26 May 2004
Student Whose Hair Set Afire Told To Stay Home. What’s shocking about this story to me is not that some moron would treat this girl this way but rather the school’s reaction:
The interim principal at Martin Luther King Middle School declined an on-camera interview, but said her staff made serious mistakes in this case and that she will offer Glowczewski and her family a summer school program and transportation.
Meanwhile, both Mark Stevens, the spokesman for Denver Public Schools, and the superintendent declined to discuss the case or DPS policy for dealing with such issues. That seems to be the same response Glowczewski’s parents got when they complained to the administration.
Umm… what? You make an very bad mistake, and then make it many times worse by refusing to actually talk about it? (sound like the Bush admin?) And the people involved can’t stop paying these joker’s either, Uncle Sam takes it from the and pays them. Time to move to the Free State.
04 May 2004
From Time, Nov. 15, 2003, page 20:
- $2.9 Billion — Amount spent on lingerie in France last year, more than any other country in Europe.
- 87% — Portion of the French population that believes lingerie is an important part of life.
01 May 2004
Why your Movable Type blog must die:
You are all pretentious twats
Every last one of you. You’re all latte-sipping, iMac-using, suburban-living tertiary-industry-working WASPs who offer absolutely no new insights on anything whatsoever apart from maybe one specialist field if we’re lucky. Most of you think that you’re writing original content and that you’re making a contribution by licensing your spewings under Creative Commons “Some Rights Reserved” licences, just because it’s the hip thing to do.
Made my latte come out my nose (j/k: Drinking Latte’s would mean I couldn’t sleep for the next 18 hours, so avoid them)
01 May 2004
On reason people have suggested that P2P took off was that people could not easily rip their own CD’s on to their computer. After trying to rip a CD on a stock Win98 box I believe it. I tried both Audiograbber which didn’t work out of the box (or rather it popped with a warning).
Then I tried CDex, which said it required the “Adaptec’s ASPI”:http://www.adaptec.com/worldwide/support/driverdetail.jsp?cat=%2fProduct%2fASPI-4.70&filekey=aspi_471a2.exe&sess=no driver, which once installed didn’t show the CD drive. Maybe because it isn’t a Adaptec product?
Then after consulting Bart’s page about ASPI I tried the Nero’s ASPI (no installer, you have to copy files into c:\windows yourself, ug!) CDex started, but complained that it wanted the “orignal” wnaspi32.dll. I just ripped a track and it appears to work, just really slow (like 1x speed).
Since I was trying to take a survey of how different programs used the MCDI frame in id3v2 tags, I tried AudioGrabber again, which now sees the Nero ASPI driver and has the exact same dialog warning me that it’s not the “orignal” wnaspi32.dll. Looks like AudioGrabber is based some what on some thing CDex is (CDex is GPL, so that would be a no-no). The option to get it to include a MCDI frame is deep in some config dialog,
not on by default.
What a total pain in the butt. But I did get my two example tracks.
CDex work under WinNT based systems, because M$ added calls to access CDDA in those versions, but it still pops up a warning first.
Given the grief it took to rip my own CD on a Napster Era PC I can totally believe people would get on Napster to just get music they already owned on their computer. Not that I think that’s all they did.