I just got back from Washington, DC. Other than a long ass drive both ways, it was a good trip. We made stops at Arlington National Cemetary, the Holocost Museum, and the Smithsonian’s American History Museum. We missed out on the new spy museum, but I can wait.

We also spent a lot of time eating and drinking. The last night we were in town we saw Wanda Sykes. To put it lightly, she was hysterical. I had a good time catching up with Lauren’s sister and her boyfriend. At any rate, I should probably get to fixing the servers at work now.

It appears Blue Beard has a few words to say about Apple’s new music store. Before I got further it should be mentioned BB and I don’t see eye to eye on DRM. What everyone seems to overlook is that when you buy a CD you don’t *own* the content.

What?!? I’ve spent phat l00+ on my CD collection! You mean I don’t own it?!? Nope. What you own are the rights to listen to the CD. Those rights are further restricted by not allowing you to redistribute, alter, or rebroadcast the CD in any way. You may be asking: Why do they let me buy blank CD’s? Well, under fair use, you are allowed to keep a backup copy of what you purchased.

BB states that he should have unrestricted use of his CD’s because he *owns* them, which, since that isn’t the case, he’d have to purchase a record label to do so. Apple lets you listen to the music on *three* different computers (or a gazillion if you burn it as a music CD). How is this horrific? The reality is he thinks stealing other people’s music is OK. I look at it this way: if I went into work each day and didn’t get a pay check I’d be pretty pissed.

I program all sorts of stuff for clients each day and I can honestly say that I empathize with the musicians. If I found out a client had breeched one of my licenses by reselling my software I’d be able to sue them into next week. What BB overlooks is that he would to.

For those who don’t use *NIX on a regular basis the above command implies this site has been flooded with posts today. This is because I’ve emerged from 2 days of solid coding. I’ve got quite a bit to talk about, but not a lot of time.

I’ll be gone starting tomorrow and not coming back until Sunday. Lauren and I are heading to visit her sister in Washington, DC. I plan on doing a lot of tourist type stuff; museums, monuments, resturants, bars, etc.

Once I’m back I have a full plate. I have a *ton* of applications to write for Jerum, a consulting gig to finish up, a scheduled rewrite of PHPTalk, and *lots* of Disc Golf. I plan on taking maybe another week off from work when I get back. I might head in and put in some half days just to make some money. Who knows. Also, be sure to check out Lauren’s new design. I’m super impressed! She did it herself using bash, vi, and scp – way to go Lo!

I found a few blog entries on the net today talking about why people blog, specificlly why the individuals making the entires wrote in their blog everyday. This reminded me that this stupid site has been around for over 3 years.

In reality I’ve been blogging for quite some time. “Joe’s Diner” was set up on a free website when I was a Junior in high school (circa 1997). I actually posted every day using FrontPage and FTP. Yup! Back in my day we had to do it the hard way! We didn’t have fancy CSS or Blogger.

I’ve been looking over my blog postings and since I started storing my stuff in a database I’ve come a long way in my writing. I also like to think I write about a wide range of interesting topics, but the reality is it’s pretty worthless drivel for the most part. Maybe someday I’ll get around to posting stuff people can actually use. Naw …

I graduated today. Nothing really big. Nabtr0n and I sat together and made fun of the funny names being announced. I’ll be offline for the next weeks persuing a little R&R.