The Day the Music Died... or at least was never heard.

Time for another rant…

My MP3 player went missing last time I was in Miami. I’m sure I probably left it in the hotel room but shockingly they were unable to find it when I called. It was not a huge loss because it was only a little key drive that happened to play mp3’s. Not many features but it got the job done. But since it was gone it needed to be replaced. So after doing a lot of research and settled on the iPod. Yeah, it surprised me too. Those that know me know that I will usually go out of my way to not be main stream but just like my attitude on Microsoft there is a reason they are wildly successful. The sound is very good and the features and accessories are ample. But what pisses me off (you knew there would be something) is that with everyone trying to do the right and legal thing with music downloads is screwing the little guy. Over at the The Lucky Word I blogged about The Departures and really wanted to listen to some of their music to see if they worth a damn but the only media on their site was either streaming snippets or must be downloaded via iTues UK and not available in the US. So how is this benefiting this group? Here is a guy sitting in Fort Worth Texas wanting to listen to their music and even willing to buy a song but can’t because they have it too restricted. I’m sure it is probably not their doing. I’m sure they turned over their eBusiness to some company that said they can take them to new levels. But all it is doing is preventing someone from hearing what they want the world to hear. If it were my band I would stomp my feet and cry like a baby until someone did something about it. I would at least insist that my web site had songs in MP3 format ready for download by any and everyone so that they can get a sample of my music and I wouldn’t listen to some suit telling them how it should be done.

Arrrrghhhh.

The Lucky Word

I have always been intrigued by randomness. I know, a weird thing to be intriguing but even the debate on the mere existence of randomness is fantastic. Randomness as a concept is easy to understand and define. It is simply something that is without order. However most of us use the word random to mean things that are not really random. Example: “I just picked a color at random.” We may think we picked a color at random but most likely we have a bias towards or away from certain colors. I for one tend to avoid maroon or dark reds mainly because they are the colors of Texas A&M and OU, but I digress. Another, albeit darker, misuse of the word random is the “random killing”. We just had a very gruesome murder in Dallas in which a man can be seen on a video monitor seemingly picking a woman at random and then following her to the street and shooting her at point blank range. On the surface it seems that is was just rotten luck that the poor woman was chosen and that the man selected her at random, but in the video we see that the man watches several people pass before selecting her. This indicates to me that he was looking for a type of person to kill and therefore introduces a trace or order in his thought. Still unlucky for the poor woman but not truly random.

So, in the human mind randomness is not really random, but I think most of us understand that. So what about math and computers? Mathematically speaking is it possible to truly be random. Of course it is, it is just not easy to get the results. We can, however, get really darn close which for most things is perfectly fine. Take for example the practice of drawing names from a hat. Everyone throws a piece of paper into a hat with their name on it and then the host will shake up the pieces of paper and reach in and grab one. Random right? Not really, most people will either draw the first piece they touch or they will draw from the bottom, either way there is an order to the piece of paper that is chosen because of the way they are written, the size and weight of the paper and even the shape of the container. That makes some sense, but what about the computer… surly the random number generator is truly random, right? Wrong. Every computer has a build in random number generator. It is used for things like randomizing your play list or choosing the photo to display on your screen saver, but it is not really random either. It needs a “seed” in which to start. It then uses a fixed algorithm using that seed as the start to select a random number. This means that if you use the same seed you will get the same set of “random” numbers each time, hardly random.

So back to the common use of the random concept and why I’m ranting about this. I had an idea for a new blog in which I will use a “random” word and plug into Google’s “I’m Feeling Lucky” process and then blog about the web site that comes up. If you are not familiar with Google’s “I’m Feeling Lucky” it is a function that takes a word you supply and then takes you to the highest ranked site. In order to get my “random” word I am using “The Random Word Generator” to get the word. I will try to do this at least two or three times a week. Should be interesting and fun, hope you like it. Check it out at http://luckyword.blogspot.com/.

The Oldest Newspaper In Texas

Some friends of mine, Kyle and Marita Beth, have a little project going in which they each take a photo a day and publish it on their blog The Daily KRuMB.

One of MB’s (far left) latest photos was of the old Galveston News building in Galveston, Texas and it made me think of something I heard growing up on the beaches of Galveston County. That is that the Galveston Daily News (now the Galveston County Daily News) is the oldest newspaper in Texas. So I thought I would provide you with a few facts that I managed to find. Oh, and I found an old photo of the same building. Interesting how it has changed. Probably all those hurricanes.

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• Galveston Daily News first published April 11, 1842


• Changed its name to Galveston County Daily News in 1993


• It is the oldest newspaper still in circulation in Texas


• It is the 18^th oldest newspaper still in circulation in the USA


• It is the 80^th oldest newspaper still in circulation in the world


• At the time of the first publication, Texas was an independent republic and not part of the United States


• The population of Galveston in 1842 was about 4,000 people


• In 1902 the newspaper was the first business in Texas to install a telephone


• The newspaper founded the Dallas Morning News in 1885

sources:
http://www.wan-press.org/article2823.html

http://galvestondailynews.com/history.lasso