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Some Improvements to Blogfest
I've rearranged the Blogfest UI so that there's more room for the actual content. For some reason, though, Firefox still insists on making some of the layout table funky.
So the J. LeRoy head and a half in the Listen to J. LeRoy Music part ... that doesn't really look like that. And the masthead isn't supposed to look like that. And the fat titles on the right side don't really look like that.
But I'm not really into figuring out what the deal is. So ... love the new format!
Woodie Guthrie Update
Hmm, it seems that no one is bothering to sue a major university for file sharing this apparently public domain copy of Guthrie's "This Land" sung here by some clown named ... um ... Woodie Guthrie.
Low Post LeRoy
Sorry, haven't been posting because I've been sitting at my desk answering questions and demands non stop for a week or so. I feel like this.
Jibjab, Fair Use and the Confusion of Intent
Before it disappears, you will be a poor person if you do not view the Jibjab video.
Oddly enough, this nearly instantly controversial video has sparked .... controversy.
Check out the thread at these places:
Larry Lessig's take and then followup.
Then some dissenting views from Chris and the Corante Cabal.
And the Yellow Magic Journalism Orchestra.
Imagine, if you will, the irony of being sued by Woody Guthrie's attornies. It would sort of be like being beaten to death in honor of Ghandi.
Note, Bush and Kerry don't seem to care.
No Stone Left Unexploited
As the Clinton-Helms INDUCE act seeks to protect children by taking away people's rights to distribute all information, it's amusing that the both the Democrats and the Republicans are using this allegedly valueless kiddie porn infrastructure to advertise for Kerry and Bush.
The last paragraph is the punch line.
Many small artists use services like e-Donkey to distribute their own, personally created work. Peer to peer systems are merely avenues to distribute information. Just like this blog.
I find it ironic that some people would see evil in a technology that lets you communicate (but can be abused) and want to outlaw it -- but they will see only good in a technology that can only be used to kill (assault weapons, hand guns, cop killer bullets) and not outlaw them.
But, while trying to outlaw P2P, electeds are advertising on it. I guess I should be happy they aren't selling bullets with their campaign slogans on them. Although, I may even go buy a box of bullets from the Bush camp that say "No Child Left Behind".
Free Speech and The Cost of Doing Business
Garry Trudeau's Doonesbury is being pulled from 38 foolish newspapers because polls showed that a majority of their readers didn't like it. Oddly enough, this happened at the same time that Doonesbury is jabbing at Rupert Murdoch. Since Doonesbury deals with controversial subjects in a humorous way, it is inevitable that it's going to cause some readers heartburn.
Currently Doonesbury runs in over 1400 newspapers in North America.
So this is a reduction of about 2.7%. If I were standing in a room of 1400 random people and I read the previous post in my blog and only 38 of them walked out, I'd think I was doing pretty well.
Are the fear-driven haterags newspapers shooting themselves in the foot by this? Certainly. Should they not do it for a wide variety of reasons? Absolutely. But this is the cost of doing business for Doonesbury. Losing 2.7% of your papers is merely another sign that you are making an impact.
Lastly, Doonesbury is always available for you here ...
And this is my favorite of the Murdoch roll:
Proper Bows to Ito & Lessig (for Larry this ran long, you might just want to look at the whole blog.)
Spoon Fed Information or Merely Ooze?
Today a bit more information oozed out of the Bush Administration that continued to not exonerate President Bush. Some have attacked the Bushniks as spoon feeding the American Public information ... but it seems to me that the administration would be better served by no information whatsoever. Thier claim that this information is endemic to bad record keeping is credible to me.
This slow leak of information just keeps the controversy current. Conspiracy theorists (and it's so easy to be one with a President and an administration who act as they do) believe that the Bush Administration has intentionally lost information that would show that Bush did, indeed, avoid military service. And this slow leaking of information is their way of withholding the really important information.
While it is plain that he certainly did do exactly that, slowly leaking this information is nearly as damaging to the Bush election campaign as would be evidence that he drank while others bled.
Support Terrorism and Win a Free Trip
As has been covered to death, the Bush Administration gave the Bin Laden family free passage out of the country. Why? No one's ever actually asked them to say. I'm sure that if Gary Ridgeway or Ted Bundy had some family members that needed a vacation, we'd ship them off as well.
But what is now clear is that they didn't go on a commuter plane. You gotta give the Bush Administration its due, when they ship off their dirty laundry, they do it in style.
You Are All A Bunch of Skinheads
I am coming to the conclusion that Americans are have now fully shot their reality wad and are becoming tired of reality.
Reagan Reality TV During the Reagan Administration our reality fixx was provided by the advent of screaming asshole television. Brought into our homes initially by crossfire and then copied by every unemployed person who wanted a television show, we loved seeing "real" people argue like crazy. We also got the Contra trials where we wondered why our kind old president was selling drugs and arms in Central America. But after a while, we grew ill of this. Because there were no consequences. No one went to jail, no one ever won an argument on Crossfire. That ushered in:
Elder Bush Reality TV During this administration we watched smart bombs allegedly hit their targets and a huge military force shoot things into the air at night. This was exciting, although a bit confusing because we really didn't understand why we were fighting to restore an oppressive monarchy comprised of business partners of the President. But Old George was a little dull and out of touch with what American viewers craved. We did get a bit of presidential action there when we saw George Bush be amazed at a grocery store scanner or threw up on his hosts in Japan, but then in the elections we saw the reality TV that would really get us jazzed....
Clinton Reality TV During the Clinton Administration, our reality fixx was provided by constant media attention orchestrated by Ken Starr and unprecedented access to 24 hour staff to report. It wasn't Ken Starr that really fostered this, it was the faster than basketball speed at which charges were levied and the way that the white house had to react. Better than any soap opera, we were met with allegation after allegation and it was great. This was the Reality TV America craved. Alas, you can only be president for 8 years. This brought ...
Little Bush Reality TV With his nearly constant vacation in the beginning of his term, and his utterly absent personality and intellect, it was clear that George Bush II was not going to provide the fun that the Clinton Administration did. He just wasn't smart enough for witty reparte. The cocaine and alcohol of his past removed any snappy comebacks necessary for reality TV. It lives on dialogue. So we had to invent lame reality TV like Survivor and Marry My Dad and Remove my Spleen and so forth. To be fair, after the constant roller coaster of the Clinton Administration, people wanted to rest a bit.
Now reality TV shows are getting lower and lower ratings. The TV industry doesn't know what to do. They look to the future and see either a burnout or a bore and wonder ... is it too late for Donald to run?
What is a nuisance?
As we all know, Republicans don't like trial lawyers very much. At the moment they are chastising John Kerry for choosing a trial lawyer as a running mate. I'll skip the too-easy digs a Dick "No really I live in Wyoming" Cheney, here.
Oops, well, okay, one dig.
One of the major reasons that Republicans don't like nuisance law suits. In case you can't be bothered to click the link, definition #2 of nuisance is:
Law. A use of property or course of conduct that interferes with the legal rights of others by causing damage, annoyance, or inconvenience.
Now, let's think about this a moment. The Republican leadership has just launched a divisive argument in the Senate to amend the US Constitution to deny rights from people they have never had. They have said concretely that they have no chance of this passing. Therefore, why launch a move for a constitutional amendment that will merely seek to polarize American society?
Let's look at it again...
Law. A use of property or course of conduct that interferes with the legal rights of others by causing damage, annoyance, or inconvenience.
Yes, Republicans as a party are vocally on record as really hating Nuisance law suits. But don't take it from me, take it from Haley Barbour. And well they should hate them, nuisance law suits are aptly named.
Granted, this is not really a nuisance law suit. It is something better ... a nuisance constitutional amendment. It is not intended to pass, but is intended to cause damage, annoyance and inconvenience. Or worse yet, irreparable rifts in American families as generations fight about making something illegal that isn't even legal.
This amendment will divide the country, cheapen marriage as an institution and merely serve to promote the short term political of a subsection of one political party.
Don't Blow Me Up With Your Idle Thoughts
We are spending a lot of time and money to protect ourselves from terrorists. This is the outcome. You can see the situation this guy was in. People are asking him "why did you write the word bomb on a piece of paper?" Then he needs to say "Because I'm a writer." To which they reply "Prove it". And how do you prove it?
Suppose he didn't have a laptop with him...
Perhaps we should have the TSA ban certain words or thoughts on airplanes as well. And books. I once read a Vernor Vinge book on a plane. Lots of things blew up in it. Lucky thing I had the row to myself.
Countdown to Ecstasy
Any major dude with half a heart surely will tell you my friend
Any minor world that breaks apart falls together again
When the demon is at your door
In the morning it won't be there no more
Any major dude will tell you
Hormones are Bad, Mmmkay?
Ann sent me this and I thought I should blog it.
Our Policy of Global Destabilization
In my original posts about the then-budding war in Iraq, and in subsequent posts, I have questioned how forward-thinking the Bush Administration was in its decision to go to war. At that time I argued that nation building needed a strong international presence. Mr. Bush heard me and assembled "The Coalition of the Willing" a coalition that included mostly small nations without militaries of their own or who were highly dependent on US aid or the US Military. In short, they were unwillingly willing.
Add to this that many nations that were "willing" actually meant that their elected officials were willing. The actual population of the nation was quite a different matter.
A case in point is the Philippines. This is one of those countries who has the misfortune of being right in a strategically perfect place. The upshot is that the population of the Philippines has been usually under someone's military control (explicit or implicit) since people started building ships.
Currently, the President of the Philippines is Gloria Arroyo. She was freely elected and rather a ray of sunshine after other recent US embraced rulers of the country. But, she's still pro-US and has been a supporter of the war in Iraq. It doesn't hurt that the Filipino economy relies on the US Military employing a large portion of its employed workforce.
Poverty is a major issue in the Philippines, a fact made abundantly clear to me during my time in Hong Kong. The term "Filipino Maid" is used as if it were a major brand. Much like, "Could you please stop by the store on the way home and pick me up a Filipino Maid?" I met and got to know several Filipino maids in HK, most of whom were married, most of whom had children, most of whom were qualified professionals. I met maids who were experienced nurses, accountants and teachers. They were all sending most of their money home. They were all making the best of a very bad situation.
President Arroyo has her work cut out for her. There are Islamic factions in the country quite anxious to see her dead. There is rampant poverty that has its roots in a history common to cultures who have been repeatedly taken over by outsiders. She has to establish and Filipino identity beyond merely national pride.
So, in this respect, the Philippines is much like Iraq. Iraq has been repeated conquered and liberated -- or simply cut loose.
Now President Arroyo has something new to put up with. Her reward for sending 4,000+ Filipinos to Iraq so that they could have a job is that they are being killed and kidnapped. As you can guess, it hasn't made the general population too happy. So she's under attack from the people who overwhelmingly elected her.
In the alleged zeal to liberate, stabilize and democratize Iraq, we have managed to destabilize our own democratic allies. We have managed to add problems to people with more troubles than Mr. Bush can even comprehend. Suppose he had to send his two often-sober daughters overseas to work for $15 an hour while wondering they would be beaten or raped and at home wondering if his family was going to be robbed on the way home from the market? It is this utter lack of understanding that has placed us where we are today. We have once again used a people who deserve better.
Typing Without Thinking
The utterly anonymous Democrats.net ran a story a few days back that basically quoted a longer, better worded rant from Brainstorms based on a post by Cory in Boing Boing.
And now I'm writing about it, but under a slightly different context. I know I have to watch about typos. I type faster than I proofread often and that is the mark of the blog. But if you are going to write about Ray Bradbury and Michael Moore and Bradbury's annoyance with the title of Fahrenheit 9/11, you should at least get the name of Bradbury's book right.
I would write to the utterly anonymous Democrats.net but I cannot because they have no contact information anywhere on the site. They also have no comments to any posts. "They" also write in the first person. Making me think that perhaps that these Democrats are one person. And, unless the site's owner is named Sibyl, I don't think one person can be plural.
So, I call on the single person at Democrats.net, to at least note on the site that s/he is not a political party and is an individual. Right after that, you can edit the post to identify the book as Fahrenheit 451 and not Fahrenheit 411.
PBX and SIP are not Airports
Mr. "David" Blog has dipped into his own pockets, which were previously used to support his habit of creating delightfully goofy things like this and this, to fund the development of a phone system that would allow people using phones on a PBX to be able to chat with people on a SIP client.
This would be really really excellent for people like me who have friends scattered worldwide. But more importantly, it may pave the way for global telephony via wireless networks. Basically, you could have a cell phone, but instead of attaching to a cell tower, it would log-in to the nearest wireless hub and you'd talk over the Internet.
Why do you care? Because the Internet is the same everywhere. Cell phones are not. And Cell phones are not the same everywhere on purpose. And that institutionalized lack of standardization is really annoying.
So, even though you might not know what I'm talking about, trust me, this is way fab.
Why Open Source Will Rule the World
I pulled up my copy of Newzcrawler today. I've been busy and lax (it happens) and haven't had time to read anything lately. So I have about everything in there, since just about everything has an RSS or Atom feed now.
One of the things in there tracks my stuff in Technorati. And today it told me that I had a couple new links to J. LeRoy's Blogfest (you're reading that now, so you don't really need a link to it).
I checked them out and one of them is the perfect example for why open source software will one day rule the world. It lead me to anti-cambre.net which has a site based on a hack of self-reported awful code.
The first guy wrote something called feedonfeeds and he said his code sucked but he wanted to get the idea out there. So he released it as GPL and basically dared someone to do something with it. So along comes some other guy who says "Hey, I can do something with that." And he does.
And then this web site popped out. Simply because someone got an epiphany one night, worked until the epiphany wore out and then passed it on to the next epiphany jockey.
Sorta like how I created a bunch of music and sounds one night and sent them to my friend Stephen. Then a week later Stephen gets bitten outside his home on Lamma Island by a poisonous centipede. Then he goes to Queen Mary Hospital and has to lay there for several days. While he was there he took the sounds that I made in Seattle and formed the 746b Sessions(named after his room and bed number).
So, in closing, open source is amazing because it surprises and delights you. It's a love fest I tell you.
Musophobia
I have started a new blog called Musophobia. It is designed to be a community focal point for artists I know. We can announce when new music or other art is available for download and discuss the pieces. Also we can find new ways to collaborate. It was just launched this morning, so it'll take a week or so to get rolling. But the framework is up there. Go take a look, add it to your aggregator, put it on your "must visit" list of blogs. The member artists will give you amazing stuff to listen to.
Yes, I got my ... wish
It is true, I do not have to deal with the emotional pain of figuring out what to do about Dick Gephardt.
Now the choice is a black and white as Bush likes to make everything else seem.
What a lucky day!
Please John, Not Dick Gephardt
I feel like a Republican on the eve of George Bush Senior's pronouncement of a running mate.
Only then the announcement of Dan Quayle was just a total shock.
Now we have the potential for the most devicive politician since Jesse Helms to be the Vice Presidential candidate with John Kerry.
Most Candidates tout their bi-partisan efforts and try to hide their partisanship. Dick Gephardt does the opposite. He's a puppet of the labor unions which for years have made great strides in solidifying their political power while making small or negative moves for actual working people.
So we have corrupt and soulless businesses on one side, like Wal*Mart, and corrupt and soulless labor unions like AFSCME on the other. So real working people are forced to either work at Wal*Mart for subhuman wages or are forced belong to their union and go on strike for a month so they can get an extra one day of paid vacation.
And we have two political parties who alternately cow up to one or the other.
I realize that I'm not a good Democrat for saying these things. Although I have faith that I'm a worse Republican than I am a Democrat.
It leaves me with a great sense of dis-ease.
Secondly, it would be ironic if everyone were talking about the possiblity of Kerry running with a republican like John McCain or William Cohen - for the very purpose of being a "uniter" - and then picking such a highly partisan person like Gephardt.
So please, don't pick Dick Gephardt. It would just kill me.
Interracial Marriage
Attentive readers will remember this post where I let people know that you could now get select arguments before the US Supreme Court. The one I gave the link to argued for state prohibition of interracial marriage. The arguments given in the 2 hour audio event are very similar to those given today to suggest that same-sex marriage should not occur.
I have recorded a little song called Interracial Marriage which is a jaunty little ditty entirely made up of samples from the aforementioned hearing. Please give it a listen. Download | Stream
Music Notes:
This is under a Creative Commons by-nc-sa license. I made the tune using (primarily) Tuareg and Live 3.0. Every sound is taken from the arguments, no synthesizers, instruments or other samples were used. Tuareg is what I used to make the jaunty loops.
Minimal Windows
Stephen told me about this composition done entirely with automating windows loop player and using windows sounds.
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