captainsblog | We can pickle that phone!

One of the more prescient scenes on this week's Portlandia (not the one I want firynze to see) was this, as it turned out:

Watch on YouTube

That's because my phone went missing for the better part of two hours just now. I'd had it in church, I knew (where, cursedly, I'd muted it); it was in the car after we got out, I also knew; and it had already parted from my bod by the time I got into Wegmans for a milk run after that.

That narrowed it down to the following:

* forgottenly tossed in the house somewhere;
* still stuck in the car, evading five searches by the two of us;
* lost somewhere in the store before I "confirmed" I didn't have it with me; or, horrors,
* fallen dead in the still-snowy Wegmans parking lot and, therefore, as likely a goner-for-good as Carrie above.

Believing, as always, in never-say-die, I made one last effort and, amazingly, it showed up. Care to guess where?
[Poll #1813027]

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As I've mentioned, our viewing of Portlandia is a completely legal proposition. Still, since those copies are fragile, it always seems a good idea to have a backup plan, and so I sought out a more preservable-on-disk copy of the thing through one of my usual sources.

Usual, that is, until last week, when, a day after the defeat of SOPA/PIPA in the halls of Congress, The Empire Struck Back:

The hits may have just run out for Dotcom, also known as Kim Schmitz and Kim Tim Jim Investor, who spent his 38th birthday on Saturday in a New Zealand jail after 70 police raided his country estate and cut him out of a safe room he had barricaded himself in.

The Federal Bureau of Investigation, which requested the raid, says Dotcom masterminded a scheme that made more than $175 million in a few short years by copying and distributing music, movies and other copyrighted content without authorization.

Megaupload's U.S. lawyer said the company merely offered online storage, would "vigorously defend itself" and was trying to recover its servers and get back online.

I was rarely, if ever, one of their users; it just didn't offer enough safety and reliablity, and I found only one or two chosen ones to (mostly) provide that. Today, though, my most-preferred one (not sayin' which, he speaks into the lampshade) was clearly another casualty of the blowback: just about every .avi version of this weekend's Portlandia came back as "file deleted."

Someday, video content will shake out the way audio did, where instead of being dragged kicking-and-screaming into the free market by competing on price and ease of transfer, the music industry sat pat on their CDs for decades longer than they should have, rootkitting and suing to protect their monopoly until, finally, iTunes forced them to break it. I would gladly pay more than $16.99 for a "season pass" to a non-premium cable show if, for my money, I would get the ability to save it and share it that I get with .mp3s. Maybe by the end of this decade, the MPAA and its ilk will figure that out, instead of treating me the way Carrie got treated in the clip at the top of this post.

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