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Happy Birthday, Du
My little brother Mark turns seventeen today. Seventeen! It doesn’t seem that long ago that the two of us were creating our massive Lego setups in the basement. Yet here we are, growing up and hurtling through life like rockets at escape velocity. For a while the five-year difference between us seemed more like a…
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Graduated Yet?
Even though I walked across the stage at the beginning of what is now last month, I still haven’t actually graduated. I more or less fell into a trap of my own making, because at the beginning of the semester I decided I wanted to get credit for my research internship again. This involves a…
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To Arr is Pirate
The voting results are in and the Swedish Pirate Party has gotten at least one seat, probably two, in the European Parliament. You’ve really got to hand it to these guys: they’ve done a lot of work to get to this point. In only three years they’ve gone from a startup political party established groups…
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Farewell to an Old Friend
At long last, the good ol’ 1984 Toyota Tercel has been retired from the Castello household. It’s been through quite a lot over the years, from getting me through my driving test to hauling massive quantities of stuff to and from residences on the UMBC campus. The past year has been pretty difficult for it:…
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Music, Evolved
I have been talking about the evolution of content distribution in my last couple of posts, and I’ve pulled together some thoughts about how this has affected the music industry specifically. Robert Heinlein said it best in his 1939 novel, Life-Line: “There has grown in the minds of certain groups in this country the idea…
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The “Right” to Get Paid?
The concept of an artist’s “right to get paid” for their efforts inevitably arises in any discussion of filesharing and the future of the web. The thought is that artists have worked hard for what they’ve produced and as a result, should be guaranteed some kind of compensation. Following this is the idea that if…
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Deconstructing Michael Lynton
For those of you who missed it, Michael Lynton is the venerable Charmain and CEO of MPAA member studio Sony Pictures entertainment who said, in words that are destined to be etched on the monument to the Days That Were, that “I’m a guy who sees nothing good having come from the Internet. Period.” He’s…
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Terminator Sacrificed for Dollhouse
As a follow-up to my previous post, Dollhouse’s companion show, Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles, has been canceled instead. According mouthpiece Kevin Reilly, “It was not an either or [with Dollhouse]…ultimately, we made the bet on Dollhouse, so that’s it for [Sarah Connor]…” Of course, that’s doublespeak for “We had a choice between two failing…
Matter, Energy, and Life of Michaela A. Castello.