December 2002 Archives
Kat wanted to get some pictures of the dogs in the snow this year. I had a great shot, that is until my finger got in the way. In my defense, it was snowing pretty hard and I was trying to keep snow off the lense. Yes, yes, I realize there is probably gear one can buy to take pictures in bad weather. But I don't have any, so there!
I'm not sure how ours compares with Brad's snow experience, but here is a small sampling of our trip to the snow:
So today Kat and I gave blood, I'm A- and she's A+, but then she's always been smarter than me. I didn't pass out. Yay! It's been at least 3 years since I last gave blood. Blood is in high demand at the end of the year. There are lots of car accidents and surgeries. Not sure if the two are related, but I know the later has to do with crappy health care coverage. Anyway, if you are in to giving blood, now is a good time. If not, consider helping out an animal shelter that's in deep financial trouble (link via This Modern World). Doing good things, whatever the scale, makes the world a better place to live.
I had a dream that I snuck into a Presidential press conference. I was sitting behind a reporter, whispering questions that she should ask the President.
Why do you want to shift more of the tax burden on to the poor?
How much money will the Vice President make from a war in Iraq?
Why are you helping Florida, where your brother is Govenor, save it's coast line, but not California?
What exactly do you have against clean air and water?
The reporter and I both got kicked out. I don't remember much after that.
Wired: "Each year, governments chip away at citizens' civil liberties. It's a tactic the United States condemned during the Cold War but now uses in the war on terror."
Not good news, but essential to understand.
In an Upside-Down World, Sunshine Is Shunned. The residents of Punta Arenas, Chile, have reluctantly learned to adapt to the hole in the ozone layer. By Larry Rohter.
NewNewsWire Pro 1.0b3, everybody's must have RSS reader for OS X is about to turn pro. You get a way to post via xml-rpc to a weblog and a "notepad" (which is really an outliner).
A weblog sprang up at Creative Commons.
I'm still on the wireless, and I like it!
I've finally gone wireless. Yes, I've had a powerbook for some time now and I just got off the wire. Yay!
I could have sworn that the Creative Commons Licensing scheme was simple and easy to understand. All rights reserved versus Some rights reserved.
I've got nothing to say I ain't said before
I've bled all I can, I won't bleed no more
Jeez, if one didn't know better, this would almost sound like a suicide note...but alas, they're just lyrics from the Sisters of Mercy song This Corrosion off the album Floodland. Which I'm sure are © Elektra/Asylum.
RIAA: The "fair use doctrine" of federal law is a complicated area. Basically, it limits the extent of property interest granted to the copyright holder. For example, this might allow citizens to cite a quotation from copyrighted material when the excerpt is used for teaching, research, news reporting, comment, criticism or parody.
It might...and then again, it might not. No, I'm not dealing with copyright issues at work, right this very moment, why do you ask?
Hezbollah Becomes Potent Anti-U.S. Force. Senior American officials have singled out Hezbollah as the "A team" of terrorism, more menacing than Al Qaeda. By Neil Macfarquhar. [Fresh Stuff]
Watch for a quote any day now from Rumsfeld saying that, "it was never about Al Qaeda."
Jeff Place, who works at the Smithsonian Center for Folklife and Cultural Heritage, talked to Terry Gross on Fresh Air about the trouble of keeping sound on media. All media decays, even compact discs will die eventually.
They played a clip from the first blast of the atomic bomb. It was pretty creepy to listen to a reporter only seven miles from Gound Zero describe what he was seeing and then to hear the incredible blast when it finally got to where he was.
A raft of dissatisfied employees may mean an increase in job-hopping next year, according to a study from recruiting Web site CareerBuilder.com. [CNET News.com]
It probably also means that we going to start hearing We're Not Gonna Take It! and Take This Job and Shove It! more on the radio...and a hefty increase in the sales of Office Space.
NPR's Rick Karr reports on how a 1946 box office flop became so ubiquitous on television this time of year. It's a Wonderful Life is a sentimental favorite... in part because of Jimmy Stewart, but also because no one ever bothered to file the papers to extend the copyright on the movie. [RealAudio Link]
Looks like another strong argument for "limited times" to me...
There is a Mac OS X Freshmeat now. Yay! With 99% less ads than Version Tracker ;-) Via slashdot.
Update: I just found the RDF on the backend.
Kat and I went to the Broncos/Raiders game at the NAT. Both teams needed a win for the playoffs. But Oakland was clearly a better team and won fairly handily, even though there were some tense moments in the 3rd quarter as Oakland let Denver get back in the game.
Neither of us wanted to deal with parking or driving, so we drove to the Richmond BART station and got on there. Since it's the start of the line, the train was pretty much empty, except for a few other Raider fans. Everything was nice and mellow even once we get to the stadium. We had seats that were at the top of Mt. Davis, real nose-bleed seats. The view is still pretty good, but I don't know if it's $60 good. But alas, that is the price one pays if one wants to see a NFL game these days.
Kat hadn't been to a NFL game, so this was our little adventure for the weekend. For those keeping score at home, you may recall that when Steven was in town he and I went to see the Raiders play the Patriots, and that was my first NFL game. The Raider fans, or Raider Nation as they like to call themselves are a lively bunch. In every line, anyone call yell out, "RAIDERS!" and expect to hear a chorused response in return. This happens more and more as the level of beer consumption increases.
Mark Pilgrim: I am now a card-carrying associate member of the Free Software Foundation. Software is free, but lawyers are expensive.
Tell me about it! Try working at the EFF and you'll find out just how hard this kind of lawyer works. Both the FSF and the EFF are 501(c)(3) organizations, so your contributions are tax-deductible. Yay!
A few people are already bragging about what number they are. It's so funny to see geeks have a pissing contest over numbers. Be it your slashdot member id or you SETI/rc64/Folding @Home ranking, it's always about being as close to #1 as you can.
Apparently I'm not immune. I have a slashdot id of 2549 and a FSF number of 175. I'm a guy and a geek, I guess that makes me doubly predictable...
NYT: Gift certificates by e-mail may seem like the perfect last-minute gift idea, but they run the risk of ending up in the electronic trash bin. By Michelle Slatalla. [Fresh Stuff]
I've had similar things happen to me with SpamAssassin. Lots of registration reminders end up in the spam folder. Now, if only Mail.app would update the number of messages in IMAP folders...
This 1.0b1 release of NetNewsWire pro includes a weblog editor, notepad, Find command, AppleScript support, and more. [ranchero.com]
Sweet! This is posted from NNW.
The talk after The Two Towers, after all the gushing that is, was about the FX. Who did them? I blanked, even though I had watched the extras on the 4 DVD set and there is a large section devoted to the company that did the digital effects. It's WETA Digital for those keeping score at home. They have one of those flash/quicktime/take over your entire screen in a new window site. Yeah, I didn't get very far into it either. But I did notice there is a very interesting article at Apple about how Macs played an important role in the making of The Lord of the Rings.
Output more than you input.
But I've made a few modifications to this tried and true diet. Here is the Pat Plan:
2 cups of coffee and 3 glasses of water in the morning, a bean/rice/cheese burrito for lunch, and a sensible meal for dinner.
Kat and I were at the CC party. I'm glad she was able to make it because they presented an animation that explained what CC is and why it's important better than any geek or lawyer ever could. This will be huge. All too often we are trapped in our own little sphere of influence, not realizing that everybody else doesn't know or doesn't care about copyright. It's not that people don't want to care, they just don't know why they should. At least, that's my theory hypothesis.
Everybody was happy to hear Lawerence Lessig's speech, which also was very cool in it's own right. I hope somebody puts the audio and the slides together again, like they did for his Free Culture speech at OSCON.
You should check out these accounts of the party, which are much more interesting than what you just read:
- Danny O'Brien
- Aaron Swartz
- Seth Schoen doesn't have an entry yet, but he should ;-)
- Google News
Reuters: "We are thrilled to join the NASDAQ-100," said Steve Jobs, Pixar's Chairman and CEO. "This is an important milestone in Pixar's 16 year history, and reflects the talent, hard work and dedication of our entire team."
You can shop at Amazon.com or Barnes and Noble using our affiliate links and EFF will get a small percentage from your purchase. Obviously, this is not an endorsement of either store by EFF.
The massive storm that came through took care of most of the leaves on our Japanese maple. Glad I got a shot before the 800 mph winds did their damage.
Yup. It happened again. Our whole area was without power between 2 p.m. Saturday and about 1 p.m. Sunday. Man, this storm is pretty freaking strong. Let's hope it dumps lots of snow in the mountains so we don't have to go through drought conditions again.
I've never lived outside of California. Obviously it has led me to believe that certain things are true, when in fact they aren't. I thought "racial integration" was a topic for history books. But after Senator Lott's huge gaffe, I've come to see the light. There are a lot of people out there, who generally don't get much play in the news out in these parts, mainly because we don't feel it's news and that these people are so far behind where they need to be socially it's probably not worth dealing with.
Salon has a story about Richard Barret, first officer for the Mississippi-based segregationist Nationalist Movement. It's sad to read, in more ways than one. There is the whole racism thing of course. But on another level, here the United States of America is trying to survive in the Age of Globalization and these people are worried about "colored folk" moving next door or going to the same schools or eating the same bacon (mmmmm, bacon). How do you break it to them that it shouldn't even be a problem and that even if it was a problem, we have much bigger things to worry about?
A lot of people have pointed to Tim's article and exclaimed, "He gets it and they don't!" Now while this is true, Tim does have an unfair advantage over the companies that form the RIAA and the MPAA.
"What's even more interesting, though, is that our enforcement activities are customer-driven. We receive thousands of emails from customers letting us know about infringing copies and sites. Why? They value our company and our authors, and they want to see our work continue."
The customers of the RIAA and MPAA don't have this same respect. Many feel as though they have been taken advantage of since the CD came out, or even before that. O'Reilley Publishing has worked extremely hard to build up that kind of customer loyalty. I hope I'm wrong, but I don't see the entertainment cartels working on pleasing customers, but rather dealing with them through legislation.
So Michael Moore has won Top Documentary Of All Time. I would appreciate better fact checking from Moore, especially if he is going to get an award like this.
We won tonight! Yay! We tied for 1st with two other teams, but winning is winning, even if you have to share.
Ruling at the table tonight:
- Champ
- Josh
- kat2
- Pat
- Py
- Steve
If you aren't big on news aggregator programs, you can now get EFF Actions Alerts and EFF Press via slashboxes on your customized slashdot page. You need to have a slashdot login, then all you do us customize your homepage and click the little form boxes next to the EFF boxes.
Of course, you can just get the RSS feeds yourself...
Typically the news reports on big Supreme Court cases by giving us snippets of commentary from the oral arguments. This isn't always that exciting, even if what they are talking about is. Well, as I was trying to talk about The Virginia v. Black case, Fred said that I should drop everything and immediately go read Virginia Burning at Slate. Turns out that the Slate writer, Dahlia Lithwick, is an old law school acquaintance. Anyway, her writing is quite humorous and informative. Perfect for ADD people like myself.
Nothing says Merry Christmas like a Tony Hawk iPod...
According to the Morning Fix, Nikki Sixx is 44 today.
Aftermath is typically used to decribe the consequence of a bad event. I'm looking for the consequence after a great event. The party was a huge success. All the people working on the new office space were frantically trying to complete enough work so that people could come in. Somebody started a rumor that before the party the toilets hadn't even been installed. It was true. This photo was taken at 3:14 PM yesterday:
I'm not sure how many people came to the party, but we polished off four kegs. You do the math. It does remind me why Kat and I haven't thrown a party in a while though. Clean-up.
...it's a Ben Sherman.
No bonuses for jobless, hungry Imagine a place where in two short years a budget surplus has been magically transformed into a deficit. A place where millions of people are jobless, many of them laid off in the past 24 months. Homelessness is steadily increasing, millions of children go to bed hungry and terrorists have recently attacked, killing thousands.
...and yet here we are.
A funny (in the really, really sad that it's true way) flash animation from Mark Fiore, detailing how perfect Kissenger is for the 9/11 commision.
How do we know? Easy, we kept the reciepts from when we sold 'em to them.
Abrams Back in Capital Fray at Center of Mideast Battle Mr. Abrams comes to his new job trailed by a cloud of controversy, most of it having to do with his pleading guilty in 1987 to the charge that he withheld information from Congress on the Reagan administration's efforts to assist antigovernment guerrillas in Nicaragua.
President Bush has run out another of his father's convicted felon buddies. His plan is to run out as many bad ideas as he can, because we can't fight them all.
Trent Lott: "I want to say this about my state: When Strom Thurmond ran for president, we voted for him. We're proud of it. And if the rest of the country had followed our lead, we wouldn't have had all these problems over all these years, either."
Of course, when Thurmond was running he was pushing segregation. Is Lott refering to the problem of civil rights and the idea that all people are created equal and that we shouldn't crap on people because of the color of their skin, their religion, or any other stupid reason to discriminate.
Update: Seems this post has become a regular left/right flame war. Joy... As is typically the case in these situations, both extremes are wrong and the real answer lies in the middle. So before you post you might want to do a quick logic review. It will save us all the time of an idotic post and you will make more sense. Yeah, that last part was a stretch. Keep hope alive.
Update Two: Not that this will make any difference to most of the people making idiotic comments, but President Bush has said that Senator Lott's comments were offensive and wrong, unless of course you feel that the President's comment are idiotic...
I love seeing the Lakers be this bad. It's nice to see the Kings win as well.
Mark Morford: "Ask any European: America is a laughingstock. Except that no one's laughing. Because that's when we start bombing."
I helped stuff over 2,000 envelopes today, so you may be getting a letter from me soon. ;-)
It looks like Working For Change has updated their effort to get three "moderate" Republicans to "pull a Jeffords."
You know that if the Republicans tried this Apple would send a C&D.
Inspiration from Anna:
10. Apple - Movie trailers galore, and I can always click over to the store to drool over an iPod. The 10gig model of course...
9. Slashdot - I don't know why though. Most of the headlines are either trolls or something I've seen already in my aggregator.
8. VersionTracker - The best place to find Mac software. Ever. Even if the new "ad-rific" interface frustrates the hell out of me.
7. Yahoo! Sports - When I have to track every NFL game at the same time.
6. Plastic - Why Plastic and not MetaFilter? I dunno...just because.
5. Salon - I bought Salon Premium to get Spinsanity and support This Modern World.
4. EMusic - To get my mp3z d00d!
3. Google - You know, because nobody else likes google...
2. Dictionary.com - I can't spel.
1. Google News - The best thing since NetNewsWire Lite!
You can sit around trying to come up with a perfect plan before you proceed to work on something, or you can just dive in and start getting stuff done. As usual, the right thing is somewhere in-between.
ThinkGeek has teamed up with O'Reilley to sell stuff. They have some pretty cool stuff so far...
You may remember something about loud construction going on in the EFF offices. If not, here is a little refresher:
The construction in the office continues. The loudest part is over though. The progress they are making is pretty crazy. Soon, the EFF office will be twice as big. Just in time for the Open House party.
If you are in the area, you should drop by and see our digs.
The new space is going to be pretty shwank. I may have to arm wrestle somebody for an office though. It's all good though as I'm pretty sure I can take almost anybody in the office.
Did Timothy McVeigh have Iraqi helpers? The Justice Department says no, but an Oklahoma City TV reporter says yes. With war against Iraq looming, her conspiracy theory has new support among right-wingers and hawks. [Salon]
I guess we could always just ask him...oh wait, never mind.
This Modern World These days when teachers warn kids about their permanent record, they really mean it! [Salon]
Apple loves to do stories about all the "cool" people who use macs. Jack Dangers has now made the list. I do wish the latest Meat Beat Manifesto album was better though.
He mentioned an interesting bit in the interview, that while he was making Subliminal Sandwhich he was trying to get out of his record deal. At the time that would have been with Nothing Records. I would have thought being on Trent Reznor's label would have been a good place to be for him. But then, a lot of bands haven't done much on Nothing. No pun intended. It might have been Interscope that he wanted to get away from though. Who knows.
I finally watched the super-duper-extended-titanium-crazy-ass edition of The Fellowship of the Ring. Two DVDs for the movie, and another two discs with extra stuff.
Lucas had better watch out. LotR is getting a huge head start on DVD sales. Of course, as soon as Star Wars 4-6 and the Indiana Jones trilogy finally come out everybody will stop what they are doing and go buy them.
I wonder what the taggers had in mind when they painted this near our office. Are they pro-fake crab meat? Were they making a political statement against fake crab meat? Was the color silver significant in some way that I'm missing?
