Digital Music: Why It Sucks March 31, 2008
Posted by fredcharles in Uncategorized.8 comments
My first musical disaster happened a long time ago while I was living with my parents. I woke up to find that my basement had flooded, ruining over 200+ albums that I had accumulated. All of my original Yes, Genesis, Iron Maiden, Black Sabbath, Alice Copper were gone. Not to mention a load of others that were out of print.
I still lament over the loss of my record collection. Even back then, it would have cost me thousands to replace them. When I lost my records, CDs were already available. I ended up replacing all of my vinyl on CD.
This past weekend, I suffered another music disaster. My hard drive, containing no less than 12000 songs. At first, I didn’t panic. Most of the songs on that drive were copied from my CD collection, which remains intact. Still, there were still several albums that I purchased from iTunes that were lost on the drive.
I still remained calm. I have some of those albums backed up on CD and the rest were on my iPod. There are programs that allow you to pull files from your iPod and load them back to your computer.
One thing of note, Apple does NOT allow you to re-download your music. You download it once and that’s it. If you lose it, you are SOL. To be honest, this policy sucks. They have a record of everything that I downloaded, why not let me just pull the files down again?
The final part of the disaster struck yesterday when my iPod got wiped. I’m not sure how this happened. One minute, all of my songs were there and the next minute…gone.
So now, I don’t have any backups of those albums. Now I’m pissed.
Since Apple does will not allow me to download these albums again, I’ve vowed never to purchase digital music again. Sorry, but I’ll keep my hard copy CDs.
If music is going to become completely digital, then these companies need to come up with some kind of policy that allows customers to get their music back in case of a disaster. Even if I could get the last 6 months of purchases back, I would be happy.
So let this be a lesson to you:
1. Whenever you buy music online, make a hard copy or two.
2. Read the policies of that store before you buy.
3. Pray that CDs never go away…
Breaking the (Writing) Law! March 22, 2008
Posted by fredcharles in Writing.Tags: orson scott card, Writing
2 comments
I’ve learned many things about writing over the years. You can read every book about writing on the earth, but you really won’t learn anything unless you do it. Even though most writing books contain the same core principals, you will never figure out what works for you until you actually do some writing.
The funny thing is that the authors of these books will tell you one thing, then break the rules in their own books. I’ve caught several known authors giving advice in their own writing books, and then doing exactly what they said not to do in their novels. My classic example of this is Orson Scott Card. In his excellent book How to Write Science Fiction and Fantasy, tells the young writer not to start a novel off with a prologue. The next book that I picked from Card started off with a prologue, of course.
Over time, you learn that breaking the rules is part of writing. It’s kind of liberating sometimes to use one of those dirty adverbs or to use some type of formatting that you were told to never use, but somehow just works. Sometimes breaking the rules will set you apart from the rest of those law-abiding writers out there.
I’m not saying to overdo it. I’m just saying that sometimes a well placed crime in your writing may do you some good.
