FolkWolf.Net

Sorry for the utter quiet from this corner. I seem to be more obsessed with the back-end of this blog these days. I'm having a lot of fun with it, but it's all on the development side, and it's not public. Looks pretty though.

As I type this, there are 5 wifi networks within my reach, and I've never figured out how to get the Airport software on my mac to use just my connection if it's available, so I often log onto one of my neighbors networks by mistake. I guess that happened to me this morning. I turned on iTunes this morning to listen to some music, and I noticed a weird drive in my iTunes sidebar called "Brendan Waddell's LimeWire" So I looked at this drive, and there was some really great music on this drive. I was listening to Xavier Rudd earlier (I caught his set at the BluesFest last summer), and now I'm listening to The Curious George soundtrack from Jack Johnson. Brendan, I don't know who you are, but thanks for the tunes! I gotta go out and buy a few new CDs.

As I type this, there are 5 wifi networks within my reach, and I've never figured out how to get the Airport software on my mac to use just my connection if it's available, so I often log onto one of my neighbors networks by mistake. I guess that happened to me this morning. I turned on iTunes this morning to listen to some music, and I noticed a weird drive in my iTunes sidebar called "Brendan Waddell's LimeWire" So I looked at this drive, and there was some really great music on this drive. I was listening to Xavier Rudd earlier (I caught his set at the BluesFest last summer), and now I'm listening to The Curious George soundtrack from Jack Johnson. Brendan, I don't know who you are, but thanks for the tunes! I gotta go out and buy a few new CDs.

Also, if someone out there in tha interweb can figure out how this works, and how I can save some of his tunes in my iTunes, that'd be cool. Leave a comment.\

UPDATE: Today I have Eric Estartes Limewire. It's all HipHop tho.

between Bloglines, Delicious, and sites like BlogAfrica. I'm spending too much time on the www. More on this later.

I went to see U2 Friday night, and while I was waiting for the Arcade Fire, my thoughts turned to Pearl Jam, and how, to combat bootleggers, they released CDs for the entire tour, one CD per show. The distribution and marketing of that was apparently a nightmare, and they had to fight their record company to do it. So the idle thought is: Why does every band not release MP3s or some DRMed version of MP3, of their show after it's done? Put the MP3s up on their website, charge $5 for it, and that would be a way to make even more money from shows, which seem to be the only way that musicians make money these days.

Jack kapica from the Globe and Mail writes about The death of Usenet. I haven't used USENET in years, but I'm kind of sad about it's decline. Some of my best experiences online were on usenet in the early days. I even found my My first post. Dorky, huh? Remember kids, whatever you write online is archived somewhere, forever.

Bloglines is my new favourite utility/web site. A long time ago I discovered blogs, but my memory is horrible, and I would go months forgetting to check them. Then I discovered RSS feed readers. Linux Feed Reader for the GNOME desktop came out, and I started using that. It's pretty good, and it integrates well into the desktop, but it has one big drawback. It's only available on the desktop, so I can't check it from where ever I am. My rule, it seems, is that everything I do has to be network-transparent. Normally, I would find an RSS reader that I could install on my website, but one doesn't seem to exist yet, really. Bloglines fits all my criteria, and will do nicely until I write my own. The other feature I like is the clippings folder. I have at least three or four more blog entries stored there. Go check it out

Mer and Colin have set up a blog where they announced the long-awaited (at least if you talk to Mom) date for their wedding

I need to set up a blog roll for friends and family. I know Geoff has a blog that he never posts to, but I can't find it anymore.

I get an RSS feed from the BBC and this showed up, the day after I went to see Romeo D'allaire. It was, terrible timing, to say the least.

BBC NEWS Wars 'less frequent, less deadly'

That's a really rose-colored report. When you think of all the genocides and ethnic cleansings and child armies that have exploded since the end of the Cold War, war may have gotten slightly less deadly, but a whole lot dirtier. I was at a lecture by Romeo D'Allaire, the commander of the UN forces during the failed Rwanda mission on Tuesday, and he asked a question which illustrates war in these times, I'll have to paraphrase it, because I didn't take notes, but the question goes something like this.

"We came upon a small village in Rwanda, and we were looking for survivors, and once we came upon the church, villagers started streaming out of it, which was unusual, because the normal way of doing things was to round up the entire village, lock all of the villagers in the church, and burn it down. In this case, we thought we were lucky, because the villagers came streaming out of the church when we came into view. Suddenly a bunch of young boys between the ages of 9 and 14 came out of the jungle on our right, and started firing at us with AK-47s. Then a bunch of young girls about the same ages, some of whom were pregnant, appeared out of the jungle on our left, they were being used as human shields by yet more young boys with AK-47s firing at us, and the villagers coming out of the Church. Now, knowing that most of these children were forced into camps, brainwashed, and pressed into service under penalty of death, knowing that these children had a "Buddy system" where if your buddy ran away, you were shot, knowing that these children where only unknowing automatons, probably given drugs to commit this act, what do you do? You have nanoseconds to make a decision, and bullets are killing both your soldiers, as well as the villagers all around you."

What do you do, indeed. It's a heartbreaking question. Luckily, he didn't ask us the answer to the question, and I think the answer he came up with on that spot has haunted his dreams for more than 10 years now.

I think his job is getting him down