pissed off post

it sucks that the first post of thier blog would be a very pissed off post.

but that's what this blog is about despite of the idealist title.

my family was reading over and filling out the new financial aid application for my brother and i think the school lost trust for parents and families that have been supporting the school for soo long. i feel betrayal. the school has increased tuition every single year since my brother started going and it's getting hard on the families especially families like us who sent kids to the school when it was much more affordable. there's some meanness in there. it has drifted so far from its founding principles and that it's turning me off.

i wonder what happened to the school? who are the board members now? what are their intentions? what are they trying to turn the school into?

the school has been raising its tuition year after year, with little increase in financial aid. it recently built a new multi-million dollar campus. the school began as a small international school for missionary kids with modest tuition. it was not intended to be a luxury school and compete with other prestigious private schools.

another pissed off item is apple itune's protected 'fair play' music.

i purchased the songs legally on itune an i realized that i can't put them on my cellphone.

i never went into this problem before because i 'had' an ipod, but unfortunately, thanks to poor reliability and quality of apple's ipod (made in china, designed in california), it died a little more than a month ago. so instead of spending another US$200-300 on another stupid ipod, i decided to get a multi-function phone instead for less than US$200 (actually US$150) that has a 2 mega-pixel camera for digital still and video, a radio, blue tooth capability, recorder and is a multi-media player.

i now understand motorola executives' view of the ipod as a stupid idea and why they were puzzled at how a rectangular portable hard drive could outsell motorola's best cellphone models. the ipod is a stupid idea. but motorola forgot one thing: the cool factor.

as stupid as the ipod is, it is cool, very cool. it was so cool that it became a status symbol and the must have gadget for simple minded teenagers, college students and adults.

i must say that the ipod is a beautiful thing, but it was a poorly made gadget. but that doesn't really matter, because it was C-O-O-L. make that VERY COOL.

anyway, so back to the itune fiasco, i realized that i couldn't play the songs i purchased on itune. that's pretty maddening considering that i don't have the freedom to use the music i bought fair and square, and the cause was itune's fair play or fair use protection. protection from what? from playing the music on anything not designed by apple? what a hell hole.

there is a well-known and simple way to get around it, that is to burn the purchased track on a cd and rip them again onto your computer. but do you know how tedious that is? imagine having to do that for several albums you bought from itune and you would have to burn them all up, input the song and artist information all over again. yes, a pain in the butt, i agree.

worst, you can't even convert the itune music you bought to mp3! what an outrage. my friends who download illegally would be laughing at me for the trouble of buying my music "legally".

things shouldn't be this way. but it is.