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.

Memoriam

I'm old enough to remember Bhutto's rise to power in the 80s, and was old enough at the time to wonder why what we called "Third World" nations back-in-the-day managed to have female leaders when the good ol' USA hadn't. (It was, after all, the groundbreaking decade of Indira Ghandi, Maggie Thatcher, Cory Aquino, Jeanne Kirkpatrick, Sandra Day O'Connor, et. al.) How interesting--and significant--that the places (I'm looking at America, France and Canada in particular) that claim to be the mailing addresses of freedom and equality and human rights somehow seem to keep putting white, straight Christian guys in charge.

I'm not a fan of Hillary Clinton, and think that her Presidency would be DOA due to the hysterical anti-Clinton ravings of the right infecting the middle. But I'm starting to think that it would be worth the price of the blue team going four-and-out to smash that glass ceiling for once and all. I'd be happy to do it myself, but for some crazy reason the world hasn't yet made me its Benevolent Dictator For Life. Maybe it's related to the crazy reason that I never win the lottery (for which I've never bought a single ticket).

Across two scripts, Shakespeare's Henry V laments the weight of the crown, "subject to the breath of every fool,"--the burden and nuisance, in a nutshell that keeps me at arm's length from active involvement in politics. Mercifully, I've only ever experienced that (up close) on a very local level. "Local" as in the kind of politics where Letters to the Editor and cranky old people with nothing better to do than attend board/council meetings are the hazards of the trade.

Bhutto took her shot, and I salute her pure nerve, playing with higher risk (i.e. wearing a bigger bulls-eye) than her male counterparts. The deluded soul who gave her (and nearly two dozen other people) what passes for martyrdom has, I fear, signed in blood the death-warrant of Pakistan. Musharraf has been living on borrowed days for years already. It's a matter of time before the long-dodged bomb or bullet or blast finds its mark. Time that may well have been shortened by today's assassination. Then an already-corrupt dictatorship will give way to corrupt anarchy and thence to corrupt theocracy. The first theocracy to have nuclear weapons at their fingertips.

Somebody stop my feet from dancing...

To me, the saddest part is that the deaths are even more wasted than any loss of life. Pakistan will certainly not be shocked into collective tolerance and cooperation.

And here in 'merica, the lesson will not be absorbed because, quite bluntly, we expect "those brown people" to slaughter each other with aplomb. The notion that our own waxing dictatorship, fueled by the blatant anti-intellectualism and jack-booted arrogance of the Christian Right might just be pulling us down the same road would never, EVER occur to most Americans.

The right kind of bias

I'm stuck with an El Cheapo hosting company for the pro bono coding I do for one of my quirky hobbies. The problem with that--other than the comotose tech. service that will have us switching providers in February, if not before--is the fact that I'm stuck with the sorry excuse for a scripting language known as PHP.

If I were foolhardy enough to allow hecklers for this, my little soapbox, I could count on language Jihadist rebuttals in 5...4...3...2...1...

But I don't. So there.

I fell in love with Java at the tail-end of the dot-com era for one reason: Documentation. Both for internal error messages as well as APIs. Sun's slipped on that recently, and I am not happy about it. But their more slovenly attempts to document an increasingly Byzantine welter of packages, classes and functions is still head-and-shoulders above what's offered by PHP.

Case in point: I fat-fingered the name of the database to which I was connecting. Any rational programmer would expect the code to fail at the line that attempted to connect to the database. But no--never mind I was even a good little geek and had a fail-statement ready in case it didn't connect. PHP didn't even fail when I attempted to execute the query. No, it actually failed when I tried to retrieve the contents of the recordset.

And that, folks, in unacceptable. Bad enough that PHP tries to enforce a half-@$$ attempt at typing--meaning that you don't declare the type up front--the data type is actually set on first use, after which point the type is apparently set in proverbial stone. So, in a sense, the programmer gets the worst of both worlds: All the ambiguity of VBScript/JavaScript, without the trade-off of on-the-fly mutability (convenient for building things like SQL strings without having to cast all numeric values to strings).

Sloppy, sloppy, sloppy. I'd just as soon go back to classic Visual Basic or even C++, were Java not available. I frankly Just. Do. Not. Grok. what anyone sees in this language, much less why it's so ubiquitous on LAMP servers. I have a more than healthy respect for the handiwork of the open source community. Surely there's something better.