More people screwing up the Internet

More people screwing up the Internet

If any of you aren't familiar with guitar tablature, it's essentially digital sheet music. It's usually represented by 6 lines of dashes "-" which make up the 6 strings of a guitar with numbers denoting which fret should be played at which time. Here is an example.


The piece that I selected for my example is the opening line of Johannes Brahms’s Wiegenlied: Op. 49, No. 4. (More commonly known as Brahms Lullaby.) The reason that I selected this piece is because it is still generally available on the internet because it was published in 1868 and is therefore public domain.

Generally speaking, tablature or guitar chords to popular songs have been readily available on the internet for sometime now. My entire endeavor to learn how to play guitar so far has come from guitar tablature on the internet. But now, the people over at the National Music Publisher's Association (NMPA) want to stop people from being able to create and publish guitar tablature on the internet. They have served a "take down" letter to telling them that they have violated copyright laws and that they will be sued if they keep displaying guitar tablature. So, until this legal dispute is settled, one of the biggest sites for guitar tablature is unavailable to average people out there who want to learn how to play their favorite songs by their favorite artists.

Is it just me or is the music industry really reaching here? First, you have the Napster issue. Now you have them working on tab sites. As Jerry Holkins (a.k.a. Tycho Brahe from Penny Arcade) put it when describing one of the music companies:


It is exactly this kind of thought process that provides the impetus for associations to ruin great things for millions of people.

What actually bothers me the most is that this isn't like Napster. At least with file sharing, there was the process of someone having to actually go pay for this crap, put it in their computer, transfer the data from one medium to another, and then make it available for you to listen to. With guitar tablature, what happens is that some talented (usually) person listens repeatedly to a particular song with guitar in hand and writes down the lyrics and attempts to mimic what they hear. Guitar tablature is the creation of the people who go through this process of listening and writing, not just some jackass with a CD-R/W drive and the entire Metallica collection.

I believe that the reason why this association is doing this is because they say that it cuts into their profits. Having been a musician since I was 12, I appreciate printed sheet music. It's nice. It's usually easy to read. It's generally very accurate. But it's also expensive as hell and not everything that you want is available. Also, it takes them quite a while to get out current songs.

You never heard horse merchants trying to get cars banned when they were invented. They simply realized that they were outclassed and that horses were going to be a niche market. The same thing needs to happen with music publishing.

What I suggest is that each and everyone of you got to the NMPA website's "Contact Us" page found here, and send them a message telling them what you think about their preventing the free expression of artistic talent simply so that they can make more money.

Posted byJ. R. Guinness at 3:27 PM 0 comments  

Yahoo! Mail Pics.

If you have gone to Yahoo! Mail in the past six months, then you've seen those insipid pictures that Yahoo! put up to advertise their picture mail feature. Everytime I see them, I have to make fun of them. So, here are some of the pics and the things that come to my mind when I see them. Feel free to add your own comments.

______Yahoo Picture_________

Ernst Stavro Blofeld's kid sister.

It's official, this is the gayest man alive.

This girl is training to be a muslim.

This woman gives a piggy bank

Legal Notice: All images are the property of their respective owners. Yahoo does not endorse this site, it probably doesn't even like it or acknowledge it's existence. So, since I put up this here legal notice, please don't sue me. Thanks.

Posted byJ. R. Guinness at 1:28 PM 0 comments  

I hope that this is a gag.

While surfing on the net I found this. Good Lord in heaven I hope that it's a joke. If not, then someone went to a lot of trouble to make a convincing website.

According to the website and their Urban Legends reference pages, this product is a gag, simply because you can't buy anything off of the site.

I know it's a weak comparisson, but what about the video game trailer websites? You can view screenshots and trailer videos, but you can't buy the game. Same thing with Genpets? Maybe.

Posted byJ. R. Guinness at 1:08 PM 0 comments  

You look like you got beat with this!!

This is a picture of one of the combo sets from where I work. I actually bought myself a Zebco Genesis 30 combo set. I'm going camping in June and wanted to go bass fishing as well. Among other lures, I'm going to be using a white 1/8 oz painted jig head with a white spinner tail. I'll post pictures of anything that I catch.

Post your favorite bass lures in the comments section.

Posted byJ. R. Guinness at 12:42 PM 0 comments  

National "Bese Mi Culo" Day

I don't know about your part of the world, but here in Austin, TX we are experiencing what I like to call "National 'Bese Mi Culo' Day." For those who don't speak Spanish, that means "National 'Kiss My Ass' Day." I'm pretty sure that the actual name for it is something like "Dia de la Revolucion del Trabajador" or some shit like that. The idea of this is that every Mexican worker isn't going to go to work or spend money at the pinche gringo shops for one whole day to "close down" cities and show us gringos how much we need immigrant workers. Also, according to one site (that I refuse to link to), the protest is to show support for the illegal immigrants.

Personally, I think that this is going to backfire. What's going to happen is that every Mexican who doesn't go into work on Monday is going to go back to work on Tuesday and find that some other Mexican has his job.

Besides being as insipid and offensive as Dia de la Raza, this protest is in support of ILLEGAL immigrants. This isn't about the thousands of people who go through the appropriate legal channels to obtain their citizenship. This is about showing support for the people who jump fences and hide in the back of trucks or do any number of other activities, including waiting 9 months, then jumping a border to pop out a baby on American soil.

So, since they are exercising their right to peaceably assemble, I suggest that you exercise your right to laugh at them and point out that their jobs are going to be gone.

Posted byJ. R. Guinness at 12:23 AM 1 comments  

Tasers work...









