Well, I decided to move my blog from WordPress.com to my old hosting provider, WebHost4Life (WH4L). I’ve always been frustrated that you can’t do hardly any customization to your blog on WordPress.com, and it finally got bad enough that I went ahead and moved everything.

WordPress, the software, is one of the most customizable blogging applications; why is the official hosting provider so restrictive with their offering?

You’ll have noticed the theme has changed… it may change, yet again, too, as I just picked this one in a hurry. When I spend a little time investigating, I’ll probably select a better theme and make my own tweaks to it.

Finally… the good news has arrived!

Now, who wants to help us move?

Check out my submission to this month’s issue of JPG Magazine…

Submitted to JPG Issue 17: Creatures. Is it a good fit? Vote Now!

In light of Microsoft’s announcement that they are shutting down their DRM servers, the Electronic Frontier Foundation has published an open letter to Mr. Steve…

April 29, 2008

Steven A. Ballmer, Chief Executive Officer
Microsoft Corporation
One Microsoft Way
Redmond, WA 98052-7329

Dear Mr. Ballmer,

The Electronic Frontier Foundation is deeply troubled by your announcement last week that Microsoft will be deactivating the digital rights management (“DRM”) servers that allow MSN Music purchasers to “reauthorize” music files after upgrading operating systems or buying new computers. As you know, this decision means that every customer that bought an mp3 from you — with the good faith expectation that despite the irritating DRM she would be able to continue to play the song on a variety of devices — faces losing music if she upgrades her PCs or her hard drive crashes after August 31, 2008.

Microsoft’s only suggestion for its customers — that they export the music to a CD and then copy it onto their new computers — is woefully insufficient to redress the problem. Microsoft is asking its customers to invest more time, labor and money in order to continue to enjoy the music for which they have already paid. In fact, Microsoft’s best customers will be the most heavily burdened — the more music they bought, the more work they’ll have to do. What is worse, this suggestion could put customers at legal risk, as they may not have documentation of purchase. Furthermore, there is no certainty that all relevant copyright owners would agree that making such backup copies without permission is lawful.

While this announcement has directly affected MSN Music customers, users of other Microsoft products (particularly current and prospective Zune customers) are deeply concerned as well. Your customers are forced to ask, “If Microsoft treats its MSN Music customers so shabbily, is there any reason to suppose that it will treat other customers any better?”

We are skeptical of the claim — expressed by Microsoft general manager Rob Bennett in an interview with CNET News — that “no one ever foresaw being in this situation.” This situation was easily foreseeable when Microsoft shut down the MSN Music Store back in 2006. Indeed, as you may know, EFF has long warned consumers that they might lose DRM-restricted content if vendors decided to withdraw support for it. See http://www.eff.org/pages/customer-always-wrong-users-guide-drm-online-music

Mr. Bennett also said that Microsoft wants to make the shutdown “as easy and painless for our customers as possible.” In light of this stated goal, Microsoft should immediately and publicly take the following steps:

1. Issue a full public apology to your MSN Music customers.
2. Offer to refund the purchase price of the affected downloads or, at the customer’s option, provide replacements from an online store that offers the same tracks in a DRM-free format.
3. Ensure that all MSN Music buyers have (or have permanent access to) receipts identifying dates, amounts, and titles purchased, so they have proofs of purchase. Or, better yet, offer to cover their legal costs if they are hit with a copyright infringement claim based on a song purchased through MSN Music.
4. Work with your content industry partners to eliminate DRM from the Zune music catalog now. Microsoft has said it would like to provide DRM-free tracks — it is time for the company to make that happen. Unless and until DRM is eliminated from the catalog, publicly commit to compensating customers along the lines outlined above should Microsoft’s business decisions cause Zune customers to lose the full value of the content they purchased through the Zune Marketplace.
5. Widely publicize the above measures so that Microsoft customers know their options. That publicity should include, at a minimum, advertising in major music magazines and newspapers in every major U.S. city, as well as targeted keyword advertising.

We look forward to hearing that you have begun taking these steps to win back the trust of your customers.

Sincerely,

Shari Steele
Executive Director

cc:

Robert J. Bach, President, Entertainment & Devices Division
Brad Smith, Senior Vice President and General Counsel

By the way, I tried really hard to find any public statement, directly from Microsoft, about this decision to turn off the servers. I failed. Apparently, they made the announcement in an email to customers of the MSN Music Store (I have purchased music from them, in the past, but didn’t receive any email), but there is absolutely no indication of the impending shutdown on their website, that I could find. If you find such an announcement, please let me know.

I just got my copy of Ron Paul’s new book, The Revolution: A Manifesto. This is one of those books where the front matter is actually worth reading!

Preface

Every election cycle we are treated to candidates who promise us “change,”… But in the American political lexicon, “change” always means more of the same:….

….But instead of thinking about what this means for how we conduct our foreign and domestic affairs, our chattering classes seem incapable of speaking in anything but the emptiest platitudes, when they can be bothered to address serious issues at all. Fundamental questions like this, and countless others besides, are off the table in our mainstream media, which focuses our attention on trivialities and phony debates as we march toward oblivion….

….These ideas cannot be allowed to die, buried beneath the mind-numbing chorus of empty slogans and inanities that constitute official political discourse in America.

That is why I wrote this book.

It promises to be a great book, even though it’s a relatively short book, the table of contents demonstrates that it will get right to the meat of the issues:

1. The False Choices of American Politics
2. The Foreign Policy of the Founding Fathers
3. The Constitution
4. Economic Freedom
5. Civil Liberties and Personal Freedom
6. Money: The Forbidden Issue in American Politics
7. The Revolution

I’m looking forward to reading this, and hope you’ll go pick up a copy for yourself, so we can discuss it together.

Carole Cohen has an interesting blog about real estate in the Cleveland area, and has been posting some statistics about various neighborhoods. When I asked her about Berea, she kindly posted a report about our soon-to-be home, today.

Berea Ohio is one of those communities with old world charm (historic homes) and modern day developments. She also boasts a few quality cluster home communities. In any event, here are housing sale stats for Berea Ohio, both for April specifically and since January 2008 in general. These stats cover single family and condominium and cluster homes.

With 134 homes currently on the market, the average listing price per square foot is $97.00. The house we’re buying was originally listed, late last year, for $249,000. With a square footage of 2524, this works out to about $98.00 per square foot… just $1 per square foot more than the average.

Of the 55 homes in Berea that have actually closed, this year, they averaged about $79 per square foot. Since our sellers have agreed to sell the house to us for $202,000, we are paying about $80 per square foot… just $1 per square foot more than average!

I thought that was an interesting coincidence… We seem to be getting an extremely average deal!

Nope, I’m not talking about R2-D2… But This Week in Photography is hosting a contest to win a free storage robot!

Would you like a chance to win a free Drobo? All you have to do is link to http://www.twipphoto.com on your blog or website. If we randomly select your link from our referrers log, you win.

If you keep running out of disk space for all your photos, you’ll definitely want to throw your hat in the ring for this one!

Animoto.com

There are so many really great webcasts, online, these days, that it’s difficult to know which ones to invest your precious time in viewing. Wouldn’t it be great if there were a “Cliff Notes” service that reviewed these valuable sources if knowledge, so we could avoid wasting time without missing the nuggets?

There is! Tim Bauer watches webcasts for you, and publishes his review online, so you know which ones to watch. Based on the name of his blog, I presume that he’s incorporated these webcasts into his daily fitness routine; probably watching them while he’s jogging on a treadmill or something.

If there’s a particular webcast you’re interested in, you can even submit it to his queue, so he’ll review it for you!

If you’re collecting your RSS feeds in Outlook, like I am, it’s pretty simple to set up some rules and custom views to automatically get reminded to watch the best webcasts:

To get the automatic flagging (which adds the “Definitely Watch This” webcasts to your task list), you create a rule that looks like this:

To get the color coding, you can use the Automatic Formatting feature of Outlook views. To do this, click on “Customize Current View…” under “Current View” on the “View” menu:

Next, press the “Automatic Formatting…” button:

Push the “Add” button to create a new formatting rule:

Name it something useful, press the “Font…” button and pick the formatting you want, then press the “Condition…” button and set up a rule, such as:

Voila! You’ll have a cool, new service that reviews webcasts and lets you know which ones you should be watching!

Thanks, Tim, for wading through all those crappy webcasts to let us know what’s worth watching… and, thanks for making it so easy to actually use your reviews, too!

The general impression is that Windows Vista is slow… ZDNet just published an interesting benchmark comparison.

Granted, the minimum hardware requirements have increased, but once you’ve upgraded your equipment, it looks like you’re better off with Vista.