Going Legit
Last year my church offered a co-ed Bible study on the topic of financial stewardship which covered giving, investing, deficit spending and the correct perspective toward work. It was a fantastic study and my wife and I really enjoyed spending that time together, but what affected me the most during those weeks was a casual question the teacher (one of my better friends, and to whom I’ll refer from here on out as Axel) raised one night: should a thief be trusted with money?
That question made me feel uneasy right away but, as I’ll admit to a certain callousness toward introspective criticism, I just brushed it off. I wasn’t a thief, after all. I was a good person. Except… how many CDs borrowed from friends or the library had I ripped? And how many had I downloaded via bit torrent or–back in the day–Napster? How many computer games had I downloaded and played without ever buying? What about other software? Operating systems, even? But, like I said, I really, really wasn’t a thief. I had never stolen a car, for example, or broken into anybody’s house. So no biggie. I figured the software companies charged way too much anyway, and since I didn’t see any starving record execs on the street there wasn’t really much harm in the lightweight shenanigans up to which I had been.
As the days slipped by, though, that initial feeling of unease came back, and soon it grew too strong to ignore. Axel has a way with words, and I’ve often found myself thinking about something he’s said even if I disagreed with him initially. I began wondering, from a purely human perspective, and ignoring the intangible concept of the soul, how much I was worth. They say everybody has a price, and I realized mine was something in the neighborhood of ten bucks, or maybe even less, because that’s how much any of the CDs I ripped-slash-stole would have cost me at the used music place. But really, since most people know I have pretty crappy taste in music, actual market value might have been just a few cents on some of those discs. So I wasn’t a thief, I reckoned, unless the item in question cost more than a nickel or two. That’s no good. I once heard the street value for all the chemicals and minerals and whatnot in the human body was around $38 (but does that include the bottled water?), and I decided right then not to be worth more dead than alive. I was going to go legit, dang it!
I threw out all my “undocumented” software, including:
- The Macromedia suite (Flash, DW, etc.)
- Photoshop (sob)
- Vegas Video
- Windows 98
- Windows 2000
- Windows XP Pro (the one with the corp key you know by heart)
- Office Pro two-thousand-and-something
- Battlefield 2
- Thief 2
- Maya
- Various SoundForge apps
- Various commercial MPEG encoders/utilities
- FruityLoops
- Several Sims 1 expansion packs
- A disc full of apps like Bryce and Poser (very old, but still)
- Some Mac OSes
- CoolEdit Pro and various plugins
- VMWare Workstation 4 (but now server is free!!!)
- Nero 7
- WinRAR
- Much more I’m not remembering on the fly
And replaced them with:
- Two purchased upgrade copies of WinXP (Pro for me, Home for the wife; fortunately I had a legit copy of NT workstation, and a friend of mine gave me his old copy of ME, so both of those upgraded nicely)
- The free version of Nero that came with one of my burners
- 7-Zip
- OpenOffice
- The Gimp (still struggling to be effective with this one)
- VMWare Server
I’m still looking for a user-friendly looper/tracker that can be had cheaply or for free, and I’ll probably also want to get back into editing old digital8 footage on something similar to Vegas… but, again, it has to be cheap or free.
I also made a point to delete all the MP3s I don’t rightfully own. That hasn’t been accomplished yet because my file server has been down for an eternity. Once Henry is back up, though, it’ll be a huge undertaking to weed through all that stuff.
I already feel better–if not poorer–about my decision to go legit, but I know it will always be a struggle. There will always be those gray areas, like at the LAN party my friend… uh… Wayne… yeah, that’ll be his name… is about to throw. If I don’t own one of the games he’s hosting, he’ll be sure to have a copy I can use for the day, complete with crack or auto-generated license code. On one hand, if I delete the game right after the party is over I’ll feel like I’ve skirted my obligation to pay for high-quality and entertaining software, and on the other, $45 – $55 is an awful lot of money to pay for (ostensibly) one day’s enjoyment. Of course, I’d have a legitimate copy of that game next time around… and I do like playing shooters from time to time… so I’d have it to enjoy whenever I wanted. I did find a review of a site that supposedly rents PC video games, but at a starting price of $14.95/month for one game at a time, I would have to be going to an awful lot of LAN parties. Axel’s at most of those parties… I wonder what he would think about all of this? Or about the manly name I gave him?
Part 2 of this series is here.
Out of Context
Danny: I like being surprised from behind
Lynn: it just burns on the right side.
Lynn: I don’t want to be beaten or mutilated
Joe: it crashed when it saw me naked
Eugene: we can get the beans off the wall too
I love instant messaging. These are actual snippets from conversations of which I’ve been either part or privy. Three fish tacos authenticos to whoever can correctly identify the contexts from which each were taken.
Cocktail on the Big White Bed
My friend Sam, from work, was in Las Vegas with his wife this week, and from what I understand he treated her to a heaping dose of surprising (but delightful) spontaneity while there.
Example: Sam listened to a two-hour spiel about a timeshare at Alan Thicke’s Tahiti Village in order to get cheap tickets to a show with an unpronounceable name and acts ranging from a hula-hooping “schoolgirl” to gay cagefighting. I’m not sure why he chose not to part with the $26 grand, though… that’s a whole week in Vegas he’s going to miss out on every year.
Example: he took his wife to a standing-room-only show (on whether or not it was the gay cagefighting one I didn’t ask clarification) that had, right at the front, a roped-off and unpopulated VIP section containing plush couches and a big white bed. Asking around, he discovered that by merely buying some champagne from the bar they would be admitted to that lotusland for Vegas showgoers. So, purchasing a $500 bottle (plus a beer, just for class), he scored some good seats up front where the waitresses were hot and the only discomfort was from the angry stares of the lesser folk outside the velvet bonds of his luxury nest.
From what I gather, what happens in Vegas happened to Sam. Plus I reckon his wife had a good time too.
F-Glider
I love the new Battlestar Galactica. And also the word frack.It’s an extremely useful word, and one that’s offensive to the ear without being your regulation swear word. It’s not even of the four-letter variety. I’m sure the in-laws wouldn’t appreciate it, but on the other hand Papajoe does use colloquialisms like “dadgum” and “razzlefrazzle…” and what are those if not merely swapouts for less socially acceptable utterances?
Still… though I doubt I’ll be using it much in mixed company, I’ll keep this word in my arsenal. It’s not an all-out F-bomb… more like a glider… but it certainly gets the job done.
Dumpy Truck
I sold my little white truck last night.
It was a piece of crap and I’m glad to be shed of it. And I’m glad for the measly $70 I got for it because insurance was due and tag renewal was just around the corner. It smoked like crazy, so passing emissions has always been a dramatic event. Well, it always passed, but convincing the attendant that visible smoke didn’t necessarily mean anything is a trick unto itself. That’s $10 a year I won’t owe anymore, and since vehicle registration fees here have gone up something like 60% since last time, I’ll be saving a bundle.
And yet… I miss it already, despite its many, many… er… many problems.
- It was a third vehicle. As such, it often sat around unused.
- It was a third vehicle. As such, it got borrowed. A lot.
- It never got gassed-up when borrowed. Ever. While that was no fault of the little truck itself, it was irritating that I had to fill up the tank every time I had an errand to run. See number 2.
- It was ugly. I didn’t care that there were always new dings and scrapes whenever it came back from a borrowin’ (see number 2), but it never made the poor vehicle any prettier.
- Overdrive didn’t work, so I couldn’t drive it on the interstate. Of course, a lot of people did it anyway, and it’s on the interstate where I recently found it broken down, literally 3 hours from being impounded. AAA didn’t cover the full cost of the tow back to my house, but again, not a direct result of the truck’s… er… truckness. See number 2.
- The reverse gear made an embarassing amount of noise.
- The air conditioner didn’t work.
- It smelled funny.
- It hadn’t run in three months. See number 5.
- Somebody smashed out the passenger-side window a few nights ago, probably looking for drugs or a gun. The pisser is that I left the doors unlocked to keep that very thing from happening. Since that time I’ve had a tarp wrapped around the door, adding greatly to the visual appeal of my neighborhood. See number 4.
- There was glass all over the place. See number 10.
- The vinyl seats were split and peeling. See number 4.
- The steering wheel was all torn up. See number 2.
- It had no radio. That, along with the speakers, had been ripped out sometime before my purchase of the “work vehicle.” See number 4.
- It had a very crappy tinting job, and there were bubbles all over. On the plus side, a lot of broken glass clung to the tinting film and I was able to throw it away as a single piece. See number 4.
- The window had a huge crack in it. See number 4.
- I didn’t let my wife drive it because I didn’t think she would survive a collision in it.
- I didn’t really need it anymore. This should have been reason enough to part with it months ago, but when I decided to sell it, it was borrowed out. I had only had it back for a day or two when it left on its final voyage to 5,000RPM-interstate-travel-land, where it lost all the remaining value I could have otherwise gotten out of it. See number 2.
I’m told it’ll probably be shipped down to Mexico. It’s old-school technology, so I’m sure it will be kept running for many, many years down there.
Vaya con Dios, poco carro blanco!