daverea.com

[and now, for something completely different...]

A hearty welcome back online to Andy, who recently posted an explosion of superawesomeness when he wrote about the best. prank. ever.

Much earlier in our RIT careers (OK, well actually 2 years earlier) the two of us embarked on a much less-creative prank. With a year’s worth of collected BMG stamps and nothing better to do, we located our friend Seth’s car – as I recall it was parked near the Building 7 loading dock, awaiting his return from some manner of drama rehearsal – and indulged yet another dumbass, mind-numbing-winter-induced, boredom-spawned idea:

At one point, I had a printed version of that shot with arrowed captions reading, “Current club president” and “Past club president’s car” – referring of course to that pillar of geekdom, the RIT Ham Radio Club. I think Andy’s tongue may have gotten adhered to the roof of his mouth somewhere in the course of this mischief, requiring copious amounts of beer to remove it.

Sometimes, looking back on where you’ve come from gives you good insight into how you got where you are. And then you look back on times like this one, and gain … no such insight.

It’s a theme you’ve heard here before: “Freedom”. I’ve talked about it, and used the word pretty prolifically, but don’t let that repetition mislead you into believing Freedom is a common commodity. Quite to the contrary, it’s precious. Whether we’re talking about a freedom so sacred as practicing the religion of your choosing, or just the freedom to use your computer and your music to their fullest potential, it’s still freedom, and that means it’s still delicate and easily stolen. Just ask any journalist, gun owner or mountain biker: without the unwavering vigilance of those who are free, they’ll quickly cease to remain so.

There are a lot of digital music users who will be learning that lesson the hard way come October 1st, 2008. That’s when Yahoo will shut down their digital music service, and cease issuing “licenses” to play or burn tracks purchased from their store over the past few years. Let’s come back to this in a minute.

Would you buy a car whose engine wouldn’t start without an encrypted “go-ahead” signal from a distant satellite? Would you buy a house whose deadbolts would only allow you access after verifying your identity with the lock company’s far-flung servers? Would you buy a furnace or air conditioner designed to only activate when it receives an energy allotment from the EPA? Of course you wouldn’t. No one wants to shell out their hard-earned money for “crippled goods” – items that will only work at the whim of someone else, somewhere far away.

Or maybe they do.

I don’t know how many customers used the Yahoo music store, and I don’t know how much cash they forked over for DRM-encumbered songs. But I do know what’s going to happen to their purchases: like mission briefings to Tom Cruise, they’re going to self-destruct in a few short months. Except for perhaps a few lines of small print buried somewhere in a License Agreement Nobody Read, no one told these customers that this might happen someday, which is what makes the whole racket so insidious.

We’ve been saying it here for years, and it’s a pretty damn simple concept: DRM restricts how, when and where you can use what you’ve paid for. Real money. Your money. The crux of the Yahoo Music issue is this: when thousands of customers forked over actual dollars and cents, they got something in return that wasn’t really theirs. Sure, they could listen to their newly-purchased music, but only on Yahoo’s approved player, only if they remained a customer in good standing, and only if Yahoo didn’t decide to close down the service. Which they just did. Sorry Yahoo Music customers, it seems you didn’t buy that music – you were just paying to borrow it.

Heading back to the hypothetical from the hypothetical-turned-reality, what would happen if some new innovation in music distribution started to put the crunch on Apple, and iTunes sales plummeted? Would they release the DRM that protects iTunes-purchased tracks? Or would millions of users, with hard drives filled with billions of tracks, suddenly find their purchases rendered useless? It sounds far-fetched, but Yahoo – the web’s most-trafficked site – has just shown us that, when it comes to DRM, sometimes even the most far-fetched of situations can happen.

Meanwhile, Internet music services everywhere seem to be getting the idea that people want freedom. From Rhapsody’s rollout of an MP3 download service – whose tracks, they are proud to add, are DRM-free – to the increasing frequency with which DRM-free lossless file formats (see Magnatune) are popping up, it’s clear that freedom isn’t extinct. It may have been hibernating for a while, but some folks seem to be realizing what happens when you take it away.

What all this means, in the context of life, not just music, is this: if you have a freedom that you desire, respect, enjoy, or even cherish, then hang onto it. A handful of folks in the Boston Harbor did – when they threw their tea party in 1773. A courageous woman in Montgomery did – when she stood (well, actually, sat) her ground in 1955. A bold man did – when this year he took on the post powerful politicians of Washington DC. And won.

It’s our responsibility to know our freedoms, and it’s our responsibility not to spend our money, or our time, or our energy on things that take our freedoms away. Please, buy DRM-free music.

Well, no, probably not now…

So far, this week has been pretty much wall-to-wall rain, with the consequence that every time I’ve both wanted to get out for a bike ride, and had the time free to get out for a bike ride, it’s been pouring. I’m not terribly averse to getting wet, but the Dakar is just too new for me to get muddy yet, and road riding in heavy rain would only really appeal to me if there weren’t any cars on the road.

So needless to say, I’ve had a little extra indoor time to burn. We started working on the dining room (fixture removal, wall texture, floor prep) and we’re starting to get the freshly-painted parts of the house put back together. An unexpected plumbing problem on Monday left us with water coming through the family room ceiling, so a new painting task has been added to the queue as well.

In between all this, I managed to catch an announcement from Verizon that they’re rolling out a new phone with Motorola, and in the press release they touted the (apparently ground-breaking) availability of DRM-free music from Rhapsody via the VCast music service. This I had to see…

It turns out Rhapsody – former DRM-secured fortress of helix-encrypted music files, playable only by bowing to the might of Windows Media Player – has very recently (OK, well, at the end of June) rolled out a new MP3 Store, where you can buy DRM-free tracks for $0.99, or albums for $9.99. The pricing and the model seem pretty similar to Amazon’s, but you can listen to a few full-length track previews each month, rather than relying on a 30-second clip to make your purchase decision.

I haven’t purchased any tracks from Rhapsody’s new MP3 store yet, but I may give them a try for a future edition of Saturday Morning Tuneage. Stay tuned…

Over the past few months, a dearth of postings here could well have been taken to mean a number of different things – maybe I’ve been swimming in work, or busy around the house, or enjoying a little extra time pedaling, or maybe just lazy or uninspired. But in the case of the last 8 days, it’s meant I’m traveling. Kelly and I just returned home from a whirlwind trip to California for “summer break ’08″, and we had an awesome time.

In keeping with my privacy policy of only blogging about trips upon my return, I’ll be posting some photos (captioned, with any luck) and a few notes and commentary about our experiences soon.

For now, I’ll just mention two serendipitous “grazings” that happened while we were on the West Coast, that are both interesting (due to the “small world factor” they epitomize) and a touch disappointing (because they could have ended up as fun connections had we only known). First, we “grazed” Ken Starks, Larry Cafiero and the rest of the crew of Lindependence 08 on Wednesday and Thursday, making our way up the California coast from Monterey to Napa. If we had an extra day and could have worked out the logistics, I would have loved to have stopped in to Felton and been part of the truly awesome work they were doing there, evangelizing Linux and software freedom. Just a few hours later, we “grazed” Garrett McCord, author of Vanilla Garlic, as he attended and reported from the Taste3 culinary convention in Napa. Though neither he, nor his foodblogger traveling companions, would know me from Adam, it would have at least been fun to meet them in person and gush about how much I enjoy reading their blogs. Sure, maybe they would have looked at each other with raised “who is this weirdo” eyebrows just before calling security, but if their writings are any evidence of their friendliness, my guess is they would have just absorbed Kelly and I into their conversations and counted us as newfound friends by the time we parted company.

All that said, we had a wonderful trip, missed connections or none. We caught up with family and friends, saw some amazingly beautiful places and things, ate more than our share of truly delicious food, took scores of photos, and most importantly enjoyed some quality time reconnecting, relaxing and recharging.

In this month’s issue of GM’s Lifesteps fitness magazine (a cool little glossy that they send free to employees who sign up) there’s an interesting little fact:

…To burn off one plain M&M candy, you need to walk the full length of a football field. Think about that the next time you dip your hand in the candy bowl.

It’s pretty impressive that they can pack that kind of energy into a little candy that can fit within the perimeter of a dime! I know there are a lot of fortunes and futures being staked on the coming Hydrogen revolution – but has anyone given any thought to powering cars with M&Ms?!

I wonder how many M&Ms I burn off biking to and from work?

It’s been a busy weekend! In the space of three days, we’ve managed to traverse most of central New York, from home to Hammondsport to Canandaigua to Syracuse and back again. Eating seemed to be the primary theme – whether or it was at a cookout at my parents’ place, or a lakeside dinner for two at Snug Harbor, breakfast-in-bed on Saturday morning, a wedding reception for Kelly’s [newly married] childhood friends on Saturday, or a delicious brunch spread at the in-laws’ place this morning.

Amid all the merriment and festivities (and eating), there hasn’t been much time for posting, but I can’t let it go by without at least a mention – Tuesday being our second wedding anniversary and all! Yep, that’s right – we made it around the calendar and back again a second time.

Happy Anniversary to us!

(Hrmmm… I guess I could have hinted at it via S.M.T. by reviewing Stan Getz’s meat-and-potatoes Jazz album Stanniversary, but that would be both excessively obscure and a little cheesy…)

This is the third summer since my first trip to Dryer Road Park, a mountain biking park just a short drive from our home. On that first visit, I rode the trusty Trek rigid-frame bike that my parents gave me at age 15. I say “trusty”, because it’s seen me through innumerable jaunts around my hometown, along the Lehigh Valley Trail, up and down the Erie Canal towpath, all over the RIT campus, and through Brighton before we moved into the house.

The Trek got its first taste of “true” off-road riding (or at least as close to “true” as I’ve ever experienced) on that visit to Dryer, and I was hooked. With Jason as my guide and coach, I got my first experience with single-track riding, climbing and descending dirt trails, weaving through trees and bouncing over roots and logs. It was a blast, and the winter of ’05-06 found me utterly jonesing for a trail ride by the time March rolled around.

As a birthday present in 2006, Kelly and Jason refitted the Trek with a slew of new components, and gave it a complete tune-up at The Mendon Cyclesmith, Jason’s employer at the time. With a longer stem, a Thudbuster seat post, a new set of Shimano V-brakes, new grips and a freshly-tuned-up drivetrain, the Trek was ready to serve for another summer.

This year brought a new experience, though: night riding with a group of experienced mountain bikers through another area park. With steeper climbs, nastier descents, more-aggressive riding companions and the newly-breached specter of darkness, it was a rough ride in more than the obvious way! I set new personal records for exertion (or over-exertion?) and – though my memory is certainly distorted – seem to recall spending more time pushing the Trek than riding it.

I’m certainly no athlete, but I’m no slouch either. My resting heart rate (awake) is 55, and I can comfortably run 4 miles in a little over a half-hour. I might be a little sore the next day, and I’m not about to win any races – on foot or on wheels – but I like to think I’m a least “reasonably fit”. Given this, I was actually somewhat receptive to Jason’s suggestion that my equipment might be holding me back a bit.

Our collective suspicion was confirmed a few weeks ago, when I tried out a properly-sized, full-suspension bike on the trails at Dryer. Suddenly, with whole new gear ranges available to me, the “previously-unclimbable” could be refiled under “possible”. Descents no longer shot the shocks of every rut and bump up my forearms – there was a suspension fork to take care of that! Standing up off the saddle mid-climb? No problem! Crossing the logs (and log piles) that had been so intimidating on the Trek? Done!

So today, I finally bit the bullet and deployed the plastic. I bought a Jamis Dakar XCR Comp from my favorite bike-shop-proprietor Craig:

Riding gear on the passenger seat and new bike in the back, I headed to Dryer from the shop. Though it’s never as fun to ride alone, I had an absolute blast bombing around the trails on the Dakar. For those scoring at home with Dryer’s handy PDF trail map, I hit Tree Beard and cooked around the upper rim of the park on Ziggy, then headed downhill on Bones to pick up Epping Forest. I climbed up the connecting trail between Chutes n Ladders and Alpha Betty, then headed across the plateau to round out the ride on Gully Down on my way back to the parking lot.

I wasn’t about to pull out all the stops today, on a brand new bike, with only a few rides under my belt for the season, but I did manage to stay on the bike for plenty of things that would have otherwise found me with my feet on the dirt. In all, it was a great ride – and I’m looking forward to trying my hand again at night riding before the summer’s end!