Saturday, May 21, 2005

An internet stream of consciousness..

There are many keen things I can now do with my high speed access to the internets. It has nothing to do with downloading pRon or warez. Let me 'splain...

With broadband I can now engage in a kind of internet stream of consciousness. Beginning in one place with one goal and ending up somewhere completely unexpected. Last night I was over at Slashdot.org where I learned about a Firefox browser extension called Greasemonkey. I installed it and then perused the many scripts that do cool things. One of the things it can do is make ifilm.com movies open up in media player rather than an ad riddled browser popup. I suddenly realize that I can now view streaming movies again and proceed over to ifilm where I see that fanboys are still producing Star Wars fan films. Sweet. I check out 'The art of the saber'. Holy crap this is cool! These two guys should be doing fight choreography for big budget movies. In the film, there is a haunting tune. The credits list it as J'attends by Gartoz A Ran (with the accompaniment of Lisa Gerard of Dead Can Dance). The song is from the soundtrack to Black Hawk Down. A hop over to amazon.com shows that I can buy the soundtrack used for $12 bucks, but I am an impatient mas. itunes only has the audio book. A final search of Kazaa gives me nothing. Finally a google search leads me to allofmp3.com a Semi-legal Russian mp3 site that the US record companies has been desperately trying to shut down with little success. I said a short prayer and charged $10 to my visa. Their selection is good but by no means exhaustive. But here's the kicker. I downloaded (at great speed) the entire soundtrack for about $1.50 in unrestricted mp3 format. (The site also does wma, mpeg4 and oog).

I have truly missed this kind of web journey. And while it can waste a massive amount of time it can also be quite rewarding. Anyone else do this? Leave a post.

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

Yeah, I do that type of thing whenever I can spare the time. Usually it begins with either blog-surfing, or a google-search for a specific thing, say, print history of the comics character, Blue Beetle. But then it can take me to an entymology site (scarab beetles), which then might take me to a criminalistics site (bugs could be used to determine how long someone has been dead, etc.) to a CSI fanfic, to someone's personal journal...anyway, you know what I mean. It's great if you happen to have a billion different interests.
--Cat

Steve said...

Fortunetly I have both a billion interrests AND broadband. Victory is mine!

Anonymous said...

I find myself doing the same thing too. BTW thanks for the tip about Greasemonkey. That is a way cool toy...

Brian

Anonymous said...

Glad to hear that you have high-speed, now you won't have to go to frag to get new stuff... Just kidding...

I am almost scared to the chaos that you will wreak with a broadband connection.

We had to download the last CSI eps that was Quentin directed... frellin' sweet man.

Monkey