Tis a sad day. The Pirate Bay is gone. I didn't use it for much of anything anymore, but still. It was nice they were there as a last ditch effort. If any of my friends who read this are still using TPB, I would say stop. Like yesterday. All the logs of stuff people have downloaded and shared are going to be up for grabs. Make sure you keep yourself out of trouble.

This is like Napster dieing all over again. A very sad day indeed.

action, not emotion

Serenity, by far. I cut my teeth on star trek the next generation, but Serenity just mixed Sci-Fi and Western in such a cool way. It was just one of the most amazing tv shows ever. I'm sad no more of it will ever be made. Though the fact that it was only 13 episodes and 1 movie long may be what made it so amazing. It didn't really have a chance to have any sucky episodes.

Long ago (way back in umm.. 2001, 2002, something like that?) I did an internet radio broadcast for a station called RagRadio. Ragradio has been out of commission for awhile. There were a few brief tries at restarting it (including one I posted about in this very blog), but we never quite captured the magic we had back then.

I realize this was supposed to be a post about Livejournal, but I'm making this post about ragradio damn it. lol.

Anyway, I had a friend who was a fellow broadcaster on ragradio named Nichole. She had a livejournal, which at the time you could only get an account by paying for one, or an already paying member inviting you. She invited me and I tried to start my own journal. It didn't last, and even today i couldn't tell you what the username for it was. That's the first place I heard about it.

Later on I tried to start blogging again, only this time I did it with blogger. I didn't like it as much and that ended up going by the way side. Then along about 2006 I decided to start journaling again, came across this website, and I've actually maintained it ever since. I go through rough periods where I don't blog very much, and I go through periods where I blog several times a day. I also do fits and starts in between. But I'm proud of the fact that I've managed to record the last 3 years of my life here on livejournal.

Going back about a year or so to the time frame during my divorce, its really difficult to read those old entries. I was very weak and really didn't know how to do anything on my own. I still don't for the most part, but for now at least, I've learned how to pay my bills online.

Back to ragradio for a few moments. I've written about it here before, but I'll write again as I might have new readers. Ragradio when it started was the first internet radio station I had ever heard of. A friend of mine Kellie introduced it to me. She also introduced me to the wonderful world of IRC. I should either thank her for that or shoot her. I'm not sure which. ;-)

Anyway, back in the day when Ragradio first started they streamed the radio at some incredibly low bitrate using some sort of Real (the company) streaming server. You listened with Realplayer (back before it was a giant, bloated, piece of spyware). At the time mp3's were still really new, and not supported by real player. (not to mention it took 5-10 hours to download 1 alubm on dialup). So we were limited to playing music by what CD's we had. You stuck a CD in the drive, selected your track, hit play, and away it went across the intertubes. You couldn't even tell if anyone was listening or not.

Kellie and I spent many hours sitting at my house broadcasting to the internet, unsure if anyone was even hearing us. We would stay up until all hours of the night, and well into the wee hours of the next morning talking into the microphone, arguing about what to play next, chatting on irc during songs, and just generally having a great time.

Then came the advent of Shoutcast. It was open source software from Nullsoft (later taken over by AOL) that allowed us to broadcast using winamp. That meant MP3's! Anything we could get our grubby little hands on in mp3 format, we could send out over the internet. It was also slightly higher bitrate, but we were on dialup, so great bit rates weren't really a posibility. Then there was the ever constant buffering, when you were listening to other people broadcasting. The things we put up with back then to listen to music over the internet would not be tolerated today. lol.

I don't remember what caused the music to die that first time around. Maybe it didn't die, and i just drifted away. I don't recall. But I do know a few years after that I came back to ragradio and things were still going strong. One thing about ragradio, it was always a drama. But it was a drama with good people. They sometimes made bad choices, and someone was always pissed off at someone else, but when it really came down to it we were all friends. Good friends, from all across the world. From Southern California, to New York, to across the pond in Portugal. There was of course myself, and Kellie from right here in Texas. I found lots of new music because of ragradio and my tastes expanded greatly. That's still reflected even today in the music I listen to. Mr. Johnny Cash is one of my all time favorite artists. The first time I heard a Cash song was on ragradio.

Over the years ragradio died. It's sad. I think it mostly died because the 2 great people running it (Mig and Ed) got tired of all the drama. They would never admit that (to spare the feelings of the people involved), but I personally think that was a lot of it. They always claimed it was things like getting shut down for running a pirate internet radio station and not paying any fees to do so. I don't think they were real worried about that though.

Anyway, after the demise of ragradio, I started up my own shoutcast station. I even set up a Linux box strictly dedicated to running shoutcast (and my eggdrop, L053r). I learned a lot about broadcasting, and how hard it is to maintain. I learned a little about programming, and how frustrating bugs in software can be. It was called freeradio. I got to experience some of the frustrations that come along with running an internet radio station. Also a little of the fears of being caught. Freeradio didn't really have a lot of steam behind it, so it died too.

Anyway, a little of my past there for folks. Ragradio introduced me to a lot, including livejournal, which is what the topic of this post was originally about anyway.

Courtesy of she is very creative!