Arnie Carver

With Amy here helping me with the day to day operations, I’ve decided to continue with my computer education. Since I still don’t have enough time to actually enroll in school per se. I decided to do a study at home course from Quickcert, that way I can learn at my own pace while still working full time. The course that I’m taking is for CEH Certification (Certified Ethical Hacker).

A close friend of mine has his certification and makes around $70k per year. Not bad for something you can learn from home. Not that I’m quite ready to leave the entertainment industry, but It’s something I can use in my day to day life and certainly something good to fall back on. Once I finish this course, I plan on taking more at my leisure. There’s a lot to learn that could really help me solve my own tech problems instead of having to pay someone else to fix them.

This article was originally posted @ mental floss.com

Iron Man hits theaters on May 2nd. The character is super strong because of his suit of iron. You should also remember the exoskeleton used in Alien. The real-life version is the work of software engineer Rex Jameson and his robotics company Sarcos. The XOS Exoskeleton moves well and gives the wearer superhuman strength. Sensors in the suit transmit information to a computer and coordinates its moves, so the wearer experiences no lag and no fatigue. The XOS takes up somewhat more room than Iron Man’s suit, but is a lot smaller than the contraption in Alien -with as much strength and more features. Jameson is now working under a $10 million US military grant. See a video of the XOS in action.

No word yet on that time machine.

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I want one!

Lats night at work, a worse case scenario happened again. I was setting up my equipment and my external hard drive would not power up. This is very bad because all of my music is stored on it.  It’s not the first time this has happened to me, actually it’s like the third time. The first was about 2 years ago, at work, in the middle of a shift. I lost everything, and it took me a week to reload all of my cd’s onto another drive.

I learned my lesson then, that technology sometimes fails. I now always have 3 external drives with my music library on them and carry 2 with me just in case. Seagate hard drives come with a 5 year warranty and they will replace the hardware but the data is lost. It will take several hours to transfer 400 gigabytes of music over to the new drive but it’s better than copying a few thousand cd’s over again.

To any other digital DJ’s out there, ALWAYS back your music up, you never know when a drive will fail.

I remember the first time I heard about Napster. It was in 2001 when a friend told me about a website where I could download virtually any song I could ever want for free. I was in total awe at this concept and never thought of the ramifications.

Fast forward to 2008 Napster has been converted to a store but countless sites with this concept have sprung up in it’s place. As we all know now this is illegal. The legality seems not to matter to many people and the RIAA and MPAA are taking action. All of this information is common knowledge but no one is really discussing why so many people are downloading.

I think the first reason is obvious, It’s free. But that’s not the only reason. Another reason is availability. I recently read a report that 60% of music downloads are indie label. That means the worlds largest music retailer, Wal-Mart probably does not carry most of these artists’ music. Best Buy has a little better selection but not much. The next option is the the net. In witch you need a credit or debit card to pay for anything. How many teenagers and college students have a bank account let alone a line of credit? Not many, I’m sure. Amazon and iTunes are great sources to get non top 40 music, but not if you don’t have plastic. Small record stores have all but vanished and most major retailers will not do special orders. I know this from experience. This leaves this largest age group of music consumers with little options to get what they want. I believe this is a major factor in the popularity of peer to peer file sharing.

I can’t cay that I have a good solution for this issue. Not that I haven’t given it a lot of thought, but I think I understand it.

In closing and for the record, I do not download music illegally. As a professional DJ, I have to account for all of my music and pay royalties to ASCAP. I guess I’m lucky that it’s a tax write-off anyway.