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senatorhung's pad
ramblings of an information troubleshooter

a sushi potluck

Tuesday, 16AUG2005:

attended maxine's birthday potluck tonight at bella's with greg, michel, auralee, daniel, john, robert, mary and naomi.

a pile of sushi, salads, cantonese chow mein and two birthday cakes later, john and i stumbled cross-country down the now-dark hillsides, pausing every few steps to take in the magnificent majesty of the northern lights and to direct my flashlight to find an appropriate path over the forboding rocks below us.

  • ip idiocy link of the day: now someone wants to patent plot points. at least the writer of the article is skeptical, which is a step in the right direction for a Forbes article:
      
    The Bard borrowed most of his plots 
    from poems and books by lesser writers 
    and turned them into masterpieces.  
    Would he have written Romeo and 
    Juliet if it meant paying a royalty 
    to the hack who first came up with the 
    idea of two star-crossed lovers who die 
    rather than live apart? 
    
    what's next, individual words ? oh, right, that's trademark law, which just happens to have a protection term of, umm, forever ... hmm, i see where this is going now. oh, and the patenter again delivers that oft-repeated refrain that creators won't bother to create if they don't get financially compensated. well, bollocks to that, i say. it's the whole 'what would i do if i won the lottery' question. unlike farmers who might accept payment to leave their fields fallow, i'm not sure that you would be able to find 'real' creators who could be paid not to create.
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movie nite in iqaluit

Wednesday, 17AUG2005:

watched a movie double-header of 'sky high' and 'wedding crashers' with daniel, who survived his astro theatre initiation in good cheer. both movies were suprisingly enjoyable.

sky high featured notable appearances by lynda carter (still a wonder woman and still HOT !!), bruce campbell (of 'army of darkness' fame - as a gym coach), dave foley and kevin macdonald (both of whom were members of 'the kids in the hall' troupe), kelly preston (escaping from scientology in a disney flick) and kurt russell. the evil 'pacifier' weapon was a hoot.

wedding crashers also larded on the stars with christopher walken (using his spooky looks to play straight this time as a concerned papa), jane seymour (with a freaky seduction of owen wilson's character), dwight yoakam as a party in a divorce dispute and will ferrell as a funeral crasher. the humour was as broad as expected, leavened with huge dollops of romanticism. oh, and the movie closed with a weakerthans track that fit perfectly.

afterwards, we lined up to get into the storehouse for greg's farewell wing night. also around the table were bella, maxine, michel, robert, kevin and gavin.

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the producers are the audience

Thursday, 18AUG2005:

i snuck away for an extended coffee break in the afternoon to the afn to go over a few things with ghislain. he showed me how to pre-program a recorded show so that it would automatically play and we set up this saturday's show to be a repeat of my previous soundtrack show.

went to the parish hall tonight to check out the talent show hosted by the inuit circumpolar youth council. they had artists from greenland, alaska and russia as well as locals. we were treated to throat singing, drum dancing, alaskan dancing, poetry, a mask dance and a few folk songs.

afterwards, malcolm and willy gave me a lift to the storehouse and we bopped around there for a bit, playing a round of pool and waiting to see if one of the performers from the talent show would show up (codenamed 'alaska').
  • link of the day: we are the web
    What happens when everyone is uploading 
    far more than they download?  If 
    everyone is busy making, altering, 
    mixing, and mashing, who will have time 
    to sit back and veg out?  Who will be a 
    consumer?
    
    No one. And that's just fine.  A world 
    where production outpaces consumption 
    should not be sustainable; that's a 
    lesson from Economics 101.  But online, 
    where many ideas that don't work in 
    theory succeed in practice, the audience 
    increasingly doesn't matter.  What 
    matters is the network of social creation, 
    the community of collaborative interaction
    that futurist Alvin Toffler called 
    prosumption.  As with blogging and 
    BitTorrent, prosumers produce and consume 
    at once.  The producers are the audience, 
    the act of making is the act of watching, 
    and every link is both a point of departure 
    and a destination.
    
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finishing off the week

Friday, 19AUG2005:

went for a morning coffee at fantasy palace to join bella, robert, john and tony in saying a final farewell to greg as he prepared to fly off.

in the afternoon, i hitched a ride with lucy out to the sylvia grinnell pavilion for a departmental welcoming gathering. kakki demonstrated his drum dancing skills and after watching a couple of other people try, i stepped in to give it a go myself.

in the evening, i finished my comic order for the month, with the priciest item (at $50 u.s. !!), being a hardcover collection of the earliest 'nexus' issues by mike baron and steve rude. i also ordered a couple of books by minicomic upstart rob osborne. '1000 steps to world domination' is about a cartoonist with delusions of grandeur and 'sunset city' is about a retiree who doesn't quite gel with his retirement home community. 'nat turner' #2, a historical book about slavery by kyle baker, was also added to my pull - i must've been sleeping when the first issue was solicited.

  • ip idiocy link of the day: why patent reform only helps the big boys
    If patent reform will hurt most 
    of the people who receive patents, 
    why are we doing it?
    
    Good question.
    
    Patent reform appears to be based 
    primarily on the idea that big 
    companies invent useful stuff that 
    needs protection while smaller 
    companies and individual inventors 
    use the patent system to suck revenue 
    out of big companies through 
    frivolous patents and frivolous 
    lawsuits.  Of course, it isn't at 
    all clear that this assumption is 
    correct.  The primary principles of 
    patent reform are switching the U.S. 
    system from 'first to invent' to 
    'first to file' by replacing legal 
    challenges to patents with a more 
    administrative challenge process, 
    and by practically eliminating 
    injunctions through which a patent 
    holder forces an infringer to stop 
    using his intellectual property.
    
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social butterflies

Saturday, 20AUG2005:

the freezers at northmart have been busted for the last few days so i couldn't pick up sausages for bbq'ing as i had planned for today's gatherings. instead, i went for some smoked salmon, a bit pricey as 4 packages set me back $70.

first stop was at bill's place in apex for a corn roast. there we enjoyed over 3 hours of political discussion, delving into information management, the perils and stability of bureaucracy, stock picking and program evaluations. when the talk turned towards gardening, tho, i turned my attention to the well-stocked tableau of food, including fresh western corn, spiked watermelon balls, smoked char and caribou salami. yummy.

cascading apex creek
well-stuffed, i hiked overland to my next event at angie's for madeleine and romyne's fairwell potlatch. on the way, i paused to snap a photo of the apex creek as it cascaded on its way to the ocean. at the potlatch, food was again the center of attraction, with chili, fresh char caught today, fresh clams and muktuk serving to satiate all in attendance.

summer sunset in iqaluit
i then accompanied malcolm, sara and stef back into town to attend the music camp coffee house at the parish hall. as we crested the hill, i got some great photos of the sunset. we watched 'ivory hail' play a series of mellow covers, some drum dancing, fiddlers, and a metallica-ish band, with rannva closing out the show with one of her original songs.

monte and i then strolled towards the legion, where malcolm, sara and stef had preceeded us. stopping in to check my messages, i found that willy had called to see what was up. i rang him back to tell him and the rest of his hearts-playing non-members to promptly attend the legion lineup where i would deign to offer them the privilege of being signed in by me.

once willy, curtis, michelle and john had all been taken care of, i hit the pool tables and managed to play 4 games in a row for only a buck, after winning the table from epeebee. quitting while i was ahead for the night at 3-1, i was content to sit along the rail and soak in the energy of the crowd.

when the lights came back on, willy and i grabbed a cab back to angie's in apex to check out their after party. however, we found a glum atmosphere as 2 wallets and a purse had been stolen from their entryway in the hour that they had been at the legion. we kept them company for a single round and then headed back to town.


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