Those pesky copyright people are at it again.  Apparently ThePirateBay.org has been closed down by Swedish authorities pending legal action for “breach of copyright and assisting breach of copyright”.  The owners of PirateBay are convinced that their site is legal according to Swedish law, and have publically mocked all threatening correspondence from the entertainment industry’s pitbulls, but Another mainstay of public torrent trackers shut down by The Alliance.  But those Gorramfeds should know that no matter how hard they try, more Bittorrent communities just spring from the ashes.  They’ll just get sneakier, until they’re legalised and/or the entertainment industry finds some way to arrange worldwide release internet TV on Demand for the increasingly tech savvy audiences.  It’s not fair that the US is the only place so far that gets it.  They can’t make it available in the US and then expect the rest of the world to just sit back and not acheive the same thing themselves!

Can’t stop the signal…

Took this today – the street I walk down to get home from the gym, I love it!

Should really post more of gorgeous Edinburgh, this town is just so pretty!

 

More soon, kiss kiss mwa mwa!

When one is sick, one really ought not go traipsing from one end of Britain to the other, without good cause.  Having said that, I think that visiting the Ubiquitous Jessie in London is a pretty good cause, because although my tonsillitis of last week managed to develop itself into laryngitis by Sunday, I still had an absolutely marvellous weekend!

Jess met me at Kings Cross station, and though I’d have loved to show you, dear reader, the Platform 9 & 3/4 which some obliging tourist agency has set up, my camera was a little short on juice.  Suffice it to say that Jess and I saw it, and laughed at the half luggage trolley sticking out of the wall.

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I’ve been looking into methods for circumventing Apple’s Fairplay copyright protection on songs bought from the iTunes store, and (predictably) there is no way of easily doing it.  It involves using another ripping program to record a song in real time as it plays from your computer, and it just burns my blood.

I understand that Apple wants to stop people from distributing files over P2P networks, but the restrictions they’ve put on songs downloaded from iTunes don’t take into account how many computers some people may go through these days.  They let you license a purchased song on up to 5 computers, but what if you’ve got an unstable system which requires a re-install of windows?  I’ve had to re-install windows 3 times this year, cause it’s not the most stable system in the world.  And there goes 3 of my licenses for a downloaded song.  I plan on upgrading my computer soon, which will involve another re-install.  Another license used.  It’s entirely conceivable that a song I bought last November will no longer be able to be used within a year.

Thinking a little more about what they’ve done, I wonder if they’re trying to encourage people to just go out and physically BUY the CD?  That way they’d keep the CD manufacturing industry up and running.  I’m so torn – I don’t want to load myself down with stuff like CDs while I’m over here, but on the other hand, I’m loving Jack Johnson’s Curious George soundtrack more than life itself at the moment, and I bought it off the UK iTunes Store.

I really think that they could come up with some other way around the problem, like needing to use the credit card number used to purchase the song as an unlock code.  I reckon that would work.  Either that, or bump the number of licenses per download to something more sensible, like 12.

Or perhaps I should just download my music from illegal P2P networks once I’ve bought it on iTunes – that way, I own the music, but don’t have the restrictions which Fairplay puts on the music.  Illegal, perhaps.  Unethical?  Not as far as I’m concerned, and surely a victimless crime should look more at ethicality rather than legailties?

Thoughts, people?

For all you fabulous people in Europe, we’re very pleased to confirm the following dates for the Mark Saul Band ‘06 Summer Tour:

August

Fri 4th: Gig in Italy – details to follow

Sat 5th: Gig in Italy – details to follow 

Fri 11th: Tartan Heart Festival, Belladrum, Scotland

Sat 12th: Anntair Arts Centre, Stornoway

Thurs 17th: Festival, Asturias, Spain (details to follow) 

Sat 19th: Beautiful Days Festival, Exeter

Sun 20th: Burnley Community Festival, Burnley

Sat 26th: Solfest, Cumbria

Sun 27th: Shrewsbury Folk Festival, England

Keep an eye on the tour itinerary page for more gig dates as they become known!

I have been informed – nay, ordered – to post more pics on my blog, because folk (you know who you are!) don’t have time to read all the entries. So from now on, I shall attempt to post some sort of interesting photo of Edinburgh to the blog each time I blog. Or post an interesting photo even without a blog entry.

This photo marks my further mastery of Photoshop, lo, I have learnt to use the automated panorama function! (bout bloody time, I hear you say!)

Some of these pics are pretty big, so I’ll give you the option of viewing via thumbnail it if you really want to (who’s installed the blogging software upgrades then?)

This was taken at a recent visit to Edinburgh Castle (which I still haven’t blogged about!). Somewhere in there is my new diggs (which I also haven’t blogged about – I lurve my new flat!)

Princes Street from Edinburgh Castle (click on photo for larger image)

Old Town from Edinburgh Castle (click on photo for larger image)
Are you happy now?

Wiki says: Viral marketing and viral advertising refer to marketing techniques that seek to exploit pre-existing social networks to produce exponential increases in brand awareness, through viral processes similar to the spread of an epidemic. It is word-of-mouth delivered and enhanced online; it harnesses the network effect of the Internet and can be very useful in reaching a large number of people rapidly.

So here I am, contributing to the marketing virus, but if it’s funny and slightly cute, then it doesn’t have to be bad, does it? Apple’s launched its “get a mac” campaign, using a frumpy, pseudo-Bill-Gates lookalike to represent PCs, and representing Macs, the uber cute, uber-chic-geek Justin Long, better known to most Geeks as The Initially Annoying Geek Kid Who Ultimately Saves The Day from Galaxy Quest.

http://www.apple.com/getamac/ads/

Funniest part was as I was flipping through these ads, my Internet Explorer “encountered a problem, and had to close”.  I wonder if embedded somewhere in that apple page is a trigger to make your computer crash out on you.

The first computer I ever used was a Mac.  Hours of fun watching my dad playing around with Paintbrush on that boxy little gizmo.  If we were good, and had scrubbed our hands thoroughly, we were allowed a few precious moments moving that magical mouse around, and making squiggly shapes on the screen.

So I’m not exactly sure how it turned out that my dad, and by extension, his children, ended up as PC users.

It Is A Mystery…

Actually, no it’s not.  What bothers me about macs is the fact that they’re not the most customisable beasties in the world.  You don’t see gamers lugging their iBooks to LAN parties now, do you?  And it’s all so WHITE!  And uniform!

I have a new computer arriving soon, I think it’s time to try out Linux on the old one.  High time I learn the ways of the Independants, instead of the Alliance or the Reavers.  Question is, who are the Reavers?

From the last blog entry on the greatness of humanity, to this one today.  I got an email today from GetUp.org.au, telling us that the Australian Government is at it again – turning away asylum seekers, and locking them up in offshore detention centres, but not just adults, children too!  Locking up people in detention centres is bad enough, fobbing them off to Australian funded detention centres in other countries is worse.  But to actually be locking up children?  I’m ashamed to be Australian at times like this – how can we have the gall to stand up and sing our national anthem with lyrics like “we’ve boundless plains to share”, and then lock up asylum seekers?  Since when were children a terrorist risk?

If you’re a proud Australian (I know, it’s hard to be sometimes), I’d urge you to sign this petition - Get Up gets results.  They ran a successful campaign earlier this year to prevent the Government from further cutting the ABC budget (remember, it’s your ABC!), and we’re hoping that they can make a difference on this issue.

Not that we can rely on Johnny Howard to really do anything contructive on asylum seekers…

OK, so. Tonight we had a function for my work, and when I tell you that I’m blown away by what came out of it, I want you to really understand that I’m not often as impressed as I am now. I’m enthusiastic, I get excited, but I’m not so easily impressed.

I’m not sure I’ve really said much about my current job, and that’s possibly because it’s very difficult to explain what the charity I work for does. It usually takes several orientation sessions and a week-long residential camp on Skye to really undersand, and though I’ve worked with Columba 1400 for 6 months now, I’m not even sure that I myself have a solid handle on what this organisation really MEANS to the young people who come through our doors.

But this evening we had a gathering of many of the young folk and adults who have been involved with Columba 1400 over the past few years, and some of them got up and explained their stories. Some of these folk have been in shocking situations, in situations where most of us may have given up. They’ve suffered from homelessness, from abusive guardians, through unemployment, crushed by debilitatingly low self esteem and by society’s expectations that they are merely the dregs, not worth giving the time of day to.

But each of them attended one of the Leadership Academies at Columba 1400’s centre in Skye, and learned how much more they were than they’d thought. It’s very difficult to try and describe what Columba does, perhaps the best way is to describe the effect on one particular young man I had the honour of speaking to this evening.

This young man, hardly more than a child at the age of 16, attended Columba 1400’s Leadership Academy last year. Before that, he’d been homeless, and had spent a stint living in state care. He’d spend most of his nights drinking himself into a stupor in his bedroom, and really knew nothing about himself or where his life was heading. Then he came up to Skye for a week for the Leadership Academy, and he described how it had given him the self confidence to really take control of himself and his life. Since then, he’s got an apartment of his own, he’s quit drinking and smoking, and is in college studying IT. He got up this evening and, as if he’d been speaking in public all his life, shared his experience with a room of 60 people (something that I’d have difficulty doing!!). He’s been meeting with other young people who are in the situation he himself was in just a year ago, and talking to them about Columba 1400, and about how they don’t have to live down to society’s expectations.

My god, I felt so proud in that moment to be working for this organisation, and so honoured that I could meet with these people who have endured so much, yet turned out as balanced as they are. I met another girl this evening who’d been though the foster care system, who’s now aiming for a psychology degree so that she can help other young people who’d been in her situation.

Sometimes I’m so very humbled at how amazing people can be.

Oh, in case you want to know more about the organisation I work for, you can visit the new website which is going live on May 10th at 12.01pm BST. This is what I’ve been working on since I arrived at Columba – they call me their “pet geek”, or sometimes their “tame geek”, and I never realised how much I’d enjoy just being the techno-geek-girl, rather than trying to live up to expectations that I’d just follow on from my boring economics degree into a boring economics job…

If you’re interested, the site is at www.columba1400.com – but remember, you won’t see my website until 12.01pm tomorrow! Until then, all you’ll see is the old design site.

The big launch… Exciting, but stressful at the same time (what if the DNS change doesn’t work properly? Even worse, what if they don’t like it?!)

My turn to do some casting – I’m getting the hang of Photoshop…

Summer Glau for Wonderwoman, anyone?