Infinifree iTunes

I'm in a bit of an ethical quandry lately. I discovered a way to get virtually unlimited iTunes for free. It's perfectly legal, and there's no hitches that I can tell. All I have to do is sign up for a new PayPal account with one of my many credit cards, and then sign up for a new iTunes account and link it to the PayPal account. I get five free songs every time I do this: https://www.paypal.com/us/cgi-bin/webscr?cmd=xpt/general/UsePaypalOnITunes-outside I can sign up for multiple iTunes accounts (all I need is a new email, and I can set up infinite forwarders from my giveministry.org server) and participate in this offer multiple times. I can also close PayPal accounts in about five seconds and sign up for a new one with the same credit card, which allows me to participate innumerable times. It's obvously not the intention of the offer, and it is definitely taking advantage of a loophole in the Terms and Conditions (i.e. "Maximum of one (1) offer per Eligible Participant per iTunes account"). Not "one offer per eligible participant", but "per eligible participant per iTunes account". So it's like this, a business is giving away free songs. They are only giving away 2,500,000 songs total, 5 per person. Through some ingenuity, I can get as many as I want. But every time I take more than my share, I keep someone else from signing up for PayPal, and if I do this a lot, PayPal will loose a little business on account of me. Not only that, I'm taking away the opportunity from some people to get free songs. So, what to do. I've contacted Apple and PayPal to ask them if what I'm doing is okay by them, or if they will shut me down. No answer thus far. What's the right thing to do? I don't know, but I'm open to opinions. I really want lots of free songs, of course, but I'm predisposed to believe this is wrong, simply because my motive is selfish, and it could end up harming another, or at least a business. Maybe I'll just use it to get my top 100 wish list songs. That wouldn't have much of an impact amongst 2,500,000 available songs, but I could save a lot of money on music. What would you do?

The Batcave

I often joke that my windowless basement office is a dungeon. We get crickets and roaches and all sorts of nasty creepy crawlies lurking across our floors. Until today, though, I never knew accurate the word "dungeon" was.

This afternoon, one of my coworkers popped his head in my office and asked me "Is that your friend out here?". I had no idea what he was talking about, so I got up and looked out my door.

To my surprise, this little guy was hanging on the wall about 10 feet outside my door. He must have been very tired, 'cause I took this picture about 5 inches away from his face, and he didn't even move.

Some building services guys came and took him outside not long ago. Not the nicest thing to do, but since bats can carry rabies, I guess it was the only sensible thing to do. I guess it's better than him being blugeoned to death in a pillowcase, like what happened to the bat that invaded Greg McConnell's and Jason Martin's shower once.

I hope he finds some other nice warm place to sleep. It's flippin' cold out!

Man ... er ... Squirrel of Steel

Here's a funny story for you.  Yesterday, Kris was walking along the street when she saw a squirrel trying to cross the sidewalk.  It was struggling to heave something about the size of a bagel to the other side, quite unsuccessfully.  As she got closer, she realized that it actually was a bagel, about the size of the squirrel itself.

The poor thing kept trying to grab the bagel in its mouth and carry it high above its shoulders.  Problem is, have you ever tried to pick up a bagel the size of a small person in your mouth?  Neither have I, but I suppose it would look something like this squirrel looked.

Needless to say, the bagel kept flopping to the ground, and the squirrel only made it half-way across the sidewalk.  Then it proceeded to grab handfuls of the bagel and cherish it right in the middle of the walk.

The moral of the story?  Never try to carry a bagel as big as you are.  Unless you're Superman.

Spinal Stenosis

I got an email from my mom yesterday.  She's going to have to go in for surgery on her lower back.  Ever since they yanked Vioxx off the market, her arthritis has been so bad that she can't get up and walk for more than 15 minutes at a time.  It hasn't helped that when she started taking Vioxx, she gained like 30 pounds.  The extra weight is the opposite of what her lower back wanted.

Anyways, so her specialist says she has a slowly degenerative condition called spinal stenosis.  One of the vertebrae in her lower back has shifted out of alignment with the one above and below it, causing the spinal cord to be squeezed and nerves to be pinched.  Ouch.

They give the surgury a 65% chance of improving her condition and a high probability of slowing further deterioration.  Since those odds don't make me really desperate for prayer, I've decided to pray for not just a successful surgery, but for a textbook case of complete recovery and regeneration.  Please join me in praying for my mom.  She is such a lively woman, just like her mother and father before her.  It's painful for me to see her pinned to a chair all the time.

Server Construction

Last night was full of surprises.  I was building a new server for our church until about 1am.  Come to find out that the PCI riser card won't reach the PCI slots on the motherboard.  I spent about 2 hours trying to make it fit, to no avail.  I have to spend another $64 for a special riser card that uses a ribbon cable.  That's okay, I guess, but I feel bad now for quoting our church's finance administrator about $120 less than the final cost is going to be (I still need to buy rails).

To make things worse, I spent $15 on a heatsink that I didn't even need to, and can't even use.  The retail processor I bought came with it's own heatsink, and the super-cooling, highly-rated heatsink that I purchased extra wouldn't even fit in the case.  The thing is the size of a softball!  I guess it didn't look so big in the picture.

Well, at least the server boots.  I just can't do anything with it yet, since I can't install the video card.  ;)