waffle

My AC adapter has failed (again). Good thing I save receipts and they have a one year warranty.

Let’s hope the MagSafe connector is free from this kind of crap. It looks like a better construction from what I’ve seen.

As of earlier today, I’m a registered (and, if they distributed them, card-carrying) member of the Pirate Party, a serious Swedish party with a realistic chance of getting something done in a position as the biggest of the new parties since the last election and a potent tiebreaker party.

What happened this past Thursday (and a few weeks before) is a disgrace to the Swedish legal system. The authorities got orders from the White House to “solve this problem once and for all”, and despite knowing that the case didn’t have a leg to stand on, sat down, took it and went through with what a foreign authority (itself influenced by a lobbying organization) told them to do. And all along this line, from what I can tell, no one stood up and said “we can’t do this”. I’m enraged - not only at my own country’s administration (which I would have voted for had I been of the requisite age at the time) but at the RIAA and also at the voters (and abstainers) in the USA, for allowing such a government to form itself.

Today’s media organizations are sat down with a truth that they don’t dare face: technology help creators enough that creating and distributing their creations doesn’t outright require the mountain of man hour effort and money that it used to. Their business model is slowly but surely sliding into obsolescence, and their half-assed efforts to modernize their business (which, actually, they don’t want, since the older model brings in more money) don’t work. Most good new business models have come from outside the traditional media business. This is about far more than copyright infringement labeled “theft”.

Are there more important and pressing issues in politics than file sharing? Without a doubt. However, the actions taken in the past few days and their effects have effectively brought the issue beyond just file sharing. It’s now about a corrupted moral in the very way our government respond to pressures from lobbying organizations in other countries; it’s about what’s happening to the personal integrity I’m guaranteed, constitutionally and otherwise; it’s about the police failing to realize (or, even worse, failing to act on the realization) that the Pirate Bay’s operation is completely legal in Sweden, in law and in repeated precedent; it’s about not taking the whole skyscraper into custody because someone on floor three is a very sketchy suspect.

It needs to be said very clearly that I, as a citizen and as a tax payer, will not put up with this kind of crap. I will put my vote in the ballot to help stop this kind of dirty game at least in Sweden on September 17.

Half time in the friendly between Sweden and Chile, and I’m struck by how much crap there is.

• On-field graphics. Circles swooping in and out — white circles — during free kicks, the distance written on a realistic but mind-wrecking angle, and a ginormous arrow.

• Six, seven, eight variants of the instant replay, in various angles and at various speeds. The score box flying in and out during these passes to signify live footage instead of the universal blinking R.

• Checking in with commentators on the side of the field - not picture-in-picture, but taking over the whole action for about half a minute telling us stuff we already know.

• Constant reminders of completely unrelated sports events on other network channels later in the week.

• Man of the match-style competitions to come in the second half.

This is crap. No, really. Crap. I can understand people wanting overt analysis overload, arrows on the field and eight angle/speed combinations of field situations. I can see people wanting to win a trip to the upcoming World Cupto a European championship qualifier game in November (what an anti-climax). However, I’m interested in the game and the game alone - which I define to a quick replay when necessary, analysis from the commentators and free kick distances in a box at the bottom.

Updated at full time below:

• The commentators kept announcing upcoming sport events in addition to the omnipresent boxes performing the same function.

• With about twenty minutes to go, the commentators began pimping the upcoming supposedly hot talk in the studio when the game’s ended. That’s nice, guys. Focus on the fucking game instead!

• Small changes for “third opinion guy”. He actually wasn’t on the field at all - he was simply out among the spectators. When he chimed in at the end of the game, though, it was purely a voiceover, not obscuring the game as such.

• The “man of the match” competition wasn’t pimped as heavily as I thought it would be based on other recent games. This was good in the sense that it gave way for game analysis, but bad in the sense that they chose to say “screw it” to that match analysis and instead pimp their network buddy channels instead (see above), where talking about the man of the match would actually contribute to the game analysis.

So to sum up once again, this is really fucking bad. I could take all the channel pimping if this was broadcasted on a freely available, unencrypted terrestrial channel, sure. But it’s not. And the rest is just very bad program design based on the assumption that people line up to hear the analysis first, win trips to distant and at the moment totally unappealing games second and maybe, just maybe, watch a game in the middle somewhere.