Went out this past Sunday night out of boredom. Waited on my friend, who shall remain nameless, to get out of work before heading out. The plan was to go see Terminator: Salvation (which I just found out has a ride) and hop over to another movie or 2. If he got out of work at 4:30 like he was originally going to, we woulda been able to do it. But he got out 2 hours later than that. Neither of us had eaten and his folks were staying in town for the weekend and they cooked, so we hit them up first, got our fill, and then headed out. By then, it was close to 9p which was kinda late to do a triple-header so we decided on trying to do 2 movies instead of 3.

He kinda fucked us up cuz he stopped at his house first before coming here to pick me up so that cost us some time. Paying for the usual overpriced theater food was completely out of the question. Free, cooked food was the way we were going. His parents were staying at the Star Island Resort down in Kissimmee. After getting our grub on, we’d head out to Downtown Disney to peep our flicks. His peeps cooked up some baked chicken, boned and boneless, and some turkey burgers that were the bomb. We coulda kicked back and stuffed ourselves so full that we couldn’t even move (it’s happened before) and that itis would kick in and fuck us all up during the movies. So we only ate just enough so that we wouldn’t have to get up and take a shit during the middle of the movies or be so tired that we’d fall asleep from overeating.

We got our fill, he gave me a little tour of the rooms they have there for design inspiration for my house, and then we had to bounce cuz it was getting later. While there, the Magic were about to play Cleveland in the third playoff game. I hadn’t seen a Magic game in forever and we thought about hanging around but we were determined to see our movies. And his parents would be a buzzkill cuz they’re old and reserved while we’re wild and cuss and cut up and act a fuckin’ fool all the time when we’re out. Woulda been an awkward night if we stuck around there.

The buildings were multi-story. Maybe 5 or 6 from what I can remember. The rooms were pretty well designed if not a little old and energy inefficient (cuz there were fluorescent light bulbs everywhere). They still had crt tv’s in the living room and bedroom. It was a 1-bedroom. Full kitchen, mini-bar, washer/dryer, spa, patio, pretty much what you’d expect in a higher end hotel room. I have no clue what they paid but it was nice for an extended stay. Bout all I could complain about was them old ass tv’s.

So we got our food on and bounced. While heading towards DT Disney, we saw the Characters in Flight balloon in the air. We couldn’t believe it. Every other occasion, the damn thing is grounded. I guess Disney got a clue and figured out that Florida weather is what it is and if they didn’t launch that motherfucker on a more regular basis, it woulda been a waste of an investment. 400 feet up is its max and it didn’t appear that high from the looks of things. It looked like no one was in it at first but the safety bars are the height of a person. I guess so that no one with suicidal tendencies gets any ideas.

It was a little after 9 or so at this point. We hit up AMC and the next showtime for Terminator was 10:10p. Last showing was 8p. What the fuck? A busy weekend with big movies and showtimes were 2 hours apart? And this theater has 24 auditoriums! We thought that was ridiculous cuz other theaters in the area were showing the big movies, like, every 15 or 30 minutes. We wasn’t gonna wait an hour to see shit. In addition, we found an easy way in and did a walkthrough the theater but got spotted by a security guard who noticed us outside previously and he tailed us. Didn’t mean shit to us cuz we were leaving anyway. Nothing was showing at a convenient time. Coulda snuck into any movie we wanted and that security guard couldn’t do shit about it. Not like other people didn’t get in using the same method we did. It was just too easy.

If we saw Terminator at 10:10p, that’d leave no time to hop another movie cuz they had no later showings of anything. How stupid is that? People crawling all over the place and the last movies were on around 10p? But anyway, without spilling my free admission secrets, since seeing the movies was a bust, we decided to peep the balloon ride. There was a lame magician act next to it, really lame, but then we decided not to do the ride cuz it was dark, photo ops would be non-existent, and I left my cam at home cuz I didn’t wanna get it wet if it decided to rain again. So we went to yet another option and that was to hit up Jacon.

I had planned on doing Jacon but since I’m unemployed, I ain’t trying to spend unnecessarily on time or money. This was the very last event ever and he knew where it was being held so he led the way since he was driving anyway. We got to the Ramada where it was being held, which was close to Star Island, and the event was already done. There were still some nerd stragglers dressed in cosplay but Jacon was a wrap. Not wanting to waste the trip, we walked around the hotel. Place was a ghost town. With this plan ruined too, we ended up with the Magic game as our last option. A restaurant/bar in the hotel had the game on but the tv’s were too small, no sound, and no one was there to add excitement. We found a fitness room onsite and it was open and empty with an old crt tv in it. The game was on it though and we had that room all to ourselves. Prob was we didn’t have no pussy with us so the opportunity got tired real quick.

I wouldn’t even call it a fitness room. Just a few pieces of equipment in a tight space. But it was wide open and unlocked, even at that hour. If you got a girl (or guy) and wanna have a little party where no one will bother you, now you know a spot where you can get that and a non-sexual workout. At this point, we wanted to find a place showing the game but Kissimmee is just a lame ass town. We drove around looking for a live spot but found nothing of interest. We did find a middle-eastern supermarket and gas station next to a Wal-Mart where 2 guys wearing turbans were walking into. My friend said, “Look at them terrorists.” Asshole. Then we saw 2 black chicks walking down the street and he hollered at them. They weren’t prosties or anything but his pick-up line was pathetic: “How ya’ll doing? Ya’ll look good.” Huh? You think them bitches ain’t heard that one before? You think they don’t get hit on by guys all the time that say the exact same stupid bullshit? Gimme a break. And no, he didn’t get no digits or nothing. So we kept on driving.

He just bought a Disney annual pass. We saw a sign for Gay Days and I told him, “So that’s why you bought that pass.” So he’d have unlimited admission to hang with his peeps in the park. We were just poppin’ out with bullshit all night. Passed a place by called Harry Ramsbottoms. I guess it’s a british bar. We joked about the name: “What does Harry do? He rams bottoms!” In retrospect, we shoulda hit that bitch up cuz I know them people know how to have a good time. We passed by a jamaican club and I knew that shit was gonna be lame. Couldn’t understand a word they’d say, probably weren’t showing the game, if they were, you couldn’t hear it over the reggae. If we were just gonna club, it wouldn’t be an issue. But I did say, “Fuck that. I ain’t tryin’ to get stabbed or get no body parts cut off.” Cuz, you know, they always got a blade on ‘em or a machete close by…so we kept on driving.

Saw a TGI Fridays and thought about going in but they’d try to charge a nigger for food. But our stomachs were still good so we passed on that idea. Only one option left: watch the game with his parents. Then he realized that there was a karaoke bar at the resort and they had tv’s. We heard the lousy singing when we left before so hearing the game wasn’t an option. There was a smell on our way into the resort that wasn’t there before. I said that it was probably the water cuz spics drink the same water they bathe in. We were just bad, real bad, with the stereotypes all night. I came up with that one out of nowhere cuz, in case you didn’t know, Kissimmee’s populace is known in the area as consisting of mostly ‘hicks and spics.’

Come to think of it, the first time we got to the resort, the security guard asked to see a visitor pass but my friend couldn’t find it. He gave the guard the room number and last name of his parents but the guard never checked. He just let us go in. Now is that good security? Hell no. We coulda been anyone, said anything to get in and they let us. Twice! Cuz they waved us through the second time. So what’s the point of them being there if they ain’t doing their job? Like I always say, people are living in a false sense of security.

We parked, walked through the lobby area where they have internet access for, if I remember correctly, .45 cents a minute or some shit which is just ridiculous. Bitches working at the front desk attractive as always. They know why they got their jobs. Wouldn’t be surprised if the top dog was a guy who hired their asses. There’s a game room. The pool was nice. Had a waterfall in the middle but it wasn’t on. People were actually out there swimming but it was kinda cool outside and the water was too. They obviously didn’t give a flying fuck, now did they? Tennis court was right next to it. Went upstairs to the karaoke bar and they were pretty live. Atrocious singing as expected but the game was on flat screens, people around to be social with, and it was free.

Not much for talent. Only 1, maybe 2, chicks that I’d consider attractive. The rest, about 30-40 chicks, were all either jailbait or fat and sloppy. It was an outside bar area and they allowed smoking. We got a whiff and were almost about to leave cuz of that shit but decided to stick around since the smells dissipated pretty quick and the motherfuckers doing it around us went further from us. It’d be my first time watching a Magic game in many, many years. We won! Maybe next season I’ll start getting back into my Magic and Bills. Felt good watching sports again.

Nasty ass bitches were line dancing to the music, jiggling their fat, drinking, smoking…wasn’t my scene but it was fun for the moment. A group of bitches in particular caught my friend’s eye. One bitch was decent looking but she was a train wreck. He tried to hit up on it and she had a kid who was there and the kid had more cellulite on her thighs than Albertsons chicken. She looked 30 but the bitch was fucking 15! Then one of the front desk staff came up to watch the game and he hit up on that and she was 16! Fucking guy knows how to pick ‘em, don’t he? Stupid motherfucker just struck out all night. I didn’t say shit to not one bitch cuz damn near all of ‘em wasn’t my steelo. I got standards.

He felt one of ‘em up who was plastered, the one with the old looking teen for a kid, and later exchanged numbers when we got in our car ready to roll out. We saw the kid walking her mom back to their room. That’s when he came to the realization that he wasn’t gonna leave without banging the drunk, whore, smoked out, probably junkie mom. Imagine a kid having to tend to someone like that? Hitting on strange men and shit. Drunk and barely able to walk. Bitch, who was spanish, even said that her kid was mixed and that she wanted some more black dick cuz “them crackers don’t know how to eat pussy.” Um, didn’t that used to be us black folk? Times really have changed. How embarrassing for that kid to have to put up with that. My friend said fuck it, cuz they were getting closer to their room, so he left me in the car to give it a shot but by then the mom and daughter were in their room and he couldn’t find them. He did call her, cuz he just got her number, but she ain’t pick up. He got voice mail. Gee, what a surprise. If you’re willing to chase after something like that, man, you got problems.

If she woulda came at me and wanted to fuck, I don’t know if I would have or not. She wasn’t completely unattractive but that bitch was hammered. A quick fuck? Don’t know. A blowjob? Still don’t know. That’d be a game time decision for me. Now if she was super smokin’ hot then you already know the answer. Shit, I’m single. Pop that bitch, dirt the shit outta her ass, and ditch her. Ain’t like she gonna remember shit. She’ll just have an aching pussy, ass, and mouth to remember me by. I don’t leave evidence behind cuz it’d all be down her throat.

After his failed attempt at knocking that trash bitch out, we went back to my place. But not after cruising Kissimmee, I-drive, and then my neighborhood looking for some tail, but there was none out and about. Got to my place and watched the latest Cheaters episode that he was telling me about. Said I wouldn’t believe it when I saw it. He was right. That shit was brutal! I’ll be streaming it this coming weekend so you can see for yourself.

Downloading is one thing. As soon as you visit most (but not all) artist pages on myspace music, you’re progressively downloading tracks when they play, usually automatically since they have it set that way and there’s no stop button. And the stream is usually saved as a temporary file on your computer. When you refresh the page or leave it and revisit, the dl starts all over again in most cases. Saving the tracks to your hard drive in a portable format and being able to keep them in your collection, burn them, share, or whatever is a totally different beast.

So here’s what happened with me. I was peeping my torrent sites to see what’s new. I noticed that Cam’ron’s new joint is out. In the tracklist, most of the tracks said ‘produced by Skitzo.’ I had no clue who he was, what he’s done, what he looks like. So I peeped wikipedia to see what’s new with Cam first of all since he ain’t did shit in a while. Then I researched Skitzo. Found his myspace page along the way. He has some tracks in his myspace music player. I noticed one of them has tons more plays than the rest so I listened to that one to find out what was so good about it. That track would be ‘Puter Luv’ produced by Skitzo, sung by Rob Rhaspy. Lemme tell ya, that song is slammin’! Definitely should be a single at some point. I went ahead n listened to the other tracks but that one really stood out. I did a search to see if the song was available for dl anywhere, as a single or on an album. Nowhere to be found. So that player is the one and only place to get it if I didn’t wanna wait for an official release (and I didn’t).

So I went to a site that I’ve used primarily to dl Imeem flv streams and then convert them to mp3. That site is file2hd.com. It lets you put in a web addy n show you all the diff types of media on the page. Like images, audio, video, etc. It’s not a perfect site as it doesn’t catch everything but that’s probably mainly due to site encryption and file security. Usually I use p2p for singles, http and bittorrent for albums. The song was simply not available so I put in Skitzo’s myspace page and did an audio search. From here I’ll do a step-by-step sorta tutorial so you can follow along and see for yourself that the method works (on a pc since that’s what I use).

Okay, let’s use Skitzo’s myspace page as the example. http://www.myspace.com/skitzofrenyc. You see the music player immediately. At the top right of the player, there’s an option for a pop out/pop up player. You can click that and the player will pop up in a separate window. If the address bar is showing, you’ll see http://music.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=music.popupplayer&sindex=-1.3&shuffle=false&amix=false&pmix=false&plid=35213&artid=2125929&profid=70614985&friendid=70614985&sseed=0&ptype=3&stime=15.647&ap=1. You can also use this addy if you like. It’ll yield the same results.

Now, copy either address (I’ll be using his myspace page in this example) and go to file2hd.com. Paste either addy in the url box, put a check in the box next to ‘I have read…,’ and click the audio button in the filter selections. Currently there’s an ad for amateur emo girls (that’s what shows up on my computer anyway). Probably a dating, porn, or cam site. You wanna click that link for some wank material or potential hookup with a ghost, that’s up to you. Doesn’t have a damn thing to do with what I’m trying to tell you now. Also, there’s a link to a web proxy next to the ad. Again, up to you if you wanna waste your time cuz all it’s gonna do is try to get you to buy something you don’t need and that you can get for free someplace else as I’ll show you. If that site’s admin wants some financial support, they gotta come up with something else cuz that shit they got now ain’t gonna cut it.

Getting back to the biz at hand, go ahead and click ‘get files’ and your results should currently look like this. I say currently cuz the music he has uploaded will no doubt change over time. But for those of you checking this out within a reasonable amount of time from the post date, that’s what you should see. In the search results you’ll see ‘featured playlist (standard quality)’ and ‘original version (high quality).’ It also says ‘older player songs’ at the bottom but we ain’t gonna focus on that right now. You can experiment with this shit on your own time. Don’t know ‘bout you, but if I can get my music in a higher quality format then that’s what I’ll get. Go ahead and right click the higher quality ‘puter luv’ mp3 and select ‘copy link location.’

Here’s where things get problematic. I didn’t try the ‘multiple album/playlist support’ feature cuz Skitzo’s page don’t have a full album.  I just wanted a single, and a high quality one, so that’s the focus right now. You see where it says ‘notes’ next to ‘high quality?’ That explains that US based ip addresses have some kind of restrictions on our ability to save the files from myspace music via file2hd. We have to take an extra step. So go ahead and click ‘notes’ to do some reading for more info. If you try to dl high quality, it’ll appear that it dl’d just fine but in reality the file is only a few kilobytes in size. Standard quality dl’s just fine but hey, it’s standard quality at 96kbps versus high quality at 160kbps. Which one do you want? Thought so.

So you have the link location saved and are ready to dl the high quality file. According to the blog contained in the ‘notes’ link, US surfers need to use a non-US based web proxy. I tested 2 different ones from the blog’s article comments but let’s just use proxificate.net which I found there. Go ahead and click the link, paste the address into the search box and click ‘browse.’ You’ll get prompted to open or save the file which is a stream. Save it somewhere that you can find it. Where it says ‘save as type,’ don’t mess with that. Leave it alone. But you can change the file name to whatever you like. And here’s the most important step: type ‘.mp3’ at the end of the file name so that it saves to the computer in that format since that’s the original format of the file. If the original file said ’.wma,’ then you’d save it as such. Always save in the original format. And that’s it. You can play the file or do whatever you want with it.

But let’s say you’re the impatient type and forgot to add the file extension while saving. Now you got some file with a .part extension that nothing on your computer will open. Here’s the fix to that. Just go to the saved file, right click it and select rename. Go to the end of the file name and delete ‘.part’ and change it to ‘.mp3.’ Click anywhere outside of the rename area and that’s it. You’re good to go. Simple, quick, easy, effective, and you don’t have to buy some garbage program or install anything on your computer to get the job done.

So why doesn’t myspace have a purchase option for tracks appearing on official artist pages? You can see where it says ‘buy’ but as far as what I’ve seen, there’s hardly ever any button there to do anything in most cases. I see Amazon mp3 links occasionally. But other than that, there’s usually no option to buy. So what’s a person to do if they like a song and can’t get it anywhere? And they wonder why people go the so-called illegal or piracy route. Don’t feel bad for using this method to get your music. This ain’t the only method but it’s the easiest win it comes to myspace music. If artists want support, if labels want people to buy shit, give us an option to do so and let us determine the value of what we’re paying for. I’m not paying a buck for one track. It just ain’t gonna happen. For ‘puter luv,’ I’d honestly pay between .35 and 50 cents cuz the song is good, I know I’d be listening to it in the future, and the file quality is high. There’s no donation link, no purchase link, no nothing for me to slide the artist a little piece of cheddar. Add up the chump change over time from different donors and you’ll see the significance. Rather that than nothing at all, right?

Yeah, I download and share files. Call me a pirate, call me whatever. I got money that I wanna give to support what I like but I wanna name my own price when it comes to digital downloads. The file is finished and in a complete form. People are mainly paying for storage and bandwidth in the price of a track I’ll bet. Give us the name-your-own-price option and you’ll get the money that you think you’re losing. Lost sales, or non-existent sales opportunities, are nobody’s fault but your own.