How is it that Stephen King has made $100-$120 Million over the course of his life but he still insists on living in this weird, creepy house. Yeah yeah I know – he’s a horror writer and it’s only fitting he lives in a haunted house – but come on, what’s the point of being rich if you don’t live it up a little?

I’ve embarked on an experiment recently, and the results are interesting.

I’ve always liked the Rolling Stones. I’ve had it on my to do list for some time now to amass a complete collection of Rolling Stones material, preferrably on CD of course. Rather, this has been on my “to do once I’m rich” list, since devoting the type of funds neccessary for that type of excercise has proven elusive. Besides, in this day and age, we have MP3.

Prior to, say, November, MP3 was a neat thing to me – free music, who can argue with that? However, MP3’s were a pain, and not just in the acquisition process. I would download 650MB or so of MP3 and burn them to a CD-R. Then I would burn CD’s of the albums on those CD-R’s to more CD’s. For a CD-R with 11 60 minute albums, this would take up 12 CD’s. Besides taking a lot of time and resources, it was disheartening to only then discover that a lot of the music wasn’t even worth the $.25 a blank CD cost. This all changed when I got my car MP3 player – suddenly my CD consumption was divided by 12 and my entire music collection could fit on a spindle in that island thing between the seats.

So I figure several months back (even before the car player, back when it was just an idea) that I can download the entire Rolling Stones discography on MP3. This is daunting to say the least. For starters, you have to define how narrow a discography you’re referring to. In the late 1980’s a German individual wrote a book on the Stones discography, chronicling every single, every album, every release in every language and every country ever released – it clocked in at 530+ pages of Bible-sized print. Obviously you wouldn’t be too interested in what “Jumpin’ Jack Flash” looked like when it was released in Korea, but it gives you an idea of the mass of this material.

For example, I have a CD-R of every Led Zeppelin song ever made. Led Zeppelin released nine studio albums and one live album during their career – ten releases in all. Four songs found their way to boxed set releases (only one of which was a true studio track) and a 2-CD BBC Sessions was released a few years back. That’s it. Short of bootlegs, nothing else was ever released, so collecting a complete collection of Zeppelin is easy. In fact, I owned all of the CD’s involved and ripped them myself. Zeppelin was only around from 1969-1980, so they spanned one paradigm – that of releasing albums and not placing extra content on singles (very often).

The Rolling Stones, however, have been together since 1962 – this year marks their fortieth anniversary, and makes them quite possibly the longest running group ever. Back when they started out, however, you didn’t release albums. The business model back then was to release singles – 45’s to be exact. These records were cut on wax instead of vinyl. There was literally a clause in the contract for the artist to give up 15% of their royalties as a “breakage fee” to cover the 15% or so of the records that would be broken by the time they got to the stores (maddeningly, this clause is still in most new recording contracts, despite the problem having gone away close to thirty years ago). Any albums that were released back then were merely compilations of the singles that sold well. Consequently the Stones didn’t have an album release until 1964, and the first albums that were released were named things like Profile: England’s Newest Hit Makers! and 12 X 5 (12 hits by the 5 members of the group), so they don’t really work as “albums” so much as “smatterings of random songs”.

In addition, different versions of the same album with slightly different song lineups and running order were released on the opposite sides of the pond in those early releases – it wasn’t until 1967’s Their Satanic Majesties Request (yeah yeah I know – the title) when the albums were the same in the US and the UK. Some songs on UK albums were never released on US albums and vice versa, so the only way to get them is to also have the compilations that do have them, meaning lots of overlap. In addition, sometimes slightly different mixes of songs existed in various regions, making the collection bit more complicated. And only in 1982 or so did they start releasing CD’s.

The Stones were signed to ABCKO Records originally, they jumped from them in 1970. ABCKO decided to shove most of their Stones content onto CD’s, but at that time the process was far from perfect and most of these releases were considered terrible. They have since “done it right” and have released “proper” CD’s, but many of these original releases still exist in stores (they weren’t defective per se, so they were never recalled – you’d be surprised how long CD’s linger in record stores). “The Rolling Stones” own everything they’ve done since 1970 and they’ve been on several labels over the years. Nearly every time they change labels the label decides to take advantage of the fact that they now have access to a good catalog of old CD’s and they go re-release all the old Stones albums. Since they don’t neccessarily get to have access to the digital remastered version the previous label put together (at that label’s expense), they remaster it again themselves – this way they can put that “newly remastered” label on their release. The problem with this is that it leaves a lot of room for songs to sound different from remix to remix, and – get this – many affectionados have noticed longer (or shorter) fadeout times on many of the songs, meaning for any given studio track there are dozens of possible versions, depending on whom you listen to. On the plus side, the 1994 Virgin (the current Stones label) re-releases featured neat “mini vinyl” recreations of the original packaging – the Sticky Fingers packaging even had the zipper back, though obviously way off scale.

The down side of all of this lies in the fact that it’s impossible to tell which version of any song you’ll get when you download an MP3 version. But oh well.

Some songs have never been on CD – they’ve only been on vinyl. 1996’s Rock & Roll Circus (companion piece to a long-shelved Stones TV show) was the first ever Stones release to not have a vinyl counterpart. I was able to download some albums from newsgroups, and some others from FTP sites, but for the longest time I was unable to get anywhere near a complete collection. Newsgroups are OK, but rarely did anyone actially fill my requests.

Then recently I started downloading KISS albums, spurned upon by a recent fascination with them due to their excellent boxed set and a Behind the Music special where I decided Gene Simmons was too cool to live. Suddenly, I got very close to a complete collection of KISS albums, where the main problem was the fact that KISS has simply had too many compilation albums over the years, so collecting any of them would be foolish. In my quest to download the rest I found a fairly good FTP site with a decent ratio – he had the early albums, I had the late albums – we worked well and he didn’t kick me off. Then I also noticed he had a ton of Stones albums, so I kept on trading.

Last week I finally had a complete enough collection to burn to CD, so I did. Interesting to say the least – I now have hours upon hours of music. I made all the MP3’s 128k, since that’s good enough for me and it allows for more songs per CD. I went through with Renamer, the coolest renaming utility ever, and renamed each file en masse to properly work in my car player. I also named the directories with a year number first (and a dash and a number for years with multiple years) to make the entire experience chronological.

It’s weird to hear old Stones when I’ve heard so much of their recent work. It’s also weird to have less knowledge of when one album begins and the other ends. It’s disappointing to not have the aesthetics of the packaging/cover art, etc. But it’s great to have the major discographies of the Stones and KISS wherever I go.

One of my favorite films of all time is Roger & Me, a documentary about the damage done to a small town (Flint, Michigan) when GM decided to close down their plant there, which made up the majority of the city’s economy. GM’s CEO Roger Smith decided to move the plant to Mexico, where labor is cheaper. Moore goes back and forth between witnessing the town go into decline and the “gimmick” of the film – he persues Roger Smith to ask him to come to Flint and see the damage he’s done – though he keeps getting cut off at the pass.

Some people said the film is anti-conservative or anti-big busineess, but these people miss the point. Roger & Me is simply a film questioning the practices of one particular business and shows us a parallel between the success of one unscrupulous business and one unlucky city. If anything it makes us question how we do business in this country and whether we should tolerate it. That having been said, I’m sure GM didn’t go into the shitter after this movie was made.

Moore’s done some stuff since then, including some minor documentaries and some books. His latest is Stupid White Men which, amongst others, slams George W. Bush. He supposedly has evidence that Enron bought the Bush campaign, along with several key energy board positions. Unlucky for Moore and his book sales that he happened to release the book after 9/11 and now Bush’s approval rating is 83%. I read what he had to say on the subject and I can’t help but think of all the people who are convinced “___ killed JFK” where they hold on to the one shred of evidence that proves their particular variant on the theory and ignore the mountains of evidence against the theory. Or perhaps it’s just that I liked it when people attacked Clinton but I don’t like it when people do the same to Bush. I guess it’s not so much fun when it’s your guy. In any event, I started to believe Michael Moore wasn’t as cool/smart/interesting as he used to be. I started to wonder if Roger & Me was really any good at all.

Now I’ve juist read a writeup of a viewing of a rough cut of his newest documetaty Bowling for Columbine, a film which dissects the question of why America is so violent. In part, the writeup says:

The quest for the answer to why America is #1 in the violent death department takes Moore to Canada, where the American and Canadian cultures are compared side by side… We learn that Canada has plenty of guns, plenty of poverty, plenty of different races, plenty of violent movies… And yet not a whole lot of violent crime. How can this be? Canada has all of the things the media and politicians blame our “culture of violence” on, but yet they can go to sleep without locking (or triple locking) their doors at night. It is a thing of beauty to watch Moore tear down the myths of pop cultures influence on violence in America. At one point he says “Heck! Most of the violent video games are created in Japan, a country which suffered 17 gun related deaths last year”

Early word is the movie can come across as a “gun control” movie (which would be odd, since Moore is a card carrying member of the NRA) but it’s more of an “attitiude control” movie. The question as to why America is so violent has no easy answer and you would be a fool (and I can name several fools) to give one. Moore’s film asks some needed questions, but doesn’t give answers.

Although I still don’t completely care for/agree with his liberal agenda, this sounds like a movie to make me have faith in Michael Moore again. Bowling for Columbine is due to be released in 2003.

Something odd I’ve noticed: The latest Internet Explorer revision (6.something) has a feature called “Error Reporting”. Basically every once in a while something crashes IE and this notice comes up telling you that something bad has happened, IE has to be closed and restarted, and everything you were doing is now screwed. However, you can have Error Reporting send the info to MS as to what happened and why and they can add it to their database of “shit that’s wrong with IE” and get around to fixing it.

Naturally my jaded geek ethic originally would tell this program to not send any info to Microsoft – they know too much already. But when my Wife started going ahead and sending the info along (figuring that helping MS unfuck its own software was a Good Thing) I started going ahead and sending the info as well.

However, I’m noticing Error Reporting coming up a lot. I don’t remember IE crashing this much before. XP has it built into everything – lots of program crashes cause it to come up. Is it that IE6 is the least stable of the IE line, or is it that the error trapping is a little too much? Or am I being too nice in remembering how unstable IE was?

Common sense prevails.

Woman sues Nintendo for death of son

Associated Press

BATON ROUGE, LA. A Louisiana woman is suing Nintendo, alleging her 30-year-old son suffered seizures after playing video games for eight hours a day, six days a week.

The lawsuit filed in federal court says the man died last year after hitting his head and mouth on a table during one of the seizures. It claims the man never had seizures before buying a Nintendo-64 player in 1999.

His mother is seeking unspecified damages for her own medical and funeral expenses, for mental and emotional anguish, and for her son’s lost future earnings.

A spokesman for Nintendo is declining comment on the lawsuit. In court records, the company denies any wrongdoing.

Let’s pick this one apart, shall we?

BATON ROUGE, LA

Why do I have a feeling this is in a trailer park?

her 30-year-old son suffered seizures after playing video games for eight hours a day, six days a week

Although it doesn’t explicitly say it, I’m willing to bet this man lived at home unemployed with his mother in the trailer park – how else could he spend 8 hours a day, 6 days a week playing video games? I’m a video game fanatic with a job and I can’t pull this one off. I wonder what he did on the seventh day?

The lawsuit filed in federal court says the man died last year after hitting his head and mouth on a table during one of the seizures

Evolution at work.

It claims the man never had seizures before buying a Nintendo-64 player in 1999

So let me get this straight – despite the fact that video games manufactured since the late 1980’s have had warnings in the manuals about the fact that they could possibly cause seizures and that if you experience a seizure playing them you should stop this man played them 48 hours a week for three years and his mother is shocked when it finally kills him? That’s like playing Russian Roulette every day for three years and being shocked on the day it kills you.

His mother is seeking unspecified damages… for her son’s lost future earnings.

Well look at the bright side Nintendo, the man couldn’t possibly have made much money since he had no job as we’ve established.

Yeah yeah I know – this lawsuit will never even see the light of a courtroom as it’s obviously some poverty-striken spinster who’s been taken in by some lawyer, but I just figured it would be fun to pick it apart this morning.

There’s conflicting reports as to whether or not MP3 is destroying the music industry. My take is: if MP3 destroys the music industry, the industry deserves it.

Im ny opinion, the single saddest example of how lame the music industry is, and how lame the American Conumer is, is O-Town. O-Town is, of course, the latest (?) boy band to be churned out by the boy band factory that is Lou Perlman. Perlman’s (two) credits include Backstreet Boys and N’Sync. Bad enough that no talent clods are selling millions of albums to mastubatory prepubescent teen girls, but at least the public was saved the trauma of having to watch how heartless and souless the process of manufacturing a music group is. But with O-Town we actually watched the process unfold on a freaking television game show. ABC’s Making the Band was a Survivor-esque reality show that whittled down a crowd of boys to the five members of O-Town. O-Town’s lone claim to fame is that Corporate America placed them on a pedestal and stated “they’re Celebrities because we said so”. The final irony is that there’s a second season of Making the Band, but ABC didn’t pick it up – MTV is airing it. ABC decided enough was enough on airing low rated prerecorded reality shows. They aired every episode of The Mole, which I actually quite liked, despide the fact that it was habitually low rated. They decided to cancel Mole 2 three epsiodes into its run, so no one will ever know who won that one.

To the music industry, I’ll make you a deal: keep coming up with shit like O-Town and I’ll keep stealing music. Deal?

Human nature is weird. Ever notice how we tend to only want to hang around with people like us? When you break it down to that one fact, it’s easy to see why we have things like racism and sexism – it’s not ignorance, it’s kinda like nature. I have black friends, but I don’t invite them to my house. This isn’t because I don’t like black people, I just don’t. There are those who would say this is racist. I talk to women in public, but I don’t invite them over to my house, and people don’t call me sexist. In light of the fact that I am married, people call me “smart”.

But now I’ve found I have an odd problem wherein I don’t socialize with people the way I used to. I was in an organization called the Corps of Cadets, and for a long time I tended to only hang out with a select group of 25 or so individuals, most of which were guys and almost all of which were my age. Now that College is over, we’ve all moved all over the state/world and we don’t hang out, except for when one of us gets married or more than one of us is in town, and that’s only if we know each other’s phone numbers.

So I’m here at work and I look around at the people here. Once again, I’m struck at how much of a natural priss we all are. Most of the people here are disqualified as potential hang outs for the simple reason that they’re old. Not too old, just old. The guy across the room from me is 30 years older than me, more than twice my age. If I knew someone that was 35 I would probably call them “too old”, at 55 you’re just “old”, not even in the running.

Then there are some people here that are my age, or in the general range thereof, but we don’t hang out. Why? Well, I’m married and they’re not. It’s not like High School where you’d call your friend up and hang out – now there’s laundry to do and things to take care of. When you’d hang out at your friend’s place in High School you’d pay no attention to what their parents were busy doing – now that shit is your job.

Then there’s a guy next door I’m friends with who’s just a year older than me – we send each other funny IM’s all day. He once suggested we go see a movie together and one of these days I might take him up on the idea. Besides the fact that he’s kinda hard to make plans around, there’s also the fact that while he is like me and married, he also has kids. Two of them. Younger people who aren’t married don’t want to hang out with me (I assume) because I’m married and therefore have entered a new bracket, but now there are other married people I don’t tend to want to hang out with because they have children and therefore have entered that next bracket. I guess the next bracket is to get “too old” and then “old”, followed by “elderly” and then “dead”. So what I wind up with is a series of “married couple” friends who just happen to be in the same window as me.

My Wife had a “married couple” friend that I didn’t like to hang out with for the simple reason that they were in their 30’s. I guess the main reason I didn’t like to hang out with them was that they were old and not “like us”. Then on the other side of the fence we have an “unmarried couple” friends who are not only younger than us but also an “unhappy couple” to boot, so we tend to not hang out with them either (especially since they’re “still in school” and so we don’t have that much in common anymore). And for an extra added wrinkle, since my Wife and I are a “happy married couple” we have to be careful of our “recently single friends” or “unhappily married couples”, lest we rub their nose in it.

So does this mean that we’re all naturally arrogant to other people?

What a shitty damn week. Last Sunday morning my Wife woke up sick. By that evening she was fine and I was sick. Not sure if we exchanged illnesses or what. So I skipped Monday. This is only like the second time I’ve been out sick from this job, and the last time I was sick I felt incredibly guilty. I did what we probably all do – I felt a little bit ill and decided to stay home. Sure I could have gone to work – but at that point I wasn’t doing anything mission critical. I’ve had tasks here that I figured were mission critical, so I’ve come to work several times when I felt less than 100% in the last few months. Monday, however, I had no problem staying home, since I was sick – no doubt about it.

Tuesday I went to work and when I got home I took a nap – and woke up with 100.5°. I skipped out Wednesday, and went back on Thursday, and came home nearly dead. I had to skip out on Friday. Three non consecutive days off – which is ironic since if I had just stayed home Tuesday I could probably have licked it. The most violent, hacking cough I have had in years, a need to take this horribly bitter Benadryl, an inability to sleep due to the pain of breathing, this bizarre tastebuds trick where everything tastes a little bit like vomit – you name it. This past week sucked.

There’s this guy at work here that I don’t like. Well that’s not entirely true, I do like him – everyone does, to some extent. He’s a real likeable person. Person. Not a worker. He never does any work. I can’t think of a time when I didn’t see him chatting it up or browsing the web. Now, sitting here and making a blog post I figure I’m hardly worker of the year, but this is on occasion for me – this guy does nothing. Then he asks me for help on something he should have had down ages ago. I’ve been here for a year, he’s been here for close to two years, and I know more stuff than him.

It used to really bother me that this guy was still here. There used to be more people working with him but they systematically all went on to bigger/better things. I figured for sure he would get canned as he was “hiding” behind those people, but nope. The part that bothered me was that it seemed to me that if this individual was still here that means that this job doesn’t care what you do – meaning then that it also didn’t notice if you were doing good instead of bad. I’ve recieved enough praise on my performance to let me know that this last little bit isn’t true, but I’m not so sure this job cares about bad performance.

Last August or so everyone got a 4% raise. Everyone but me – as it turns out you had to have been here a year to get it. This means that this person got a raise for no other reason than being in a nice little rut and no one noticing him. It really ticked me off – until the next month everyone got their titles changed and mine carried that 4% raise. Today, however, this person informed me that he has now moved to a better parking lot because – you guessed it – he’s been here long enough. I’m not sure where I stand on that list but it’s just another annoying example of how the system here works – just stick around long enough and you get everything – even if you don’t deserve it.

Perhaps I’ll get that promotion soon. Oh well, it could be worse – at least I don’t have to live in goddamn cubicle land.