2020 Hindsight

Accessibility

What I've done to this site to make it more accessible:

Well, at this point, I've started thinking about it.

All Monday all the time

Well, all CEOs except Dick Cheney, that is... I heard a news soundbite within the last few hours: Geo W. Bush in a speech to CEOs, said "If you're a CEO and you think you can fudge the books in

order to make yourselves look better, we're going to find you,

we're going to arrest you and we're going to hold you to

account."

So how come the person from Judicial Watch who attempted to serve a legal complaint on Veep Cheney on behalf of Halliburton shareholders was threatened with arrest by White House security?

piracy, drm, legislating for corporations I've been thinking of putting together a primer on all these issues. Barring that, how about a few links?

Amy Harmon in the NY Times Movie Studios press Congress on Digital Copyright

Ms. Sohn [President of Public Knowledge, see below] said she had told legislators that if they thought they must pass additional laws to protect Hollywood's copyrights, they should also insist on an agreement that the studios would actually deliver their material over the new channels. She noted that they had already promised to do so in 1998, after Congress gave major copyright holders additional protections in the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, but that so far there had been little to show for that agreement.

I'm trying to find words to describe what this site is about; alas their mission statement has too many flowery words ("fortify and defend a vibrant 'information commons'" --aack, not quite as bad as "core competencies" this kinda language reminds me of the scintillating, virtuoso performance-brochurespeak from, say, the UCLA performing arts upcoming season calendar). Their list of goals is better.

Public Knowledge will seek to fulfill four broad goals:

• Ensuring that U.S. intellectual property law and policy reflect the "cultural bargain" intended by the framers of the constitution: providing an incentive to creators and innovators while benefiting the public through the free flow of information and ideas.
• Preserving an Internet that is built upon open standards and protocols and "end-to-end" architecture, thereby fostering innovation and user control.
• Protecting consumers of digital technology from market practices designed to erode competition, choice and fairness.
• Ensuring that international intellectual property policies are adopted through democratic processes and with public interest participation.

When it comes to the primer I was after, it looks as though Public Knowledge is on it. Here's their Intro to Copyrights page.

science Thanks to Scott Rosenberg, I just found Dave Harris' Science News. Cool.

Local color Sprezzatura visited the Huntington library and gardens. In this case, gardens. (to the left of the view depicted, the Japanese gardens)

Clinton on Corporate abuses in this interview on ABC's website. [via dangerousmeta]

We started back in '98 warning about the accounting problems and when my Securities and Exchange Commissioner tried to stop the Enron accounting practice of accountants being the consultants, the other party stopped us, and their main lobbyist was Harvey Pitt, who is now head of the SEC.

More accessibility and web technique I'm back to checking through the different things covered by the Dive into accessibility site by Mark Pilgrim.

Some examples are given in radio/blogger/moveable type. Other places he says that this (calendar html markup) doesn't work in Manila.

On relative font sizes, I think I'll be playing with another site that has a buncha CSS (this site does not--yet) to see how the examples given apply. More news here.

I "wolf" you

Last night I saw Atanarjuat (The Fast Runner), a film based on an ancient Inuit legend. My jaw is dropped in awe. I can only parrot what others have been saying, "indigenous filmmaking" "epic" and amazing amazing.... shot with digital video then later converted to film, many scenes are set inside of igloos by seal-oil lamplight. Amazing.

The above-linked website describes some of the methods and impact of filming this story: script derived from the words of 8 tribal elders who describe the story as told to them from their respective ancestors. (They have no written language, so All History Is Oral.) Of the costuming and props, developed from both ancient tradition and the journals of the first westerners to journey to those parts. The Inuit cast and crew learning acting and moviemaking on the job (and doing a damn fine job of it!), and the beautiful way in which everything in this movie served to strengthen their ties to their own culture and history.

It was kinda hard to know who was who in some of the earlier scenes, but that didn't stop me from getting totally absorbed in this nearly 3-hour movie.

Under the Radar

Under Google's Radar NY Times: Net Users Try to Elude the Google Grasp Very timely, in light of a recent discussion I had with someone who doesn't want to be searchable in Google. UPDATE: I just learned that this article was what prompted this discussion. How recursive!

Under Union Pacific's Radar L.A. Weekly: The Hobohemians

But since the early '90s, train-hopping has been gaining ground among a new generation of tramps. The grizzled old hobos may be dying off, but they're being replaced in boxcars and on the porches of grain cars by street kids, gutter punks, dreamy anarchists and eco-warriors, train-obsessed professionals, all held loosely together by a vision of freedom as old as the nation itself, an America of movement and self-reliance, of mythic vastness and silence, of discovery, escape, rebellion.

Learning new tricks I'm boning up on accessibility, XHTML, CSS and bunches of other stuff. I probably will break and then fix Dreamweaver, too. Aside from all this, I tweaked my template to put my name and the site name at the top of each page. (flying under Google's radar? Who me? No way! Higher, higher!)

I'm starting to replace bold tags (<b></b>)with strong (<strong></strong>) tags, too.

More stuff to explore (an ongoing To Do list, and Done list):

• Added DOCTYPE to this site. DONE
• table trick to get content to show first.
  

  I don't get it yet. But the brain's a-working on it.

• What's Deuteranope got to do with this site? eeek!
• <acronym title="what the fuck">WTF</acronym> is an acronym tag? I learned of it here. Aaah, well, Manila, in its list of possible legal tags, does not support this one. 'course I 'spose I oughtta do a test with a regular site as well.

Thursday, 25 July

A hearty dose of trivia Suppose your heartbeat averages 82 beats per minute. How many times will your heart beat in a 4 week period? I did the math: 3,306,240 times. Now, supposing that your heart got better all of a sudden four weeks ago, you'd have 3.3 million new kindsa beats! :D (those are qualititatively different than the ~60,769,872,000 beats that preceded.)

Fast Food Nation, redux I have not (yet) read the book (yes, it's on my list), though I've read a number of articles and blog entries about it. The latest, courtesy of rebecca's pocket, is a Globe and Mail article discussing excessive corporate power.

The 21st century, Mr. Schlosser predicted, "will no doubt be marked by a struggle to curtail excessive corporate power." The challenge facing the world, he wrote, is how to balance "the efficiency and the amorality" of the market.

...There was one significant flaw in Mr. Schlosser's reasoning, however. The tide of public sentiment has turned, but not for the reasons he predicted.

Like many others before, he argued that a backlash would come because Corporate America had failed workers at the lowest end of the wage scale, had failed consumers, and had failed the environment.

What he did not foresee was that the backlash would instead come from the people who were always considered a central part of the system. [Read More]

socially acceptable PeterMe lists an intriguing list of articles of social science research on how the internet affects how people relate to each other. I'll have to look into it more deeply [via Scott Rosenberg]

Speaking of Salon, congrats to UserLand and Salon for blogs.salon.com

Hugs to Garret and family.

7:06 pm. strange. Been updating this page and it didn't update on the static site. Try, try again.

Freedom (or not)

Mac OS X (from 9) Where files belong now This helpful page compares old and new location of various items in your mac's directory. Where it can be found in OS 9, and where in OS X (and X.1, too). [via Now This]

Now, what I'd like to know is, once I'm logged into someone else's computer running OS X, where Bryce is installed in the Applications folder, how can I get access to the various preset files in the Objects/Materials/Skies/Textures/Trees libraries. I can't access any of them.

Anti-Terrorist watch Instapundit notes how the FBI is turning away perfectly qualified people because, in former days, they inhaled. I feel very secure here in our homeland.

Warren Buffet speaks to the book-cookers in a New York Times op-ed piece [via Scripting News]. He puts his money where his mouth is about accounting for options.

For these C.E.O.'s I have a proposition: Berkshire Hathaway will sell you insurance, carpeting or any of our other products in exchange for options identical to those you grant yourselves. It'll all be cash-free.

Freedom (or not) Doc's coverage of the Open Source Conference in San Diego—and Larry Lessig's keynote— is worth a read.

How would a million bit march work?

Dan Gillmor's covering it, too. He mentions the following:

At the moment he's showing Adobe's e-Book restrictions in the license agreement. It would be absurd, but it's more scary than anything else.

Never has there been more control" of creativity, Lessig says. "Never in our history have fewer people controlled more of the future of our culture, ever," he says.

Music in Surgery (a short installment in stories of health and The Patient—who's recovering well, by the way)

Four weeks ago today, in an exam/consult with the surgeon and the PA (physician assistant) on the day before the Patient's major surgery, I asked the seemingly silly question, "What music do you listen to during surgery?" The answer: rock music during opening and closing. This is not what *I'd* consider rock music, the PA said. The residents—who are in their 20s—are the ones selecting the music. Further, the surgeon added that when it comes to the central part of the surgical procedure, no music. "We're all business here." I was happy that my off-the-wall question produced so much detail, and the "all business" statement was greatly reassuring.

Recalling that, I looked up music in surgery on google.

All findings are about music and the patient, not necessarily a feel for the operating room atmosphere and work conditions.

Linda Rodgers, daughter of Richard Rodgers (of Rodgers and Hammerstein) does musical therapy. That is, music that is played for the patient.

Music in Surgery reduces stress, according to one study. Comparing those who chose music and listened to it, vs. those who did not. Emphasis here is on patient's choice of music, tho the study design wasn't three prong (listen to music chosen by someoen else, choose own music to listen to, don't listen to music at all)

Music during surgery leads to faster healing A Dutch study.

Farlow Music Therapy Services has a summary of research findings and a list of article references on the topic of music and surgery.

A Bedtime Story in Ten Chapters

In which we Learn how Big Entertainment Industry works Los Angeles Magazine's cover story, Lawyers, Tiggers & Bears, Oh My! describes the lawsuit between the woman who licensed the merchandising rights to Winnie-the-Pooh to Disney...and Disney. Brilliantly written by Amy Wallace. (earlier this year, I blogged reports of Disney shredding documents. Alas, two of the three links are no more. This one shoulda been among them, and it still works. )

It seems to Pooh that the shouting hasn't stopped since. Depending on who is shouting, and sometimes Pooh has trouble keeping track, he and his friends generate anywhere from $1 billion to $6 billion a year in revenue for Disney. That even rivals what Mickey Mouse makes and represents perhaps as much as a quarter of Disney's $25 billion annual operating revenue. Which helps explain why Disney executives get so bothered when Fields claims that if he proves his case, the Pooh Lady can terminate Disney's Pooh license. If Fields is correct, the Pooh Lady could grant some other Multimedia Conglomerate the right to sell Pooh T-shirts, sheets, toys, stuffed animals (known as plush), and thousands of other Things. Pondering that makes Disney executives Very Sulky indeed. [emphasis mine]

Me? I never liked what Disney did with Pooh and his friends.

More Pooh Papers: Jon Shea, correspondent for The American Reporter, wrote a story about the June ruling in the ongoing case referenced above.

In a tentative ruling handed down late today, Los Angeles Superior Court Judge Ernest M. Hiroshige fired a controversial forensic accounting firm, threw out most of a court-appointed auditor's findings and awarded the owners of commercial rights to children's favorite Winnie The Pooh a 12.5 percent error rate in their Walt Disney Co. royalty payments that may yield as much as $200 million for them, the plaintiffs say.

But the plaintiff, Patricia Slesinger (the daugher of the Pooh Lady), didn't like the wording of one of her quotes in the above story, and fired her maid, the wife of reporter Jon Shea. Until this time, the Sheas have been friends of the Slesingers, and they were married in their home.

An heiress to the multimillion-dollar fortune generated by royalties from Winnie The Pooh has fired her family's longtime maid because the maid's husband, American Reporter Correspondent Joe Shea, refused to change a particular word in a quote, the well-known journalist revealed today.

This is enough for a novella! Talk about conflicting loyalties: Who are you more loyal to? Your friends or the lawyers prosecuting your royalty agreement case against a prominent member of the Dow 30? Journalistic integrity, to write the quote as stated, or to alter something for the reported source, a friend?

Other interesting things found in the search for more on this story:

All of the Disney vs. Pooh Lady stories from the American Reporter

One of the Pooh licensing deals: Winnie the Pooh Roo Juice (through Coca Cola), as found on the Atlanta Journal-Consitution's Coke Insider page.

Coke's Disney-branded drinks planned for U.K.

Coca-Cola is expected to sell fruit drinks in the United Kingdom using Disney's Winnie the Pooh brand. Coke, through a partnership with Disney, already sells Pooh-connected drinks in the U.S., Mexico and elsewhere. According to the Independent newspaper in London, Coke is expected to offer "Winnie the Pooh Roo Juice" in the U.K. The drinks are targeted at children.

Why do I care? I'm wondering to myself why I care about this, why I'm "wasting" time to find these stories and post them here. Disney's part in lobbying for legislation protecting corporate rights to make money for content, and the amazing coincidence of how the corporation's copyright on Mickey Mouse is just about to expire at the times that Congress manages to extend the time period for copyright for corporations.

Fight Club's perspectives on the emptiness of being a corporate drone or someone who values one's life based on the particular accumulation of corporate-branded objects one possesses.

People who stiff other people in the name of doing business. Earlier phone conversation today with a friend: A Friend went into business with Someone. Friend made Someone's business larger. Someone is now richer. Someone stiffed Friend, claiming reduced income, dot-com squeeze, while meanwhile raking in dough. Where does this leave my Friend? And why is it that my Friend has seen

Those are things at the back, middle and forefront of my mind as I explored this story. Now the theme I find most interesting is the conflict between friendship and doing your job well.

What does it mean to be a friend? Not to have a friend, but to be a friend.

Have you read Dorothy Sayer's Gaudy Night in the Lord Peter Wimsey series? Amid the crime that is being solved winds overlapping stories about Doing the Job (whether it be scholarly research, criminal investigation) and answering the job's demands before one's own personal concerns.

Monday Monday Monday Monday

Home, sold home Congratulations, Craig!

Finally Installed Mozilla Damn smart of them to import bookmarks/favorites from both old copies of Netscape and Explorer.

Long Time No Photo When I uploaded the fotos from Meetup Day (keep reading), I realized that it's been over a month since I posted photos. Who wants to take (much less post) photos from time spent hanging around a hospital? Well, okay I *did* take photos of the flowers outside in order to bring camera into the ICU and say, "Here's how the flowers outside are from 5 minutes ago." Good for the patient, but only just that.

Blog Meetup Day It's kinda old news, looking back to Thursday night, but I went. It wasn't well attended. Next time, next time. At first there were two. I met Mike of Cruft, who heads up Engineering/IT (surrounded by creative types) at a local large entertainment company who's been doing this net thang for years and years, and even had anecdotes of people-he-knows who, years ago, told the boss, "you know, there's this internet thing, and I think that we should stake out our territory and register disney.com." "what's this? what's an internet domain?" "well, it's.... yada yada yada." "Sure, I'll give you the go-ahead to do that."

"Here, Susan, you oughtta get *this* camera; it's smaller and better." Looks compact all right!

Mike of Cruft points to my camera's monitor as I take our picture.

Later we were joined by no! yes! a third person! Martin, of chokersandwich (When my grandpa made us sandwiches, he'd mix together peanutbutter and honey, spread it on bread and we ate it without anything to drink...that was a chokersandwich.)

Joined —yes!!! by a third person, Martin of Chokersandwich

I also learned about:

Mike crashed a Segway, and there's a QT movie of what happened.

Being the IT/Engineer guy at an entertainment firm is yet another example of the thankless job. (Good functional design is this way, too) If you're doing your job well, no one notices. Everything works and the broadcast goes flawlessly. Yawn. For days on end. Yawn. They all go hyper and hooptedoodle about, say, broadcast ratings. How'd we do? How'd we do? But being up and running? That's invisible.

Geocaching, a sport using GPS. Go visit little caches (like time capsules or those tin boxes with logbooks placed on mountaintops for hikers to sign) stashed here and there. Or go set one up yourself. Geocachers are good backwoods citizens; there's a "pack out litter and post pictures of yourself doing so" that's part of the whole thing. Kudos to you all.

More 802.11b discussion. Security, stuff like that. I also know someone who just got wireless running, so that link to news serves a few purposes.

Oh, and during the meetup, we watched the Dodgers lose to the Padres. Bummer.

Bleeding edge entertainment Sometimes I'm on the leading edge, seeing a movie when it first comes out. Others I see much, much later. Last night I finally saw Fight Club. Wow. An amazing flick, on so many levels. The DVD with the author commentary between Fight Club novelist Chuck Palahniuk and screenwriter Jim Uhls was good. Found this link on Chuck Palahniuk's site to a brief memoir that ran in the L.A. Times Sept 12 '99 about what happened to him after the book and movie came out.

Oh.. one other thing. Without giving plot elements away for those even further behind than I was, seeing this film post-9/11 made some things --such as the air-travel collision fantasy and the final scene with the resulting mayhem was, well, more to-the-point than perhaps the author/filmmakers intended. Or, in a twisted way, prescient?

Blog Meetup Day

Blog Meetup Day is today. The Pasadena-Pomona area group will meet west of all of this in Glendale. Okay, close enough for me. But west of all communities described. But it's not as far as Santa Monica (the LA area one I previously looked at), and large enough (11 people!) in its own right to be in the Top 50 of Most Popular or Well Attended or something.

Speaking of Local each drive along the 210 (Foothill) Freeway shows progress in the construction of the Metro Line. There's some sign that says (I think) pasadenagoldline.org but there's nothing there. I guess I'll have to look sharp on the next drive for the real site url. I thought it was the blueline, and indeed, there is a website for the LA-Pasadena line. Poking around, I see that there's a section about Station Art for the different Metro stations.

Local Art — Performance Just heard about this free performance series in downtown L.A. near MOCA. Each weekend, on either Thurs, Fri or Saturday night (and daytimes, too). Bring your own picnic and wine.

At Seventeenth

Oh, shit! [via boingBoing]

Greenspan and new phrase. They're descriptive: Irrational Exuberance; Infectious Greed.

Alan Greenspan does better at phrases than does George W. Bush. Consider these statements by Dubyah:

On terrorism: "You're either for us or you're against us" ... "axis of evil." This clear-cut thinking is different once you dare touch his very own pocketbook. The Prevaricator In Chief says, "There was an honest difference of opinion as to how to account for a complicated transaction....In the corporate world, sometimes things aren't exactly black and white when it comes to accounting procedures." Uh huh. Infectious greed is right.

Well, there's a weblog called Irrational Exuberance. How long before we get a weblog called "Infectious Greed"?

Also seen on Weblogs.com: A blog by the Web Pages that Suck folks.

Hooyah!! Turns out that the Blog Meetup site now takes your zip code and tells you the closest meeting to you. So rather than schlepping across LA to Santa Monica, I'll join other San Gabriel Valley-ites in Glendale tomorrow. Yeehah!!!! And maybe even meet Mary Wehmeier, too.