Here’s a photo of Phyllis and I outside of the Ely Cathedral. I visited Phyllis over my Thanksgiving break.
I am becoming a bit nervous about Apple’s future. They are sitting on some great products, but I’m not sure that Apple’s current strategy is in its best long-term interests. My particular concern is with Apple’s unwillingness to liscense their DRM technology to other device manufacturers. I love the AAC codec and I love the iTunes Music store… but the music industry has too much power to be limited to a single distributer. There is a lot of music out there which is not available through iTunes, and if people cannot get the music they want from iTunes, and when cheap and good alternatives to the iPod exist, people will drift away from Apple’s iPod/iTunes music platform.
I am fully aware that the iPod is the best-selling portable music player currently on the market, and that Apple is reaching out to those that cannot afford an iPod with the iPod Shuffle, but I think pretty soon Apple is going to have to open up the AAC format to other distributers, or else risk eroding it’s market share.
Came across a very funny error 404 page today:
I’ve come really close to purchasing a new computer in the last couple days. This may seem excessive in light of the fact that the Yale physics department furnished me with a new computer just 3 months ago, but the desire isn’t for the computer itself. No, my desire is being fueled by the growing list of computer games that I want to play, but that I cannot because I don’t have a computer which meets the minimum system requirements. This list includes: Call of Duty, Splinter Cell: Pandora Tomorrow, Max Payne 2, Doom 3, City of Heroes, Far Cry, and most importantly, Half-Life 2. This last game is what has brought this issue to a head in the last couple days. My desire to play this game has me pricing out various different configurations of gaming machines.
Alas, I have decided to hold off until I finish some of the current games that I own. The games which I own, but which I have not finished, include: Half-Life, Black and White, Warcraft III, Max Payne, Splinter Cell, and Freedom Force. I know, I know… it’s been 5 years since Half-Life came out and I still haven’t finished it. But, I have a good excuse, I was 70% done 6 months after it came out (I was too busy playing multiplayer to bother with finishing the single player game), then I reformatted my computer. I had backed up my saved games, but when I copied them back onto the machine, I could not get the saved games to load. Frustrated, I eventually erased the save games. Approximately one year later, I discovered that the reason my games wouldn’t load was that I needed to change the file permissions to read/write (files burned to CD are automatically tagged as read-only).
Then this thing called college got in the way, which left almost no time for video games. I did finish a couple others in the meantime, such as Jedi Knight II, then I got into consoles and played through Final Fantasy X and VII, Halo, Lord of the Rings: Return of the King, etc. But mainly I got in the habit of starting to play a lot of games, and not finishing any of them. Hence the large pile of unfinished games. Anyway, as the list of games that I want to buy keeps growing, I resolved to finish some of the ones I currently own first. Consequently, I started playing Half-Life again about a month ago. I started over, and I’m now about 80% through the game.
I don’t know how long I can resist buying a new computer. It doesn’t help when people like Lawrence keep telling me, “oh, just buy yourself a sweet gaming machine!” I just might, Lawrence, I just might…
I changed the address of the site this morning to http://www.blakerobertjohnson.com/. This signals the end of the needcollegestuff.com project. It’s really a shame that nothing ever came of NCS, but I can’t say I didn’t try.