Sander Wolf

I know that pictures don’t really steal your soul. I know that once I’ve posted stuff to the internet whether on Facebook, Linkedin, MySpace, this website, or any others that it’s pretty much out there for the world to see with no expectation of privacy. However, that doesn’t mean that you can take images and other information I’ve posted and repurpose them. This has just happened with a new site called spock.com. Do a search for me there and you see my smiling face. It’s an image they’ve downloaded from (probably) MySpace and stuck on their servers. Now it shows up in response to a search for my name. There’s also some other information there that isn’t accurate. Apparently, their algorithm has semi-conflated me with someone from the Netherlands. Now, I’m well aware that there are other people with my name (and that’s a whole other story), but piecing my info and their’s together seems particularly, well, rude. If you’re going to steal my image at least attribute it correctly.

I sent them a “take-down notice” via their feedback page. They replied that, “My guess is that your search result came from publicly available information from your various social networking sites.” Well, duh. But just because it’s publicly available doesn’t mean it can be used where I haven’t given permission. And I haven’t.

No More Pussy

One of the more boring things I’ve written, but maybe the headline (which I didn’t write) evens things out.

So I bought a pair of these. I figured I’d have enough to fill three of them, but after the big purge, I barely filled two. Cassettes are stored somewhere else for now and the few DVDs I own fit on the CD racks. And the fact is, I don’t really touch any of the CDs in the rack anymore. The procedure now is to just rip everything to the big hard drive and then file away the CD for reference, or to prove I didn’t steal it when the RIAA comes looking for me, or to see if the lyrics are to Death Cab for Cutie’s “Soul Meets Body” are really as goofy as they sound. A fair amount of the music I “own” doesn’t even embody a physical medium. That’s a fairly odd thing to think about and leads to a whole tangent about backup methods and drive mirroring that’s far too dry for a topic as emotional and lively as music. But it’s a topic that anyone who actively listens to new music will have to deal with. Oh, and I’ve got records too. Not a lot of them, but it’s just as well — the stylus on the old Fisher stopped working about a year or two ago so now I don’t have a way to play them anyway. I guess if I get the urge I could always re-buy them on iTunes. Maybe they’ll give me a discount if I cut out the UPC code and mail it in to them.

So I do some writing about music. Nothing too crazy, but every now and then I get to interview and/or meet one of my heroes. I shook Elvis Costello’s hand once. I hung out with John Popper backstage at the Orpheum in Boston — I’d prove it but the pictures I took didn’t come out. And over the last ten years or so I’ve also amassed a fair number of CDs and tapes that I’ve gotten mostly for “free.” As my collection grew I kept buying storage units to hold everything. So, before this whole “media room” project started, I had about four or five mismatched, unfinished wooden shelving units. Classy.

Now the tapes I don’t know what to do with. There were a few hundred, so I did some triage. I threw out the tapes that I also had on CD, the ones that really sucked and I couldn’t defend keeping, and the ones that were still shrink-wrapped. But I still don’t know what to do with the rest. I’ve got them arranged artfully in a moving box and, you guessed it, an unfinished wooden shelving unit. I figure one day I’ll convert them all to mp3s, I’ll get started on that right after I stain and finish all my shelves.