Matter, Energy, and Life of Michaela A. Castello.

Category: Life

Short (and long) reads extracted from my personal life.

  • The Corporate Sense of Entitlement

    IP apologists like to say that people such as myself who don’t like seeing ads, installing malware on our computers, or paying for copies of an infinite good have a “sense of entitlement” to content. As you might have guessed, I think this is hogwash. Corporations and content creators have gotten used to controlling the…

  • Not Consumers, but Customers

    Last week, Ars Technica and Gawker Media realized that the role played by so-called “consumers” has been changing. The simplistic web advertising models they rely on worked great when visitors had no choice but to consume the advertising “impressions” loaded on every page. As people take back the power to be customers instead, even normally…

  • Remember Pyrrhus? Yeah, This is Kind of Like Him

    Yesterday people both on- and offline were crowing about how Pink Floyd “won” a legal battle with their record label, EMI. At last, the band can force their fans to buy digital versions of their songs as full albums, rather than individual tracks. Wait, what? This was worth fighting over? Amidst an industry segment in…

  • Palm Trees and Snowy Mountains

  • RAS Syndrome

    Redundant Acronym Syndrome syndrome: people incur it all the time. They say an acronym but repeat the final word as well: DVD disc, ATM machine, ISBN number. Were the acronym to be fully expanded, they’re duplicating that final word and saying “digital versatile disc disc.” This used to aggravate me immensely, but the other day…

  • Whoopsie

    Remember Ubisoft’s amazing new DRM scheme? The one that would stop all those nefarious “pirates” by forcing legitimate purchasers of Ubisoft games to be constantly online? Yeah, well, it got cracked. Mere hours after the release, at that. I know it’s a bit of a potshot, but I just couldn’t resist. It didn’t take a…

  • Missing the Point

    It looks like a few suits over at Penguin publishing decided to “connect with this whole internet thingy” by turning their eBooks into applications. Because what’s missing when you read a book is a little self-contained social network / entertainment platform. This is the kind of mistake that stems directly from the mistaken idea that…

  • Not Enough Hours

    Like just about everybody else, I often feel like there aren’t enough hours in the day to accomplish everything I want to do. Short of jettisoning my internal clock with something like the 28-hour day (and I can see my lab’s circadian expert shuddering from here), the best I can do is try to manage…