Michael P. O'Connor

This weekend I am hoping to be able to start reading the VPN book I got at the cplug security conference, and maybe have some thing setup so I can have full access to my home network and shutdown all the other ports I have open up at home, I am thinking the few ports I have open the few chances I have to get hacked into on the home network, call me paranoid if you must. Plus if I do this right I am hoping that I will be able to see my iTunes Library that is at home from work. I just have to make sure that when I am connecting to my iTunes, no one can connect though the iTunes at work and get to my iTunes at home.

I had an interesting dialog box pop up on iTunes today, I got some Celtic Hymns today, and more then I care to admit here. When it finished downloading the music it popped up a dialog box with the following message “Your Music is important, Please back it up”. I was kind of taken aback by it. Not because I did not know that, but because 1) most music stores do not want you to back up your music, and 2) it would be more profitable for them to not have their customers back up their music. I will have to give it to the Apple corp. they don’t seam to be as greedy and evil as other corps. seam to be some times, that is probably why I will continue to go back to the iTMS.

I have to admit I like the USB jump drives that are coming out. At first I kind of resisted them because I was hoping that the SD cards and card readers would be what replaced floppy drives, but I am not blind and I can see that it is the USB jump drives that are what people like to be the next replacements for floppy drives. The benefits of them are that you do not need drivers for them, and most (if not all) computers in use today do have USB connections, and windows 98se or higher, Mac OSX, or a Linux based computer that supports USB mass storage devices. The one thing I love about the SD cards was that they not only worked in the card readers on the computers, but also in PDA’s and Digital cameras, and a host of other devices. The one downside to the SD cards was that they were (in fact are) slower then the USB jump drives. And the card readers (even the smallest ones) are considerably larger then a jump drive. The nice thing about the jump drives now, is since most people are buying them, which is helping to drive the price of them down. I still like the SD card for PDA’s and digital cameras but I am starting to move over to the jump drives.

I am starting to get really annoyed at the napster commercial, first they are annoying to beginning with, and I am going to go as far to they are engaging in false advertising. Yes it will cost 10K to full fill up the size iPod they are talking about. Also they may cost only $15 a month. But that is $15 a month, for as long as you have the device. I have an iPod, and I am not forced to spend money every month to keep my music. Then there is the fact I have a collection of mp3’s from before I had the iPod that filled up 1/4 of my iPod, again money I did not have to spend. The most I have spent over the past year on my iPod is $66 above the cost of the play (which was free since it was a gift to me from my parents) since I got the iPod Dec of 2003 if I had one of the napster players for the same amount of time I would have spent $240 on it above the player.