mahiwaga

You turned me inside out and you showed me what life was about only you, the only one who stole my heart away

I am staring at the sun glimmering over the glorious sea once again, pondering the infinite, twisting paths of destiny that have led me to this wondrous shore. And somehow my iPod is sadistically taunting me with love songs and lullabies.

Looking back as lovers go walking past all of my life wondering how they met and what makes it last

There is something achingly beautiful about this sense of endless desolation juxtaposed with the joyful beauty of the ocean. It’s perfect.

The waves give me this inexplicable intuition that fate is guaranteed to lead me to places and experiences that I had never considered. I am naively hoping that fortune promises to lead me to happier things. I’ve definitely had my fill of sorrow and disappointment. Oh, I know. Chance favors the prepared mind. There really isn’t much more I can do but endure. And continue to hope. And dream.

Now I think Apple is doing the right thing by offering DRM-free music. Although, frankly, the DRMed stuff is not all that hard to crack. Just burn it to CD then re-encode it with the Apple Lossless codec. No loss of quality necessary. (I wouldn’t recommend re-encoding to mp3 or AAC unless you don’t care and/or don’t notice the drop in quality.) Hard drive space is cheap, anyway. My 30 GB 5G iPod cost me less than my (sadly, broken) 20 GB 2G iPod. And if you don’t want to waste a CD-R, I’m sure there are other hacks out there for removing the DRM.

All of the sudden, there’s this bugaboo about Apple encoding your user information in the DRM-free AACs you download. Paranoid much?! You know what they say, if you aren’t guilty, you have nothing to hide. Hehe.

But seriously, come on. Ever heard of sed?

sed -i s/Your Name//g gnarls_barkeley-crazy.m4a

Voila! Your name is gone, daddy, gone.

(WARNING: I haven’t actually tried this, and this may completely corrupt your AAC file beyond all redemption. Don’t blame me. You’re the idiot who didn’t make a backup.)