Medicare vs. Britney : Why a brainless Mouseketeer gets more ink than the federal budget

This little piece of news about a possible HIV vaccine was released yesterday, although, with the heartbreaking loss of the Pulitzer Prize winning Anna Nicole Smith and the horrifying trials and tribulations of the great philanthropist Britney Spears receiving such attention, it would be understandable if you never heard about this. Surely those stories are more worthy of attention anyway.

By the way, I never thought I'd say this, but go Bill Gates!

Just beating out the Transformers as the #1 movie that I'm hyped about despite being 99% sure I'll hate it is the just announced Milli Vanilli biopic! I mean, c'mon, are you psyched or what?

Remember how much the weather sucked last week? Well, I missed the whole thing!

There is never a better time to go to Los Angeles than when the northeast is about to be blanketed by snow and the general crapulence that snow brings, and while everyone was looking up to the sky pumping their fists with furious anger, i was crusing* down Sunset Drive with the windows down and listening to Indie 103.

As a New Yorker, I'm supposed to hate Los Angeles in general. I suppose I kinda sorta do, but the appeal of the place is definitely understandable:

- The weather is nice
- People are nice and let you turn into their lane
- The beach is nice
- Beverly Hills is nice

On the other hand, I got really sick of driving everywhere (I hadn't driven this much since I gave up my car 8 years ago) and missed the freedom that having to drive anywhere brings (you don't have to pay for parking, never have to ask "how much is gas here?", can get drunk). I'm also not completely jumping for joy for missing the snow storm, as loneliness is pornography and Discount-what'smybloggerpasswordagain?-Kid got stuck at the airport all day, the latter on his way to come see me! Oh, and the bars close at 2 a.m.

Other general observations:

- What's really amazing about being there is observing just how prevalent the entertainment industry is in Los Angeles. I know people also come to New York to make it big, but there's also other things to do in media, and there's the banking and advertising firms too. But there, man, you see so many young kids trying so hard to be fabulous and popular that you're like "wtf".
-Being that the current fashion trend for girls is to wear huge sunglasses and a baseball hat, it's impossible to tell who is a celebrity and who isn't.
-After looking forward to hearing what a major indie rock station would sound like, I was pretty non-plussed by Indie 103, until the weekend hit. Then the playlist was just magical, going from Joy Division to TV On the Radio.
- Our song of the trip was "Young Ones" by Peter Bjorn and John. It's rare that I'll go out and buy a CD from a new band after hearing only one song from them nowadays, but guess what I just did on my lunch break!
- After not going to one since going to school in Rochester, I didn't realize just how much I missed Del Taco.
- For a town in which everybody drives, the drinks are pretty darn tootin' strong.

* stuck in traffic, tapping the break pedal every 2.7 seconds.

Steve Jobs calls for the end of the DRM. All who have ever purchased music on iTunes scream "hells yeah!" in unison.

I truly despise the iTunes DRM. I think iTunes as a store is a truly wonderful thing - you can browse an extensive catalog, hear snippets of songs immediately, and buy what you want immediately. For people that completely flip out when they hear something new that they like (not that I would know this from personal experience at all.... *cough*), this is just the bee's knees.

The problem arises in how the file is then authorized for your use later. From the best of my recollection, you are limited to six devices being able to use that particular file. Then (I guess), it's dead. This would be OK, if it were not for the fact that I seem to be cursed to have at least one hard drive failure a year, whether it be the hard drive on my laptop or on my iPod (usually, both go kerplunk within weeks of each other). As a result, I have now used up three of my six authorizations over just a two year period - even though I am using the same laptop and the same iPod.

The only way for me to not say goodbye to these files is to burn them as full blown audio files to a CD, then rip them back to my computer as mp3s. I cringe when thinking about how these files are going to sound after all of that.

So, someone who wants to continue to support the music industry is thereby punished for supporting the music industry, since you don't have to jump through these hoops with illegally downloaded plain ol' mp3s.

I'm just wondering why Steve Jobs is such a proponent of all this. He says iTunes' proprietary format is not incentive enough for people to continue to purchase iPods in the future, even though just about any product life cycle model would indicate that in five years, that will most likely be the case. Like, what up with that?

My alma mater's psychology department just released some study about the impact of playing video games on visual acuity. OK, so I should probably find the study more interesting than I do, me being a psychology major from said school..... buuuut, tucked in at the end of the article is a paragraph that makes it sound like they're working on a bonafide holodeck! Hello! The future is now!