ACTA: How can Prentice be so short sighted?

I know that not many people read this blog. It's really a place for me to vent, more than anything else, since there is little that I can do, personally.

I have already emailed my local Member of Parliament the following:

Dear MP:

I am very concerned about this article I read in the paper today:
http://www.canada.com/vancouversun/story.html?id=ae997868-220b-4dae-bf4f-47f6fc96ce5e

I have been following the copyright laws in Canada for some time now and have been concerned about the direction Mr. Prentice seems to be taking on this issue. His latest proposal does not consider the rights of citizens such as myself and seems to be very biased (unfairly so) towards American interests.

Under current legislation, I am a law abiding citizen. I have an ipod. I have a blog. I participate in various activities on the internet, all of which are legal in Canada (and other first world nations.) The introduction of this bill seeks to treat me like a criminal first and has not been given adequate public attention or review. Please Hedy, there are thousands of us in your riding who will all be negatively impacted by this bill. Please be our voice and at least raise questions or vocalize our concerns. This issue is of primary importance to those of us who live and work with these technologies.

For more information and some background material, you can look at a website maintained by one of Canada’s leading legal minds in this area: Michael Geist. His website can be found here: http://www.michaelgeist.ca/

Thanks for your attention. I have purposely kept this message brief. If you have any questions, feel free to respond to this email

I look forward to hearing from you.

Sincerely,

I am putting this up in case someone else is casting about the internet looking for examples of what to say to one's government representative. Mine is probably not the best example and I am in no way experienced in these matters. But if my spoonfeeding gets one or two additional people to raise awareness of their concern to their local government, maybe others in office will start to take this proposed bill more seriously.

Others have had more meaningful things to say about this proposed bill - I suggest following the title link for a concise writeup on it.

Problem displaying Album art on the ipod touch

I really regret not taking a picture of this when it happened, but recently I added an album to my ipod (The very best of Elvis Costello) and after doing so, every album inherited the Elvis cover art. Now this particular album does not have the most flattering picture of EC, so I was interested in correcting this problem. When I looked in iTunes, everything was normal there, so I tried to sort it out myself. After a little trial and error, I noticed that if I did the following, I could correct the problem:
* view the ipod-bound playlist
* sort by album view
* Get info on the first (or any) track, select the Artwork tab (iTunes remembers your selection for next time)
* Select the artwork (click on it) and then copy it to the clipboard (press CTRL-C in windows)
* Return to the Album view and select all of the tracks in the album you just grabbed artwork for
* Right click and choose Get Info again - this time it is for the group of tracks which brings up a different screen.
* Click on the Artwork input box and paste the art into it (CTRL-V to paste in Windows)
* When you click the OK button from here, iTunes will reprocess these songs and the next time you sync, this album art will appear correctly on the ipod.

I had to do this for each album, so I also took some time to clean up the files a bit - for example, my Elvis Costello collection came in as separate albums for most of the tracks because it is a compilation album spanning most of his work. By providing too much detail such as the album a song was originally released on, iTunes thought it was best to separate these into different albums. By making the Artist and Album fields consistent (and blanking out the Album Artist field) these tracks finally appeared as a single album and not as a dozen or so.

My music collection is not all that large, so this was a workable solution for me. If someone had hundreds of albums, I could see this being a chore too big to handle in this way, and in fact, there very well may be a simpler solution. This worked for me and only took me about half an hour to complete.

UPDATE: It really bugged me not having a photo of the display problem, so here is a photo of what it looks like after I corrected things.

Posting from the iPod touch

Every now and then I come back to Blogger to see if I can make a post from the touch yet. It is one of those things that should 'just work' but clearly doesn't yet. Well here goes, let's see if this typing exercise was just for practice. It seems I can enter text if I switch the view to 'edit HTML' but not on 'Compose'. Still, this is better than nothing. 'barely works' is not as good as 'just works' but is better than 'just barely works'. OK I'll stop now