10:37 PM
So it’s like a week or so later and I’m blogging again. Right now I’m sick. I hate being sick. I have a sinus infection in the middle of the summer and there’s nothing worse that this.
I’m suffed up and my ears are messed up and all I want to do is lie down and chill for a while.
The trouble with an on-line job is that you have to work a lot more than a “normal” job. Since I’m essentially on-call 24/7, I end up working something like 5 or 6 hours a day 7 days a week. Any time I sign on, I’m expected to do whatever work is waiting for me. No matter the time, no matter the day, no matter if I’m half dead and really just want to go die … it’s work.
Part of me hates it and part of me loves it. I mean the plus is that in this economy on-line work from home jobs with benefits from a fairly stable company are rare. The bad parts are that hey, the pay sucks and for all the stability, the fact remains that nearly everyone I work with actually works two jobs just to make ends meet. Such is the life of working on-line.
Right now I’m looking through my cds and sort of wishing that I hadn’t spent all my money on tapes over the years. I have a billion tapes. Tapes used to be a lot cheaper than cds and frankly, I liked tapes better because they were smaller and I could actually use them on a walkman and mix my own tapes during college. CD walkmen were around but they were expensive and dang, if you couldn’t mix your own line up, I just wasn’t interested even if the quality was better.
My first CD came with the family’s 486 dx2 66 in the early 90’s. I did the whole “join the music club and get 12 cds for a penny” deal but never really followed up on it because they weren’t portable enough for me and the price was too much to bug with when compared to tapes. I didn’t really get into cds until, believe it or not, I started downloading MP3 files off of napster. Yes, I was the one person the RIAA feared — a guy who downloaded to sample musicians off of Napster then actually went out and BOUGHT THE ALBUMS.
Don’t let them BS you. They were more worried about guys like me than they were about anyone else. They wanted Napster gone and if there were even a handful of guys who actually bought CDS left after sampling off of Napster, they couldn’t go after them the way they did.
So to get rid of me they actually turned me off of CD buying by raising the price of cds to $18 to $20 in the mall stores. So to get rid of them I turned back to Napster until it died and then to whatever I can find music on these days. I also switched to finding used cds where I can. I don’t know if the RIAA is making any money off of the used cds, but I sure as heck feel a lot better about paying $10 compared to $20 for a cd.
My best friend yells at me for buying them, but you know, they’re the same cds. So what if someone else has already listened to them? $8-$10 off is two cds instead of one. To me, that’s a bargin.
And that’s my rant for the evening,
k9