I’ve tried alot of photo albums addon for WordPress but not really liking any of them. So I decided to use a feature in my NAS for this because it works pretty damn good. One feature that I’m working on is the ability to geotag photos so you can map out where we’ve been and the photos from that place (in the top right corner, simply choose “Map”). Unfortunately this means going through every picture and you know me and how retro I can be when I go down that path!
Anyway here is the address for it : http://photos.kristoffer.com/photo/
The login is “Gäst” and the password is the Swedish, short name of my employer.
If you’ve ever bought a harddrive you know that what is said about it’s size on the package doesn’t equal what Windows says the drive is. What I am really starting to hate is that now that the drives are so damn big I’d say it’s a fraud selling a harddrive as 3TB when in fact it’s only 2.7TB.
The geeky explanation why this has happened is : When 1 kilobyte was established it was with binary math as 2^10 = 1024 bytes. But with the next step, megabyte, math says that 2^20 = 1048576 bytes. But the manufactureres didn’t like that so they decided that 1MB = 1000KB. And now that we are talking TERABYTES this math has gone so wrong that an average disk sold as 1TB disk will in fact only be 931 megabytes (or 0.9TB) in Windows and any other OS or application. That’s almost 7% gone because the manufacturers are saying one thing when math says another.
Why is this bothering me now? Because now I have 5x3TB harddrives in a RAID5 at home. RAID5 means that 1/[number of disks] of space is wasted for parity so I can retain the data if one drive fails. In this case that’s 1/5, that’s 3TB, is gone for that. So 5*3-3 = 12TB. So I should have 12 beautifull TB of space. But I only have 10.8TB. That’s 1.2TB gone – 11% because manufacturers are taking the piss out of math. And it’s really starting to piss me off now that we’re talking about drives in the TB class!
Do you know any other market where a retailer sells you something and you totally accept to only get 89% of what you paid for becuase of math?!
And now you might start to realise … I can do clickbait to! 🙂
Just a little personal congratulations to myself for having passed 6 Microsoft exams now, and I’m just one little exam away from being a Microsoft Certified Solutions Engineer. I don’t know why that makes me gigly, not likes it’s going to go down well with the ladies but for me it’s a big deal. And it’s not going to give me a payraise nor going to stop my ear from peeping. So it’s just to boost my ego. If all goes we’ll I’ll be on the advanced Sharepoint 2013 course in one month and write the last exam after that for that glorious title.
Yay for me.
I doubt you’ve read this article : http://torrentfreak.com/uk-users-need-27-services-to-get-most-popular-films-report-finds-141208/ . What it basically says is “if you want to watch the most popular movies the legal way online you have to have 27 subscriptions”. It doesn’t say how much they cost but in my case that is irrelevant. Or you can have one subscription to a good Torrent/Usenet site and get it that way.
It’s the same issue with having physical purchased Blurays versus digtal media files. With the digital media file you simply double click and the movie starts. With buying a physical purchased Bluray you insert the disc and sit through adverts, commercial, trailers, discailmers, copyright notices, sound checks and animated menus that fly back and forth and then the movie actually starts!
That’s why filesharing won’t go away – because it’s a way more convinient way of consuming media today! I’ve started using more of online webservices like Netflix & Viasat which are great but still some issues. They don’t have deals with all studios so they can’t have all the movies & TV series. And the TV shows don’t have the latest episodes shown in the states. So as long as the entertainment industry is set in their ways and don’t want us in Sweden to see the latest episodes/TV series, as long as they have their distribution strategies and insist on showing us trailers, disclaimers and stuff on our discs when all we want is to watch a movie then filesharing won’t go away. I’d gladly pay $50-$100 per month for a service where I could see -> everything <-. But I don't want to pay $10 per service per month and still not get the latest stuff. That's what I think...
This week I’m on another 5 day Microsoft course. It’s a rather exciting one too – “Configuring Advanced Windows Server 2012 R2 Services”. Ok that doesn’t sound exciting but for me it actually is since it’s things that I deal with everyday. From NLB to failover clustering – it’s all good fun and usefull stuff. Because I have to admit, sometimes these courses do tend to talk about stuff you’ll never encounter in the real world!
But I am a bit confused. When we were doing the lab for Branch Caching I get a sense of deja vu and realised I know this stuff already thanks to the certification for the course prior to this one! I got so confused I even had to check my MCP status to make sure I didn’t accidentally write the “wrong” exam but nope. It seems MS are a bit confused what’s in the different courses. But I’m not complaining, can never get enough repition on this.
But I do wish MS would make it easier for us and actually license the virtual machines we use…
… they relase a new expansion that is really, really good! I know, I should and I wanted to quit World of Warcraft a long time ago. It’s a huge time sink and no matter how hard I try I can’t even come close to the level I played at 6-7 years ago! But this expansion is actually really, really good!
They’ve decreased the amount of spells, dropped atleast 2 digits on all item attributes and they’ve made the game much harder to play! When I played as healer I have to work pretty hard to keep the gang alive! And when I’m doing it as DPS I actually have to work hard to keep up the DPS as warlock which used to be easy mode.
And the new content, the new dungeons with some of the encounters (like the one on the train) are pretty awesome! UBRS is back and better than before. The one thing I really don’t like is that we can’t fly in the new zone – and they really do utilize altitude as an obstacle in some zones which is pissing me off riding around for 10 minutes to try to find how to get up a cliff!
So nope, will be a while more before I hang up the wizards hat…
So we finally got ourselfes one of those robotic lawnmowers – a Husqvarna 308. There was a period in May that I had to mow twice a week so I gave up an ordered one.
This is how I mow the lawn nowadays with my Automower 308
Then I spent a few days of troubleshooting the lawn and everywhere that it got stuck. Had to change the wires a bit and fill up some holes and such but after that it’s been going like clock work all summer long. Surprisingly well as a matter of fact! Except that you still need to cut the edges of your lawn manually since this bounces of things (including the cable) and therefor doesn’t go all the way to the edge. And then I noticed that our grass looks more bent than cut and I checked the blades and they were completely worn down! They do recommend you to change them a few times but I didn’t think it’d be after only about 8 weeks!
Other than that the only issue I have is the surge protection that I bought for it (per Husqvarnas recommendation) that cuts the power a bit too easy, meaning the mower doesn’t start at all and it can be like that until I notice it’s off.
I do regret buying it a bit since the lawn hasn’t really improved at all. Yes, it’s been nice not having to cut the lawn every weekend this summer but I could have used the money more wisely than on this. But that’s the way it is.
So Plan A didn’t work. Those people over at Owncube promised 30 TB (or “unlimited” in the promo e-mail), but when I finally got the backup-routines in place (which included RAR-ing everything first) and the backups actually went through (after getting alot of disconnects) it halted after 600 gigs saying “not enough diskspace”. But when checking the interface is still said unlimited. At that point I couldn’t be bothered with them anymore and decided to go with plan B. So now I have a double-drive USB case hooked up at work with enough storage to take backups of all my stuff at home. The only downside compared to the other alternative is that I will have to prioritize what to backup from home to here because the storage won’t be enough for both. At first. But when I’m not in savings mode anymore (i.e after the summer) I can buy new drives for it so that it’ll have more storage.
So now I can finally change my raid at home from 10 to 0, and go from “only” having 6 terabytes of storage to 12. As anyone with tech knowledge will tell you, raid 0 is suicide redundancy wise but if I have everything backuped up here at work I don’t see the problem. Plus – now the house can burn down and I won’t have lost my “Star Trek” collection!!
This is what happens when I take my work home with me!! Not quite the same with my wife though, her’s is cheaper but it stinks up the entire house with the small of burnt popcorn!
One of the things I am good at is finding and eliminating “single points of failure”. When I see a process or procedure I look at it and check for weakest link. Ever since my first job when my boss told me “if you’re hit by a buss on the way home, the company needs to live on” I’ve done a good job of making sure I’m not it. And when “ITIL” comes along there’s the Matrix organizations that’s all about spreading information, responsiblities and risk I felt it was totally natural and a given. And here at Thomas Cook we hate single points of failure in the IT organization and work to eliminate them constantly. Much like the lawfirm we have 2 datacenters to run from so we can lose an entire building and the IT would still work!
(now I’m going to go all computer tech on you!)
So … I took my job home again. When we got the annual bonus I bought stuff to have a 6×3 terabyte RAID 10 in my server for storing all the digital stuff I have. Everything from documents to images and the DVD/Bluray backups I have, they all need to be stored somewhere, but I’ve always felt like “if I lose this harddrive what will I do!?” – but with a RAID 10 I could easily lose one drive (actually 3 – if they are the “right” ones) and it wouldn’t affect anything… but the next level was “what if the house burns down to the ground”? In such a scenario I’m pretty sure I’ll have bigger issues to deal with than “oh no I lost all my Star Trek boxes and the digital backups of them!”, but I still wanted to make sure that’s not an added headache if it were to happen. One solution was to buy a 2 drive USB case and 2 4TB drives in a RAID0 and get a safety deposit box and once every 3 months take it home, back it all up and put it back again. That was actually looking like the most practical & cost efficient way of doing it…
Until OwnCube offered me a deal to store 30 TB of data as long as their company exists for a one time fee of €150! Done! So now I’m set to once every .. does 3 months sound enough?… zip everything I have to encrypted files and send it up to their datacenters for storage! Even though I only have a 100 mbit upstream connection which means this is gonna take over a week I can’t say I’m in much of a rush since it’s automated and running in the background.
So now the house can burn down and I’ll still have all my Star Trek episodes 🙂
I hate flying. Well not the actual flying part, but all the stuff that goes with it. Everytime I go flying I’m reminded how we as a civilization needs to come up with a transport-system! The saying “time is money” would indicate that there is a helluvalot of money to be made from such a patent, right?
Ryan Air used to fly to Edinburgh directly but now in time for Christmas they’ve cancelled that line so we had to go with KLM instead with a stop in Amsterdam. When flying home we started from our hotell at 4 am on sunday morning. I arrived home at 1:45pm. That’s almost 10 hours. Out of that only 4 hours were spent in the air!! First it was the taxi to the airport, got there early because we needed to check in 2 bags as luggage, then security checkpoint then wait…. and wait. And off to Amsterdam and after we landed it was atleast 10 minutes to the actual terminal, then another checkpoint. Then wait. And more wait. And then the next flight and we got home. And waited for the luggage. And then going home from the airport is another 30 minutes (which for Arlanda is pretty decent since we live on the “right side of town”, for the others it’s atleast a full hour.
That is such a waste of time! Not that I’m too important for this, not at all. It’s just .. a waste of time. 10 years ago when I was travelling to our embassies around the world I didn’t mind as much, probably because I got paid even when sitting at a pub on the airport. But now that it’s my spare time, I kinda mind. In this modern age where hours are important and your life is so stressfull, having a transporter to instantly beam you over to where you’re going instantly might be worth it. “What about all those transport accidents in Star Trek” you ask? Well what about all those air crashes in real life!? But considering how many gazillion people that work in logistics would get laid off I guess that’d be bad for employment figures, not to mention the airlines 🙂
Sometimes I really wonder how normal mortal humans manage their online safety?! I got a pretty good grip on IT security and have strong passwords on almost all the places I can and 2 step authentication (that is a double check that I’m who I say I am) on the ones that offer it. But there was one chink in the armor – my Twitter. Because Twitter don’t offer 2 step authentication with Telenor in Sweden I can’t activate it and pure lazyness from when I first set up that account led to me having a pretty week password there. “Week” as in 7 random characters & numberals. Yet that’s how someone got me yesterday. Managed to log into my Twitter and send bullshit links to the few followers I had, which are mostly friends of mine so pretty quickly I got a message saying “Hacked? Or do you really think I need diet-pills?”. Another chink in the armor is my Android phone. I’m pretty relaxed about installing stuff on my phone as long as it comes from the Play Store but it wouldn’t be hard for anyone to sneak something in there to hijack the phone. I knew there was one dubious app on the phone already so as a precaution I wiped the phone today and started from scratch. Really no point to restore it from backup, is there ?
But it lead me to wonder how mortal humans do it? Mortal humans who might not know what 2 step authentication is, let alone have it activated? Or people who can’t memorise random passwords?
It’s been a while since I threw crap on the “evil corporation” trying to stop piracy on the internet. A few weeks ago it looked like we had made a bit of a breakthrough because one studio exec actually said that they should look at the piracy seen to learn what the consumers want and adapt.
And today? Well today we know that was just talk and a smokescreen. Because yesterday the Swedish anti piracy organization fixed a raid against a Swedish site. Not a torrent site. Not an FTP site or anything like that that supplies people with movies. No, this site was a source of subtitles!! Seriously – subtitles !! Apparently Henrik Ponten missed being in the spotlight so he went for a site serving up subtitles! And I’d get it if the charge was “aiding copyright violations” like they used to get the Piratebay guys, because they kinda are (although not more so than Winrar!). No, they played the “dialogue is copyrighted too”-card. Which is really great because this isn’t a gray area at all!!
I get how dialogue is copyrighted, but if a person sits down, takes his time to go through a movie and translates it to his tongue, makes his own interpretation of the dialogue and the gives it away for free, is that really copyright violation? If you just write the dialogue in the same language as the movie, word for word, than yea, I can get how that’d be problematic. But I know just how much interpretation goes into translating movies. When I was last tasked with translating a movie we actually had to read the notes that came with the preview to know exactly what they meant in some specific cases. So does a interpretation & translation fall under copyright of the movie? If so .. then I’d say they owe me some money, because that’s exactly what I did for them for free not too long ago and noone told me what we did there was going under any copyright protection?
This’ll be fun to see how it goes. If they end up with the same judges as the piratebay guys they don’t stand a chance if there’s a gray area. I just hope some defense lawyer makes it black and white.
Unless you’ve lived totally unconnected for the past week I’m sure you’ve heard the latest “scandal” – that NSA is being fed data by the big computer companies in the USA, all to try to catch bad guys before they do something bad against them. And the guy who blew the whistle left his life in the states and fled to China and god knows where he is now, and he’ll probably always be a wanted man in the states.
Regarding the fact that NSA can read my e-mails? … anyone who thought anything differently really haven’t been paying attention! I’ve always said e-mail is one of the least secure ways of communicating. And I’ve always assumed that the US authorities _can_ access my files on Dropbox, so I’ve bought an encrypting software so anything personal that I’d never want exposed is encrypted. I’ve always treated my online data with the sceptic view that “if someone really wanted it they could get it” and very aware that with the Patriot Act so could the US authorities. And you know what? I’n fine with that. ‘Cause I’ve got nothing to hide really. I just wish all the IT managers around the world would consider this before being so fast to jump on the “could” bandwagon! As a matter of fact, only two months ago I wrote a recommendation to our IT manager about using Microsofts online cloud-based Sharepoint solution to host a collaboration site. I had the big reservation that “by doing so, we must acknowledge that all the data we put there is only as secure and safe as Microsoft states and as the laws in that country allows”. I almost feel like a prophet now for writing that!
Regarding the guy that blew the whistle … although I totally support people who blow whistles when they feel something is wrong and standing up for their principles, I gotta say, throwing your life away for something that most of us kinda shrugs our shoulders at and say “yeah, so?” at seems kinda dumb. I mean it’s a good thing he did it I guess, but was it really worth it? … especially now that both Google and Microsoft are coming out swearing that basically “no the NSA doesn’t have direct access to our servers, we only send them data they ask for and only when we’re told to”. Should we trust that? I’ve made it a practice not to trust anyone that stands to make a profit out of it. Call me sceptical or paranoid, but time and time again I’m proven right.
Something that can annoy me sometimes, even make me angry, is when people go out of their way to find something sexist or homophobic or whatever their cause is. People can really ruin something fun like an ad on TV that has humor and BAM! someone shows complete lack of humor and just knocks it down because it made fun of women being portrayed in a special way.
Not that I condone portraying women bad, but there’s this huge space between making something funny in a 30 second ad to having an evil master plan. And sometimes I even feel sorry for those people that can’t look at an image without trying to find something politically wrong with it.
But sometimes there’s the freak occurence when they actually have a point! And I think Feminist Frequency may just have one, even though I think they mistaken in other areas. Who? “Feminist Frequency a video webseries that explores the representations of women in pop culture narratives.” says their website. It’s created by Anita Sarkeesian and they have published two long YouTube videos on the subject of how women are portrayed in video games. Not today, but even back in the 90’s. Video 1 is here and video 2 is here. Waiting for video 3.
When I started watching it I was hoping it would be just another feminist trying to prove there’s an Illuminati conspiracy to portray women as inferior beings. And she partly goes into that territory which I think isn’t really helping their case. I’ve played games for a long long time and I haven’t reflected much on this issue. And had there been a long running plan then they seriously failed, at least with me. Another issue I had with the videos was – “what point was she really trying to make?”. Most of episode 2 is covering how women are portrayed as fragile pieces of porcelain that needs rescue (“Pretty Woman” anyone?), right? And then she goes on with statistics of how many women are victims to spousal abuse? How did a (“women being fragile in computer games”) result in b (“women are being beaten because of how they are portrayed in computer games”)? Or did I miss a step?
I can give her points that there is a real lack of women heros in the gaming business. And when cutting so many games together with the common theme like “your wife dies and you have to save your daughter” then yeah it’s apparently lack of creativity on the writing-side of things. We need more Mass Effects and Diablo 3’s where we can chose the sex of our hero to make this even more of a non issue. Although I have to say she missed Diablo 3 when writing up exampled of “women turned evil so you have to kill them” 🙂
I have for a long time thought that treating something like a non issue is a good way to live. 2 guys wanna get married to each other? Not an issue. But Takei made me rethink that by saying that “if we don’t treat it like an issue we’re sweeping it under the rug and pretend there isn’t violence toward the gay community on a daily basis”. And he’s right of course. And I guess it’s the same here, for me it wasn’t an issue of women being portrayed this way. But if we don’t see the issue it won’t change. And not changing our ways is bad.
Not sure how many of you are into the “console war” of Nintendo Wii vs. Sony Playstation vs. Microsoft Xbox? I’ve never been a major fan of consoles really but back in 2000 I bought a PS2 and basically only played Tekken and Grand Tourismo on it, that was it.
Then I bought the PS3 when it came out. That, the PS3 version of “Civilization” and an exercise bike made me lose about 30 pounds! And I’ve watched bluray on it and used it as the primary media player with the use of PMS. But I’ve never been really big on console games. Racing games makes sense but I prefer games with keyboard and mouse. And I’ve never really seen a big enough reason to buy an Xbox 360. I missed out on Halo unfortunately and the entire Xbox Media Center thing and being able to download games and play them on a modified Xbox. But as I’ve said, never been heavily into console games. But it’s not that I’m a huge Playstation fanboy (I can easily crack down on it, like how it’s not nativaly able to play MKV files even though it’s suppose to be DivX compliant!), it’s just that I’ve simply not gotten around to it.
Well now that both are coming out with new consoles I’m ofcourse thinking which one to buy first. And I’ve gotta say it’s looking alot like it’s gonna be Playstation again. Not that I was blown away by their pretty mediocre reveal or the games or anything like that. But because they aren’t conceded enough to think they can change how I have my entertainment setup at home in my living room which Microsoft thinks they can, but I can already tell them “no”.
Xbox One is supposed to be the “one” box to rule them all and make me throw everything else away in my living room. Well it doesn’t have speaker outputs so I’ll still need the amplifier. And unless the plan to release one specifically for Viasat in Sweden I’m still gonna need my satellite reciever with a build in HD to record stuff so there’s that. And there’s no way they are going to support MKV playback over my network at home so I’m still going to need a HTPC computer. So no, it’s “just another box”. I can see how they want me to connect my satellite box to the Xbox input so I can watch TV through my Xbox to minimize the screen and browse the web and read my e-mail on the side. ‘Cause today it’s terrible inconvenient to do that from my phone in my couch, right? .. And the EA Sports partnership? … not really! Had it been a FIA partnership then yay but focusing on NFL, really? Yeah, it’s big there but not anywhere else. What more was there? Halo TV series? Yeah, am I going to buy an Xbox to watch a TV show, that’s more than likely going to be on YouTube or downloadable somewhere else. And the size of the thing? And it comes with an 500 gig drive which by todays standard is pretty lame – and you can’t even upgrade it, something Playstation have not only supported but actually encouraged to prolong the life of their consoles! But yeah, I can buy a USB drive and hook it up (which I can do just as well with a PS4) and I’ve got one more device that I wasn’t suppose to have.
I’m not going to go into the “online” and “killing of used games market” because neither of those are actually a problem – FOR ME!
If I had any input on the development of the new Xbox here’s my list of things to do that would make me go “YAY!”:
– Multiple HDMI inputs. This would be a great solution so people won’t need to switch channels on their TV or amplifier (if you connect your HDMI inputs to the amplifier and then to the TV). That would be huge!
– Replaceable HD
– Full Xbox Media Center support over LAN.
– Stop focusing on partnerships that offer stuff only a small percentage of consumers want !
With those four things I’d easily buy an Xbox over a Playstation. Because the Playstation doesn’t have HDMI in at all. Or any sort of “play media over network” thing that works well. And the only partnerships I know of are all games-related. With the one exception for DivX.
Or I may end up buying neither until 2 years in when they are half the price…
I don’t know if you have Instagram, but if you wanna follow me and my wife when we’re off on vacation next week I suggest you turn to the official “Ving” Instagram channel – http://instagram.com/vingresor
Every week an employee at Ving get’s access to the account and Instagrams from their trip. Yeah, that’s how much we’re travelling – there’s always someone going somewhere willing to Instagram their holiday! Pretty good free PR and it goes both ways – people who are tuned into it via Facebook for example can write up their recommendations and tips for us on the other side, and we can promote our resorts. It’s all good 🙂
So tune in in one week when we’re off to Crete!
One thing I thought was very important for journalists is listening to both sides of the story. If you’re going to print a story about a trial it’s important to print both sides of story. For example, last week there was a ruling in a trial where 3 guys had apparently shoved a glass bottle up a girls vagina. That’s one side of the story. The other side was that she had just had sex with two of them and they thought she was ok with this since she never outright said “stop”. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not defending the guys here, no matter what’s going on if you think a girl would like a bottle shoved up her vagina there’s something wrong with you, but the point is it’s important to print both sides of the story.
And right now there’s a very big lack of that. So much so it’s embarassing for all journalists in Sweden. Everyone from the people at “TT” who has historically been very good at printing facts down to the “let’s twist the facts so much it’s as juicy as possible without deliberately lying” so called “journalists” at Aftonbladet, they are all doing it. They have for the past 6 months printed one side of a story. Namely the one of Gottfrid Svartholm who’s right now on trial for hacking and stealing sensitive data from our IRS and hacking one of our largest banks mainframe and tried to transfer out money. The guy had apparently done this from his refuge in Laos or wherever. The swedish authorities, who’s already made it public they hate the guy, charged him with a high enough offence that they could have him arrested and deported back to Sweden. This was a long time ago and since then they’ve gathered evidence upon evidence. And most of it is logs on his laptop apparently. And the media have covered this from one angle and that is the information they are fed from the DA who’s handling the case and the managers at the places that got hacked. The DA’s job is to nail the bad guy, and he’s sure this is the bad guy so you could say he’s just doing his job. And the managers at the places that got hacked are, as victims in this case, hardly objective either. And now the trial has begun and in the days leading up to this the DA worked hard to make public what this guy was charged of doing. And he didn’t really speak in the “what we’re charging this guy with is…”-voice, rather the “what this guy did was…” which assumes guilt. But you can still excuse this guy for just doing his job.
But here is where the journalists are failing so hard. They are printing his statements and they are printing them as facts. And so far I have only seen one 30 second clip from the defense where he said “he’s pleaded guilty to some of the lesser charges but not the major ones” and that was it. Where are the people to examine the case against him? Where are the technical experts that will tell anyone that an online computer is easily hackable and anyone could have used this computer to do anything, even plant the logs which now makes up the majority of the evidence against him? Or the people to question why this kind of sensitive information was stored at the outsourced private company in such an insecure way that it was leaked? Where are the journalists to question why they have treated this person as guilty before they even made the arrest (and gained access to those previously mentioned so very important logs)? Where’s the impartiality? Is it left to us in the blogosphere to handle that?
I’m not saying the guy isn’t guilty and that he’s a saint. I can see this guy being totally guilty, but that doesn’t change the fact that there are two sides of the story and the media should cover them both, not just re-print what the DA feeds them!
Right after I write that they are on the right path of giving us better digital alternatives with Netflix and HBO, then I read a story like this. Basically, Warner Brothers wants to have their own service that they want me to pay another $10 per month for … and that’s not going to work really. If I can pay $10 per month for VIP membership on a bittorrent site I have free access to any movie I want, regardless of studio or licensing. Then why should I pay $10 for netflix and $10 for HBO and $10 for Warner Brothers, and the grapevine says Viacom (which owns Paramount among other things) is considering terminating their partnership with Netflix.
So much for being on the right path ..
I saw the movie “AFK” last weekend. I say movie although it tries to be a documentary. But 99% of the film is following the 3 people on trial for running the Pirate Bay and allowing them to talk freely without any opposition and very limited fact check.
But still .. some things in that entire thing is very disturbing. As is the latest twist Peter Sunde is blogging about. In short … if you’re up for digital copyright violation charges in Sweden you are in for a very very tough uphill battle. Not only is the prosecutor very “Hollywood”-friendly, so is the judge, the jury, the police and the court of appeals and as it turns out the European court as well. It’s pretty scary!
But what strikes me as the most upsetting thing in the entire story is that no one with judicial or political power is taking them seriously. There have been some serious integrity breaches and legal procedures never followed and bias that you’d think that some politician with real power would say “this entire thing was handled wrong!”. But no one is even listening to them. It’s like they hear “pirate bay” and just turn on ignore mode. Which is really sad and makes me embarrassed to be Swedish to be honest.
I can’t argue much for their innocence since they are guilty as shit of “assisting copyright violations”, but even so, a fair trial is the least they deserve.
And here we are, 3 years later and what has happened on that front? Well we have Netflix and HBO has just started in Scandinavia (albeit with very limited selection) but other than that we’re still pretty much screwed. If I wanna see a movie in HD the legal way I either have to go to the cinema, which is an entire project now that I have a kid. Or I can buy the bluray for $30 (which either involves taking a trip into Stockholm or order on te web and wait 3-4 days) and sit through commercials and advertisements and disclaimers and copyright warnings and a menu that takes forever to load because it connects to the internet and then I can finally press play. Compare that to the illegal way of “what movie do I wanna see? this one, ok, download, go make popcorn and poor up drinks, unpack, go to the bathroom, and the press play. They really should offer more legal ways of doing it because I’d pay for it! Valve realized a long long time ago that the best way to fight piracy is offering a convenient alternative and every game I’ve played for the past 8 years I’ve actually purchased.
Oh man I’ve got that “Chuggington”-song playing in my head now! Our son Sam just loves watching trains on YouTube so it’s Thomas The Tank Engine and Chuggington all the time!!
But life is proceeding pretty well. It’s ok at work, I’m having daily battles with Sharepoint 2013 trying to get it to work with an upgrade from our Sharepoint 2010 which isn’t as simple as going from 2007->2010 mostly because of the claims thing. At home I’m having weekly battles with our budget, trying not to spend much for anything ’cause we’re off on vacation in about a month. Finally! And my woman has just recovered from being i’ll for about 2 weeks. For her the worst part is going back to work only to see that noone has done nothing and her mailbox is swamped with stuff and she already had a backlog … she’s what you could call a single point of failure, and if it was a small company there wouldn’t be much fuzz, but this is one of the biggest phone operators in Sweden so they really should know better.
Also planning to build a deck on the front of our house. I built a huge one 3 years ago on the back but my woman wants one in the front too so that’s what I’ve got to do. So I’m keeping myself busy all the time 🙂