songs that much). Get it? Got it. Good.

So yeah, I know all of this is paranoia, but now that I have explored it further… why wouldn’t Microsoft do this? No reason I can think of…

(Note: The image that I based my windows media player montage on is from this site: http://images.google.com/imgres?imgurl=http://img.slate.com/media/1/123125/123051/2111767/2121805/050727_mb_Payolacolor_tn.jpg&imgrefurl=http://www.slate.com/id/2123483/nav/tap1/&h=150&w=205&sz=16&hl=en&start=8&sig2=f4isglXsxmYhaYdbuRRQhw&um=1&tbnid=5az-XfPvCRbiCM:&tbnh=77&tbnw=105&ei=DJpIRrm4GoTOiQGv663PCA&prev=/images%3Fq%3Dpayola%26svnum%3D10%26um%3D1%26hl%3Den%26sa%3DN)

Working on a google gadget where you can be chomper (the little guy in the log of chomperstomp.com) and stomp around and do random things.

Right now it’s just a flag and a bug that you drag around to influence his movements. But if you think it’s cute, and want to keep up with my progress, you can add this as a google gadget to your desktop or google homepage. Here is the gadget URL: http://www.chomperstomp.com/chomperStomper.xml

Just put that in the search box in the “add gadget” page for google desktop or enter this in when you click “add gadget by url” for your google homepage.

I just got an e-mail from a friend to the effect of “Ok, I’m ready to try this Linux thing. Any words of wisdom before I give it a whirl? Should I try Ubuntu?”

This is the second person in less than a week to ask me this question (the other person I actually drove to their location to help them burn the .iso and install it. Linux noobs really have no concept of burning an .iso file, and it is something very poorly explained by linux people because they forget about the novelty of the idea soon after their first time of having to do it themselves. I myself made half a dozen “coasters” before I got it right the first time).

So here is my reply to them:

Yes. Ubuntu is the one you want to use if you are ready to with fear and trembling take the plunge into the entrapping freedom of Linux. There is no such thing as a good distribution of Linux for a newbie, but if there were, Ubuntu would be it.

I joke… somewhat. When dealing with Linux, you always have to remember that it’s easy unless it’s hard. There is usually no in-between. Unless it is laughably easy, it will be sobbingly hard.

To be specific:

If the program that you want to install is not in the repository (that’s the thing that comes up when you click “install new program”) you (as a newbie) can safely forget about installing it at all, unless you are ready to spend several hours and lots of online research trying to get it done. If it *is* in the repository, it’s literally only one mouse click away from being fully installed and configured and integrated into your “start” menu. Thus laughably easy, or sobbingly hard. There is no “setup.exe” in the linux world.

Something that is basically required if you want to do anything other than just basic e-mail/word processing/free games is a basic understanding of command line unix. If you know what “ls” “pwd” and “chmod” do, you should be ok. If not, then you should familiarize yourself with them (try typing “basic unix commands” into google). These will be necissary when things get sobbingly hard.

I honestly think that Linux is potentially about a year or two from becoming “mainstream ready” (pessimistically it could be more like 5 to 15). But it is so close! The only thing it doesn’t have that I have become painfully aware of is easy program installations, and clear (self explanitory) file system structure standardizations, like the “Program Files” directory in windows.

However, Dell is soon to start selling their PCs with Ubuntu pre-installed, and I have a good feeling that that is going to really spur people to even more rapidly make Linux “mainstream” ready. Specifically because for the last 15 years (or so) hackers have been working so hard on OS and Linux.

It is their baby. Their baby is finally growing up, and kind of going through puberty in a way. Now is the time when they are really going to (or need to) start whipping it into shape and molding it into the young man/woman it is going to be as an adult. Making it a productive useful member of society. As a child it was really there for it’s parent’s amusement. They showed it off to friends who looked at the prodigy and saw the great potential. It did really specialized things (ran 65% of the internet) and it did them well. Now, as it matures into an adult it is going out into the world and really getting hammered from all sides, soon to be honed into a sharpened well crafted tool. It’s a cold cruel demanding world, and unless Linux learns how to deal with it’s new environment and needs it will be doomed to end up like a social outcast who goes back home to sit in it’s parent’s basement for another 10-15 years until it is really ready, which is what I am afraid is going to happen.