the half week in review

This morning the light rail station's parking was full by 7:20 am. Three floors, over 400 parking spaces or something, and they were all taken. I'm glad that everyone's excited about public transportation, but I could usually find a parking space on the first floor, and always on the second, before this darn lightrail started. I enjoy the frequency of the train, but if it's going to get me to work half an hour LATER on the days I have to drive to a different station, I'd rather have the express bus back, thank you very much.

Yesterday Steve Jobs made posted an open letter to the digital music community on Apple's website. Responding to absolutely-true allegations that Apple's Digital Rights Management software is keeping people with iPods from buying music from places other than the iTunes music store, Jobs said that the DRM is necessary to placate uppidy recording labels who wouldn't let their music be sold online without it. Jobs goes on to say that the music sold by the iTunes store amounts to about 3% on any iPod, so it's not really a problem, and that he'd really love to sell music without any DRM at all. DRM is about the worst thing to enter our post-napster world besides law suits against 80 year old men and 9 year old girls, so this is pretty exciting news. Hopefully there will be some serious and significant pressure on the big 4 recording companies to get with the times and make their songs available as open mp3's.

I started reading "Wise Blood" by Flannery O'Connor this week after hearing some really amazing quotes from her other works. I'm almost done, and I can't make much sense of the book so far. It contains lots of allusions to southern culture that I don't understand and lots of characters who have absolutely incoherent conversations. Any Flannery Fans out there who'd care to explain a little more about it?

That's about it from here for today. No exciting news, no weird muffin stories, and, worst of all, no funny videos. Sorry about that - I just haven't seen any lately. I just haven't.