This will be offline tonight as I import everything into WordPress. Come back tomorrow and read some fine content why don’t you?

Jon W. Sparks was kind enough to make mention of this article from the L.A. Times on his blog, and I’ll do the courtesy of making the same mention. Having just finished working on a movie with Craig, I was surprised to learn that nobody has been paid a dividend from the $9 million distribution buy-out for Hustle & Flow. According to the story, that would be nobody except for the producer John Singleton. It seems like a very difficult situation for everyone involved, and an excellent point is made in the article by John himself: “This is a matter of business.” I’ll make no comment other than to suggest you read the story and make your own inferences.

I hope for a positive resolution for everyone involved.

There’s no way it’s too early to start asking about things I’d like for the holidays. While I sit here waiting for two more people to complete free iPod referrals and playing Dell’s instant win game waiting for the Dellf to bring me something swell, I realized that Christmas is probably on everyone’s mind this year for a number of reasons. I’m the first to admit, I do want peace on earth and goodwill towards mankind. I want people to donate to charity and help out those in need because it’s been a tough year for so many of our fellow man.

But I have some basic needs of my own.

Mind you, I have come to realize that I have fairly simple needs. Part of 2006′s pre-planning for me is about dreaming big and living simple. In accordance with that, I have a few small wishes and needs from the people I know and love. I’m going to go ahead and link you to my X-Mas wish lists, and if things come up that I need, I’ll add them here.

This has been a very tough year financially in a number of spots. Despite what you may think, internet jobs only pay if you work for a big company and the movie business only pays you if you’re at the top. I’m nobody special, I’m just like everyone else in the world, working my fingers to the bone scraping to get by. I’m not complaining, mind you, because at a personal level my successes in 2005 have been many. This has been the year that put me on the path, and I’m grateful for so many opportunities. So many of the things on my list are in service of 2006′s plans. If you think you’d like to buy me something on one of these wish lists, I’d love you forever and I’d probably be indebted to you for at least that long.

If you have a used iPod, laptop or digital camera lying around that you’d like to donate, I’ll gladly take it off your hands and put it to good use. Barring that, here’s some of my needs (and wants) for 2005.

My Froogle wish list can be found here for you to look thru. If you want to buy something from this list, be sure and email me to let me know so I can tell someone else not to buy it for me. If there’s something that you’d like for Christmas this year, leave a comment here and (if I can afford to do it), I will do my best. But I warn you now: it’s going to be a regifting/handmade Christmas for me.

Good tidings to all, and to all a good night.

It should have come to pass a long time ago that Memphis developed and all-ages scene worth giving a crap about. There has kind of always been one here, but it lies just on the outer edges of things. It’s shrouded in its kind of mystery in no small part because, well, “all-ages” seems to connotate to those who don’t know any better, in the words of someone I know, “a bunch of loudmouthed, bitchy, dirty, smelly kids bouncing off the walls to garbagecore”. So, the “adults” don’t care or get involved very much with their scene. These “kids”, being kids, have a healthy distrust of the people around them who spend more time trying to shut them out than to give them a hand.

While “the adults” are focusing too much on the bad apples and refusing to harvest the rest, your loss is someone else’s gain. I’m here to tell you: the all-ages scene is out in force to prove you’re on the wrong mission.

Among the other “all-ages” venues in Memphis, The New Daisy (an amazing venue that appears to be on its way back) is buried down on Beale Street which makes getting in and out very difficult and parking expensive. Then there is The Skate Park Of Memphis, is really in Cordova and, to be quite honest, I’m not a fan of Cordova and I dont want to venture out that way unless I have to. Had it not been for wanting to get out of the house Friday night, I might have completely skipped the show I decided to attend. Chuck Vicious has been doing a consistent and impressive job booking all-ages shows at Pho Hoa Binh on Madison, and I wish I could have stayed for Tofu Fest on Saturday night (if you saw me there, you’d know I wasn’t feeling too good when I showed up). But while PHB has a fantastic sound system, they can’t handle the sheer volume of people associated wtih a huge touring band.

Anyways, I had been to The Complex in its previous life and was none too impressed. The venue needed a lot, and the City of Memphis thought so too. What I discovered when I went back was much more than I, or probably the city itself, ever bargained for: an amazing venue that people had completely and needlessly overlooking because of that pesky term “all-ages”.

It’s a full service restaurant serving authentic Mexican food. I hear, from many others, that they even serve breakfast! They have a full bar and a stage with an excellent sound system. The room comfortably holds 500 people. It’s on Madison right across from the original Sam Phillips Recording Studio (around the corner from Sun Studios), and it’s in close proximity to the UT Memphis campus. And for big shows like the Against Me!/The Epoxies/Smoke or Fire/The Soviettes Fall Tour, they even had security from off-duty Memphis & Shelby County Police. The result: a great venue perfect for touring bands where they can have an excellent crowd without too much overhead and stellar food.

I’m not sure what more you could ask for. Okay just one thing: better parking?

To the people in Memphis who have been working to bring the all-ages scene together (there are so many), they have given it a new life and deserve recognition for their effort. The best way you can do that: go to shows and support the venues and the bands.

Against Me! was phenomenal, and The Epoxies put on a great live show. There were no fights that I witnessed, I only saw two people get kicked out, and the rest was just fun. Everyone who showed up had a good time.

But to make the night even more fascinating, as soon as that show was over The Complex hosted a free dancehall reggae and hip hop DJ night featuring DJ Redeye Jedi from Tunnel Clones! I got all my musical food groups — Hip-Hop, Punk, Reggae, Hardcore, New Wave — all in one comfortable seating. After dancing to some hot grooves, I rolled over to the Young Avenue Deli to finish up the night with 3/4ths of the boys from Lucero, all of Against Me!, and a whole crew of people.

I’ll probably put up a live review of the show over at Scenestars here shortly. For now, here’s a bunch of pictures from the night. I had a great time Friday night hanging out with everyone I ran into. Now you can see what you’ve been missing out on as well.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation published a list of all known Sony-BMG products that contain the “rootkit” technology I’ve been writing about. Here’s what they have so far:

Trey Anastasio, Shine (Columbia)
Celine Dion, On ne Change Pas (Epic)
Neil Diamond, 12 Songs (Columbia)
Our Lady Peace, Healthy in Paranoid Times (Columbia)
Chris Botti, To Love Again (Columbia)
Van Zant, Get Right with the Man (Columbia)
Switchfoot, Nothing is Sound (Columbia)
The Coral, The Invisible Invasion (Columbia)
Acceptance, Phantoms (Columbia)
Susie Suh, Susie Suh (Epic)
Amerie, Touch (Columbia)
Life of Agony, Broken Valley (Epic)
Horace Silver Quintet, Silver’s Blue (Epic Legacy)
Gerry Mulligan, Jeru (Columbia Legacy)
Dexter Gordon, Manhattan Symphonie (Columbia Legacy)
The Bad Plus, Suspicious Activity (Columbia)
The Dead 60s, The Dead 60s (Epic)
Dion, The Essential Dion (Columbia Legacy)
Natasha Bedingfield, Unwritten (Epic)
Ricky Martin, Life (Columbia) (labeled as XCP, but, oddly, our disc had no protection)

Also of note, according to the EFF, “Sseveral other Sony-BMG CDs are protected with a different copy-protection technology, sourced from SunnComm, including:

My Morning Jacket, Z
Santana, All That I Am
Sarah McLachlan, Bloom Remix Album”

The best thing for you to do if you’ve purchased one of these titles but have not attempted to play it on your Windows-based computer: click here for detailed instructions on preventing infection of your computer with the potentially dangerous rootkit.

If you have already attempted to play one of these titles on your Windows-based computer, click here to download the patch which disables the XCP patch.

In response to public outcry, Sony BMG Music Entertainment has agreed to stop selling music CD’s that carry “anti-piracy“, or rootkit technology, to consumers worldwide. The anti-piracy features which Sony had been including on new music titles creates even broader security risks to those who use the CD’s, including leaving a listener’s computer vulnerable to hackers.

Since the discovery of the security holes on October 31st by Mark Russinovich, chief software architect at Winternals Software, the word of the technology leak has spread broadly throughout the tech and consumer world. The “XCP” technology, which affects users of Windows-based computers only, was intended to keep purchasers from making more than a certain number of copies of the CD. The technology also prevents users from loading the songs from the CD onto an iPod while leaving the opportunity open for loading songs to owners of Windows Media Player-compatible portable media players.

The extent of damage to home computer users is not known at this time, but the technology was only present on 20 popular music titles at the time the decision was made to stop including it. Fortunately, some leading antivirus manufacturers began including the Sony XCP technology for recognition in their virus definitions as potentially malicious, enabling it to be detected as a virus and to be disabled.

Sony has neither made admittance of wrongdoing nor has any offer for replacement or refund been made to any purchasers of CD’s which contain the XCP Technology. Thousands of the discs are still in CD stores at this time. Sony has no plans to recall those music CD’s at this time, but they began making a patch available for download on their website which purports to fix security holes left by the discs. But some computer experts have reported that the patch not only does not work but may cause more crashes and potentially further damage.

The best bet for all concerned: DO NOT PURCHASE ANY Sony/BMG products until they discontinue all copies of CD’s carrying this technology. Send a message back to the company that you don’t like being treated like a criminal for giving them your hard-earned money.

I’m sure by now, everyone is familiar with RSS Feeds and how you can have a desktop appliance to aggregate, or collect, updates from your favorite websites and blogs to your computer as they happen. Any good website or blog has an RSS feed. Yes, even I have one right here you can subscribe to my site with if you use an aggregator.

Well what if you’re far away and you don’t have your computer? What if you dont want to have to set all that stuff up again time after time? NetVibes handles it all for you. It’s a completely interchangeable web-based desktop aggregator that is easy to organize. Once you add a feed, you can arrange it in the order you want to see it by clicking on the feed, dragging it to where you want to view it on your page, and NetVibes remembers your personal settings.

It can act as your home page for your browser, complete with instant email checking, a number of excellent built-in options (including easy connectivity with your del.icio.us bookmarks, Flickr photos, or Gmail accounts), a feed directory you can browse through to find web feeds you’re interested in, and a customizable header.

Mind you, NetVibes is only a couple of months old — officially it’s still in Beta. But when you see how nice this webtop appliance is, how quickly it works, and how it is accesible from any place that has internet connectivity, you’ll want to play around with it and see how it works for you.

I like this thing a lot. No spam, no pop up ads, nothing (at least not yet). If you understand how to set up RSS feeds, then go set up your own NetVibes and check it out.

It appears that the hubris of the recording industry sees no end, and an ever-growing number of CD’s out there contain malware sufficient to cause damage to your home computer — PC or Mac. The list of CD’s out there containing music industry malware, or “copy-protected” CD’s, are not always disclosed to the general buying public. In fact, according to the Campaign For Digital Rights, many manufactured CD’s fail to contain any warning that they are copy protected, and a listening public turning more and more towards playing CD’s in places other than a stereo (such as their home computer) are stuck with the results: discs that won’t play, lock up your machine, or cause damage to the machine itself requiring costly repairs.

In the end, you may not even be able to get a refund on one of these CD’s from the retailer where you purchased it, meaning lost money from computer repairs and no guarantee of satisfaction as to the quality of the CD you purchased from the store.

You have rights as a consumer that are being violated, and nobody really seems to care. But there are lists going around on the internet that will keep you informed of what CD’s are listed as “Copy Protected” even if there is no warning label or sticker attached. Click here and here for two seperate lists that will help keep you from falling into the industry’s lack of consideration of the consumer and help you to enjoy the music you actually purchased.