This looks like a useful tool: Daily Record of Events Makes Ubiquitous Capture a Snap – Capture tools – Lifehacker. I’m getting better at taking more notes, but I’m still not where I want to be with that. A simple note-taking shortcut such as this one might help move me a little closer to my goal.
Archive for July, 2009
I have submitted my answers to the five questions posed in the Copyright Consultations.
1. How do Canada’s copyright laws affect you? How should existing laws be modernized?
Canada’s copyright laws affect me because I enjoy many forms of media that are protected by copyright. I enjoy reading, playing computer games, listening to music, and learning from podcasts. These are more readily available to me in because of the copyright agreement between creators and consumers. My work builds upon the work of others to produce personalized maps and reports for clients. There are very few aspects of my day-to-day life that are not affected by copyright.
Existing laws should be modernized to allow people to build upon the works of others to add greater value to derivatives of those works. For example, a lot of the music I listen to is a reinterpretation of other pieces which were themselves derived from earlier works. Copyright laws need to recognize that we are all standing upon the shoulders of giants. Creators do not develop their works in a vacuum but build upon everything that has gone before them.
2. Based on Canadian values and interests, how should copyright changes be made in order to withstand the test of time?
As a Canadian, one of the things that I am proudest of is my heritage. Canada is not a melting pot, but a tapestry of many cultures drawn together into a greater whole. Copyright should be limited in time and scope so as to prevent the loss of that heritage and to encourage creators to draw up on that heritage and bring it to life for each new generation of Canadian. Locking away pieces of our heritage for life does not encourage Canadian values but individualistic dog-in-the-manger-like behaviour.
3. What sorts of copyright changes do you believe would best foster innovation and creativity in Canada?
Copyright should have a strict time limit, one that is much shorter than an individual’s expected lifespan. This would allow creators to draw upon their earlier experiences to bring new life to half-forgotten ideas. There should be broad fair-use rights to encourage creators to develop ideas to their full potential without fear of costly litigation. Creators can innovate much more freely if they’re not constantly looking over their shoulders in fear of lawsuits.
4. What sorts of copyright changes do you believe would best foster competition and investment in Canada?
Copyright should be narrowly focused on specific expressions of an idea. This would allow competitors to develop their own possibly superior versions. With reasonable copyright laws Canada can be a center for creativity and investment.
5. What kinds of changes would best position Canada as a leader in the global, digital economy?
Outlaw Digital Rights Management (DRM). It is ineffective in stopping or even slowing piracy. The ones who are most affected by it are honest consumers – those who seek to violate copyright are not even slowed down by DRM and have not been for as long as digital media has existed. Due to DRM I have lost access to numerous programs and books which I purchased legitimately. DRM is anti-consumer.
Copyright law should not refer to specific technologies but instead look at broader principles.
Copyright law should not refer to specific technologies but instead look at broader principles.
As always, Thomas Babington Macaulay’s 1841 speech to the British House of Commons covers most of the issues that keep being brought up in these discussions of copyright. The arguments for copyright have not changed much in over 168 years. We have let those who push for stronger, broader, longer copyright have the upper hand for too long and their results have been dismal. It is time to return to a fair copyright.
If you’re looking to while away a few idle hours World Of Warcraft – Television Tropes & Idioms has you covered. I knew that charm of WoW had nothing to do with its originality, but it amuses me to see the number of tropes it draws upon. Tropes are powerful things.
Some people are quick to criticize cliches, but what is a cliche? It is a truth that has retained its validity through time. Mankind would lose half its hard-earned wisdom, built up patiently over the ages, if it ever lost its cliches.
– Marvin G. Gregory
Anathem
Jul 29
I finally tried reading Anathem by Neal Stephenson last night and that graph matches my impressions. I’m not going to continue reading it. It looks as though Neal Stephenson is one of those authors whose writing I really like or really dislike depending on the book. I’ll wait around for his next novel and try again.
>How to Buy a Mattress
Jul 28
I imagine we’ll probably be buying a mattress at some point, so this is good advice to bear in mind: How to Buy a Mattress * Get Rich Slowly. Nothing too exciting, but still good stuff to know.
I finally broke down and bought the full collection of Buffy the Vampire Slayer episodes.
Scary as it is to contemplate my dear daughter will doubtless watch the whole series. She likes things a little on the scary side. It’s funny but I didn’t watch Buffy till it was almost over because I thought it would be too frightening for me. Thanks to reading the Anita Blake books, I decided I could handle a little bit scary and wound up catching up on the whole Buffy series.
I don’t agree with all the ideas taught in the Buffy series but there are a lot of powerfully good lessons there. The biggest one is this:
Fairy tales do not give a child his first idea of bogy. What fairy tales give the child is his first clear idea of the possible defeat of bogy. The baby has known the dragon intimately ever since he had an imagination. What the fairy tale provides for him is a St. George to kill the dragon. Exactly what the fairy tale does is this: it accustoms him by a series of clear pictures to the idea that these limitless terrors have a limit, that these shapeless enemies have enemies, that these infinite enemies of man have enemies in the knights of God, that there is something in the universe more mystical than darkness, and stronger than strong fear.
– G. K. Chesterton The Red Angel
One of the things that kept me interested in Buffy was the various fan productions so I’ll leave with one of my favorites:
This looks like a fun project: Change Computer Part Colors Easily and Inexpensively – Mods – Lifehacker. I know someone who deals in used computers so I might buy a couple cheap keyboards off of him to try this out before using it on my main keyboard.
If it works nicely, I bet the kids would really like to have this for their computer when I get one up and running for them again. So far the computer they trashed the worst involved a tower full of Oreos and milk. The last one to die wasn’t their fault – the CPU fried and I just haven’t had the budget to replace the system yet.
Druid Ding 80
Jul 25
After a long stretch I finally got my druid up to 80. For a while there I thought I was going to be leveling him just through the daily fishing quests, but I ended up doing a good chunk of Northrend after all. I finished off in Sholazar Basin which I had never completed before, so that was a nice change.
Now, to decide if I want to level my hunter, warlock, or death knight next.
Couch to 5k Complete!
Jul 24
Finish Line from Philo Nordlund
I have been wanting to try this out for a while and this year I decided to actually do it. The thing that motivated me to get started is that I found myself short of breath after little things such as going up a flight of stairs. By running, I was hoping to increase my lung capacity and it seems to have worked out well.
I found that weeks 5 and 6 were some of the hardest weeks of the program as it moved from runs of 10 minutes or so to 20 and 25 minute runs. My ankles were sore in the last two weeks, but with the rest days in between they seem to have healed up nicely.
Robert Ullrey’s C25K podcasts were extremely helpful. The rythm gave me something to follow as I put one foot in front of the other. I found his vocal cues encouraging as well.
I’m lucky in that I have some lovely deserted country roads to run along, so I was able to run barefoot. It doesn’t get much more minimal than that for exercise equipment! 
I’m not sure where I’ll go from here. There is enough warm weather left that I could probably make it to 10k before winter if I keep going. I’m thinking of trying the Freeway to 10K program.
If you’re thinking of taking up running, give the Couch to 5k program a shot – it worked for me despite my lack of running experience.
Perfect Push Ups Workout Guide: 35+ Exercises shows a LOT of push up variations. Some of these are almost scary to look at – the level of fitness implied by these push ups is amazing. If you’re looking for a challenge at any level of fitness, there’s a push up here for you!
(via Unclutterer)
This looks like a really useful tool: The Big Book of Everything: A Free Life-Affairs Organizer * Get Rich Slowly. I know that I tend to keep a lot of stuff in my head or organized in random places that make sense to me that would be crucial for my family to know about should I die or be in a coma. Filling out something like this would be a big help to whichever poor soul is in charge of closing down my affairs. I really like the author’s suggestion that you do a page a day rather than tackling the whole thing at once.
This project: Make a Handlebar Phone Mount with Modeling Clay – MacGyver Tip – Lifehacker looks like something I would be able to do. The only thing is that I don’t use gadgets while cycling. 99.99% of my cycling is commuting to the office and I treasure the time when I can be alone with my thoughts. I could see using this for a GPS to track my speed or if I decided to start biking longer distances.
I’m almost done getting my druid to level cap, so there’s a decent chance that I’ll start leveling my death knight. It’s been long enough since I’ve been through Outlands that it might be more interesting than running through Borean Tundra and Howling Fjord yet again. If I decide to start leveling a death knight, this looks like a good resource Death Knight Leveling Builds (58-68) – Patch 3.1 | gnomeDK – Your Pink Haired Guide to All Things Death Knight.
One of the things that I like about the leveling game is that I can play when I want to and stop when I want to. If I get bored or distracted it’s not a big deal to hearth and start again another day. With endgame stuff, you can’t do that. Hearthing out of a raid or instance because you’re bored is out of the question if you want to do anything with these people again. Skipping a day of dailies cannot be made up and extends the grind to reach whatever reward you’re grinding for. It’s been fun to just play and enjoy myself – if I happen to get another toon to level cap before the next expansion that’s great, if not I have a couple toons at cap ready to go.
Crap Detection 101
Jul 19
I tend to believe things that support my biases and doubt things that don’t. Sadly, sometimes my beliefs are just plain wrong. Howard Rheingold : Crap Detection 101 gives some guidelines for determining whether that lovely (or nasty) tidbit of information your just found is likely to be true or false. The BoingBoing post also links to a video version: Howard Rheingold explains 21st Century Literacies.
There are a lot of people who enjoy their Kindles. I’ve takena hard line on buying stuff with DRM because of things like this: Amazon remotely deletes Orwell e-books from Kindles, unpersons reportedly unhappy. A Kindle version of Orwell’s 1984 was from a publisher that didn’t have rights to the book, so Amazon went ahead and used the DRM to delete the book from people’s Kindles. So far we have seen them turn off text-to-speech, canceling accounts and locking Kindles up, and throwing in all kinds of other hidden limitations.
Remember, If you can’t open it, you don’t own it!
The Perfect Thing
Jul 18
I read Steven Levy’s The Perfect Thing: How the iPod Shuffles Commerce, Culture, and Coolness. It’s a fanboy’s paen to a favorite gadget.
This book gives a good history of the iPod and a description of its cultural significance. What really annoyed me about the book is that it seems to take the perspective that Apple and more specifically Steve Jobs can do no wrong. Any mistakes that must be admitted are at most minor, charming quirks. The fanboy tone really got on my nerves.
As always, Steven Levy does a wonderful job of describing what it was like to actually be one of those who developed the iPod. He provides snippets from a wide variety of insiders and you feel the emotional impact of their struggles and successes. The iPod doesn’t seem like such an amazing invention now, but the challenges that were overcome in developing it were impressive. The discussion of the effects of everyone carrying around entire collections of music in their pockets and living with their own personal soundtrack to life was fascinating, if a little shallow. I would heartily recommend this book to anyone who is interested in how the iPod came to be what it is.
I came out of this book wanting to buy any other music player but an iPod. When the author praises iTunes, I really have to wonder if he’s using the same iTunes that I’ve struggled with. The Apple attitude seems to be "We’re way cooler than you so shut up and do it our way" and I resent that. I want a music player that works the way I want it to.
Arclite Theme
Jul 17
I’ve decided to try out a different theme for my blog, mostly so that I can play with some of WordPress’ new features. At the moment I’m using Arclite – I’m not sure if I’ll keep it or try something else.
Everquest 2
Jul 16
I tried out Everquest 2 last month. It was okay but it didn’t impress me, so I won’t continue playing. I only made it to level 20 or so and didn’t do any dungeons. I did not try out the card game.
Downsides The graphics are pretty enough but not particularly breathtaking or ugly – a step or two up in realism from World of Warcraft. Given that WoW borrowed a lot from EQ, it’s not surprising that gameplay is a lot like WoW’s. The NPC voiceovers got annoying very quickly. Quest text was often vague and the maps were pretty unhelpful. The terrain has a number of altitude levels which could be annoying when trying to go in a straight line from point A to point B. The UI is awkward at best. Selling items via a broker was an awkward guessing game. Item stats were gibberish to me. Crafting things was just painful – from finding and gathering the raw materials to finding the right recipe to finding crafting stations to the actual crafting. This was probably my biggest turnoff in the game.
Upsides The classes were very interesting – about the only thing that was missing was the equivalent to a WoW hunter in a pet class. The abilities and their animations were a lot of fun. The world feels HUGE and very lore-rich. Player housing and the ability to see another player’s house is a great way to personalize the game. Collections are an amusing idea.
I canceled my subscription after the first month. It just wasn’t fun enough to keep playing. I would love to explore this game some more but it desperately needs a better UI. Needs more addons! I can definitely see why this lost out to WoW – it feels like WoW’s clumsy cousin.
EDIT: I forgot to say that I loved the idea of being able to learn other languages and even switch factions. That part really appeals to me.
I found that that post: UI design and add-ons for leveling | No Stock UI has a lot of good generalized tips for laying out your UI in a non-raid situation. Apart from spending time fishing, most of my recent WoW play has been leveling characters so this is good stuff to think about. I would like to get a few more toons to level cap as there have been rumors of a new expansion coming out in the not-too distant future. I’m not sure what I’ll do with a bunch of max-level characters but they do provide me with a variety of gameplay options.
I found this interesting: Mythbusting: Four Myths About Staying Hydrated Debunked. Lately I’ve been drinking a lot more caffeinated beverages (diet pop and coffee) as a substitute for eating more, so it’s encouraging to know that at least they count for hydration.