Anders Pollas

Just got JPG. JAPAN GRAPHICS as a present, fresh from Barcelona (thanx, Merete) — really nice graph­ics in a funky rub­ber cover. And she brought back some addi­tional good­ies: The “Toys and Games” issue from Belio, the Robot issue by Fase Super­fanzine, Open Here (in Span­ish, though) and Intanto by Paul Cox — some weird lit­tle embroi­deries that are really funny. Bot­tom line: Yum, yum prints. Could eas­ily spend every penny I own on mag­a­zines, small col­lec­tions of graph­ics and stuff like that. For­tu­nately, some­one else just did :)

This is a promise to cut down on the non­sense and start being more selec­tive — proper infor­ma­tion ahead. In the mean­time: What robot are you?

Finally a rea­son­ably sim­ple overview of what’s allowed and what’s not [in danish].

Finally some fairly good news. It’s amaz­ing how the indus­try con­tin­ues to fight their own cus­tomers over copy­right instead of sup­ply­ing up-to-date dig­i­tal ser­vices. The debate is get­ting still more bor­ing as no progress seems to take place, but in short: Artists and the com­pa­nies behind them should ben­e­fit ecom­i­cally from their work as it is what they do — and we all like to get paid for what we do. So I under­stand why ille­gal copy­ing is a prob­lem. But as in all other busi­nesses, the respon­si­bil­ity to sup­ply their ser­vices in a rea­son­ably man­ner lies on the com­pa­nies them­selves, mean­ing that if they can’t keep up with how peo­ple of the mod­ern world do things, buy music and movies etc. they should start work­ing on it instead of blindly pur­su­ing out­dated ways of mak­ing their money. What if the inven­tor of the wheel had been try­ing to stall the use of it because of dif­fi­cul­ties with how to fig­ure out how to make profit from it? Would any­one have waited even though it could change their world, sav­ing them loads of time? Same thing with dig­i­tal dis­tri­b­u­tion; the tech­nol­ogy is there, the ben­e­fits are enor­mous and — in my opin­ion — it actu­ally offers the indus­try a great oppor­tu­nity to pin­point their sales. But cus­tomers demand this now — not when some hobo record compny feels safe enough to get online.

Just spent 35 min­utes on the phone try­ing to get rid of my Tis­cali DSL con­nec­tion. Their total lack of sup­port com­bined with the most messed up account­ing sys­tem ever (mak­ing them believe bills hadn’t been payed etc.) made me quit in the first place, but not to any­ones sur­prise they tried to extend the notice I had to give. Basi­cally they throw away your let­ter, send out the con­fir­ma­tion 2 weeks late — and inform you that you have to pay 2 extra months…without any expla­na­tion. So I just spent 35 min­utes get­ting explained that…well, er..basiclly that they screwed up…which I already knew… Now I just have to wait for another con­fir­ma­tion let­ter, and the poor guy at the hot­line didn’t even dis­agree that I prob­a­bly haven’t heard the last of them… They’re sooo in the wrong track and it’s just a mat­ter of time before they crash to the ground. Words of wis­dom: Don’t go there!

Happy new year every­one! Best wishes for 2003…

Maybe I should do more polit­i­cal graphics…

Merry Christ­mas every­body — off to greasy food and loads of candy. Yo ho ho … Greet­ings from Lolland.

It appears my new ISP is finally get­ting their act together. I bailed on Tis­cali (actu­ally the bat­tle isn’t quite over yet as it’s unbe­liev­ably hard to get a con­fir­ma­tion of the ter­mi­na­tion of my sub­scrip­tion, but hey — them messin’ about made me quit in the first place…) but even­though TDC (yes, back with the enemy) promised me my con­nec­tion on the 12th, the lights hadn’t come on until 5 min­utes ago. So expect server down on GZR1 (for those who know what that is) as I’m chang­ing my router as well…Wi-Fi ahead, yeah!