Jonathan Coulton

From Engadget, Carlo Bertocchini has a cat named Elvis who lost the use of his rear legs in an accident, so he built him a little cat-controllable moving platform. Elvis doesn’t seem that good at driving around yet (PLEASE watch this video), but he’s pretty cute for a cat with two dead legs. One beep for Meow, two beeps for puke on the carpet.

A posting on Metafilter yesterday caused double download traffic – I love when that happens, even though this post contains what is probably the worst misspelling of my name I have ever seen. Coullter?

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It’s almost a little scary how much weight some of the more popular blogs can throw around. I would fear for my bandwidth costs if it weren’t for the fact that I am hosted by HostBaby, the same people who do CDBaby. They promise unlimited bandwidth, though we’ll see if they still love me after the Slashdotting that is bound to happen (maybe someday in the future if I am very very good).
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Also, for those of you who don’t have radios, and really I don’t blame you, you can download my recently aired hour on the David Lawrence Show for a small fee.

I saw this on iPodObserver:

The Dave Matthews band has posted instructions for circumventing the DRM on their own CD. The problem is that their CD has a copy protection scheme that doesn’t allow you to just pop the CD into your computer and play it, you first have to copy the songs to Microsoft’s secure WMA format, and then play those files in the Windows Media Player (after downloading some sort of a license). Of course iTunes doesn’t support the WMA format, so you then have to burn a CD and rip it to mp3s in iTunes. Check out the ridiculously complicated process.

The stupidest thing is that you can keep all this from happening if you just hold the Shift key down when you insert the CD to temporarily disable the autorun from starting the software that keeps you from just playing the CD like a normal person. Though it’s possible that both circumvention methods are probably illegal under the DMCA. In fact, SunnComm Technologies, makers of fine copy protection software, nearly sued a graduate student under the DMCA for publishing a paper that discussed the Shift Key Method and other shortcomings of their technology. They changed their minds when they realized that was stupid.

Now I want to say “See, this is where we’re headed!” but what I really mean is “See, this is where we are!” This is happening now – your rights are being taken away by large corporate entities who don’t care about you. I am not for piracy, you really should not steal music, but this is not the solution. Like most “anti-piracy” measures, this one will not stop any pirates. But it will make it difficult for you to listen to these songs on your iPod. At best, you have to jump through a few hoops and spend another buck on a blank CD. You might even need to break the law. TO LISTEN TO A CD YOU BOUGHT WITH ACTUAL MONEY.

I don’t know why we’re not all furious about this.

I’ll be on the David Lawrence Show again tonight at 11 PM east coast time. We’ll be talking about the PopSci soundtrack and playing a few of the songs. Tune in here:

XM Satellite Radio – 152 Extreme
Sirius Satellite Radio – 148 TalkCentral
KBNP/Portland
KNEW/San Francisco
WGN/Chicago

I should have done this sooner, but never mind because I have done it now. You can get the lyrics to all the OBOOCA (Our Bodies, Ourselves, Our Cybernetic Arms) songs on my songs page. You will need to download them from PopSci for a while, because dammit, they deserve the eyeballs for being so forward thinking. In the future, all magazines will come with soundtracks, and all magazine soundtracks will be written by me.

Getting a great response from everyone, a little press here and there, and plenty of airplay in the podcast universe. Thanks everyone for your comments and emails and other kinds of support. Once I get my shite together I will add some links to the podcasts and radio stations who’ve been playing me all along – something else I probably should have done earlier, but you know, TV to watch. Now get to work memorizing those lyrics.