A letter...

Dear record company,

A couple of weeks ago, I purchased the recent album by "The Music"¹. It's a good album.

However, in your infinite wisdom, you appear to have applied some form of "anti-copy" technology to the CD. I do much of my music listening via the CD-ROM drives fitted to various computers, both at home and at my workplace. The anti-copy technique used prevents several of these computers playing my CD. In some cases, it actually crashes the machine. The CD was broken, in other words.

Luckily for me, my computer at home with a CD writer plays it just fine. So I made a copy, which seems to work quite happily in other machines.

Your anti-copy measure didn't work; it actually forced me to copy the CD in order to listen to it.

All your "anti-copy" efforts achieved was an annoyed customer, and one more CD copy in the world. Well, two copies, actually, as the first copy was broken in the same way as the original.

In future, please don't do anything so stupid.

Sincerely, etc.

¹I ask you, what sort of name is that for a band? Makes it bloody impossible to find them in the catalog of online music stores, for a start.

Ow...

I've spent half the weekend cobbling together a PC from assorted bits of superfluous tech lying around the house, and then cloning Cal's Parents' PC's hard drive into it. After I eventually got everything working, there remains one question:

Why does poking around in PC innards always rip my fingers to pieces?

I have several small cuts and scrapes on my fingertips. I have broken fingernails.

There are no significant sharp edges in either of the PCs I've been working on. This is not hard physical work by any stretch of the imagination. There was even a lower-than-usual quotient of stubborn connectors. How does this happen?

At the risk of sounding hopelessly optimistic...

The most powerful nation on earth has spent the last several months attempting to justify invading a third-world tinpot dictatorship.

Think about it for a moment. Fifty (or even thirty) years ago, a global power would have just invaded, and presented it to the world as fait accompli, but now the US feels the need to stand up and attempt to explain their actions beforehand.

Ok, their "justification" is shaky, even outright propaganda in places, and they're probably going to invade despite the opinions of just about everyone, but I still think it's progress.