early midlife crisis alert

As a young child through to junior high school, I was most interested in luxury import marques like Lamborghini, Ferrari, Lotus, and the like. But by the time I reached high school, I had developed what has since been an ongoing passion for Porsches. When Electronic Arts released their driving game Porsche Unleashed a few years ago, I was skeptical. However, as soon as I got a computer that could play the game, I was hooked on it for a long time. I loved how you could build a stable of vintage Porsches in your own garage and take any of them out for a spin through the countryside on the weekends.

Last year, I discovered a great magazine for Porsche enthusiasts and owners called Excellence. Each month features a market update on vintage Porsches, and this month's issue discusses the earliest models of the 911 from 1963-1973. The article described them in considerable and interesting detail and also provided a detailed list of price ranges for each model year for poor, good, and excellent condition cars. For the model years I'd favour most (1969-1973), a good-quality specimen can be obtained for as little as $13 thousand US. That's not a bad price for a thoroughly good sports car from a classic line. The car wouldn't be nearly as fast as today's 911 turbos (compare horsepower between 160 in the 1973 911T and 456 in the 2002 911 GT2), but it would be a great drive and not too hard on the wallet. (The newest 911s seem to be priced in US dollars according to their top speed: the same GT2 can go 170 mph and it's worth about $170 thousand US.)

I couldn't consider it right now, but reading articles like that demonstrate that my dream of owning a Porsche could be realized one day in the future. That's a pretty fun thing to look forward to.

more on MP3 trading service

Been giving the MP3 trading service some more thought lately, thanks to numerous comments in recent discussion here. In considering the concept of trading, I've been wondering if you couldn't assign some value to what members would upload to other users in addition to what they download from other users. Premium subscriptions could be offered as incentives to those who share a great deal of music, who function as a supernode, etc.

chaizzilla also suggested something about specializing in concert bootlegs. I mentioned nt's CD-R listing page. Is there some way that we could find each other through a P2P network for LJ users? Maybe that's something for the lj_biz community to bat around. I'd totally hook up to a music community on LJ if it had a parallel P2P protocol associated with it to find music that's being discussed or profiled.

Can you search for users on the Kazaa network? Does everyone here have a Kazaa client?

on Kazaa and spyware

giles pointed out a good article about Kazaa's spyware apps here:
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/news/archive/2002/01/04/financial1758EST0370.DTL

Sounds like the project was mismanaged to me. But as long as you fully close down Kazaa between sessions and do not install any third-party programs which you're occasionally invited to do while connected to Kazaa, I would think you'd be safe.

"Spyware" is a touchy word - full of emotion, I think. It's not hard to see why advertisers would like to gather as much demographic data as possible on their audiences in order to push their decreasingly effective banner ads and other promotions to the most carefully-selected groups possible. It should sure as hell be clearly regulated (which it's probably not), but it's hardly the Big Brother scare that it's occasionally made out to be.

Of course, we're all entitled to our opinions...