senatorhung's pad
ramblings of an information troubleshooter
ramblings of an information troubleshooter
biting the bullet
Monday, 25JUL2005:morgan, one of my co-workers, has decided to abandon the north (this true love thing must be contagious). anyway, since it will cost him thousands to get his vehicle moved south, he decided that he was better off selling it up here, even if he had to take a financial hit. not one to turn down a great deal, i decided to succumb to the call of the north and buy my first snow machine. (2004 Polaris XC-500 Legend)
after work, jordan took me to the cleaners again at chess. i was so depressed that i decided to skip the gym for the evening. *haha* well, the fact that i slept all day yesterday gave me an indication that i may have been pushing myself a wee bit hard, so it was probably best to take the lieu day.
greg phoned up with the great news that he had gotten a job offer down in sudbury. accordingly, i joined him and the gang for a drink at the storehouse to celebrate. i also ended up picking up a sedna carved out of caribou antler from one of the vendors making the rounds of the bar.
- ip idiocy link of the day:
how the grokster decision
didn't
resolve anything
Why is legal uncertainty in this context particulary chilling to innovators ? ... Unlike nearly every other area of law, copyright allows plaintiffs to skip proving actual damages and instead collect statutory damages, which a court may set between $750 and $30,000 per work infringed. So when secondary copyright claims are made against mass market products like the iPod, CD burners or file-sharing software, all of which are regularly used by customerws to make copies of millions of works, statutory damages become a corporate death penalty.
shadow of the nite owl
Tuesday, 26JUL2005:finished re-reading the first 3 books in the 'ender's shadow' sub-series by orson scott card. just in time, it turns out, as the concluding volume was just published in march. time to exercise those online ordering fingers ...
the only major issue that i have had with these books is the philosophy that baby-making should be considered the major achievement in life. sure, it's a great motivational tool for the characters, but i'm more skeptical about its general applicability to real life. that said, card provides great characterization and writes meaningful dialogue, enough that buying the final book is a no-brainer.
also drafted up playlist and script for this weekend's radio show that will have a jukebox theme. hopefully this will allow me to avoid the sequence of fumblings that i provided during last weekend's show.
5-way action
Wednesday, 27JUL2005:there is an 'inuktitut word of the day' feature that pops up on the intranet at work. today's word managed to penetrate my morning mental fog. the word was W/Es6g6 'pi.ja.ri.uq.tuq', meaning "does it for the first time". for a moment, i thought it was another one of those spam messages offering teenage sex videos ;)
another evening, another poker session. todd wanted to host just one more match before he leaves on vacation on friday. patrick, becky, spencer and myself were happy to oblige. the early going was pretty uneventful and it took a few hours for becky to become the first player to get knocked out. becky stuck around to deal for the rest of us. other people began to swing by the apartment including stef, kevin (with his xbox), greg, becca, dave, helen, bella, karen, etc.
before things got too out of hand, tho, i managed to smoke todd out. he believed that i had a couple of low clubs with 3 clubs on the table, based on my betting hard after the turn, indicating that i didn't want another club to show up. me, i had actually been playing my two-pair, kings and twos. when another club came out on the river, i put him all-in, risking that he didn't have the ace. as he had the queen, i beat him by a single card.
after a few rounds, i successfully bullied patrick out, leaving me to play heads-up against spencer. after winning a few hands, it was looking bleak for spencer as i had about a 10:1 chip stack advantage. however, once the surrounding partiers started smoking, i began to lose focus. i didn't play stupidly, but spencer was able to take advantage of my distraction and started to beat me hand after hand. after another hour, his chip stack surpassed mine and seeing as we both had to work the next day, i was happy that spencer was willing to split the pot down the middle so i could go home to get at least a couple of hours of sleep.
- IP idiocy link of the day: the economist discusses the u.s. supreme court's grokster decision, explains how the current copyright time periods are economic nonsense and advocates a return to the original limited monopoly terms of 14 years, renewable once.
- link of the day:
the
sniper and the journalist: phillip
robertson, an embedded u.s. journalist,
searches out the sniper who shot his
friend, iraqi journalist yasser salihee.
After Joe fired at the windshield he walked to the car and saw that Salihee was covering his eye with his right hand, but as he watched the hand fell and blood poured from the wound in the man's head. Not long after the shooting, Joe's unit left the area. "We had to leave the scene and that was fucked up, but we had to continue the mission. Then we came back and I saw the lady crying and it got to me because I'm not out here to kill innocent people at all. When I saw her, that's when I knew something was wrong." The woman Joe saw was Raghad Salihee, Yasser's wife ... Raghad went on to say, "I want the Americans to go back to America, but I know they won't go." She asked me if I knew a lawyer in the United States who could take her husband's case. As her daughter gazed hypnotically at the hotel pool, Raghad said, "Can you help me ? Please, can you help me ?" ... Before I left Joe at his company headquarters at Camp Victory, he said he wanted to tell the Salihee family he was sorry and that he'd never had to fire to stop a car before the 24th of June. "If I'd seen his hands up, no way would I have fired a shot. We didn't murder him. No way was it murder," Joe said. But there was desperation in his voice, as if he wasn't sure.
the other shoe drops
Thursday, 28JUL2005:today, the city finally admitted that it has no vision about recycling. 3 seacans full of materials collected for recycling will now be going straight into the city's landfill and the stuff being collected in the new bins (minus pop cans) will go there too. supposedly it costs them to keep seacans around and they need to free up the seacans for something else ? call me a sceptic.
i've been encouraged to put my money where my mouth is and so i'm applying to sit on the solid waste management committee which will provide policy input to the city. i have little illusion that i'll be able to steer the city towards more sustainable waste management practices, but we'll see how it goes.
coincidentally, the city's engineering director has just resigned, following in the footsteps of the city's former director of public works. i wonder if there is a root cause for the city's difficulties or if it is merely a continuation of the transient tendencies of iqalungmiut from the south ?
- ip idiocy link of the day: an
interview
with the director of
mad
hot ballroom about what she had
to do to get clearances for all the
music used in her documentary.
Stay Free!: There's a scene where a woman's cell phone rings and she has the 'Rocky' theme ring tone. I noticed that you even cleared that ! I would have thought that could be an example of fair use. Sewell: I thought so too. It's only six seconds ! But our lawyer said we needed to clear it. So I called Sprint, which owns the ring tone master rights, and they gave it to me for free because they saw it as product placement. But then I called EMI, which owns the publishing rights and they asked for $10,000. ... Stay Free!: Were there any other inconvenient clearances you had to deal with ? Sewell: Well, we had to watch out for billboards and Frito-Lay trucks all the time. But I usually didn't care, we would just shoot. The biggest danger with clearances is when they interfere with documenting real life. Something spontaneous like a cell phone ringing is different than a planned event. If filmmakers have to worry about these things, documentaries will cease to be documentaries! What happens when the girls go shopping and there's music playing in the stores? We were lucky because in our movie the music wasn't identifiable, but otherwise what are we supposed to do: walk up to the store manager and say, "Excuse me but can you turn off your radio?"
payday means partay at the legion
Friday, 29JUL2005:today's inuktitut word of the day was NwW2<X 'na.i.pip.paa', meaning 'finds it while searching'. if i hadn't just made up a batch of business cards, i'd have changed my inuktitut job title, as i think this is a much better description of the role of a librarian, rather than what i have now: 'works in a place where books are read'.
another friday, another bevy of farewells. first, we had a gathering at the storehouse to wish morgan luck in peace river. from there i wandered over to greg's for a big bash to see off becca, who leaves monday, and greg himself who is heading up to pang next week and will only have a few days in town when he gets back before he departs for sudbury.
we managed to fit over 20 people into greg's hacienda, so it was a boisterous bunch that decided to move things over to the legion. we only had enough members to sign in half of our group, so we went around looking for other members to help sign in the folks stranded outside. once we were all in, you couldn't turn a corner without running into one of the party-goers.
so i signed up to play pool on wW= 'i.pi.bi's table but he got knocked out by jimmy, so i avenged him to win the table. morgan had signed up to challenge me, but i couldn't track him down, so i played norman instead. i made a game of it, but norman unsuprisingly beat me to the punch.
another table opened up and i played a friendly with patrick. i won, but only because patrick sunk the black too soon. luc, who had just come from ruling the tables at the storehouse, decided he wanted to take me down. however, i somehow gave him enough tough-angle shots that he got a bit frustrated and i ended up winning. hey, there's a first time for everything, and i don't have any delusions about repeating that feat anytime soon.
the lights came on and we huddled outside in a light sprinkle of rain before eventually moving on back to greg's. there, dave baked up some tasty 'ghetto dogs' that warmed us for the walk home.
- link of the day:
any
gas left in google ?: the writer
tries to determine if investors who
have sat on the shore during the
google explosion are too late to
catch the boat. he goes thru all of
the assumptions and formulae that he
uses to value a company's stock.
Now all you Google shareholders, ... keep in mind the $275.14 share price is based on a number of estimates and guesses. If you change any of the assumptions, you get a very different answer. For instance, if you think the analysts are wrong and believe Google will grow 60% a year over the next five years, the company's value is $615. Also, if the company's business model changes in a way that it generates more cash, that also affects the valuation.
jukeboxes, aircycles and haunted mirrors
Saturday, 30JUL2005:today's radio show celebrated the magic of jukeboxes, inspired by my songs heard on a jukebox mix.
aur.oral exposures setlist for 30jul2005:
- Echo Beach - Martha and the Muffins
- Beatles Medley - Stars on '45
- Shaddap You Face - Joe Dolce
- Boy From New York City - Manhattan Transfer
- Don't Bring Me Down - Electric Light Orchestra
- jukebox excerpt from 'Diamond Grill' - Fred Wah
- Saturday Night - Claire Jenkins
- Let the Jukebox Keep on Playing - Mike Ness
- Endless Love - Lionel Ritchie and Diana Ross
- The Break Up Song (They Don't Write 'em) - Greg Kihn Band
- Jesse - Carly Simon
- Rasputin - Boney M
- Urgent - Foreigner
- I Love Rock 'n' Roll - Joan Jett and the Blackhearts
- You Spin Me 'Round (Like a Record) - Dead or Alive
alas, this flick just emphasizes again what a rarity it is when hollywood manages to do a sf film well, even tho they are inevitably well-rewarded for the effort, e.g. '12 monkeys' or 'blade runner'.
some of the action set pieces (i.e. the spinning fan) were ludicrous and were a waste of the special effects budget. the philosophical dilemma faced by djimon hounsou's character, as an african military man tasked with retrieving the future equivalent of slaves was not as fleshed out as it could have been and sean bean's megalomaniacal geneticist had no redeeming qualities. if he had, there would maybe have been an interesting examination about how far we can go to protect the already living, using the might yet live.
ewan mcgregor got to play himself and his clone, but the transformation from lincoln six echo to client was just too easily done to be credible. interactions with other, more sympathetic, clients may have helped to show a greater moral conflict. however, kudos to the casting director for putting the luminous scarlett johanssen on the screen. steve buscemi was hilarious as usual.
finally, why all the fuss about a $500,000 car that's still tied to the ground, when you could have a kewl aircycle ? man, those were HOT !
went home to finish neil gaiman's 'coraline'. it's an award-winning children's book that is being made into an animated feature in the next few years. a very spooky tale about a young girl who learns to appreciate the world and the parents that she has after surviving an alternate version of each.
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