Mathew Carley

I remember when I was about 8, there was the suggestion made that Sex-Ed should be taught to 10-year olds.

I thought this was a pretty awesome idea – I thought we were literally going to learn to fuck.

Sadly, this was not the case (of course, I had no knowledge of the law, but when you think about this in a historical context, 11 isn’t so young). I made it all the way to age 11 before having said classes at school (though I had read books on the subject years earlier).

Anyway, what prompted this post?

Well, first, I just came home from the Gym a few hours ago, and I had been talking in the Sauna about the English-speaking world being uptight about things like public nudity, then, I was watching a podcast, and said topic came up. It was an older American guy talking about the generations comparative views on the subject of sex and all that goes along with it, and how happy he is that the body is finally being liberated.

Rewind to last night, I was visiting a friend, and on TV was some documentary about some über religious fuckwit going from town to town in the USA, hosting these… well… what can only be described as “big virginity banquets”. These girls would enter this church or hall or whatever, be given a white rose as a symbol of purity, and would have to pledge to their fathers and “god” that they wouldn’t lose their virginity before marriage.

I just can’t understand why anyone would do that to themselves, especially in this day and age. In addition, it even goes against Christianity. But of course, naturally the Americans have distorted Christianity as they distort the English language, the Kama Sutra and democracy.

Italy, which one could almost call the cradle of that religion, has none of these fucked up views, and they seem to be a far happier people. Oddly enough, in the summer, its wonderful to be in France or Italy because all the Americans are touring, and they’re promiscuous if you spew out a word or 3 or French, Spanish or Italian… take them to some small shitty cafe in the middle of nowhere and they turn in to putty.

Seriously, celibacy isn’t the answer to anything except venereal diseases and even then, if only they were taught how to take care of themselves and just not be stupid about sex, well… the rest of the world wouldn’t be laughing at them. I mean come on… New York state age of consent is 18 – in the northern neighbour its 15. Who has more school shootings? Who are happier, kinder, more chilled people? (It’s not the Americans).

You see my point. I could expand, but I fear I may repeat myself. Feel free to argue.

I’m basing this on the NW-A806.

While the player itself is OK, whats under the hood is not. Some marketing genius at Sony decided to call it an MP3 player. It is not.

While the files on the player may very well be MP3, in the typical Sony fashion, they’re a *custom* version of MP3, otherwise known as OMGAudio. The sole purpose of this appears to be to cripple the music with DRM.

Sony have this software (which is utter shit) which you have to use to convert and transfer the files to the player. All I have to say is gaaaaaaaaaaaaaargh! I spent about 1½ hours of frustration trying to use some *other* Sony utilities to put normal MP3s on the player that would play (keeping in mind that it appears as a drive in Windows explorer, but when you transfer MP3s in this way, they don’t play).

Then finally I downloaded the SonicStage Software. Again. What utter shit design this is. Once I installed it and restarted my computer (REQUIRED… I hate when it is actually required to restart the computer after installing something as trivial as a music program), I plugged in the player.

Then, it tells me that I have to format the player because a previous version of the software had been used to put music on it before, and this was not compatible. Fuck that. All I have to say is, buy something better. An iPod plays music, it just works, it plays MP3s. This, Sony, is why your Network Walkmans are unpopular. Do not buy one. DRM is a bad idea, and I’mhappy that some stores and such are finally recognizing this.

Anyway, in the end, I ended up burning the music to CD-R…

Damn Sony. I have 1 Sony device left (my camera), but I suspect when it comes time for a new one, I’ll be going Canon or Nikon. I’ll have to have a *really* good reason to buy any Sony product again… Sony used to symbolize quality (or something like it) – now it symbolizes utter shit.