There are studies out there that say BitTorrent accounts for over 35% of all Internet traffic. I would be willing to bet that the percentage of Internet users who even know about BitTorrent is a lot less.

BitTorrent works by users clicking on a ".torrent" link on a webpage or otherwise. Once they click on it, they are not only connected to the server hosting the file, but every other user that is downloading the file. Bits and pieces of the file are downloaded onto your computer from all the other people that are downloading the file, and it turn you reciprocate by providing other users the pieces that you have downloaded. This system is not only ingenious, but fast.

You are probably already familiar with groups like the RIAA and the MPAA, who have sued thousands of people and companies in order to stop the tidal wave of illegal downloads of their copyrighted material. Naturally, they did the same to servers hosting .torrent links to movies and CDs, so it's a little harder nowadays to find such links.

These groups do not understand the Internet and they do not understand their customer base. Given the choice, users would prefer paying the artists directly rather than seeing 90% of the money they spend on a DVD or a CD go to the record or movie companies. Given the choice, users would rather be able to buy a song or a movie and play it in their car, on their computer, and on their home stereo without having to buy three different versions.

Fortunately for us, technology will soon overwhelm these companies and they will be forced to change their practices. Last week, the beta program eXeem was released. This program combines BitTorrent with the peer-to-peer sharing of programs like LimeWire. What this means is that there will no longer be one central server to sue for hosting .torrent links, because everyone will be able to share links with each other. It will be just like the file-sharing programs you are used to, except lightning fast. I downloaded the program last week and in two days I had already downloaded 4 high-quality Hollywood movies and five music albums, including one that hasn't even been released yet.

I do not recommend downloading eXeem quite yet, because it is like Kazaa and has a ton of spyware, but if you can't wait you can download eXeem Lite which has the spyware removed.

Whether eXeem or some other eXeem-like program becomes the standard is not relevant. What is relevant is that the tide has turned - consumers now have the power and anybody who owns intellectual property had better recognize.

Guess who has 2 tickets on the floor to the opening night of U2's tour in San Diego on March 28???

ME!

It's been a pretty dull past couple of weeks. I've spent the past two weekends in Chicago with nothing particular to do, but that's been fine by me.

My first weekend here didn't start off so well, because I spent most of the Friday afternoon in line at the local Social Security office trying to apply for a card so I could do my taxes. It was ridiculous how long it took me and how slow they are. In the end, they can't even mail it to my home address, so they are going to send it to my hotel. What if I wasn't working in the USA anymore? How would I do taxes? Grr ... Anyways, the day wasn't all bad because me and Mike and Nick (both from work) went to Frank's Place (the hotel lounge) and had some beers and food after work. Nick ended up picking up the tab - thanks Nick! That weekend I watched Stuck On You, which wasn't "laugh out loud" funny but was still a very sweet film with very endearing characters, a Farrelly Brothers trademark.

Work has been going okay as of late. Although it's sometimes frustrating, I'm very happy we've got a good crew on the ground here, so nothing is unmanageable. I can't believe I only have two months left in Chicago! We had a couple after-work gatherings this past week, including an awesome trip to a local bar called Gator's, where they have bar none the best pub food I have ever eaten! The wings were huge and delicious, not to mention the other cool food they had, like "spudsters" - deep-fried mashed potatoes smothered in hot sauce!

This weekend was filled with football and movies. The football games were disappointing blowouts but the movies were pretty good. Mike from work lent me a couple DVDs so I watched them. I finally saw Pulp Fiction all the way though, and I am happy to report I enjoyed it. It wasn't "amazing" or anything, and in fact the first hour or so is pretty boring, but in the end it redeems itself. I do think that if Samuel L. Jackson hadn't bee in the movie it probably wouldn't have been good at all. Either way, this was the first Tarantino film I've liked. For the record, I don't like him as a person and I think he's one of the most over-rated people EVER. Reservoir Dogs was one of the worst movies I've ever seen! I even turned off Kill Bill Vol. 1 after 10 minutes, but I suspect that had more to do with the fact that I was completely wasted and still mad at him for Reservoir Dogs, although I doubt it. The other show I watched was From Dusk Till Dawn, which he wrote the screenplay for. It was kind of like two movies in one, because it really veers off once they get to the bar, but it was still okay. I wouldn't mind knowing how the first movie would have ended had they not turned it in a whole other direction.

This weekend I went into work for a half-day because I'm taking this Friday off to head to Mexico. I'll be getting my tux fitted for the wedding and spending some quality time with the fiancée. I'm also going to be picking up the wedding invitations so I can head back to Regina the weekend after to mail them!

I am very much looking forward to the day my children or my grandchildren ask me how I could possibly have grown up without the Internet. I was a part of the last generation that grew up without the online world we take for granted today (we got the Internet in our house in Grade 10).

I also hope they ask me what it was like to have less than 500 TV channels. I will tell them that having only one thing on TV to watch really united everyone in a way that will not happen again. Our lack of selection was no hardship when you had people as genuinely funny and warm as Johnny Carson on the air; it was a pleasure. That it will never come again is what makes life so sweet.

RIP 1925-2005

As per usual, Slashdot pointed me to a great essay called What You'll Wish You'd Known, which is summarized on the site as follows:

Eminent computer scientist, author, painter, and dot-com millionaire, Paul Graham has written down the things he wishes somebody had told him when he was in high school in What You'll Wish You'd Known, suggesting, among other things, that students treat school like a day job, working on interesting projects to avoid what he has found to be the most common regret among adults of their high school days: wasting time.

I loved this essay and would unabashedly read it word for word to students if I was ever asked to speak at a high school. It reminded me so much of another excellent essay about high school I read a few years ago that really stuck in my mind, so I went in search of it, and 'lo and behold, it was written by the same author!

Paul Graham, who's known for his writings on Lisp and other Lisp-like languages as well as his essays on combatting spam has taken a bit of a detour from his usual topics. His latest essay is one that's a little more personal and that we can all relate to: Why Nerds Are Unpopular . It's a lengthy but engaging writeup of that chamber of horrors we call high school and why being smarter than the average bear is more of a liability than an asset during that stage in life. It's food for thought for those of us who've already been there, done that and been stuffed into lockers by the football team and it should give some hope to those who are going through it right now.

You might think the article doesn't apply to me since the resumé version of my high school experience reads

• Captain of the football team
• Dated Captain of cheerleading squad
• etc.

As he points out in the essay, we've become so productive as a society that we now have about 10 years in our lives where there is nothing for us to do, so they put us in school to keep us occupied. The problem is that school is less about teaching than it is about keeping the students in one place for eight hours a day. Rather than devoting our resources to truly educating our children and tailoring programs to help them as individuals, as usual we spend more on keeping people alive than helping them live.

I paid $20 this year for a U2.com membership and you probably didn't (if you weren't a previous subscriber to the print magazine it will cost you $40), so here's the latest in an e-mail I got this morning:

U2's 2005 tour is set to be announced on U2.Com this Monday.

And right now we can tell you that it will be called 'The Vertigo Tour', that it will kick off on the US West Coast at the end of March before arriving in Europe in the summer... and that Kings of Leon are on board as support act in the US.

Keep checking U2.Com for more tour news as we get it.

On Monday we'll have the countries, cities, venues, dates - and the all-important ticket information.

We'll also be mailing you with details of how you - as a U2.Com Member - can take part in the advance presale of tickets, before they go on sale to the general public.

Best wishes

The U2.Com Team

Looks like this time I will only be able to buy 2 tickets per show in advance :( I have no idea which show I will be attending, but I will be seeing at least one. If you're interested, now's the time to start thinking about it ...

Straight from the horse's mouth:

The premiere date for the new season of Family Guy has finally been confirmed. No more “FOX 2005” for us. Oh no, we have a date AND a time. The season premiere of Family Guy season 4 will take place on Sunday, May 1st 9/8c on FOX. Mark your calendars and buckle up… only 104 days to go!

2005 kicks ass!

I recently finished the last book in S.M. Stirling's Island in the Sea of Time trilogy. I was loaned the series by a buddy of mine at work and read the books off and on over the last six months.

From the Amazon summary:

A cosmic disturbance transports the island of Nantucket and its inhabitants over three thousand years back in time to the shores of a Stone Age America. In addition to coping with the day-to-day problems of survival and the trauma of losing all connection with the modern world, the residents of the time-stranded island find their lives complicated by the presence of native tribes across the water.

The three books (Island in the Sea of Time, Against the Tide of Years, and On the Oceans of Eternity) cover about a decade or so after "the Event" that throws them back in time. Although they were not the best books I have ever read, they were definitely worth the time spent reading them. Stirling put an incredible amount of time researching almost everything that goes into the book, and it shows. It could almost be considered a pseudo-history book. Unfortunately, all that detail does tend to get in the way of the story, and I found myself skimming sometimes when I thought he was just describing for the sake of describing rather than furthering the story. As a side note, although it seems I was probably reading a first edition, I found the third volume needed a serious amount of proof-reading - there were typos and spelling mistakes all over the place. Bad editor!

There is an enormous amount of circa-18th century naval warfare in the book, which I found very interesting and made Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World an even better movie for me, since it's pretty much the same level of technology as in the books.

The one thing that was so very American about the novel (and by extension, the author) was the way their post-Event society was set up. If the movie had been set in Saskatchewan (or Canada, for that matter), you would have ended up with a ton of government departments controlling every aspect of the transplanted island, but in this novel there is very little government. Instead, the Islanders started hundreds of companies to deal with their problems. "Sea Haven Engineering" handles most of the Island's machining needs, another company handles most of the production of clothing, and so on. I found it very interesting that they wouldn't just band together and have everyone collectively own everything, especially since it was really them against the world from the beginning. It was striking that not only did they not take that approach, but that (in the novel, at least) their system served them very well. The approach didn't seem either right or wrong, but it did bleed red, white, and blue!

Of course, any book of this nature really illustrates the age of excess that we currently live in and how we could not only survive, but thrive with so very much less. After reading this story you'll probably feel even worse than usual about the pervasive consumerism that dominates our lives today - I know I do.

Also, the book has sword-wielding lesbians.

A recent Wired article and subsequent Slashdot discussion was a lot more fact than fiction for me and reminded me of a story I'm fond of telling ...

In the summer of 1997, my family and I moved to Regina two days after I graduated from high school. My friends, Tyler and Brian, and I worked for a couple weeks at a local computer camp (where we had originally met years before) and then spent the rest of the summer working for the Saskatchewan Science Centre developing curriculum for a computer camp and re-doing their website (see the fruits of our labours here). We were working there through a grant provided by Labatt People in Action. We were either really good at what we did or there wasn't enough work to do, because we spent most of that summer downloading new things called "MP3s" and playing Quake against each other. If you are not familiar with the game, our computers were networked together and we (virtually) ran through mazes all day killing each other with some huge weapons, and our days were filled with explosions and graphic (1997 graphics, of course) murder. We played Quake at least 6 hours a day, sometimes even more.

It got so bad that it started to affect my real life. Once, I was in the bathroom not far from a mining exhibit in the Centre. Every few minutes this exhibit sounded a giant explosion in its demonstration of mining. I was sitting on the toilet and suddenly heard this huge explosion (from the exhibit, of course) and my first thought was "Oh shit, they're coming to get me!" and I started to get up. I literally thought that what I had heard was an explosion from gunfire and mortars and I needed to leave before I got killed. The next time the line between reality and fantasy was blurred was when we were at the university that summer registering for classes. We were walking out of the UC when I saw a bus driving by with pictures of C.C. and Lorie on it, the DJs at what I considered to be the worst radio station ever, Z99. I swear to God that I reached behind my back for my rocket launcher! I actually believed that I was carrying a rocket launcher and could use it to blow them away.

Verily, I speak the truth!

I spent this past weekend in Mexico and it was another great time. It was my first trip back in over a month so it was super awesome to see Sofi again. I ate like a king all weekend - I can't begin to tell you how much I enjoy Mexican food. A large portion of the weekend was devoted to wedding planning and wedding-related activities, which shows no sign of slowing down for the next couple months!

Last night a bunch of us went out for dinner to the local Benihana and had a wonderful meal. I have become a huge fan of teppanyaki this year, which is a great treat but too expensive to do on a regular basis, as my meal (with tip) came to $45USD.

I'm staying in Chicago this weekend and plan to lay low. The Vegas trip has been postponed indefinitely so I'll have a little chance to relax. I don't mind - did I mention it was +16C today and the foot of snow on the ground all melted? :)

The holidays are over and I'm back in Chicago, waiting for a "big snowstorm" to finish dumping snow on the city when it's about zero Celsius outside. It's nice to be warm again but I sure wish I had another couple weeks of holidays!

The only thing that didn't go according to plan over the holidays was heading for lunch with Dale (which didn't end up happening). Instead, I hit the road on Thursday the 23rd destined for Assiniboia, the first stop on my holiday journey. I got into town around 4pm and got my initial round of visiting done before picking Darcy up and meeting Blair at Ryan Ellert's place for a beer or two. The three of us went to the Bar-B for some greasy food and drink. Blair won on the slots as usual so he was feeling generous and picked up the tab - thanks, buddy! After supper me and Darcy went to the annual Festivus at Solberg's, which I actually managed to survive this year! Pretty much the whole crew was there and it was nice to visit with everybody. I insisted that we leave after a couple hours, though, because I didn't want a repeat of a couple years ago. Instead, me and Darcy went to the Franklin to finish the night off - and finish the night we did. The night didn't really live up to my expectations, thanks to not as many people as I expected (that I know) showing up, the bar trying to give me light beer all night, the loud and brutal band, and the hundreds of people jamming the place that I didn't know. Still, some folks I didn't expect to show did and I made up for everything else with copious amounts of alcohol! After spending quite a while falling down outside I made it back to Darcy's to crash for the night.

The next morning it was hard to get up but I managed and was on the road by around 2pm again, this time headed for Maple Creek. I stopped off in Swift Current along the way to visit with Marco and his family, and he made me some excellent cappuccino while I enjoyed some Chilean bread his mom made. I managed to make it to Maple Creek just in time for supper, which was good. We had a great meal and opened a few presents before me and the family headed back to the cabin. We opened the rest of our presents there. I was pretty excited because I thought that I bought some pretty kick-ass presents this year, but I didn't get the earth-shattering reactions I was hoping for! Still, it turned out great, because everybody got sweet gifts. We spent the next couple days watching movies, TV, and playing my Trivial Pursuit: SNL DVD Edition that Santa gave me (rest assured, I won every game!). Grandpa and Grandma came over for supper on Christmas Day, which was nice. It was just a super relaxing couple of days, my favourite activity.

Christmas photos courtesy of the digital camera I bought for my dad:

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On the 27th it was time for some real work, though, because we packed up the cabin and headed into town for our annual family Christmas tradition - it was time to make deer sausage! We started in earnest around 9am and were finished by around 4pm, and in the end we managed to pack around 600 lbs. worth! The job was made all the more easier thanks to a new vacuum-sealer that Phil picked up, saving us much needed time and extra hands! After we were finished I got in my car and headed back to Regina. It was a pretty crazy drive because it was mostly dark out and the roads between Swift Current and Moose Jaw were pretty brutal (black ice everywhere) but I made it home in decent time.

On the 28th it was time for Bernie's Annual Christmas Bowling Party, which was going strong in its 8th year. I went to my parents' house for supper and then Zab picked me up afterward and took us to the bowling place. I was nervous because I didn't do any advertising on my own this year and there were several reports of people not coming, but we actually had a great turnout, pretty much average as far as these things go. It was a great time and it was awesome to visit with lots of folks I don't normally get to see. Afterwards most folks made it to the Barley Mill for food and drink, most of which was kindly provided by Bernie - thanks a bunch, buddy! We didn't get too out of control, though, because most everyone was gone by 12:30am. Even though we went home early it was still an awesome time!

The only down part of the whole night was the fact that Brad didn't show up. Not only did he not show up, but he gave different people different stories as to why he wasn't coming. He told me that he had to stay home because his parents were coming over (even though they were in bed by 8:30pm that night). He told another person that he was tired and had to sleep. He told yet another person that he just wasn't going. I also heard rumours that night that he wasn't having the New Year's party at his house, which were confirmed when I got home - not only was he not having New Year's at his place (not a problem at all), but he was leaving town for the weekend! I got this information in an idiotic "mass e-mail" that was only sent to a handful of close family and friends. I'm surprised he even bothered to send an e-mail or tell anyone at all, because it's pretty clear that Brad is a giant douchebag. The man didn't even bother to see Bernie at all, even though he was in Regina for more than a week! Can you believe that? As I said to many, it's not like Bernie is just "one of Derek's friends" or anything! I asked a number of people if I was just being a bitch, lamenting over the way things "used to be" or projecting some negative aspect of myself onto Brad because I couldn't deal with it, but it was obvious to everyone that the problem had nothing to do with me, it's that Brad is a selfish son of a bitch!

I wasn't up to a whole lot the rest of my break, and the giant snowstorm didn't help matters, either. I ended up spending New Year's at Jackie Rorquist's, which was a Christmas miracle in and of itself because I probably wouldn't have left the house had Bernie not taken his 4x4 to come and pick me up! Jackie was a gracious host, and even though I didn't know too many people there (other than Jackie, Bernie, Mike, Jenn, and a few of Bernie's friends I had met previously), I made the best of it using Jackie's excellent musical choices and my not-so-secret weapon, alcohol. I felt like garbage the next day but I had fun, if only I hadn't been the first one to throw up in Jackie's new house ;)

I got to watch a lot of movies this break:

• Canadian Bacon - Michael Moore's greatest film (boy, is that not saying a lot) is one that I had seen parts of before, but now that I've seen it in its entirety I can say that it's not as funny as it could be, is even less funny when you think about what a great cast he had at his disposal, and is not funny at all when you think this was one of the many things that perished when John Candy died :(
• Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World - a superb movie, that kept my attention even though in the end they really didn't do a whole lot in the movie. It was a great example of what it was like to fight in a war back then, not quite so automatic as it is now, but it's interesting how some things stay the same.
• The Return of the King: Extended Edition - a great Christmas present and the final piece of my collection. A great movie made even better by the extra scenes. What I found remarkable was that although this movie had the most footage added, it seemed to impact the film the least. I dunno, maybe it was the mood I was in.
• Mean Girls - a very clever screenplay that had a lot of laughs, this movie was remarkable for two phenomenal reasons: 1) Lindsay Lohan has GIANT boobs and 2) Tina Fey (the hottest woman on television today) with her top off - enough said. The whole movie smacked of somebody who swore they would get revenge on the people they hated in high school, though ... hmmm ....
• In America - another good Jim Sheridan movie featuring one of the best actresses out there, Samantha Morton. It was pretty painful to watch what was happening to the family so that made it drag a bit, but I'll give that man two hours of my time any day of the week.
• Tomb Raider: The Cradle of Life - I don't know why Angelina Jolie doesn't want to make any more of these movies, it looks like she's having a hell of a lot of fun and they make her look amazing in more than looks department. I sure do enjoy looking :)
• Shrek 2 - I thought this one paled in comparison to the original, and while there is certainly humour laced throughout the film, it's mashed together in such a disjointed (and unfunny) way that it just screams "we put out another movie to make gobs of money"

After New Year's my holidays were quickly coming to a close.In the end, I think I spent more time during my holidays feeling guilty that I wasn't doing anything than I probably should have, but it was a good break nonetheless, and one I would very much welcome again!

I've been sick off and on throughout the holidays and after, which made the plane ride to Chicago on Monday absolutely brutal, because my ears wouldn't pop and it was a very painful 12 hours until they did. I still can't hear well out of one ear but at least the pain is gone. I've been coughing and hacking for about a week or so now, but hopefully I've turned a corner.

I'm headed to Mexico this weekend to visit Sofi, which will be beyond great because I haven't seen her in a while. I'm supposed to go to Vegas as well one of these weekends but I haven't heard from Blair as to what the plan is regarding his little pre-convocation celebration. Anytime is good for me :)