This was written by Harry Stottle, from Ragged Trousered Philosopher. This article was lincensed by him under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.5 License.

I met god the other day.
I know what you’re thinking. How the hell did you know it was god?
Well, I’ll explain as we go along, but basically he convinced me by having all, and I do mean ALL, the answers. Every question I flung at him he batted back with a plausible and satisfactory answer. In the
end, it was easier to accept that he was god than otherwise. Which is odd, because I’m still an atheist and we even agree on that!
It all started on the 8.20 back from Paddington. Got myself a nice window seat, no screaming brats or drunken hooligans within earshot.
Not even a mobile phone in sight. Sat down, reading the paper and in he walks.
What did he look like? Well not what you might have expected that’s for sure. He was about 30, wearing a pair of jeans and a “hobgoblin” tee shirt. Definitely casual. Looked like he could have been a social worker or perhaps a programmer like myself.
‘Anyone sitting here?’ he said.
‘Help yourself’ I replied.
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“We either get worse at living and better at dying or better at living and worse at dying, there’s no other way around”

This came to me while I was watching my pants soak in hot coffee this morning. Don’t ask how it happened, but I think I’ll quit caffeine.

The more I know women, the more I like my dog.

iTunes better look out because a new music service will soon offer millions of songs for free. New York-based Qtrax is launching a beta application that will aggregate up to 25 million songs from peer-to-peer networks. Of course the old saying of, “there is no free lunch”, applies here and users will have to endure ads to listen to their songs. The service works by centralizing music from P2P sites and then reoffering the songs with some extra DRM attached. Songs are downloaded to the listener’s computer, but they can only be played back inside of the Qtrax ad-supported player. The player expands to fill the user’s screen, but don’t fret because you can still surf the web with a Mozilla-based browser inside of the player.

For those of you old enough to remember the dot-bomb days, think of the Qtrax player as a music version of the much loathed NetZero web browser. While a full-screen player plastered with ads will probably turn off many people, we believe this could bring new life to your unwanted laptops and desktops. Just download and play the songs on the spare computer while you continue working on your primary machine. The company promises to share ad revenue with the song owners and claims that deals have been made with the four major record labels: Universal Music, Sony-BMG, Warner Music Group and EMI. Interestingly enough, those labels haven’t yet confirmed any plans. According to the Qtrax website, a PC beta program will be available at midnight Eastern Standard Time.

Source: TG Daily

I’m still a bit skeptic about this whole “music business” revolutions that people like Tom DeLonge have been claiming in the past few years.

If this new system has the Fecal Matter Demo Tape by Kurt Cobain then I might give it a shot, if not… Keep trying.

On the other hand, people are already claiming that the files won’t be compatible with the good ol’ iPod… Not that I care since I don’t have one of those stupid whitey players (anyone willing to give me one… you’re more than welcome). But anyway, it is of public knowledge that anything that plays on your computer can be converted one way or another to any other format, even if it takes a lengthy and boring process that could be easily skipped by simply paying the one dollar that the song costs.

And what about sound quality? Anyone that has ever used a P2P program such as eMule or Ares (or any program that connects to the Gnutella network) knows that there are LOTS of fake files or low quality ones (yes… those awful 96kbps online radio rips or even worse… ACTUAL RADIO RIPS with the voice over that says “we’re listening to the last hit by our beloved pop queen, Miss Britney Spears“), so I’m not sure how they’re going to handle the quality tests and I hope they don’t use the line “it’s a free service” as an argument.

Blah blah I’m already criticizing something that no one has tried yet, so let’s just stop leave it here.
Let me give you some interesting links about this new Qtrax thing before going to bed (oh yeah, no way I’m staying awake just for the release of a lousy free sharing system or whatever):

- Associated Press (on Google News)
- What’s on Qtrax (Official Site)

Update:

THOSE IDIOTS! It seems like they never had the approval of those 4 major music labels so… No Qtrax for now. I can’t believe there is people out there paying for James Blunt to go and sing on their launch party for a product that didn’t have the correct permissions for its most basic functions.

It was billed as the “second coming” for the music industry, but it turned out that the offer of an unlimited supply of songs downloaded free turned out to be little more than a sham.

QTrax, a start-up website, spent an estimated £500,000 carpet-bombing Cannes over the weekend to promote its revolutionary service. Briefly, it convinced the world that it had signed up major record companies to create an online catalogue of 25 million songs.

But once the lights had dimmed on the glittering launch party, it emerged that none of the world’s four music majors had actually signed up to the site, leaving QTrax with almost none of the 25 million songs it had promised.

There are now doubts over exactly when, or if, QTrax will be available.

Check out that failure here

Yossi Vardi talked about local warming issue at TED. This talk is a must for bloggers. Specially, man bloggers.

We were so busy building replicas of famous monuments with dough. But we are back. It was hard to return. It took me… 10 minutes to solve the weird database problem (though it wasn’t the database). And half an hour to redesign the logo.
I don’t know yet what we’ll write here, but the site will look so fucking pretty.

That means (for all you simple humans) I don’t fear Friday the 13th. And I thought it would be cool to write something today, just to piss on paraskavedekatriaphobic people.

We are trying to work around here, so don’t bother now. This is a “hello world” post and probably the whole site’s layout is going change in the next days. Don’t expect anything from us. Two ants and a dolphin are better than us tweaking CSS and Wordpress.