Archive for February, 2004

2004.02.14

Interview with Rael Dornfest

Technology Review is running an interview with Blosxom creator Rael Dornfest. Here’s the summary paragraph.

Innovation is all over the place. That’s what gets me most excited, seeing this stuff we’ve been talking about show up all over the place. It’s coming from all corners. It’s coming from the citizen engineers. It’s coming from the research labs. It’s coming from the logical progression of things. And it’s coming from those brilliant people who are either burnt out, or are out of jobs, or who are rebuilding after the bubble burst. There’s no one place to look for it.

2004.02.13

San Francisco Apple Store

About freaking time Apple opened a store in San Francisco! The address is One Stockton Street, right downtown about two blocks from Moscone Center (location of the Macworld Expo) and central to most of downtown SF. Unfortunately right now I can’t see in my head what business they’ve replaced but I think it was a large perfume retailer across the street from Virgin Records.

They are having presentations of interest for those of us interested in film, music, and music in film. The official schedule is on the SF Apple Store’s main page.

2004.02.12

Marriage and Civil Union

It seems like all I’m hearing lately is that the Massachusetts Supreme Court has said that homosexuals have as much a right to marry as anyone else. It is food for thought that in a country that espouses Equal Rights, which we still do not have under the Constitution, we would openly shut down a minority instead of trying to integrate them. It is not as if the homosexual population of America are not Citizens, pay taxes, vote, and contribute to society in culture, science, economy and politics.

What is the problem? The problem is that marriage is defined in two ways. One is the secular legal definition and the other is the religious definition. While they are similar, they are not the same. Legally it is a union of a man and woman in which certain rights are conferred to the couple from the perspective of the Civic Authority (the state or government). By religious standards, it is the union of a man and a woman that is blessed by God and is representative of the connection between God and his people.

The two definitions overlap, it is true, but one is dynamic, changing with times to adapt to the culture it represents. As culture changes so, too, does its laws. The religious definition is static. There is no reinterpretation of the Bible or the many other religious books. It will remain the same as long as the religion exists. The problem is that the word “marriage” is used generically for both definitions by most everyone. The difficulty is that no one wants to give up the generic use of the term for both definitions. The irony is that everyone is convinced legislation will fix the problem. It will, but not the legislation that is being attempted.

Currently there is an attempt to add an Amendment to the Massachusetts State Constitution which would define marriage as the union of a man and a woman exclusively. Many other states are attempting to preempt the situation Massachusetts is dealing with by passing similar amendments before they are faced with the same difficulties. Some are also considering wording to say that Civil Unions will be honored equally as the current usage of Marriage. President Bush has said he would also consider starting a Constitutional Amendment process to this effect protecting marriage.

This wordage is rightly considered a legitimization of inequality. Straight people can be married, but gay people can only have civil unions. The solution is quite simple: to make marriage a subset of civil union and that civil unions can be between a man and a woman, a man and a man, or a woman and a woman. Further define it to include monogamy (though eventually this might be challenged, even: Utah) and give it a certain age (you must be 18). Finally, and only because people are stupid, make it crystal clear that marriage is a religious definition, but that it is NOT illegal to use it in the generic sense. The exact wording I couldn’t tell you; this is for the legislators to detirmine. However, this would allow anyone who wished to be joined from the eyes of the state.

And now, completely seperately from everything I’ve just written, here (if the link continues to work) is an article discussing homosexuality in the animal kingdom. I can hear the Creationists moaning in their sleep at the blasphemy.

2004.02.11

Digitizing Old Music

I spent part of yesterday digitizing old music I’d written so Bill can incorporate some of it into his film. I’ve been meaning to get to this anyways as the old tapes are deteriorating. Unfortunately there is loads of tape hiss that I had to work the EQ to minimize. Here are a few of those songs for those of you interested.

Bad Day. The story of one man’s very bad day.

Cohen Island. For lack of a better title, this is how I imagine Leonard Cohen’s island style.

DC Groove. Again, no title… I wrote this when I lived in Washington, DC.

Gothic Melody. Ok, a trend should be emerging of really bad titles. I like my very fake Middle Eastern style in the middle of this one.

In The Heather. There are actually words for this. The recording was made simply to play around with chords and turned out sort of interesting.

Midnight Waltz. A combination of two previous waltzes I’d written in college, mashed together for some hopeful goodness.

This Is Not A Love Song. An old EOD classic.

Watchers. This was originally written for a friend’s film which was never made.

These are not done in Garageband; they are all old songs from my Cubase on a Mac IIci days except for This Is Not A Love Song which was done analog on a 4-track.

Keep in mind these were pulled from the archives only for Bill’s soundtrack (his requests for the most part), not to be representative of my particular style. Once I’ve digitized a larger portion of my stuff I’ll dump it online and you can then judge what style or genre me and my friends belong to. In the meantime you can download some other crappy MP3s here.

2004.02.10

It Is I…

…Don Quixote, the Man of La Mancha.

Actually it is Don Quixote and Sancho Panza looking up at Cervantes in Golden Gate Park. I took this last Saturday while Scott and I were out for a walk, getting brunch, and talking about movie ideas. Good ideas, too.

I realized I hadn’t posted a picture in a while. I also realized I hadn’t taken any in a while. I will have to remedy that… Too bad the camera phone is of such poor quality. I hope they fix that soon (and make it affordable). Meanwhile, just pretend like the lense flare around the edges is some keen effect I had planned from the get go.

2004.02.09

New Keyboard

I bought a new keyboard for cheap from Corey since he was selling it. It’s a midiman Keystation 61. I’ve had it one day and I’m already starting to rerecord a song for Bill’s film project, Living In Hell. I’m recording to Garageband, which is a nice app and would be tons better if it weren’t such a resource hog. I’ve read this is partly because of the GUI, but I think there are other ineffiencies that will be ironed out, hopefully soon.

Once I have a few songs ready I’ll put them online. Hopefully Living In Hell by the end of the day.

2004.02.06

Reading Room

I’ve just added Joey Gibson’s new reading_room plugin to this site. It allows you to prepare easily maintained list files similar to Nelson Minar’s file plugin but more useful in some ways.

For example I could see the referer or logger plugin output file being delimited in whatever you set reading_room to use (default is the pipe | symbol) and having lists with builtin links. For example a referer log might be formatted:

2/5/2004,20:17:11|64.81.55.126|Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; PPC Mac OS X; en-us) AppleWebKit/124 (KHTML, like Gecko) Safari|/journal/geek/blosxom/0402readingRoom.html

Joey’s default formatting is Author|Title|ISBN|Rank so if you make a .tpl file read like this:

Someone at $reading_room::Title accessed this page at $reading_room::Author using this browser: $reading_room::ISBN.

you would then get something that looks like

Someone at 64.81.55.126 accessed this page at 2/5/2004,20:17:11 using this browser: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; PPC Mac OS X; en-us) AppleWebKit/124 (KHTML, like Gecko) Safari

Not the original intent of the plugin (nor a very good template for its purpose) but pretty cool none-the-less. Great work, Joey!

You can see it in action on this site by going to the read, listen, or watch sections.

UPDATE 2006.09.30: This article is no longer relevant to this site, though if you use Blosxom you might find it useful.

2004.02.06

Mac V. PC

Of course by PC we mean Wintel machine. This site sets out to debunk many of the myths surrounding Macs such as:

“Windows/PCs are cheaper.”

Response: Just not so. Despite sometimes having a slightly higher initial purchase cost, Macintosh computers have substantially lower TOTAL COST OF OWNERSHIP.

There are many myths addressed, such as speed issues, support issues, and the idea that since most businesses use PCs then that should be taught in schools.

When people ask me what they should buy I am naturally inclined to encourage them to get a Mac. There are definate exceptions to this rule as some people only need a computer for extremely minimal needs and have only ever used Windows. Now that MacOS X is unix based and the hardware costs are effectively equal to similar quality Wintel machines, I recommend PCs to far fewer people.

The site was set up originally to help prevent a school system from arbitrarily switching from almost all Macintosh to all PC, but the information provided works just as well for businesses and individuals.

2004.02.05

Civil Liberties, Entertainment Industry

An article on Fox News covers how the entertainment industry, particularly the RIAA and the MPAA have abused their supposed and real (through the DMCA) powers. If things continue the way they seem to be going we will loose Constitutional civil liberties which will be replaced by what I’ll call Corporate Liberties.

Corporate Liberties would mean that we own absolutely nothing we own. Our computers would be the property of a company who insures we do not abuse them by copying music. Abuses would result in the confiscation of that device. Our genetic code would not belong to us. When we reach a point where we can fix genetic defects we will need to pay large sums of money to a) the company that develops the process of resequencing and b) the owner of that section of genetic code. If you want to start a business you may have to pay licensee fees to various owners of process patents just to move money from point A to point B.

Fair Use will disappear unless it is shown that money could be made by the owner through the fair use. For example the pictures you see on this page to books, music and movies would be illegal unless I wrote something encouraging you, the reader, to purchase the thing. Negative criticism would be shot down, legally, by your reference to the product without permission, to the company without permission and enforced by copyright protection, patent ownership, trademark infringement, or some other idiocy.

It sounds ludicrous, but it is true. The continued abuse of the copyright and patent systems by corporations and various idiot individuals will not stop until the system is either revised by Congress or given over entirely to those who want to own everything. Unfortunately those who have the most to gain are also the ones with the most money and they “buy” members of Congress to get their way.

What scares me is that the RIAA and the MPAA and other similar organizations and corporations see themselves as benevolent. “There’s no desire to crush people’s civil rights,” says Rich Taylor, a spokesman for the MPAA. “The DMCA is not something that was chiseled in some back room in Hollywood and thrust upon the populace. It was carefully contemplated and negotiated with Congress, the software industry, the music industry, librarians and ISPs.”

What would be ironic is if Hollywood released a movie that portrayed this as a fiasco which had a soundtrack made up of music in either the public domain or licensed under the Creative Commons license.

If you are worried about these issues I encourage you to look at and support the Electronic Frontier Foundation.

2004.02.05

Consolidating Candidates

The Democratic primaries are happening and it’s all over the news. I suppose it gives the media something to focus on that let’s them look involved and slightly less trivial.

Here’s a thought, though it probably isn’t possible given the egos involved, but I wonder if the candidates worked together to get a full ticket created if they might do better against President Bush? Bush did so well not necessarily because of his own abilities but because he put together a team of cabinet members who know what they are doing (even if you don’t agree with their goals). The Democrats could do the same thing.

After the next round of caucuses and primaries, the leader should be obvious. Likely it will be John Kerry. Make him the candidate. The Democrats must do better in the South this time around. Have Kerry bring the Southern Senator John Edwards onboard as the Vice Presidential nominee. Wesley Clark might do well as Secretary of Defense or perhaps State, and Howard Dean… somewhere useful. Let Dean choose himself so he will be mollified at not being the candidate.

After that bring in highly qualified candidates for other cabinet positions. It’s not rocket science, but with a cartel like that I think the Democrats have a very good chance. In particular it should unify the party in a manner not previously possible.

It would be ironic if the Democrats, who are good with domestic issues, won the White House while the Republicans, who are (generally) good at foreign policy kept Congress. This is ass backwards from how it should probably stand as Congress should be looking inward and the White House should be looking outward. As seasoning give the Supreme Court to the Libertarians and watch the delightful results…