We’re in….

We’ve moved in to our new house, in the sense that all of our belongings are on our property. Many of them are even in the house. A few of them are put away….

Lots of work is ahead, though. Tomorrow’s big project is some carpentry. There isn’t much storage space in the place, and shelves are needed. This will allow there to be an “away” to “put” many of our belongings.

We also bought a futon today. So we’ll have much better crash space than a sleeping bag on a floor….

My to do list is a mile long, and I don’t even want to think about how much my credit card debt has increased.

But all in all, it’s a very exciting, if exhausting time.

protecting Us(tm) from Terrorism(tm)

Imagine. A group has, after careful study, concluded that Terrorism is not the focus of the Department of Homeland Security.

Exhibit A:

Of the 814,073 people charged by DHS in immigration courts during the past three years, 12 faced charges of terrorism, TRAC said. Those 12 cases represent 0.0015 percent of the total number of cases filed.

Exhibit B:

The TRAC analysis also found that DHS filed a minuscule number of what are called “national security” charges against people in the immigration courts. The report stated that 114, or 0.014 percent of the total of roughly 800,000 individuals charged were charged with national security violations.

And what was DHS’s response? Nothing but empty rhetoric, stating that the report is “ill-conceived” and that the group “lacked a grasp of the DHS mission.”

That’s what is so maddening about this. This report looks at what the DHS DOES. The DHS spokesman wants us to focus on what they SAY they do. Big difference.

One can draw two possible conclusions from these facts: either the mission of DHS is not what it is commonly claimed (ie, to protect Us(tm) from Terrorism(tm), or they are just terribly incompetent at what they do. Additionally, it seems fairly obvious that terrorism just isn’t the threat that it is made out to be.

Bucking The Trend

For the first time in human history, right around now is when the World population becomes more urban than rural.

In other news, we have officially bought the house in New Gloucester. We’ve started moving now; we get the rental truck and take the bulk of our stuff on Monday. Then, we start sleeping there.

I guess they might have to wait another day on that; 3 Mainahs are going from urban to rural….

spring cleaning

Time for some spring cleaning around here, methinks.

I’m still thinking of moving this site to a WordPress blog. The cool thing about that is that I believe I could import both this blog and my old blog into one giant, mega-site of happy JWL goodness.

Though since Google bought out Blogger and went to Blogger 2.0, there seem to be some issues in importing the content.
This page, however, seems to say that it is possible.

Hopefully I’ll start working on this soon….

sixteen-track mind

Today was a historical occasion. For the first time, I recorded Freakwitch live, with 16 tracks of recording capability. In the past, we were limited to 10 tracks, which were actually 9 due to some technical details.

We did another round of studio upgrades recently. Everything is installed and running. The new setup means that we can record the entire band playing at once, along with having more than one source for sound for each band member. In other words, we get the sonic benefits of the old overdubbing paradigm, along with the ability to capture the energy of a complete band performance.

Our capability just went up an order of magnitude. This is a very good thing. We have a busy month, lots of recording sessions (including a session at another studio), as well as a gig at Geno’s in Portland on 4/4.

In other news, it’s spring.

About time….

The Black Spot, severed horse heads, and Suzy Boggus

Very strange things are afoot, as anyone who pays attention to the world will tell you. Of course that does not differentiate our present age; strange things have always been and always will be afoot.

I think it’s just the particular character of the strangeness.

In the middle of our hallway in our apartment building, a Suzy Boggus Greatest Hits CD materialized, and was lying on the ground.

It’s still there. I’m not sure what to make of it.

Perhaps it is a sign. Perhaps a Suzy Boggus Greatest Hits CD is the early-21st-century equivalent of The Black Spot or, even worse, a severed horse’s head.

After all, what sin could we have committed to be presented with such a ghastly artifact?

another study: RIAA is full of $hit

They just keep coming:

A new study in the Journal of Political Economy by Felix Oberholzer-Gee and Koleman Strumpf has found that illegal music downloads have had no noticeable effects on the sale of music, contrary to the claims of the recording industry.

Entitled “The Effect of File Sharing on Record Sales: An Empirical Analysis,” the study matched an extensive sample of music downloads to American music sales data in order to search for causality between illicit downloading and album sales. Analyzing data from the final four months of 2002, the researchers estimated that P2P affected no more than 0.7% of sales in that timeframe.

The study looked at time periods when German students were on holiday after demonstrating that P2P use increases at these times. German users collectively are the #2 P2P suppliers, providing “about one out of every six U.S. downloads,” according to the study. Yet the effects on American sales were not large enough to be statistically significant. Using this and several other methods, the study’s authors could find no meaningful causality. The availability and even increased downloads of music on P2P networks did not correlate to a negative effect on music sales.

“Using detailed records of transfers of digital music files, we find that file sharing has had no statistically significant effect on purchases of the average album in our sample,” the study reports. “Even our most negative point estimate implies that a one-standard-deviation increase in file sharing reduces an album’s weekly sales by a mere 368 copies, an effect that is too small to be statistically distinguishable from zero.”

After this, I think the RIAA needs a new motto: Have You Sued Your Customer Base Today?