For reasons I won’t go into here, I suddenly find myself with most of a six-month lease on a VPS/VDS that I don’t actually have an immediate need for, doh. I’m not paying a huge amount for it (around 7 or 8 USD/mo, I think), so this lack of utilization isn’t a huge issue, but it gets me to wondering… what should I do with it?

I already run a TOR node elsewhere, and don’t really want to run a second. I thought about maybe running a TOR hidden service or two, but nobody uses the ones that are already out there, except for child porn, and, um, no. I don’t want to offer free webhosting to cheapskate assholes or “sponsor” a “clan” of spastic teenage malcontents, or whatever. No, I will not run your bittorrent tracker; no, I will not let you seed torrents off this machine, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. Don’t even ask.

The server is running Debian (but that can be changed); it has 512MB RAM, about 20GB of disk space, fairly beefy CPU access, and 300GB of bandwidth per month. It’s in the central United States somewhere, and the host forbids anything IRC-related, as well as spam, w4r3z, h4×0r stuph, et cetera.

If you had this available, what would you do? Assuming there were scores being handed out - which there aren’t - you’d get bonus points for ideas that are “socially responsible”, community-oriented (for a given value of “community”, anyway), or just plain nifty. Realistic ideas that involve software or applications which actually exist, please; no “Find someone to write a Ruby application which…” kinds of suggestions, right?

One of my absolute favorite radio shows is the CBC’s Rewind, which plumbs the (quite extensive) depths of the CBC radio archives for interesting historical material. The programs are made available (briefly) as downloadable podcasts on this page, though once they’re gone from there, you’re mostly out of luck.

Lately, they’ve been broadcasting a lot of stuff from the very early 1970s - the current episode as I write this is about Rowan and Martin’s Laugh-In, for example, from 1969. (It’s highly entertaining, and I suggest you give it a listen.)

That program reminded me of another they broadcast a year or so ago - an old program called “Something to Say” from September 1970, featuring quite long, quite extensive, and immensely fascinating interviews about rock ‘n’ roll with Grace Slick, Jim Morrison, and Charlie Allen (18MB, 40-minute MP3).

You probable know who Grace Slick is, and who Jim Morrison was, but… Charlie Allen? Turns out he was the singer for a band called Pacific Gas and Electric.

In all seriousness, this has got to be one of the most fascinating sets of sociological interviews concerning rock music ever. I know a lot of you might want to skip forward to the part with Morrison (who died less than a year after the interview was broadcast), or Grace Slick, but Charlie Allen’s bit at the beginning is just as interesting a glimpse into 1970 as the other two interviews.

As the CBC interviewer puts it, “Rock and roll isn’t just a fad, it’s the music of a generation, who’ve grown up in the Atomic Age, the age of space, jet travel, a rising tide of noise, instant communication, material abundance, and rapidly changing concepts in human moral beliefs. For young people, rock and roll seems to be a unifying force, not simple a means of enjoyment, but a way of expressing what they think and feel about life and what’s going on…”

The more things change, the more they stay the same.

Enjoy; I know I do.

Random amusements from the interwebs:

Australian officials have found a possible cause for crop circles. While the story is entertaining, the comments below it are absolutely priceless!

Hot on the heels of its successful injunction against gang members at the Cinco de Mayo festival earlier this year, Saint Paul is suing to keep gang-bangers away from a prominent neighborhood festival later this summer. Will it work? Time will tell.

A bunch of interesting tidbits from the USAF:

Think North Korea is the only country posturing with missile tests? We just lobbed a MIRV’d Minuteman III two-thirds of the way to Pyongyang as part of “an operational test to verify the weapon system’s reliability and accuracy.” Anyone think the timing was coincidence?

In happier news, airmen in Florida rescued stray kittens from inside the wall of one of their buildings. Better hope they aren’t plague-carrying al-Qaeda kitten operatives, eh?

It doesn’t go far enough, but there’s a glimmer of hope where “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” is concerned: The Secretary of Defense is apparently considering reviewing the military policy, with an eye towards making how and why you’re “outed” the pertinent factor. Damn, but the guy has a real genius for coming up with policies that won’t please a single person…

Not that I care, or cared, for or about Michael Jackson, but I have to admit these surreptitious nighttime photos of Neverland are damned cool. I’ve always wanted to explore an abandoned amusement park; the closest I’ve ever gotten has been the one in Hove Beach in GTAIV, alas.

So, forgive me if this is an old idea, but I’m not really a big geek where file-sharing technology is concerned. However, I did have a cunning idea…

So, rightly or wrongly, in a large portion of the world, it’s illegal to copy and share copyrighted works, be they music or video or whatever. However, I wonder just how legally defensible the sharing of metadata is?
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