I had been experiencing the usual withdrawel symptoms of not writing and for the first time this semester, I felt like I had the opportunity to write something. The piece I wrote was a bit of a gamble, but I ran with it. Who knows, this could be the third accurate prediction I’ve ever made or it could be the first big prediction I’ve ever made that is going to fall flat. As with my previous predictions, it’s not something I just pull out of thin air, but rather something that takes long study and a round of all the plausiblities and measuring the odds of what’s going to happen (not an easy task to say the least).

My prediction is essentially that ACTA is going to lose teeth simply because of all the different opinions going around within ACTA and where it should go among other things. I think that a vision of complete chaos and filibustering would really explain why all the secrecy is going on because that would wreck some images amongst pro-copyright maximalist camps. I can expect some disagreement within the details as that’s just a normal part of online commenting, but I feel that the overall point of view is actually sound at this point that there is reason to doubt the extremes ACTA was originally intended to go. The question really is, how flat is this thing going to go?

I will readily admit that I was among the first to sound the alarms about ACTA, but naturally, it was because it was a huge threat to what we know today at that time. As things went along with various events happening throughout the process, I can admit that there are reasons to doubt that ACTA would live up completely to copyright extremists expectations. Of course, until this point, that was very hard to see.

I’ve been really busy with school as of late. In fact, I’ve had hardlyh any time to do much outside of school.

Still, I got a rare opportunity that couldn’t happen at a more odd part of the year - I learned a tonne about DJing in front of a live audience. This was the second time I’ve ever had that opportunity and, shockingly, all this was school related.

There’s plenty of good lessons I learned including how to properly beatmatch music (which, for a while, I never had the chance to try and fix, let alone sit down and figure it out). I can say it makes a heck of a lot of difference DJing with fully beatmatched music even though it takes several hours of pre-show prep to pull off.

I also learned what it’s like to DJ with an actual MIDI controller. Yes, it’s 100 times better than DJing with a mouse despite what kind of problems that can occur in the process. I’m hoping to hang out with this other DJ that’s been teaching me all this fancy stuff more as time goes on. While I’m more in to producing, he’s more in to live shows, so I think we can do a bit of trading off of stuff here and there.

I couldn’t pass up on an opportunity like this since live shows are going to be a big part of my career as a producer if/when things keep going the way they are going.

Oh yeah, the audience response was pretty much entirely positive of the performance even though I had minimal practice with the MIDI controller. A lot of it was “I’ve never heard of this music before, but I love it!” and some of it was, “I didn’t think I’d like that kind of music.” In essense, similar reaction to my first live show and my old radio show. No one believes me when I say electronica has good music until I get them listen to it. I remember some of the priceless reactions being, “OK, what’s the song called again?” over the years which, when it comes from someone who was telling me 5 minutes earlier that all forms of “techno” (their term, not mine) is crap, is bordering on hilarious in a positive way. Maybe chalk it up to too many years of listening to top 40?

I’m also already looking forward to Summer as time goes on because that’s when I can actually get back in to writing a lot again. It’s just that writing will always be there waiting for me to come back, but school is either a “you are committed” or a “your not going to get very far” kind of thing that lasts only a certain period of time. School will eventually be over, but journalism can last a whole lifetime.

Anyway, just letting everyone know I’m still hanging about, just more infrequently than usual is all.

For some reason (well, it only happens once a year for such a release) I forgot to set some of my files to “release” to help with initial distribution. It happens every year where the queue lines just jump up in size for everything I’ve been sharing.

I’ve set the 2009 RAR file to release to help some users move up in the lines. Several other older files should be better distributed anyway.

The good news is that a few users probably have the file by now to help speed up distribution. Still, I know the ED2K/KAD network enough to know that issues such as “three complete users and no upload, 50 users and three parts missing” happen, so I’ll keep the file on release for a while long after the first few completions.

So, just a notice to let everyone know I’m trying.

PS: I’ve had the odd crash here and there, so if I inexplicably go offline on a rare occasion for an hour or so, that’s probably why.

A small milestone compared to previous ones (quarter of a million), but my music download release hit 275,000 downloads late last night. Yay!

There may be a problem with the 2009 release pack, but the problem is minor. I created the M3U files while I was in the planning phase just so I could move from temporary song order to “set in stone” order.

While I had the M3U playing, I was reworking the file-names to add some order to it (ala what song went next, etc.) I tested the M3U afterwards and everything played fine. So I packed everything and uploaded it all.

That was two days ago.

I opened up the M3U file today and all but two songs could play properly in the shared directory. So I went to the test directory where I saved everything thinking it may be a directory issue of some sort, but when I opened up the M3U file in the test directory, it was the same error.

There’s nothing I can really do now that the files are out there, but I do know not to use WMP to make final M3U’s in the future. Lesson learned!

So if you’re wondering why the M3U files won’t play the music properly in the 2009 pack, my best guess is that they are simply pointing to old file names, though that doesn’t explain why two seemingly random songs will play properly.

To fix the problem, follow these instructions:

1. Highlight all the songs in the directory (excluding the M3U file)
2. Load up your favorite music player.
3. Save the playlist as an M3U by browsing to that directory, highlighting the old M3U file.
4. Hit save.
5. Say yes to overwriting the file.

In WMP, it’s that pull down menu you go to for saving it above the playlist and to the right of that red ‘X’ (not the ‘X’ that closes the program!)

I appologise for the inconvenience this caused and I will do whatever I can to alleviate the problem in the future. This is the first M3U I created with the latest version of WMP and it turns out that it screws everything up when changing filenames at least.

After what was probably too much time, the 2009 free music download release pack is finally available. eMule users can download it at the usual place: eMule Content Database.

Sorry this took so long, but it has finally arrived!

It’s a 2 disc set (RAR format) featuring 93 minutes of music from me, DJ Frozen IceCube, and other artists also using Creative Commons licenses. The eMule content database also features every track available for individual downloading as well for your convenience.

Enjoy!

It took a while to make it possible (time was really the only factor as I had limited amounts of it to work on this) but I managed to post a double exclusive today. Worked with the EFF as well as Jennifer Urban who both had comments regarding a Sydnor (man that was hard to type out!) posting talking (to put it mildly) about a Study penned by two authors, one of whome I spoke to about the posting.

I’m really happy about this and hope it stirs up some interesting debate.

This is essentially one of the behind the scenes projects I was working on and it came to fruition very nicely. I have the music project to finish and another behind the scenes project to finish up at this point. It’s unfortunate school has taken such a toll on my free time to do these things though, so I can only ask for patience at this time as I work on these projects in the mean time.

Well, I’ve got a bunch of stuff done on the release pack of 09. It’s at this point that I’m really realizing how much school is already taking out of me. In retrospect, writing a 10,000 word article (split in three, but still) wasn’t exactly the best thing to do when energy to write serious and well researched articles become increasingly scarce as real life gradually becomes more demanding.

It sounds lame, but the reality is really being obvious. Either do well online or do well offline. Can’t have both anymore. I know I made sacrifices in the past to keep up the writing pressure online, but the schooling for me at this point has become way too critical to ignore at this stage in the game. That is also why I wasn’t able to simply take an evening and completely put together a release pack and release it by the end of the day or the next day.

That doesn’t mean I haven’t been able to make progress all this time. I’ve got the original content mostly completed and I’ve started work on getting together an awsome additional “disc” for other music. The good news is that I have a fantastic reserve of CC licensed music I gathered all Summer long to pick and choose from. It’s a matter of going back over it and putting together a great compilation.

So what’s left is finishing the second disc, putting extra content in the first disc, putting together the readme’s, packing it and releasing it while submitting the hash values to the content database.

I’ve got a few last minute behind the scenes projects to finish and get up on ZeroPaid as well.

To put this in another way, it’s like running through 3 feet of snow. At first, you can feel the resistence, but you can get through it, but after a while, the run just takes everything out of you.

Good news is that I don’t think anyone really faults me for doing this. There’s a lot to be said for my overall longetivity as a writer in this field and I can always pick up the ball later on and continue to run with it.

A little while ago, I reflected on the past of the Canadian Copyright debate given that more entities are entering the debate these days. The Executive Vice President left an interesting comment on the posting and that was picked up by Michael Geist.

I hope that these last three weeks before I more than likely have to focus on schooling will be a nice last push before I get burried in homework in my last semester of schooling. When I got back into writing during the Christmas holidays, it seemed like I was returning to a bit of a dissappointing low response rate on the articles at the beginning, but as time went on, things picked up on articles I was writing. Leaving for a few months in writing ZP articles looked like a mistake, but acedemically speaking, it was the most brilliant thing I did since the grades I got back were simply amazing (One of my final projects was just a hair shy of 100%)

So, it’s a simple tradeoff - focus on my online career or focus on my offline schooling career more? To be honest, I know I can do great things in both.

I’m hopeful I’ll get an upgraded job out of this - at which point I’ll be able to focus a lot on writing and music production again - this time, it won’t be seasonal efforts finally. I hate working seasonal as I feel way too flakey when I do and it’s way harder to keep trying to re-establish/grow your fan base that way.

Either way, I’m really happy that so many people read ZeroPaid and hope my next project or two on there draws some more interest to the site.

I know, every year it’s always a little later into the new year to release this thing. Well, you already know about the other things I’ve been up to, so you know this is the next thing to tick off on my “to-do” list.

I’ve been pouring over my reserves for CC licensed music and I think from what I’ve got, people will be happy with what I compiled on the Canadian talent for my radio show. I had originally planned to find music every so often whenever I come across it. Unfortunately, that plan hit a snag when I got a million other things tossed on to my plate. The good news is that now that the other things are completed, I don’t really have many major projects underway (minus the secret one I have going on behind the scenes right now )

So the steps are simple for now:

1. Create directories (there’ll be 2 this time)
2. Compile all of my songs and give them a nice flowy order (I wish I could have produced more to be honest)
3. Add M3U of contents in directory.
4. Compile a list of CC licensed music for the second directory.
5. Give them a nice order to flow from one to the other.
6. Make M3U of directory contents.
7. Add appropriate NFOs (really time consuming, but necessary to keep things as legal as possible and have everyone pointed to proper sources of the music)
8. RAR the release.
9. Place in eMule download directory.
10. Put copy of second disc separately as individual files (for easier downloading and users on the eMule network know what’s also in the second pack without having to preview the RAR file which often gives an incomplete list of files until it’s nearly completed)
11. Hash files (automatic in eMule)
12. Dump hash values in eMule Content database web page.
13. Post about it on blog.
14. (optional) pass along directory to Pirate Party of Canada and help seed on BitTorrent.

Yeah, a bit of an involved process. :\

Worth it though!