Month: November 2007

My main man, Michael Geist comments on a recent government led study on the effects of Peer-To-Peer file sharing (read: the concept of sharing music, music, etc. over the Internet for free) and the purchase of CDs.

If anything, it shows that P2P users tend to purchase more CDs.

I can relate to this. There are quite a few bands whom I’ve downloaded to see if I’ll like them and if I do, I pick up their album if I like it. However, let’s tell the truth here people – I tend to buy a new album of an artist I like and wait and pick up the others when I see them in a sale bin. In the end, I’m supporting the artist…just taking my time getting there!

http://www.michaelgeist.ca/content/view/2347/125/

Picture this: I’m driving on my regular route to the park and ride and I hear on the radio that there is no power at an intersection which is coming up.

Quickly, I realize that the traffic will probably be slower along that route because of the lack of traffic lights so I double back.

Unfortunately for myself, the radio report wasn’t entirely correct…it wasn’t the intersection that had no power, it was the entire area!

Here I was navigating through neighbourhood streets which I’m not entirely familiar with and I finally found my way out of the maze only to discover that since the power was out on one end of the neighbourhood, it was out on the OTHER end that I was heading towards and there’s even more traffic there!

Hence, I became stuck in stop and go traffic for 4 kilometers because there were police directing traffic due to lack of lights in the area. Argh! In the end, if I just stuck to my regular course, I probably would have spent a few additional minutes instead of the 10 I just used trying to find a shortcut.

Case in point – Sometimes you’re not as smart as you think. In my case, this happens a lot. Ha ha.

Right before I woke up this morning I was dreaming a dream which can only be described as one which inventors must have…a glimpse of the insane future where the things you see can only come from Star Trek.

I’m just writing about this to document the event so in the future when it comes out I can say “Hey, I dreamt of that one night on Hallowe’en!”

I was sitting down in some type of theatre, or maybe the Scotiabank Place. Think – the floor with some seats. Right in front of me was Matt showing me a picture he just took on his digital camera.

The things is, the camera screen was huge. Think about a laptop (tablet version) but double that size. So here he is holding up this giant screen for me to look at this picture, but as soon as he’s done, he pushes on the sides and the thing shrinks to the size of a laptop and he goes to take a picture with it.

Now, if you visualize this, you have to admit that hauling around something the size of a laptop to take a photo is ludicrous, but the idea of this invention where you can expand your screen just by pulling on the sides and then shrinking it by pushing on its sides was pretty neat. It’s essentially the concept of zooming in and out on a software application, but in a hardware form.

I thought it was pretty darn neat looking and I hope to see it in the future. Although, not the size of a laptop.

I should also point out that considering this was probably taken in the future, you should be happy to know that Vero was sitting next to me. Which bodes well for her, but not well for me and my quest to date a nuclear physicist.