Tales of my Dumbassery

I invite you to learn from my stupidity. Or at least take the opportunity to feel superior. It started with music. See, I write to music and I wanted to hear the Dresden Dolls, "Coin-Operated Boy." And maybe "The Garden State" soundtrack. And Hot Hot Heat's, "Goodnight Goodnight." I checked it out at iTunes and they had the songs, but I needed to download an upgrade to buy anything and I hate how even if you buy the music you still have to do a lot of work to get it on your non-iTunes compliant mp3 player, which is what I have. I looked the music up on ebay and half.com, but it takes too long to ship. I wanted to hear it now, damn it! And why should I pay the exact same amount for digital files I've got to burn and rip and such without liner notes when I can just have it shipped to me in a week. How much different will my life be in a week, I ask you? All these conflicting ideas bounced about my noggin.

None of this precludes my buying of the physical albums. My problem is that I want the whole album, and I WANT it right now. But I also want the liner notes. Last night's problems could have been solved if I'd sorted out these priorities ahead of time.

I ended up at the Dresden Dolls website. They have some sample mp3's to download, which is a wonderful practice. Then I got greedy. I still REALLY wanted to hear "Coin-Operated Boy," and hell, I'm going to pay for it, so I thought, "Maybe there's another site that has just that one song on it. I NEED to hear it right this instant or I will never write another word." At this point I'd forgotten about iTunes. I got caught up in the moment.

I ended up at negativebeats.com, a nice looking site that had all the sample mp3's, plus the one I wanted. I tried to download it, nothing happened, it just hung. Soon after, I discovered that something did happen. I'd invited an ass load of spyware to take up residence in my registry.

Two hours and much deleting of keys and programs later, (including installing ad-aware and spybot, and briefly unable to boot into anything except safe-mode and blocked from accessing google...) the spyware was defeated. BF took over the operations at one point and I made a Screwdriver. Then the kitten helped me spill the Screwdriver. Then we cleaned up the Screwdriver. Then I was sad, lo, for I had spilt the blessed nectar.

The RIAA needs a friendly spokesman to rub this in my face -- a Smokey-the-bear type for pirating music. How about Harry the Hard Drive? Then I could look into Harry's disappointed face and be truly repentant. No one messes with Harry, especially not on Good Friday. Excuse me, I'm in California, I meant: Cesar Chavez Day.

And I never even got the song.