Every new year is an excellent opportunity to take a fresh approach to the things in life that drag you down. Many people use the new year as an excuse to make resolutions, and pledges to improve themselves. As with the holidays in general, it’s a time to pause and reaffirm appreciation for the folks that have provided support throughout the year during the good, bad and the ugly….
I tend to use New Year’s day as a time when I absolutely make certain that I have kept up with my computer hard drive back-ups, particularly when it comes to emails, photographs and raw media files. I’ve had a lot of crashes, but luckily I haven’t lost much data. I may be missing a few videotapes in my archives, but that’s another matter entirely.
Looking at the news and blogs of my daily intake, there’s three things in particular that stuck out for me on on the very first day of 2008:
1) January 1 is being celebrated as Public Domain Day, a chance to celebrate artistic, literary, and intellectual works, which have passed out of copyright protection, and thus can be shared freely.
2) Kevin Kelly co-founder of Wired magazine, alumni of Whole Earth Catalog, and creator of the amazing Cool Tools website, is sharing his latest True Films publication free of charge. True Films is a wonderful collection of short reviews of “200 Documentaries You Must See Before You Die.” Previous versions of this publication were only available for sale, but this one is free of charge!
3) Yesterday, the RIAA stated that it was illegal for people to make personal copies of their own CDs. Can you believe it? I can’t. I’m thinking someone at RIAA got New Year’s Day mixed up with April Fool’s Day. This is absolutely absurd. The Washington Post has the write-up on this new change of policy.
A little over a month ago, I purchased my very first iPod. I’ve owned a variety of MP3 players, but this is the first actual “iPod” I’ve owned, and I’m having more fun with it than I expected. Ever since I picked up this little gizmo, I’ve been transferring more of my collection to my main music hard drive, including a lot of my boxed sets and odd packaged CDs that were impractical to access on a regular basis. As I own somewhere around 3,000 CDs, 2,000 LPs, and have purchased a handful of recordings via iTunes and other assorted authorized downloads, it’s not like I’m ripping off the artists. For RIAA to pull off this kind of nonsense is an absolute insult to the folks like myself that have supported the industry for many years.
The one thing I love about this new iPod is the way I can get completely absorbed into my music without disturbing anyone else in the house at 1 in the morning, which is when I tend to get a lot of things done without any outside distractions. Right now, it’s “Hummingbird” by B.B. King….