A little more than a years worth of hair growing has now been immortalised on my licence renewal.

I can remind myself how my hair looked in October 2009 for ten whole years!

For most of my life my hair management scheme has involved cutting it all off every month or so.

Some time in the middleish of last year I got sick of cutting my hair, so I stopped. I've had two haircuts since. A "short back and sides" not long after I started this crazy mission, and a trim of the back about six months ago.

Somewhere along the line I decided I'd keep going until I could tie my hair back. I'm almost there, with just some stubborn fringe parts being too darn short.

Why? Because I can. Why not? I don't know. Shut up.

The whole thing has been a long string of new experiences...

• Hair tickling my forehead is really annoying.
• Hair tickling my eyebrows is really annoying.
• Hair tickling my ears is really annoying.
• Hair tickling my nose is really really annoying.
• Hair getting in my mouth while I eat is really annoying.
• Hair getting in my face while doing everything is really annoying.
• Having to "do my hair" at all is really annoying.
• Being a few degrees hotter on hot days really sucks.

In theory once I can tie it back, most of my irritation goes away.

I like how it looks. I don't know if I'll like how it looks tied back. Maybe not. I don't know how I'll deal with it in the moshpit at a music festival on a 45 degree C day. I might get heat stroke.

Maybe I'll just cut the whole thing off again.

That'd be fun.

Beatles piracy fixation gets stranger with huge FLAC release [Arstechnica.com]

• SMS Saturday: "Beatles Mono box - $540 for ten albums!"
• The Beatles still don't have their music for sale on iTunes or other digital retailers despite they and their record company being "keen to make it happen."
• Songs on iTunes cost US$1 each.
• Why don't the Beatles have their tracks on iTunes?
• See first point...

The Ars Technica article quotes Paul McCartney suggesting the problem isn't piracy as such, but wanting compensation from the record company should their tracks "leak" to the internet.

Either, as the article suggests, Paul doesn't understand that tracks can leak to the internet from ripping CDs, or his real fear isn't piracy but early leaking of new tracks. This is exactly the argument Metallica uses these days to explain their Napster crusade. They were not annoyed at piracy, but at their new song "I Disappear" being found on the net before it had been released.

The recent USB drive release of the remastered albums was a stroke of genius and was either a fluke of misunderstanding (as Ars suggests) or a demonstration that The Beatles understand the whole digital music marketplace better than anyone thought.

The USB drive apparently not only included MP3s (at the highest possible quality of 320kbps) but also losslessly compressed FLAC files at 44.1hz 24bit. This is better than CD quality (which is 44.1hz 16bit).

I might suggest that they've all been snapped up so quickly, despite their insane prices, because the quality is better than CD, and because the source is directly from the band. It's not based on any kind of reality, where no-one on the entire planet would be able to tell any difference. It's based on Beatles fans thinking they're getting that pure "in the studio" feel, almost as good as having snuck into the studio at night and copied the master tapes.

If iTunes and the like started pumping out 24-bit MP3s, and explained in a slightly but not too technical way why they're better than CD, they might get a lot more customers very quickly. Techy customers who want better quality, and lots of non-techy customers who want to upgrade, even though they don't need to.

And then when they updated to 32 bit...

Or maybe not.