Stray Hawkeye

I’ve decided that posting this around New Year’s is now a tradition as well:

Also, you know what I’m looking forward to about the New Year’s Eve celebrations next year?  Seeing how they’re going to make those stupid plastic eye glasses where the frames are in the shape of the year out of a 2011.  Maybe everyone will have to ring in the New Year with only one eye open and the whole celebration all around the world will be pirate themed.  Happy New Yarrrrrr!

Previously here and here.

• Expired
• Starry Nite
• The Kraken
• Ambition
• Making Conversation
• Season’s Greetings

I was planning to post a youtube video of a song that I heard recently, really like, and have stuck in my head.  However, when I found the song on the singer’s official youtube channel (I like to link to the official versions so the artists get the page hits and all of that) it has embedding disabled.  So I can’t post it here.  Yes, I could link to it, and send you over to youtube, but I’m not, because this made me mad.  I’d like to promote a small independent band, give them free publicity.  But they put up a block to make it harder for me to share it with you.

Side / technical rant:

What really makes me mad on the internet is people trying to prevent sharing.  The whole internet is sharing.  It’s what the whole thing is based on.  And (RIAA come get me you bastards) it’s based on making copies.  Now, to be clear, I’m all for attributing work, and making sure the people who create things get the credit/cash (double meaning intended) for it, but we need to recognize the underlying technology here (to say nothing of the social aspect).  Everything you’ve ever looked at on the internet (with very, very few technical exceptions that I won’t get in to) is a copy.  Every time you visit a website, you don’t actually look at it where it lives, you make a copy of it on your computer, and look at it on your computer.  What actually happens when you go to a website is this.  Your computer sends out a request over the network.  This request itself is copied many, many times around the network until it gets to a computer where the files live that you’re looking for.  When your request makes it to the computer that has the web page you’re looking for, that computer knows to break up the files you’re looking for, and send them to you in little pieces.  These little pieces (packets) then get copied many, many times to get them across the network back to you.  Each picture and bit of text gets broken up,  and copied from one computer to the next until it gets to you.  Once at the bits for a given part of the web page get to you (for instance all the part of the background image), your computer puts them back together into an exact copy of the one on the computer where the website lives.  And then, your browser puts all the images and text and dancing bunnies together, and displays them for you.  you don’t get to see anything on the internet until you have made a copy of it on your computer.

Everything we call The Internet, is just a way of describing and organizing this copying of files from one computer to the next.

</rant><vengeance>

So, since this band didn’t want me to embed the nicely done, well recorded, professional, studio version of their song that is catchy and gets stuck in your head, I looked around a bit.  I found a video of them doing the song live backstage at some show and sounding about as good as your average Stairway to Heaven playing college student after coming back from the bars and screaming all night, and looking about as good/sane too.  Don’t want to make giving you free publicity easy?  Fine.  Free mocking is even easier, and embeddable:

The lyrics are still funny, but it’s amazing what a recording studio can do. </vengeance><random association theatre>

The above clip also makes me think of Benny and Joon:

And yes, that is Captain Jack Sparrow.

Let see you go Norwegian indie rocker to Disney ride in fewer steps.