This Presidents' Day, if you're an American, you can thank George W.
Bush for at least one thing: on Friday, the President signed into law
new legislation which will make the national
Do Not Call registry
even better. No one likes phone spam, and the DNCR is doing a great job
of curtailing it. Yet, the DNCR did have some flaws, and in a rare case
of Washington harmony, all parties came together to fix the most
pressing problems.
The big kahuna was a ticking clock on original DNCR registrations from users like you and me. When the DNCR was launched in 2003, it was launched with a five-year "reset" policy for any registered number.
This meant that, according to the original rules, had you signed up in 2003, sometime in 2008 you'd be removed from the list whether you liked it or not. You could always sign up again, but it's a hassle that no one (save perhaps telemarketers) thought was fair.
Reacting to consumer and congressional concern that a "reset" was both unnecessary and
unfair to consumers, the FTC already agreed to suspend the removal of any registered users until Congress and the President could consider the matter. It didn't make sense to start resetting user's registry entries if there was a chance the policy would be chucked out the window.
The process of healing is painful. As we commit to healing, we slowly begin chipping away the bricks from the walls we build to self-protect our hurts. Exposure and vulnerability are two words we love to hate because they will be a major part of the journey. A journey that travels through the pain, not around it. What awaits on the other side is freedom from “the stuff” that keeps us from living the life we want. Freedom to experience the relationships we desire. Traveling through the pain and doing the work necessary, means feeling. Feeling is what we try to avoid, at any cost. We create many different strategies to avoid. What feelings are you avoiding and how? It is possible to feel again. Hope awaits. The motto that you “gotta feel to heal” is true. The journey to the other side is worth taking!!
Apple will offer DRM-free music from EMI for $1.29 per song (see 
