Alex Reid

I came across this great quote from Kenny Howard about keeping it real.

I make a point of staying right at the edge of poverty. I don’t have a pair of pants without a hole in them, and the only pair of boots I have are on my feet. I don’t mess around with unnecessary stuff, so I don’t need much money. I believe it’s meant to be that way.

There’s a ‘struggle’ you have to go through, and if you make a lot of money it doesn’t make the ‘struggle’ go away. It just makes it more complicated. If you keep poor, the struggle is simple.

Kenny Howard was a famous American designer, having learned how to make professional signs at the age of ten, he became the leading pin stripper of motorcycles. He then got into metal shaping, making special knives and guns. In 1958, he designed and produced the “Mare’s Leg”, a cut-down Winchester rifle for the movie Wanted: Dead or Alive with Steve McQueen.

Despite his objectives of “the struggle”, his heirs sold his “Von Dutch” name to a Japanese clothing company who then got bought out by another company who turned the name into the “it” clothing line for celebrities.

The BBC reports that the British government has drafted an proposal that would have ISPs be responsible for monitoring downloading pirate media files via their networks.

Of course, it comes down to what technology is available to be able to monitor such traffic. ISPs can’t go through each packet of information, as much as anyone of us can detail every snowflake in a winter storm.

Last year, I used YouTube’s (beta) AudioSwap program that allows you to swap an uploaded video’s audio with that of YouTube’s selection of artists who have allowed their music to be shared as audio-tracks to (solely) YouTube videos. When the AudioSwap program began, there was limited selection of audio, but now that list has increased. That’s great, but it’s terrible that the features haven’t increased.

I uploaded this otherwise quality scenic video from a plane last year only to have it compromised; YouTube’s video encoding often ruins sweeping scenic views. I suspect I know why, but that’s for another time. In this video from last year, I selected Colin Mutchler’s ‘Destination Non-Specific’ which went very well with the pixelated theme of Thunder Bay.

This video is simply me filming a guy freaking out and yelling in the street. I had to use the video camera to even see what was going on, and I’m still not sure. I think the guy was flipping out on PCP or he was incredibly drunk/stupid. But I used this silhouette video to illustrate the many flaws of the AudioSwap program – even a year after it was rolled out. First, you can not fade in/out of the song, because back to my original frustration, it’s hard to find audio that not only matches the feel of the video, but matches the time. This video was 1:07, but no song I could find was that short. And you can’t adjust the sound volume at all. And then it doesn’t even list the artist or song name with the video after the video has been re-uploaded.

I guess Google isn’t about audio. Which might be for good reason.