Drive-by update

I don't have a new cellphone. After work last night we went to the sprint store to get a pre, but first their systems were down and they couldn't process sales, then jebra discovered the pre uses a different OS than my Centro and I'd have to license a copy of the, um, emulator? in order to run the programs I've been using. We postponed making a purchase.

Next stop was MicroCenter, for a bigger drive for my laptop and an external case for the old old. Bought both, plus an eSATA cable for work, then came home. Whereupon Jebra discovered that our mail server was dead. So much for working on my laptop, email takes priority. It's also a good thing we recently upgraded my desktop machine as jebra used it to replace Angus (the mail server). He thinks Angus' motherboard went bad.

In other not-exactly-news, I've been knitting scarves like mad. I promised Jebra's cousins' girls hand-knit scarves, only the yarn I promised I'd use is no longer available (not even on eBay). So I've been knitting a variety of other yarns in similar colors trying to come up with something that is close to the promised version. I think the boucle I'm using now will do, only the color isn't quite right. I might be closer now that I'm using two strands of the pink ribbon with the cream-color parts removed. I think I'm up to five child-sized pink(-ish) scarves with one more still on the needles.
And I have two more skeins to try -- I am soing to be *so* sick of pink by the time I finish.

Two or three other bits of randomness

I'm totally grooving on PBS' Inspector Lewis. Elfin convinced me of the worthiness of slash between Lewis and Morse many years ago, and now that Morse is gone, I think Lewis and Hathaway make a fine pairing. Not to mention Hathaway is interesting to look at. I wouldn't have pegged him for my type (although now that I've said pegged, very naughty thoughts are going through my mind)...

Meanwhile, in my following of copyright issues, I somehow stumbled across an article about Lily Allen, a UK musician who complained about piracy and called for more anti-piracy legislation on her blog -- only to have it revealed that she herself created illicit mixtapes full of copyrighted music and made them available to the public. I was vastly amused. And more convinced than ever that most people don't see this type of free use as wrong and won't until they begin to feel that every single thing they do or have been involved in in the past ought to produce more income for themselves. (I put Jon Gosselin into this category too (and how sad is it that I even know how to spell his name.) (Come to think of it, I think it's a bizzare form of entitlement and makes me think of Christopher Meloni and his "player haters" remark. Being one of the few people still watching SVU, I can honestly say he's making *way* too much money as a caricature.)

Back to Lily Allen. Yesterday I read this article http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20090923/1409046297.shtml which lead to Dan Bull's open letter to Lily (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HL9-esIM2CY), which is catchy enough that I found myself humming all afternoon and lead me downloading his latest album from his website (www.danbull.com). I'm listening to Safe again today and enjoying it enough that I plan to keep an eye out for this guy. Now if only he'd appear on an episode of Inspector Lewis, perhaps as a musician friend of Hathaway.