re: Downloading Music
Posted by Pavan Chander | Filed under Friends, Media
Ian just wrote a post about his brother coming to grips with the legality of downloading music, and I felt an opinion of mine should see the light of an LCD screen. Your eyes will thank me later.
Or at least I hope so - if you’re still using a CRT please, purchase invest in an LCD screen.
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But here’s a potential problem when switching from a download mentality, to a purchase mentality.
Purchasing every song either detracts from genre experimentation, by forcing the consumer to choose tracks wisely and with more thought, or it puts a huge hole into ones pocket every month because of excessive track downloading/purchasing. When you have spent the last [however many years] with the attitude that if you like that song, you can just go grab it and listen away, it will be hard to have to stop and think about whether its good enough that its worthy of spending a dollar on. Or $10 if you’re like me and want to get the whole album to keep things organised and complete.
In an ideal situation, one could maybe learn from the movie industry and the success of Blockbuster and the like. While it may sound silly, the ability to “rent” an album for a period of a month or maybe even longer could prove to be a huge success.
Because, personally speaking, a lot of the time I find that I like a certain track or artist, but after a few weeks of repetitive listening I’ve lost their taste. After which I might not care about the album anymore, but at least I would have been able to make an informed decsion as to whether to officially own it or not.
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It’s definitely a thought.
Which century are we in?
Posted by Pavan Chander | Filed under Friends
Yes, I realize thats a rhetorical question, as any google search will immediately tell you the answer is the 21st.
But how could you convince someone of that fact when they see 2008 to mean the 20 century because 2000 must mean the 20th century.
Well I just spent the last 45 min trying to do just that to no avail. Even after trying various methods of explaining it, from drawing the similarity of the education system and “grades”, to talking about which century the years 1-100 are in.
We got to agreeing that the years 1-100 are included in the first century, but then he insists that the next hundred years (the years 101-200) are also part of the 1st century. Which if you can count, means that the 1st century is actually comprised of 200 years…which contradicts the definition of a century.
I think the whole issue stems from understanding that there is no 0th century. Which means that year 1-100 are indeed the 1st century, not the 0th. Which I agree is a bit of a challenging way of thinking at 2:30 AM, so I’ll give him some slack.
I think one of the easiest ways of relating to the concept is by talking about a particular year, where one would have been in grade XX. If we take grade 12 in our example that means that have finished only 11 years of education, as they started in grade 1 NOT grade 0. So one could say that we are in the 21st century, because we have completed 20 hundred years, and we are now in the 21st set of hundred years.
Either way, it’s not really a topic that I plan on spending too much time trying to elaborate on.
There are only a fixed number of times you can say the world is round, until you have to just wait for them to discover that fact by themselves :P
