(no subject)

Clover seems... well, alive this morning. She's apparently eaten some peas, and had medicine, and drank a lot of water from the bucket-lid in the garden, and has gone back to hiding in her little spot under the trellis.

She's certainly no worse. Better... hard to tell. She had a lot of fight about getting into the house, so that's a good sign. I'll pop out in an hour and check on her.

I also appear to have lost a couple of Sigma lenses. This is... annoying. It's because I've been testing posh lenses, the standard ones that came with the camera have been misplaced.

Today, I plan to work, configure my Nostromo N52 for controlling some apps and UT2003, drink some Dr. Pepper, and eat a biscuit from Greggs I just found that I'd forgotten to eat. Studio temperature is MUCH lower due to switching a lot of things off.

(no subject)

Called the vet, he reckons it is encouraging that Clover is a: still here, and b: drinking water. The stuff he gave her was Kaogel, which is used for basically binding up the liquid mess in her gut and is used on all sort of animals with non-specific enteritis, and should sort out her system. She's not straining anything like as much as yesterday, I haven't noticed her straining at all.

She's pecking at her food bowl at the moment; as I was talking to the vet, she looked up with a beakful of rice.

His basic opinion is that it's up to her to recover; but it's good that she's made it this far and drinking, and I should call on Monday with her status first thing. He also said feeding her Ready Brek with a syringe was an excellent idea to get nutrition into her when she's not interested in eating, a couple of ml at a time will be good for her.

I've never had enteritis, but from what I understand with people, it's pretty horrid, and makes humans want to sit around and not eat anything. He also wasn't surprised that she had blood in some droppings after seeing the state she was in.

(no subject)

Clover ate SO MANY PEAS!

She didn't want anything else, just peas. First the ones left over from earlier, as long as they were dropped. That was about 20. Then some scattered. Then some fresh peas; two strainers full but some are dropped or in Ivy. She wanted to look around for them, and seems a little perkier for eating them.

And then I found some earthworms, and they vanished into her rather fast.

She's still flopping down, still not totally healthy, but she's eating and drank a load of water. This is progress, I think.

(no subject)

Norway's consumer council is really down on iPods and iTunes; and bringing Sweden into it. Now, since the rest of the world - generally - is quite happy with the terms and DRM iTMS uses, being one of the few genuinely legal (allofmp3 is SO not legal) stores when you actually buy the right to listen to the track anytime - not just a subscription to that track, that supports both Windows and Mac, and the most popular music player - people seem to forget that iTMS came AFTER the iPod's popularity was cemented.

Still... if you're in a career in something as mundane as the Consumer Council with a fixed timescale, then perhaps you want to make a mark...

Bjørn Erik Thon was appointed as Consumer Ombudsman in Norway for 6 years, in December 2000. So, December 2006, he'll be replaced. Mr. Thon no doubt recieves many complaints about iPod and iTunes, and as a user of the service, he can probably be assumed to be fairly neutral overall.

Well, neutral, perhaps. Astonishingly stupid, yes.

"Thon cited his own situation as highlighting the difficulty in dealing with songs purchased from iTunes.
As a customer of iTunes, Thon said he bought a large number of songs that he would now like to transfer onto his new Nokia N80 telephone, which has space for about 600 songs.
"These songs cost me about €1 each when I purchased them, but Apple stops me from using them on my phone," Thon said. "I just cannot imagine an argument in favor of stopping someone from using a song they purchased.""

Well, for someone dealing with consumer law, he's clearly a bit confused about ownership of music, but also, about READING THE EULA before purchasing the songs. No-one is 'stopping him from using it', after all - he can play it, share it between 5 authorised computers, stream it to other iTunes clients, put it on an iPod, and burn it to CD.

However, he's also apparently a bit slow regarding reading the bloody manual for iTunes. To get his songs onto his Nokia, he need only burn an Audio CD of the tracks he desires, and reimport them, circumventing the DRM entirely legally.

Anyone want to find his email address and inform him of this?

Yes. There are restrictions. There are restrictions on nearly ALL licensed products; these days, those restrictions aren't just words in the small print, they're actual restrictions. I'd say "Buy a CD", but you Windows users are possibly going to have some bit of software that... RESTRICTS WHAT YOU CAN DO WITH YOUR MUSIC! Yeah!

Apple, the iPod, and iTMS deliver what a very large section of the market wants. That's why they are successful. If they didn't deliver it, they wouldn't be. People need to just deal with it. If a firm in Scandinavia wants to set up a rival service without the conditions they find so onerous, then it's a free market. They're welcome to do so, and if it costs the same and supports more devices (better make sure it supports iPod, if you want that market share), offers as much music, at the same prices, with the same ease of use - it'll succeed. Of course it will. A couple of years or so ago there was no iTunes Music Store, after all.

I can't see the record companies going for it. WMP is not inherently 'less evil' or morally reprehensible than M4P, after all, and if you have a large iTMS music collection that you want on your phone, then you bought the wrong phone. Nothing is stopping Nokia from making Apple an offer they can't refuse if they start losing sales to Motorola based on iTunes integration.