My father’s father, my grandfather, Don Adams, passed away yesterday. It was a merciful ending to his struggle with Parkinson’s. Our oldest cousin, Matt Adams, recorded his feelings about Grandpa earlier this month in a letter to Grandma, and it is a beautiful testimony to Grandpa’s life. Read on…
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New photos posted from Kelly’s mini-vacation to visit Candie and take on the Big Apple.
Strike Over! League & Union Settle Dispute
Well, it looks like I’ll be able to see my broadway musicals and plays after all. I am so excited!
CNN.com - Broadway musicals closed ’til further notice’ - Mar. 8, 2003
Well, here I’ve planned this great trip to NYC and now Broadway is on strike. I realize there are many other things to see in the city, but Broadway was the whole point. I guess they still have a few days to work it all out. Look at the odds though, I’ve been waiting to go to NYC my whole life to see a Broadway play and the week I’m going they are on strike. They’ve never been on strike before in my lifetime. I’m sure this is all Calvin’s fault.
Valenti On The Moral Imperative (7.6 MB)
Very provocative speech by Jack Valenti, president of the MPAA. He makes a good defense of the MPAA’s actions, a defense that would endear itself to most Americans; however, I’d like to offer some thoughts to keep in mind while listening.
I couldn’t help but think, as Valenti opened his speech, “wait, wait - Hollywood is lecturing me on morality?”
Valenti never shows a terrible amount of concern for fair use, as evidenced in his responses to the questions of a backup copy, use of software to filter content in DVDs, or DVD region encodings.
He may not see any difference between having to purchase new glasses and wanting to NOT purchase a new DVD, but the Supreme Court has, and has ruled that backup copies are within fair use.
He speaks of the free market system, which, as he points out, can be manipulated by powerful people. He then says that a moral system must be crafted to uphold the free market system. What place is there for the consumer in Valenti’s moral system? Are there any consumer rights, or do all the rights (how many copies, what region it may be viewed in, what content must be viewed) belong to the producer?
Finally, history has shown us that law frequently lags behind the moral system, and during those times of lag, illegal activity is indeed a moral response. Our country began under such a notion, and has developed through difficult times under such a notion. Based on that, I feel no moral apprehension at violating the DMCA to invoke my rights to fair use.
Grungers and ex-grungers, lend your ear! Techno-freaks, tune in!
The Bad Plus is in the house. Yeah dawg.
A List Apart: How to Write a Better Weblog
Am I doing this right? I stumbled across this article while trying to find some other info on A List Apart, an excellent indie publication for web designers. Good reading for the writers out there (you know who you are), no matter what medium you’re publishing to.
On a side note, any time I start to think too highly of my writing, I just have to haul out my essays from Professor Basney’s class (forget what class it was). The man was ruthless, and one of the best professors I had at Calvin College. I miss him.
For you Matrix/Japanime fans out there, I just recently stumbled across The Animatrix. Cool stuff, can’t wait for the 3rd and 4th episodes.
Slashdot | MiniDV As A Backup Medium
It appears you can use MiniDV tapes and some freely available software (what OS?) to backup 13 GBs. This could be a nice backup solution for doing some off-site backups as a compliment to my RAID.
Boy, I’ve got all sorts of cool geek news today. First up, this Slashdot article, Object Prevalence: Get Rid of Your Database?, details an interesting proposal for resolving the tension between RDBMS and OO - get rid of the RDBMS and persist data in objects stored in memory.
Skeptical? And for good reason - it’s a new idea that makes grand claims (queries that are up to 9000 times faster). There’s a good article on IBM’s developerworks.com that introduces the theory. As detailed in the Slashdot article, there are benchmarks available, as well as a page discussing the tests they ran and running the tests for yourself. The project to implement this theory, Prevayler, is experiencing some load difficulties due to the publicity resulting from Slashdot, so you may want to check back in a few days.
Update - I’ve found an article on Advogato written by one of Prevayler’s developers. The article should provide some additional info until such time as prevayler.org becomes accessible again. The ensuing discussion after the article also addresses some of the obvious issues - scalability, transactional issues, etc.
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