From the Orient

Aparently Congress wants to outlaw fast-forwarding through commercials [via "Mike Krisher":http://www.mikekrisher.com/2004/11/fast-forwarding-past-previews-on-dvd.php]

They want to make it illegal to use software or hardware to skip all of those commercials and previews that the studios are placing before the beginnings of movies on DVDs, something which is freaking ridiculous since it’s your DVD playing on your DVD player in your home. How about making it illegal to not pay attention, too?

Luckily my children don’t live under the laws of the US Congress (although give it time because where US lead, the UK follows) because they have a number of Disney DVD’s and they find it very annoying that they have to wait for Nemo or Sleeping Beauty for Disney to try and force them to winge at me so they I will buy them more Disney DVD’s (luckily I wear my winge avoiding pants and am immune).

They’ve discovered this wonderful invention called a button on the remote control that allows them to skip past the adverts and onto the wonderful goodness of animation that lie past the thorns.

I hate the adverts on these movies (they seem more prevalant on Disney that anything else; there were certainly no adverts on my Shaun of the Dead DVD) that I am forced to rip a copy of these bought DVD’s and extract the movie segment only. I’m only doing it to protect my children from becoming criminals. That, and protecting the original DVD from sticky fingers and being thrown around the room like a frisbee. It’s a backup.

My new toy :-

Loaded roughly 60 albums onto it and I’ve only got 31Gb free now.

You can pick out particular parts of the Today Programme and listen to just that bit. Brilliant.

Today, I was just about to get out of my car, and the presenter asked the question “Why arn’t the French fat?”

I wanted to know whether she was just bitter about this and wanted the French to be fat. Sadly “it turns out to be simply that they eat less”:http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/today/listenagain/ram/today5_diet_20040727.ram

p.s. my newspaper cuttings are only updated in bloglines when I update the main blog. As a result I’m using del.icio.us again. “RSS feed”:http://del.icio.us/rss/sarabian

I’ve been a bit dumb. How else can I explain how I’ve missed listening to the wonderful “6 music”:http://www.bbc.co.uk/6music/ ?

Of course, now they’ve got the Hapless One, I’ve tuned in and found a wealth of good stuff. And if you missed the first Marc show, you can listen to his show, Rocket Science any time you want (until tomorrow I guess). It sounds very odd, him fronting the show, but he can play cool music, unlike the crud that was on Radio 1.

In other media news, Microsoft saw the threat that was “lugradio”:http://www.lugradio.org/ and tried to go one better with “Channel 9″:http://channel9.msdn.com/ (Scorchio!). Shame it’s crud and doesn’t work very well. The videos won’t play in my browser; I know the reason but don’t even want to bother to fix it. The ones I have seen are blokes talking to the camera. No point in that, might as well be radio show.

oh bugger.

As per BoingBoing, dellah is in morning.
Hmm, I rather like it.

I’m just wondering how many times this message needs to be said before the music publishers take note.

I have watched my 19 year-old daughter and her friends sample countless bands on Napster and Kazaa and, enthusiastic for their music, go out to purchase CDs. My daughter now owns more CDs than I have collected in a lifetime of less exploratory listening. What’s more, she has introduced me to her favorite music, and I too have bought CDs as a result. And no, she isn’t downloading Britney Spears, but forgotten bands from the 60s, 70s, 80s, and 90s, as well as their musical forebears in other genres. This is music that is difficult to find — except online — but, once found, leads to a focused search for CDs, records, and other artifacts. eBay is doing a nice business with much of this material, even if the RIAA fails to see the opportunity.

In August, I went to the Reading Festival for the day. This is a list of bands I bought CD’s of after listening to MP3’s of their work before going to listen to them live at Reading. Let me point out that I would have bought none of these albums, as I wouldn’t have taken the time to visit the relevent stage without listening to some of their music before going.

• Interpol
• The Vines
• British Sea Power
• The White Stripes
• The Dandy Warhols
• Longwave
• Electric Soft Parade

With current radio stations playing only commercial List music crap like Popstars, without the internet, how else am I supposed to find out what is good new music. Ten years ago, I didn’t have the same problem as I was a student and students do things like go to gigs and listen to support acts (I saw Suede as a support act, I saw Blur playing in front of 200 people, but I sold out on the Manic’s long before they did).