maple’s.fortunes

I was reading Slashdot this morning and I came across this little gem. These wonderful folks over at Dozier Internet Law (oops, I wasn’t supposed to do that) have such a great privacy policy/user agreement.

We also own all of the code, including the HTML code, and all content. As you may know, you can view the HTML code with a standard browser. We do not permit you to view such code since we consider it to be our intellectual property protected by the copyright laws. You are therefore not authorized to do so.

I don’t even know where to begin with this. How can you ban someone from looking at your source code? When someone looks at your web site, they download a temporary copy into their cache. Gasp! I wonder how these lawyers feel about that. I’d go as far as to say that is piracy. I mean, come on, that is ridiculous.

If you take a gander at their code, you’ll find a disaster zone. Who ever wrote that should not be allowed to create web pages. First of all, they don’t have a Doctype. How can you call yourself professional when you don’t have a Doctype? Plus, their site is all tables. Everything seems to be in a table, with nested tables too. Do they not know how to use CSS?

So, I bought the new Radiohead album yesterday. For those of you who don’t know, Radiohead is not in a contract right now and they decided that they wanted to try something different. They put their new album up for download on their website. Nothing really new here, but here is the thing, you paid what you want for it. If that means nothing, then so be it. I really admire what they are doing and wish them the best. Now, how all this relates to me.

I thought the currency was Euros. So, I was thinking that I want to pay about $20 CDN for this CD. I know, that is a little more than what a CD would cost at Future Shop, but I wanted to support them and their decision to try this out. Since I thought I was paying in Euros, I did the currency conversion with CDN to Euros. $20 CDN came out to about 15 Euros. I went and ordered it, thinking I was paying 15 euros. I realized today at about noon that I paid in pounds. 15 GBP != $20 CDN. It is closer to $30 CDN. Yeah.

Here is how I have justified it to myself. I didn’t pay for some of their previous albums because my brother-in-law had them and I just got them from him. Now that I’ve paid a substantial amount more than I should have paid, I don’t feel so bad about not paying for some of the other albums.

Overall, it is a pretty good album. It was worth it. If you like Radiohead, I’d recommend going and downloading it. If you want to wait for the actual CD, that will be out probably in Jan 08. If you do want to download it, go to http://www.inrainbows.com

This post has nothing to do with the title, as I’m sure you’ve already figured out. I like random titles.

Before I left on my trip, I bought a new 19″ LG Widescreen LCD. I bought it the day before we left, so I didn’t really get to play with it that much. I’ve now been home for a few days and have had time to use it. I love it. It is so sharp and clear. It has a 2ms response time, so it is really fast. Overall, I’m really pleased. I’ll post a picture of my new setup when I clean up my desk, which I was hoping to do today, but I didn’t.

I started writing this post a while ago and in that time, I’ve got some other new toys. The first is my new friend Issac, a black MacBook. I upgraded the RAM to 2 GB instead of the standard 1 GB. So far, I’m really enjoying it. My old iBook was having some problems, so i decided it was time for a new one. Yuri’s DVD drive didn’t work anymore. When I stuck a disc in it would stop recognizing the drive. This made it really hard to get the disk out. I’m surprised I ever did. I think it was mostly luck. Yuri’s battery is also shot, so that kind of defeats the purpose of a laptop.

My other new toy is the Halo 3 Legendary edition. I got it last Monday night at 7 PM, so 5 hours before everyone else. It was pretty sweet. I beat the game on normal difficulty by Tuesday night. I’m now almost done Heroic. If I didn’t have a stupid philosophy project, I would have had it beaten on Heroic by now. I’ve found all the skulls and the terminals. That was pretty fun. I was really impressed with this game. The graphics are awesome! There are some really cool new features in Halo 3, like the Theater. You can go in and watch previous games, including campaign. While watching, you can fly around and check everything out. You can take screenshots and upload them to Bungie.net. You can then share this replay with your friends. It is really cool. The map editor, Forge, is also really cool. I haven’t had a lot of time to play with it, but when I did, I thought it was really cool.

I’ll post pictures of my fun new toys when I get a moment.