Keith Olbermann’s Special Comment

I haven’t had much to say politically lately, so here it comes …

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4lxXMOgIT74

MSNBC is clearly “left-leaning”, so it shoud be no surprise where Olbermann comes down on this issue, but that doesn’t make his point any less valid.  The McCain campaign has been surprisingly quiet on the shouts of hatred at the rallies and this is incredibly disturbing.  Down in the polls and down to his last breath as a candidate, McCain continues to disappoint me.

An election cycle ago, McCain was the breath of fresh air to the independent voters.  He was a favorite on the Daily Show.  His “straight talk” and “mavrick” attitude were a welcome chang to the typical politics of Washington.  But he’s sold out.  At this point, he wants to be President so much that he’s abandoned his decency and morals and instead embraced the politics that he was so against in previous years. 

To me, it’s really just sad to see the desperation.  In a way, I feel bad for McCain — he’s in such a state now that he’s unable to really see what’s happened to him.  Every once in a while, I see the old McCain rise to the surface — when addressing the woman who called Obama an Arab and when replying to the man who said that he would be afraid if Obama won the election — he told them to show some respect for Obama and that he had respect for Obama. 

But now it’s just silence.  Shouts of “kill him” from the rallies don’t seem to faze him.  Instead, he’s letting all of this slide in hopes that if he can’t win an election with ideas and ideals, he’ll win an election with fearmongering. 

I believe that after the election, regardless of who wins, McCain may just break down entirely.  I think his career is effectively over if he loses — any respect for him will be lost.  And he just may regain that conscience that he seems to have misplaced, which may be the worst thing that could ever happen to him.

Attempting To Post By E-mail

Okay, I’m not thrilled with this, but at least I fixed some of the problems with the e-mail handling in WordPress.  I find that from time to time I have something to say and I’d like to be able to say it from my mobile phone.  So I’m going to give this e-mail posting thing a try.  I’d prefer some administrative interface on my phone where I can type in a text box and post from there, but no such beast exists, short of www.p2wp.com, which I’m not really that thrilled with.  I’d use something like that, but I want it hosted on my website so I don’t have to give away my password.  So when I have time I’ll write such a beast myself, but for now this’ll have to do until I find something better …

A DRM Free World

From XKCD … my thoughts exactly.  I have been goofing around with a Zune pass and, while I like the general idea of pulling in any sort of music that I want, it’s a little frustrating to know that it’ll disappear once the Zune pass expires.  (There are other frustrations with the Zune pass, but that’s for another post.) 

The interesting question here is one of collection — if everything is available online and you continue to pay a monthly fee to maintain it (assuming the media host doesn’t disappear), what is the value of a personal collection?  Why not just maintain your bits online forever?  That’s much of the thinking behind the Kindle — sure the format’s going to change, but as long as Amazon is around, I’m pretty sure that purchased Kindle content will always be available. 

So what we really do is invest in a company with our subscription services, not in the content itself.  My purchase of Kindle content is really an investment in Amazon.  The problem is that there’s no recurring revenue for the Kindle or books for Amazon, thus if sales drop, interest in supporting the content will likely go away also.  If they switched to some form of annuity where you got as many books as you liked for a subscription (like the Zune), that might better support the longevity of the content.  Hmmm … interesting …

Rehosted

Just migrated jeffreykay.com over to bluehost.com.  Cheaper than maintaining my own server at this point and I’m not really doing anything that I require root access these days.  Hopefully everything is still functioning properly — if not, send me an e-mail.