This will be my second year making a run at the City Weekly Best of Utah issue. If you dig what I write and enjoy this little voyeuristic journey with me, by all means, gimme some props and vote for me.
Just click the license plate, register, and vote for me.
Deadline is March 15th, so do it now!
My sweetheart bought me a Blu_Ray player for Valentines day.
I haven’t really been eager to jump on the Blu-Ray bandwagon, figuring that everything’s gonna be digital-file, hard-drive or flash-memory based soon anyway. Sure, I’d read all sorts of reviews, and it’s awesome, and etc. Whatever. Most of my movie collection is on a hard drive and I stream them through the Xbox 360. It’s a pretty sweet setup.
Anyway, she bought me a Blu-Ray player and Transformers to test it out. I hooked it up, put the disc in, and aside from a slow load disc load time, was reasonable happy.
Then the movie started.
I had forgotten how pretty my TV can be! I was so amazed at the difference between Blu-Ray quality and DVD quality! And the sound, oh the sound! It’s AMAZING!
If you’ve got a nice HDTV and a decent home theater system, there’s no reason NOT to have a Blu-Ray player as part of your setup.
For reals.
You all know how much I like movies, right?
I do.
A lot.
And I see lots of ‘em. Well, I enjoy a good contest, too, and since nobody else I know is having an Oscar’s contest, I figured I would.
On Sunday, March 7th, ABC will air the 82nd Academy Awards®. I’ve decided to hold a contest, and the winner get’s a $50 Visa Gift Card from me. It’s pretty easy. Pick who you think will win, and the person that get’s the most correct answer’s wins. Easy, right? Here are the categories that will be used for the contest, and the nominees in each one:
Best Picture
Avatar
The Blind Side
District 9
An Education
The Hurt Locker
Inglourious Basterds
Precious: Based on the Novel ‘Push’ by Sapphire
A Serious Man
Up
Up In The Air
Best Actor in a leading Role
Jeff Bridges (Crazy Heart)
George Clooney (Up In The Air)
Colin Firth (A Single Man)
Morgan Freeman (Invictus)
Jeremy Renner (The Hurt Locker)
Best Actor in a Supporting Role
Matt Damon (Invictus)
Woody Harrelson (The Messenger)
Christopher Plummer (The Last Station)
Stanley Tucci (The Lovely Bones)
Christoph Waltz (Inglourious Basterds)
Best Actress in a Leading Role
Sandra Bullock (The Blind Side)
Helen Mirren (The Last Station)
Carey Mulligan (An Education)
Gabourey Sidibe (Precious: Based on the Novel ‘Push’ by Sapphire)
Meryl Streep (Julie & Julia)
Best Actress in a Supporting Role
Penélope Cruz (Nine)
Vera Farmiga (Up In The Air)
Maggie Gyllenhaal (Crazy Heart)
Anna Kendrick (Up In The Air)
Mo’Nique (Precious: Based on the Novel ‘Push’ by Sapphire)
Best Director
James Cameron (Avatar)
Kathryn Bigelow (The Hurt Locker)
Quentin Tarantino (Inglourious Basterds)
Lee Daniels (Precious: Based on the Novel ‘Push’ by Sapphire)
Jason Reitman (Up In The Air)
Best Animated Feature
Coraline
Fantastic Mr. Fox
The Princess and the Frog
The Secret of Kells
Up
In the event of a tie, there will be a movie trivia quiz to decide the winner.
Email your picks to me by clicking here, or just email me at j@brandfoundry.org with “2010 Oscar Contest Entry” in the subject line.
All entries MUST be received by midnight MST on Saturday March 6th, 2010.
Oh, and as a secondary contest, the person who refers the MOST new people to my site to enter the contest wins a $25 Visa Gift Card. Sweet, huh? Just tell whoever you refer to start their email with “referred by: ” so I’ll know where they came from. If your friends don’t include that, I can’t count ‘em.
And the $50 Oscar Visa Gift Card goes to….
We recorded on Tuesday this week, so you get your MJM love a little early this week. I recommend listening only under approved conditions and when wearing proper protective gear.
Three years ago, a bit-torrent website was shut down. It happens every day, but this one was different.
You see, OiNK.cd was an example of what online music could be, and the recording industry hated them for it.
OiNK was an online community of 180,000 users, audiophiles and music lovers to varying degrees, and it was invitation only. There was a very strict set of user guidelines, and if you so much as strayed into the gray area even once, your account was at risk. Cross the line and you were done, banned, no questions asked, no chance for appeal.
But there were amazing benefits, if you had been lucky enough to receive an invite. Users described OiNK as one of the world’s largest and most meticulously maintained online music repositories, and they were right. At it’s peak, OiNK hosted over 200,000 torrent files of exceptional quality and range. Users were required to maintain a respectable upload-to-download ration, which ensured that there were no freeloaders, but that everyone actively participated in the shareage. And because it was a community of music lovers, only the highest standards in music encoding were acceptable. If you uploaded a sub-par CD rip to try and up your ratio, rest assured that it would be reported and removed faster than it took you to upload it. Duplicates were strictly forbidden as well. And the music, oh the music – there was anything you could ever want!
I loved OiNK, and for the few years that I was privileged to enjoy the community and the music there, I was in heaven.
But all good things must come to an end.
On October 23, 2007, in the culmination of Operation Ark Royal, a joint operation between Interpol, the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry (IFPI), the British Phonographic Industry(BPI), and some other organizations, the site was shut down, the creator, Allan Ellis arrested, and the site’s hosting servers at nForce confiscated.
The days that followed held fear for all OiNK users. Would the authorities be able to identify them? Would the ISPs give up usernames and real-world identites? Would the joint task force start seeking out the 180,00+ users and begin prosecuting them? And what about Trent Reznor, who was a vocal member and fan of the site? Would he be prosecuted as well?
As it turned out, they were only interested in a few individuals besides Ellis, and most were promptly released from police custody and charges dropped.
On January 15, 2010, Allan Ellis was unanimously declared not guilty. He’s provided just a little bit of information over at OiNK.cd:
If you would like to get in touch with me, you can do so here: contact@alanellis.co.uk.
The solicitors representing me in the case were Morgan Rose with Alex Stein as the barrister.
I’d like to express my thanks to all those who have been in touch offering their support over the years, and the huge amount of congratulations I’ve received over the past few days.
There were three main questions arising from the emails:
1. Will the site be returning? Absolutely not.
2. Will I be available for interview? No, sorry, I would like to get on with my life in peace now.
3. Where did I buy my coat? Wait, what!? Well, I’m almost ashamed to say, but it’s from New Look, and judging by the fact that when I checked yesterday my local shop had more than 10 of them in stock for £30, it’s not very popular!
Finally, a huge thank you to my excellent legal team, without which I wouldn’t be here writing this right now.
It was a sad day when OiNK was shut down, and except for an exclusive few, the rest of the world may never know what a music-sharing site has the potential to be. For anyone that thinks iTunes is a neat idea or the next generation in music distribution: with all due respect, that’s like saying digital watches are the next generation of home computing.
