It should be noted that, what I consider to be the best album ever created, Pink Floyd's Dark Side of the Moon is up in its entirity on their website. While they don't seem to be making any new music, at least they're doing something to make people happy.

If you've never heard the album, I highly recommend you buy it, isolate yourself from the world, and listen to it entirely in one sitting. Barring that, give it a listen on their website. Make sure you use the "HIGH" setting next to Quality up there at the top. For some reason, it defaults to "LOW", which is an atrocity.

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Friday my right desktop speaker at work broke. I used to use this speaker as a kind of extension cord for my headphones, whose cable doesn't reach the computer. Lacking a better solution, I unplugged the speaker cable out of the back of the speaker (regular speaker cable), and tried touching the tips of that and my headphone cable together. No sound. So, I moved it a litte further, so the heads of each were touching the middle section of the other (69, basically). Then, there was sound. It just wasn't... all of it. Certain sounds were missing, like the vocals. I could hear them sometimes, but they sounded distant. The drums also sound weird. On some songs, it sounds like its underwater (Beatles, mostly).

Many Ani DiFranco songs I can only hear the guitar on. That should make it easier to play myself, at least. While I know that people must have been doing this for ages, it's a new discovery to me, and a somewhat exciting one at that. It's like getting a new version of every song. That, and I should be able to make Karaoke versions of some songs that previously didn't have one.

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My day drags on as though an eternal nine hours. When will it end? I've seen the minute hand go round maybe a dozen times in the past hour. Is it still the same hour? My god, where is the time coming from?

My watch laughs at me. I can hear it all day. Tick... tick... tick... Never a moment passing. That is the laughter of clocks and watches. That is why you never hear them when you're enjoying life. Unless, that is, you enjoy working at a clock shop.

The sun is invovled in this conspiracy. The shadows beneath the trees have not moved in hours. Perhaps a thousand people have passed beneath them in the time I have been watching. I could not keep count. They all look the same to me. If hours passed like pedestrians, I'd be home by now.

Another hour has passed. I must be traversing time, for it is still that same hour it was a moment ago. The hour hand has not moved. Perhaps I should force it. No, there is still my watch, and the shadows cast by the trees. I could set the time on my watch, and chop down the trees. That would only leave the sun.

I could block out the sun. Then night would fall. No one could dispute that the day was done, then.

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Anyone wondering why my site was down for a week, you have Names4Ever.com to thank. My domain was set to expire, so I decided to transfer from Network Solutions to a cheaper provider. I guess I should have taken a hint from the small problems I experienced just signing up for it, but the $8/year was too tempting to pass up. Well, needless to say, it never worked, and what a specatacular failure it was. Let's run down the list:

I got blank invoices.
I had no password, but couldn't even log in without entering one.
The domain never transferred.
Tech support never responded to my questions about why the domain wasn't transferring.
When I asked to cancel, I was sent a dead link.
When they fixed the link, I was able to bring it up, but in order to cancel I had to enter my domain, which they had yet to provide me with.

There were a few other things, I've forgotten them now. Well, I'm back with Network Solutions. They may overcharge, but at least they fucking work.

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Have we forgotten the tale of The Tortoise and The Hare? It seems everyone in the tech industry is concerned with speed and new features over reliability and functionality. This leads to being able to do something over again really fast because it screwed up the first 15 times, and being able to make fresh coffee in your car while waiting for the tow truck to arrive.

Does my refridgerator really need to have internet connectivity built-in? Does it really need to have computer-controlled temperature adjustment? If it keeps the food cold and frozen stuff frozen, that's all I need. I don't think there's ever been a moment where I thought "My food is just 0.5° too cold." Maybe it's even nice to be able to set my oven to the exact temperature specified in the directions. It's still annoying that it takes a minute to punch it all in on those shitty buttons. What's wrong with knobs? I turn two knobs and everything's set. It may not be exact, it may not even be within 5°, but it only took me 2 seconds to set it.

Somehow all this leads me to DVD burners. I've been looking at reviews, and it seems the DVD burner industry has decided to go ahead and make faster burners without fixing any of the problems that the older burners had. These are minor things like "Discs burned with this burner can't be read by any DVD drive" and "May produce bad burns 20% of the time." To me, that's a hell of a lot more important to fix than "Takes up to 30 minutes to burn a full disc". If I'm running backups of my stuff, I wan't to be damn sure that backup works, if it took 15 minutes or an hour.

"It can burn a disc in 5 minutes. Good luck getting any data off that disc, though."

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