Off By One

It’s the end of 2007, and last night I was asked by our waitress if I was “ready for 2008.”

It’s an interesting question, isn’t it? In the absence of epic new plans for the coming year what does “ready” mean? I’m not panicked about the coming year, if that’s what she meant. I’m not planning to do anything for which I am not ready, too.

This bit was, of course, a bit of a non sequitur.

Basically, I want to wish everyone that reads this a happy new year. Be well, be happy. Hopefully your coming year is as good as my previous one.

Pepper oil hurts my sensitive bits.

The Midwest Teen Sex Show is freakin’ excellent, even though I’m neither in the midwest, nor a teen.

It’s fitting that the quote on my homepage’s title bar, as I started to post this, was “Against stupidity the very gods themselves contend in vain”.

People who know me know well that I’m a geek, and as such I have many of the canonical traits that define ‘geek’. I’m oriented towards strict, quantitative judgments and I prefer things that fit neatly into categories.

I’d like to show you two lists, as seen on a site called Coding Horror:

Now, I ask you: Which of those two seems like a better approach to the problem of sorting lists?

Here’s the thing, now that you’ve answered the question. The comments on the post that advocated the same sorting approach that I’m sure you picked were… distressing to me as a software developer who is concerned with human factors and real-world usability. Comments like this:

This attitude is the very worst of my profession, and to everyone that has ever seen a list sorted like column ‘A’, above, I apologize on behalf of the nerds that did the work, who to this day probably still think that you’re wrong.

Well, well.

Persuant to my post about the Canadian DMCA it appears that the legislation has been pulled and will not be enacted in its current form.

It’s hard to say why without the power of telepathy, but I would imagine that the widespread public outcry over the effects of the law can’t have hurt.

Sorry, the bill has been delayed, not withdrawn

On a significantly lighter note, here’s a place you can go when you run out of books to read:

ReadMe

This is a wiki collecting a significant fraction of the Ask Metafilter questions pertaining to suggested books.

I fear this list… It means I’ll be nose-deep in books soon. I’ve been expanding my reading tastes a bit lately, and this is only going to push that harder.

Buried under the avalanche of holiday-related product placements that hit once every year for about, oh, three months, a major change in Canadian copyright legislation is about to take place, and — despite Minister of Industry Jim Prentice’s claim that this change will “put consumers first,” there’s little enough of that to be seen in the proposed legislation.

Now, I’m not going to parrot the analysis here, because one of the biggest friends that this type of law has is an uninformed populace. What I’d ask instead is that you (the two of you still reading this after my long silence) spend a morning informing yourself about the way laws like this will affect your freedom to consume and produce art in the Canada we’ll live in for the foreseeable future. If you need a starting point, as I’m sure that you do, I can offer a couple:

If you want a great video showing you what is happening in the US — whose DMCA is the template for the act that will be introduced in Canada sometime in the next week and a half — then I recommend Lawrence Lessig’s TED talk: How Creativity is Being Strangled By the Law. It’s 20 minutes, but it’s well worthwhile.

If you’re more inclined for a local perspective, you can do far worse than Michael Geist’s Canadian DMCA articles. Geist is a lawyer specializing in the internet — specifically issues with respect to privacy and e-Commerce, and he’s one of our best early-warning systems for dangerous copyright legislation.

And, in the end, if you come to the end of these links — and please at least skim them — and you want to do something, there’s an article on what you can do, too. I, for one, am going to be contacting Laurie Hawn and Jim Prentice. Hopefully on some level they listen.

Update

I just sent this to Jim Prentice

Good day, Mr. Prentice;

I am not one of your constituents in the strictest sense, being from Edmonton. I do live in Laurie Hawn’s constituency, and I am a Conservative voter in both the capital- and small-c- senses. It is in the latter capacity — as a philosophical conservative — that I write you today.

I believe that Canada’s future as a vibrant culture and an economic powerhouse can be better assured by removing barriers to innovation and reducing the challenges with which creative persons must contend to produce their art. Coming into the earlier parts of the 21st century we have an unparalleled opportunity to take the fruits of our technological process at this early stage of their development and use them to broaden our collective horizons in ways that you and I cannot possibly imagine at this time. This will not, however, happen if we as a nation do not protect the freedoms necessary to create new art from old, a process which has been ongoing for almost all of human history, with a lull only in the early parts of the 20th century when the costs to create new media prevented all but the largest corporations from participating. That imbalance has now righted itself, and the technology of creativity is now democratically available again. The question is, with what will these newly-enabled artists create? What will be their raw material? Moreover, how will others see their work? The restrictive legislation that is to be tabled later this month lacks critical provisions for fair use and for reverse engineering, both of which are driving forces of invention.

Make no mistake, I am not a ‘copyleft’ fanatic; I am a software developer by trade and I make my living on copyright and the protections it provides. I do not wish to see a regime wherein my work is freely available without compensation to any Tom, Dick, or Harry who decides that they want it. Moreover, my friends who are artists run the gamut from the “give it away” to the “it’s mine and I should be paid for it” on the spectrum. What is true, however, is that the legislation that you are expected to introduce this month will hurt all of us in ways that are eminently predictable, since we have the immediate example of the United States to see.

In conclusion, I ask that you reconsider your stance on consumer consultation before introducing this bill. When creating content has become so trivial (witness YouTube, although perhaps you’ll share my sense of disappointment with most of that content) it’s important to realize that the only difference between a ‘consumer’ and a ‘creator’ in this century is likely to be in the size of their wallet.

Thank you for your time.

and I wanted to work Catch-22 into that title, but couldn’t.

So, in response to some vigourous prodding last night, I felt it was time to dust this off and get back to keeping people apprised of my life.

Here’s the skinny, since… holy shit! November 6! It’s been almost four weeks!

Since then, I have:

• Travelled to the Dominican Republic (where we were all amiss in not posting to Morruz)
• Dislocated my shoulder… again. That sucked. Worse? I was just playing volleyball in a pool, not even doing anything interesting. Funny thing is, though, when I went to a medical supply store to get some foam to pad the horrid sling I took home with me, the lady running the store told me that my injury seems to be quite common in volleyballers, at least anecdotally.
• Got my performance review at work, for which the term “glowing” might be an understatement.

And you wonder why I don’t post? My life is dull, dull, dull.

It hasn’t even been that interesting of a time, politically. I’ve kept my eyes on the news, but there’s been little out of the ordinary to spark thought or discussion, either north or south of the border.

Um… I’ve read some good books, lately. Is that interesting?

Expect more later. I’m just barely awake, and Char just fed me coffee.