On most holidays during the year I think of hand-drawing greeting “cards” to friends, but never quite get around to doing the actual drawing and/or sending. This past Valentine’s was no different (sorry guys!). However, I did begin to design characters for cards on the much underutilized theme of “cute baby animals.” This is as far as I got:
It’s old news by now to anyone who listens to music via iTunes (at work, at least) that the v.4.7.1 “upgrade” secretly crippled a number of formerly available features. Most egregiously, it now limits the number of people who can connect to your music library to no more than 5 per day. I suppose this was supposed to make some rich pencilneck music exec happy in some obscure way. (Will someone decide to outlaw overhearing your neighbor’s music next?) But here’s the rub: the new limitation does absolutely nothing to curtail users’ copying behavior: iTunes has never permitted copying of another user’s music anyway. Did I miss something? Because from my perspective all they’ve done is irritate people and given them a reason to outright copy the music they could formerly just listen in through their networks. (There are tons of very transparent, non-iTunes ways to do precisely this with Windows and Macintosh systems alike.) So the “upgrade” is in fact exacerbating behavior it might have been designed to curb. Way to go, geniuses.
High Fidelity: A Novel by Nick Hornby
Stumbling on Happiness by Daniel Gilbert
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