I don’t make a practice of this kind of thing, but I like to play my CDs through the media player of my choice, my way, and this was the first really annoyingly protected CD I’ve bought in quite some time. That said…

Yesterday I bought the Switchfoot CD “Nothing is Sound“. Today I put it in my computer to play it. As may be more common than I’d like to think, a ‘custom’ media player came up. To be shorten this story, I deduced that this was a Macrovision TotalPlay CD. I hate custom players. ARG! Which set me on my path…

Normally I would just use the freeware program AudioGrabber, which has ripped other copy protected CDs I own without a hic-up. In this case, the last track (Daisy) gave an ASPI error when ripping. Had I completely disliked the track, I might have gone on my sweet little way, but that wasn’t the case.

As is my secondary try, I open up (the now defunct) Cool Edit Pro – great audio editing software, on the cheap, that has the ability to pull audio from CDs. [CoolEdit is now an Adobe product called Audition]. For some reason (I’m not that nerdy) this has been able to get certain tracks that AudioGrabber couldn’t get. In this case, however, the track list wouldn’t load. Oh, well.

So, the ‘custom’ media player allows one to copy the media files to “your library”, and to burn the CD up to 3 times. I assumed that the burned CD would include copy protection, but I decided to experiment.

I opted to rip the tracks to my library, and being the audiophile that I am I chose the Windows Media Lossless format. Hopefully you already assumed that the only available formats were WMA.

Once the rip was complete, I simply went into Windows Media Player 10 and used it’s built in burning capabilities to select the tracks I had just ripped to be burned to a new CD-R. Sure enough AudioGrabber had no problem reading and ripping all of the tracks from the new CD to good ol’ (unprotected) MP3 files.

The extra step is only an annoyance, but the upside is that I now have two CDs I can play in my car/house/computer/wherever.

Now, to quickly answer some questions: No, I will not distribute these files in any way. This was simply an exercise for personal pleasure. No, I will not get you a copy of the CD. No, I will not answer your questions about how to rip your own CDs. This wasn’t intended to be a lesson in getting around a copy protection scheme so that you could put all your songs on some peer-to-peer network somewhere. (In that case, I would have given you step-by-step instructions with screen shots to follow along with).

I was excited that I got around a top-of-the-line CD copy protection by using elementary tools, and thought I would brag a bit about how simple it seemed.

The End.

I recently ran across an interesting blog post by Scott Wills called How McDonalds Makes Profit.

To the best of my knowledge all the numbers seem about right. I can’t say for sure if a McDonald’s I’ve been to has ever overcharged me, but I’ll definitely update you on that soon, as I sometimes stop by McD’s for breakfast, and specifically remember feeling funny about the price I payed.

I’m normally half asleep in the morning though, so rather or not there actually was an issue with the price or not, I have no idea.

The End

So, in a recent email from the Youth Pastor at The House Student Ministries, I was told – and I quoth:

And when you get time. Would you please deisgn for me a kick butt youth t-
shirt. Thanks.

As a joke, I sent this back, within about 2 minutes:

The End.

Alright, this is kinda scary. I’m an avid Opera user. I really like it. I like how it behaves, I like the way it treats tabs, I love having my little notes area, and I especially like that I get everything AND my email in one lightweight app. Of course, being in web-design, I’m in a habit of using multiple browsers. I run Opera first, simply because that’s what grabs my email, then I use Firefox if for some reason I’m bored, or have too many tabs open in an Opera window. Yes, I could open another Opera window, but trying to maintain some weird personal balance, I usually open a Firefox window next. And if for some reason I feel so inclined, or a webpage I’m trying to view breaks in everything BUT Internet Explorer, I will use the aforementioned Internet Explorer.

I just like to keep in touch with them all – However, a strange thing has been occurring… and another has recently just occurred.

In my quest for balance… or for other unknown reasons, I’ve been using Firefox more and more lately. I leave Opera open for my email – I’m one of those freaks that has to get my email right when it arrives – but I’ve been surfing in Firefox.

Just recently however, I’ve downloaded and installed Thunderbird. Just to try it out, I swear. I only set up one of my email accounts, and did some of the usual customizations… but I wanted to see what it was like. That’s not bad, is it?

Am I okay? Am I being trendy? I’m kinda scared.

Never-the-less, I shall continue to use Opera for my email, and because it has all of my bookmarks, and quick launch buttons, like the one I used to write a post about this page, and to quickly add a link to the Thunderbird page to the Recent Links section.

I guess we’ll just see what happens.

The End.

I have absolutely no idea what to write about. I think about stuff all day. I get excited about what I’m going to “blog about”. You can ask Laura… at least once a day, at some point, I get emotional about something (excited, happy, frustrated, I-can’t-believe-they-did-that) and I say “I’m going to blog about that tonight!”. Psh! It hasn’t happened yet. I’m sorry.

On another note… sometimes I worry that Art really is something you’re born with, and that maybe I wasn’t born with it. That upsets me, because I absolutely love to create, change, alter, and beautify anything I can. I’m great with Photoshop, and I absolutely love code, and design on the internet. Other than music (more art) it’s all I want to do.

The thing that keeps me going – when I’m busy being an idiot and doubting myself – is this thought:

If I gave up art, what would I do with my life?

The simple answer is: nothing. I wouldn’t be happy at any job I can imagine that doesn’t allow me to fix, beautify, create, etc… and since there’s nothing on the other side I know for certain that I must absolutely push on and do what I want to do. What I love to do. And sometimes that’s really, really hard. And really, really frustrating. But I don’t know why.

The End.