Al's Blog-o-Sphere

The Grinch hated Christmas!

The whole Christmas season!

Now, please don’t ask why. No one quite knows the reason.

It could be that his head wasn’t screwed on quite right.

It could be, perhaps, that his shoes were too tight.

But I think that the most likely reason of all

May have been that his heart was two sizes too small.

Perhaps it was because he was sick of being inundated by commercials with a Christmas theme starting before Halloween? Continue Reading…

I’ve been struggling with this problem for two months now and gotten nowhere, so I guess I’ll rant about it here. Who knows, maybe someone will read it who can help, but mostly, I’ll just get it off my chest.

I run a web site for our local ski club at the Buffalo Freenet. It’s been there for a couple years now. For those of you not familiar with the BFN, it’s a non-profit, public service sponsored by the Department of Library and Information Services at the University of Buffalo. It began years ago as a service to the community to let people get online back before internet service was commonplace as it is now.

It started out in the days of phone modems and text-based services. I had an account there years ago and used to wait my turn to log in on one of the two phone numbers they had. My first (I mean very first!) web page was hosted there. I remember getting an account at Delphi (The ISP, not the auto parts company I worked for. It was before Delphi Automotive even existed.) because they offered PPP service that you needed to use a web browser before Compuserve or others did. AOL didn’t exist or may have just started up out of the remains of the Commodore-centric Quantum-Link service. Continue Reading…

Well, that shouldn’t be a surprise, but I do keep harping on the disgraceful state of the music industry and how they have twisted and perverted intellectual property law into a cash cow all the while turning the artists themselves into virtual indentured servants.

But when I ran across this blog article the other day while reading an article about the RIAA vs. Jammie, I just had to save it to post here. I hope you enjoy it, as it’s a pretty comprehensive look at what is wrong with Big Music.

When Pigs Fly: The Death of Oink, the Birth of Dissent, and a Brief History of Record Industry Suicide.

I got a friend request from a Shy Guy Shawn on MySpace today. I got a kick out of it right away because the whole site was nutty. So nutty, you had to like it.

But when I saw the friends list made of all Toms, at first I thought it was another joke. I thought he had doctored Tom’s picture and made a fake friends list. So I did what naturally would come next – I clicked on one of them.

To my surprise, it went to another MySpace page for the variant Tom. I looked in that friends list and it was even more Toms. The joke just got even better. Continue Reading…