Monday, September 15, 2003

Starting Strong

It’s good to see that the Vikings have started off their season with a 2-0 start. I always have high hopes for the Vikes, but I really didn’t expect a whole lot from them this year, especially after last year’s horrible performance. It’s also good to see that my last season of volleyball here at SJU is off to a good start, as we won our first game.

It was pretty apparent that we were all a little rusty as we had many communication errors and some flow problems, but it felt so good to have the team together and playing again. We put ourselves in all three leagues this season so every Sunday, Monday, and Tuesday night I’ll have a game. It definitely feels like college again now that my usual routine is kicking in—work, classes, frisbee/volleyball/lifting, sleep, repeat x5, weekend. I really think I would have a hard time getting anything done without a schedule. If not for a deadline for getting things in, I will let them go indefinitely.

Speaking of deadlines, my first paper of the semester is soon due. The preliminaries of the paper have to be in tomorrow, and if not for Karl asking me what I was doing, I probably would have forgotten to do it. We are writing our first paper in Modern Philosophy on Descartes’ Meditations, which deal with existence and epistemology. I have found the reading very interesting (much more so than most of my other classes), and am even looking forward to writing my paper (which obviously will criticize some portion of Descartes—I’ve come to gain the reputation with the philosophy department as being overly cynical, but at least I don’t believe everything at first glance). Hmmm…I’m guessing none of you really care about philosophy much so I’ll move along.

I found a very interesting article while I was reading the news this morning (you can read it here). It talks about the differences between the movie industry and the music industry and how they are handling piracy, customer relations, and pricing. It’s amazing (and refreshing) to see how well the movie industry is doing with their more customer-friendly marketing and relations, while the music industry continues it’s downward spiral as it alienates customers more and more each day.

Ever since the RIAA started handing out lawsuits to casual users of file trading software, I have decided to not buy any more cds, and I haven’t in well over 2 months. I have also started going through my cd collection and am selling off many of the discs that I don’t listen to anymore. I really want to distance myself from such a greedy and heartless organization. If I really want to hear a song or cd I’ll borrow it from a friend, but there isn’t too much for new music that I like to listen to anyways. There isn’t a whole lot new talent in the heavy metal music circle lately. Just look at the recent crap that’s been released like Metallica’s new disc or any of the generic radio-rock cds out there.

I haven’t bought a dvd in a while either, but that’s mainly because I haven’t had the money and because I have a decent backlog of dvds already stockpiled in my room to watch. If there’s a movie I love, I’ll probably buy it simply because you get so much more for your money with a dvd than you do with a music cd. As much as I’d like to sit here and bash the RIAA, I think the article above does a good enough job……well, that and I have to go to class.

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