I’ve recently rediscovered IRC. It’s been a while since I spent a lot of time on there, but I’ve found it useful for a lot of things lately. With the problems Napster’s having it’s nice to be able to just trade stuff online with another person and not have to worry too much about a company or agency monitoring what sort of stuff you’re trading. Lately I’ve been downloading and watching a lot of television episodes in ASF and MPEG format. Shows like Seinfeld, the Simpsons, Star Trek, Futurama etc. The best part is that there are no commercials and you can pause whenever you like. It’s similar to trading tapes. I’ve also been checking out so-called ‘bookwarez’ these are books, of course, either audiobooks in mp3 format or books in some sort of document format like acrobat, word, or text format. There are actually people who go to the trouble to scan each page of a particular book into an ocr (optical character recognition) program to transfer the information into a digital format and then they go back and double-check the manuscript. You have to admire that dedication! I downloaded the audio book edition of The Rise and Fall of the Roman Empire. I’ve always wanted to read that. It would be nice to take along something like that on a long plane trip.