Who's waving the white flag again?

Normally, I don't pay too much attention to campaign rhetoric, but the last part of today's AP article quoting also-ran-Romney d--ned near made my blood boil:

Mitt Romney suspended his faltering presidential campaign on Thursday, effectively sealing the Republican presidential nomination for John McCain. "I must now stand aside, for our party and our country," Romney told conservatives. "If I fight on in my campaign, all the way to the convention, I would forestall the launch of a national campaign and make it more likely that Senator Clinton or Obama would win. And in this time of war, I simply cannot let my campaign, be a part of aiding a surrender to terror," Romney told the Conservative Political Action Conference in Washington.

Let me see if I have this straight: This man's party has shredded the Bill of Rights because it's too mendacious and incompetent to capture the architect of Sept. 11. This man's party has dismissed the Geneva Convention protocols as suggestions and basic human rights as dewy-eyed idealism. This man's party has squandered billions on an illegal war, and allowed the most naked of power-grabs by the Bush Junta, leaving the next generations to undo their damage. This man's party has dragged the reputation of the United States through the gutter at the chariot-wheels of its kingmakers, boot-lickers and hired thugs.

In short, this man's cronies have used the bin Ladin bogeyman again and again to do possibly irreversible damage to America--to the point where the question of whether it will ever again be the land of the free or the home of the brave is genuinely debatable. "Terror" is only a threat because the puppet-masters of the GOP need a mustache-twirling villain straight from Central Casting to distract from their profiteering--political and monetary.

Let's keep this permanently on record: This man's party gave the city over to sack, pillage and rape--by their own forces. After the enemy had long since decamped, I might add. They have damaged America more in six years more than bin Ladin and the other so-called enemies of freedom could have achieved in lifetimes. The War! On!! Terror!!! has been mainly prosecuted against the American taxpayer and the average Iraqi. If that's the definition of "fighting terrorism", "surrender" doesn't sound like a bad option. At least if the "logic" follows the same Orwellian newspeak syntax as the rest of the theocon universe. You know, the place where a futile war in Iraq can be won by declaring war on Iran? Yeah, that place.

Sadly, Romney--like the rest of his reality- and truth-challenged cohorts--will never have to account for his complicity in the FUD that passes for political discourse. He's doubly lucky that we don't have the same mother. With fibbing on that scale, he'd be tasting soap for months.

Reason #26917 to despise Microsoft

Understand that I generally see a lot of promise in open source software, zits and High Priesthood elitism and all. Grant you, it won't save the world. But anyone who underestimates the power of passionate folks to change the world by moonlighting in a world of craftsmanship and meritocracy--which they d--n sho' don't get from the suits at work--is a Grade A moron.

I had an a revelation at work today, namely why I so deeply loathe Microsoft. Bottom line: I resent black boxes for software that's as elementary as a web server and script processor. Alas, my company is not doing a very good job of getting the classic ASP monkey off its back. Current example: Rather than "waste" programmer time hand-coding our own solution, we instead serially waste three programmers' time trying to get a prima-donna IIS plug-in up and running for IIS 6. And, as you might have guessed, I'm the latest programmer to inherit this bit of infuriating scut-work.

What particularly chaps my pastey-white dimpled backside is:

1. When you're paying for the coin for so-called "Enterprise" software, the installer should do the messy work of "hacking" itself into IIS. Commercial software should never, EVER require manual registry edits.
2. (More to the point...) We wouldn't have to install this craptastic piece of gwano if ASP classic had any decent support for file uploads (or combined file/form POSTing) to start with.

Even more frustrating is IIS's utterly mulish behavior. I tried adding an extension to the list of file types handled. The first field in that form has you designate the DLL/EXE handler for the extension. The second has you specify the file extension. But apparently you need to specify the extension (with a leading period) and THEN browse for the DLL/EXE. Or the "OK" button is greyed out. Effin' brilliant user interface design there, hey? Just knowing that the incompetent twit who wrote that code (and the still more incompetent twit who allowed it through quality-checking) brings in more bling than I do--probably in stock options alone--just makes the steam curl from my ears.

Small wonder that Microsoft has to resort to mafia-esque thuggery to prevent someone more competent and user-attuned from eating their lunch. That's bad enough. But the less obvious result is that, in defending their own shoddy work against all comers, they have spawned whole cottage industries devoted to writing lame accretions to an already-lame codebase. All because Microsoft has apparently forgotten what made them the 800-lb gorilla in the first place: Namely, they made it easy to develop for the DOS and early Windows platforms. Nowadays, even a config. file for IIS is too much to ask for. Unacceptable.

And so, like open source folks the world over, I'll be happily parked in front of my Linux home workstation tonight, plinking away on non-proprietary software on a non-proprietary platform. Is it a perfect world there? By no means. But if my work draws one other person away from the clutches of a company that has the same attitude towards its customers that the Bush Regime has toward law-abiding taxpaying citizens, I'm happy be yet another stitch in the Evil Empire's winding-sheet.

Progress report

The first month of this year-long experiment in "intelligent selfishness" is winding down. The problem with measuring "progress" is that 2008's January is not apples-to-apples with 2007's. The U couldn't be bothered to offer the one class I wanted to take this semester, so I'm not in school, and will probably stay that way until next Fall. So my evenings are relatively unencumbered. I do wish that I had grown enough spine to back out of the work-related training, though. That's a complete waste of time in the short- and long-terms. And I do mean complete: The stipend for passing the certification is trivial. No promotions, no extra job security, no glamorous reassignment in the offing. Stupid, stupid, stupid of me to give in to the urge to help out the co-worker who's taken on the thankless job of leading up the training.

But caveating and carping aside, it's going well enough. Making regular progress on the more important projects feels wonderful. And I'm learning throughout, which is also good for the soul as well as the brain. I expected my romantic side to pine for the feel of a calligraphy pen, or of needle passing through cloth, but it hasn't happened yet. I'm still itching for the escape of travel, but that has far more to do with work frustrations than life in general.

Torturing myself

Sigh... Carnevale kicks off on Friday. So I'm auto-tormenting with daydream collages borrowed from Guardi, Caneletto, the Comedia della Arte, etc., etc. With mental images of strolling, garbed in a masked motley of color, among the Piazzas and Piazzettas. With the fantasy of escape into anonymity--flotsam on the froth of revelry, calling for "madder musing and stronger wine," flinging "roses, roses, riotously with the throng." That sort of thing.

[Insert wistful sigh.]

But the best that I will manage this year is a round or two of bellinis (another recipe here) with dinner on Friday. And maybe finish up the Venetian costume history book that was an extravagant birthday present from Dearest.

Too darned wierd not to pass along...

One has to wonder what Dr. Suess would think: Glowing pig passes genes to piglets. Just gives a whole 'nuther spin to "Green Eggs and Ham," dun'nit?

Better writing than I could manage

A few weeks ago, a bit of sophomoric journalism from the Washington Post lit up the west end of Blogistan with the claim that a legal brief from the RIAA claimed that consumers don't have the rights to copy content from their CDs to their hard drives. When this partial-truth was propagated by one of my favorite blogs, I temporarily abandoned my no-profanity-in-posts rule and lit a roman candle of four-lettered invective in the comments section. To positive reviews, I am proud to note.

But the claim was exaggerated, as it turns out. Normally I'd post a contrite retraction with an apology. But in this case I don't feel it's justified. Heck, if my so-called betters in the White House can use the "Okay, maybe Saddam didn't actually have WMD...but he was gonna!" argument, surely I have license to make similar rationalizations, no? (Or, as Shakespeare's Isabella put it: "Thieves for their pilfering have authority when judges steal.")

Rationalizations aside, the question of whether the "Oh by the way, which one's 'Pink'" suits will soon force you to start popping quarters into your iPod or BluRay to enjoy content you legally purchased is moot. The current state of affairs is already ridiculous. The FAA already assumes you're a terrorist for buying an airline ticket. I don't consider it a coincidence that the climate of fearing the customer has spilled over into mega-capitalism as well.

I'm still on Ubuntu, but sooner or later will have to upgrade the Windows box, if only for testing. And given what coming off the message boards about Vista treating its user as a criminal, I'm not looking forward to that--quite apart from the hardware expenditures.

The anonymous poster on this blog-post, though, did a far more eloquent job (than my carpet f-bombing) of summarizing how it's already gone too far. And that it's past time for a revolution of some sort.

When you buy content from the entertainment establishment, part of your money goes to the RIAA and the MPAA. Here’s what you get in return:

1. Laws that extend copyright beyond all reasonable bounds (originally 14 years, now life of the creator 70 years) These are not required to promote creativity. They are here to protect Mickey Mouse, and the ‘estates’ of dead artists that continue to leach off the culture without providing anything in return.

2. Laws like the DMCA that allow publishers to subvert your fair use rights by slapping on a layer of flimsy DRM that can’t be circumnavigated without breaking the law EVEN FOR USE THAT IS ALLOWED BY LAW.

3. Penal codes that allow a $250,000 fine for sharing a single .mp3. You can commit vehicular manslaughter and get away with a lower fine. (I promise you, it wasn’t concerned citizens who insisted on that sort of draconian punishment.)

4. Trade agreements that require operators of CD plants in foreign nations to submit to government inspections (imagine that, after winning to Cold War, we’re now insisting that the Russians start policing their own presses on our behalf.)

The list goes on. The fact is, when you buy entertainment at full retail, you support some very unsavory practices. This is not meant to justify piracy (a pure boycott would be the more ethical choice.) Rather, it should serve as a reminder that you simply cannot buy entertainment in a fashion that does not entail encroachments on your basic liberties and dignity. There’s environmental fallout from every minute you consume (at full retail.)

The short story is that, in spite of the freedom granted by the first amendment, the entertainment companies are profoundly undemocratic in their regard for individual liberty. Their desire for control of the user experience is absolutely boundless, and they will sue the daylights out of anything that crosses their paths, even if its tangential to their business. Xerox got sued for creating the copy machine. Sony got sued for creating the Betamax. Napster got sued for popularizing P2P. ANYTHING that can be used to distribute culture in any form is instinctively regarded as a threat by the content industry, at least until it can be brought under control and turned into an exclusive revenue stream. And how for will they go to ‘protect’ these streams? Just ask the Girl Scouts, who got sues for failing to pay royalties on songs sung around the campfire.

Some people call this evil. A better description is primitive. Understanding how to operate in a free culture is as challenging as learning how to govern with the consent of the governed. This is not, traditionally, something that Kings were good at. Only when threatened by bloody revolution do they back off and concede ground. And, revolution by revolution, tyranny is slowly replaced by democracy. Well, currently content is King. And like most Kings, it has been abusing its position terribly.

Now, it is fighting to maintain its dominance, but the people aren’t backing down. And nor should they. Not until the King has renounced some of his more despotic practices, and has decided to serve the needs of free culture instead of invading every corner it can find and gouging people for admission at every turn.

The journalist in question--whose name escapes me at the moment--was guilty of...errr...creatively trimming his quote from the brief, and should be disciplined accordingly. Make no mistake there. But I hope against hope that the furor was a wake-up call for the commissars of content. Because they have a PR as well as a business model problem on their hands. The very fact that a whole lot of intelligent people were perfectly willing to believe that of them is a big ol' problem. And blaming Kazaa and college students for it is not the answer.

I find it reprehensible that while my livelihood is under pressure from outsourcing/offshoring every day, I'm told to retrain, retool, and generally suck it up in the name of capitalist progress. But in the alternate reality bubble in which the pointy-haired likes of Jack Valenti exist, the laws of capitalism don't apply. (Rather like the Constitution, human rights and walking the walk of a Christian faith so loudly professed aren't supposed to get between the Right and their kleptocratic grabs for power and money.)

Technically, I'm a content provider. My gentle reader could, for reasons passing reason, plaguarize this blog letter-for-letter and deprive me of the fame and fortune and world domination that are rightly mine. [insert extra-sarcastic eyeroll] But does that give me the right to insert a chunk of code into Blogger that matches the content's thief cuts-and-pastes against this blog? Definitely not.

I gave Dearest a few DVDs recently, and received a couple CDs, which splashes me with guilt for feeding the RIAA/MPAA's monkey. Particularly when the monkey (disingenuously) conflates content and media in their FUDD. And they're in cahoots with Microsoft to enforce their overreaching.

Is boycott the right sort of revolution, though? Or is there a third path? I honestly don't know the answer. Music, in my Universe, largely exists to drown out cube-farm chatter. Movies are something to watch during a leisurely picnic dinner on the living-room floor. Or the adult equivalent of sucking one's thumb after a mind-bruising day. But ultimately, as The Big Lebowski's Walter Sobchak put it, "What's mine is mine." He was talking about dirty underwear, but I'm talking about my control over my own property. And neither Steve Ballmer nor Jack Valenti has squat to say about that.

A shy welcome to 2008

I've said elsewhere that I don't want to wish my life away in dribs and drabs, which is exponentially true for entire years. That being said, when I Iook back on 2007, I can think of several reasons to rejoice at parting company with it. The final loss of Dearest's Grandma (who had been mostly taken from us by distance and a couple of strokes some years previous), and the implosion of my teenage nephew's life. Another few rounds of throwing money at his relatives who have no sense for using it. Despite insulating the hive and generous servings of sugar-syrup, the southernmost family of bees succumbed to cold. A friend started her battle with cancer.

And those are just the woes of me and mine, to say nothing of points elsewhere.

In all fairness, 2007 saw Dearest's oldest brother marrying a wonderfully kind, well-grounded lady. And we made it off the continent at long last, another red-letter set of days. And I made the conscious decision to let a number of extracurricular obligations expire with the end of the year, so I step into 2008 with a sense of being lighter. (Or of lighter being--take your pick.) It is what we do when we don't have to do it that makes us what we are: I firmly believe that. In this case, though, it's not a question of doing less, but rather focusing the same measures of time and effort on things that aren't so taken for granted.

Hopefully the coming year will handle us all a little more gently, in any case.