Today’s So Costa Contest Rocked!!! 3 Towns Battled it Out! It was a Doozie!!...... Here are the Final Results:Open Girls 1st: Ana Herrera 2nd: Julia Mynett 3rd: Erika ValverdeBoys 1st: Victor Mendoza 2nd: Jordin Cabillo, 3rd: Miguel Sibaja VillanuevaOpen Men1st: David H. Jimenez2nd Rogelio Araya 3rd: Ariel GonzalezMasters 1st: Gene Harris2nd: Mike McMurray 3rd: Russel MurrayMini Groms 1st: Dilan Tubito 2nd: Juan Diego3rd: Sam Reidy

The past month has been rather extreme with Tropical Hurricane Tomas as head-liner and a number of large swells as backup. On October 28th the Lifeguard Board of Directors met with a number of items on the agenda including plans for a Junior Lifeguard Program, plans for pro-moting local business lifeguard fundrais-ing events, plans for using the new na-tional certification of our lifeguard staff to help secure government assistance, plans for providing swimming and beach safety lessons and CPR classes. Please remember that our lifeguard program is still entirely dependent on donations. Even the smallest contributions are im-portant and without adequate support we lose our hard earned reputation as a safe beach.

Remember too cash donations aren’t the only way to help: offers of time and energy and equipment and ideas are wel-come.

Thanks,

Steve jazzysriverhouse@hotmail.com

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Just what exactly is an MP3 File?We all have music in the MP3 format on our computers but do we really know what those files are and why they work? Here’s some history.

In the early days of music, that lived on the computer, a 3 minute song would take up about 30 MB of space. This was a lot back in the early 90’s and certainly too big to send over the internet. MP3 is short for Moving Picture Experts Group Audio Layer 3. This file uses an algorithm that reduces the file size by 90%. So, how does it do this? It uses a masking system. Here’s the theory. Let’s say you are listening to someone speaking to you and while they are speaking, a thunderclap occurs. The person is still speaking but you did not hear him because the thunder over rode the speech. That result is how the file is reduced. Because you prob-ably won’t hear certain parts of music because of a louder element, the MP3 file eliminates the data that you prob-ably won’t hear thus reducing the file size. Many critics of this lossy system argue that you are missing important parts of the music. And that is true. It’s a strange paradox that as technology let’s us hear music fidelity better than ever before, the masses are listening to lower quality MP3 music. Why did this happen?

Back in 1998 a company in South Korea sold a small pocket size music player, the Rio PMP300. It did not have much space to hold music, but if the music was shrunk down using the MP3 codec, one could carry about 3 albums worth of music in your pocket. Later on, other companies came out with MP3 players, but it really didn’t explode until Apple came out with the iPod. Because of the small size of the files, a couple of guys set up a peer-to-peer transfer service over the internet and called it Napster. Suddenly everyone was sending and receiving free music over the internet. The music companies sued for viola-tion of copyrights and eventually won their case. It was Apple’s iTunes store that legitimized the sales of MP3’s thru the internet and it turns out that is the way most people now purchase their music. The quality of the MP3’s has been going up as well. Originally most were made using 128k as a bit rate. The higher the bit rate the less data was

tossed away. Now bit rates of 320k are common and sound very close to the original source. Because hard drive storage space is now very cheap, more people are saving their music on loss-less (no information is taken away) files and listening to music on their portable players. Of course, now other problems arise. Because the masses are now listening thru earphones, hearing loss is becoming a problem for future listeners because they have the volume to high.

Just as the LP vinyl record gave way to the Compact Disc, the CD is now giving way to a computer file with sales of physical media decreasing. In the near future, the same thing will be happen-ing to DVD’s as downloading almost everything will soon be the norm.

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La Revista Original de Costa BallenaThe Original Costa Ballena Magazine

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