Another important organizations from the standpoint of liberating content:
Project Gutenburg is digitizing open source books so they can be downloaded off the web, anywhere, for free.
And an interesting tidbit I dug up on copyright law in Canada: I could be reading it wrong, but doesn’t this mean I can copy a CD without breaking the law? Must find a lawyer to tell me why I’m wrong about this.
More from Lawrence Lessig: slides and voiceover commentary from a speech at an open source conference in July.
There’s a wonderful battle going on at the moment in front of the U.S. Supreme Court, over the future of the dread bill, the DCMA. At stake are a number of important issues, but basically it comes down to how long a creation can stay in private hands. With DCMA, the U.S. Government is trying to make private ownership of artistic creations perpetual. While that sounds good for artists who own their creations, it is in fact death: most rights are quickly transferred to the immortal corporate entities that control publication, and artists are left with substantial, permanent constraints on their ability to be derivative of prior works. As Spider Robinson points out in a great short story Melancholy Elephants, this could eventually lead to the end of art.
So the court case is important. On the front lines, the U.S. lawyer Lawrence Lessig is arguing the case against the DCMA. And he’s got a blog, which has a very interesting running commentary on the issues and the state of the battle. Read on…
What a fabulous weekend we just had! In my Thanksgiving list for this year, I’m giving thanks for a lot of things, but near the top are giving thanks to those who made the weekend for me, Anne, and my parents.
The Thanksgiving dinner at Anne’s was a triumph of organization, preparation and presentation. I helped out as best I could, but she did all the hard stuff. I haven’t been at a sit-down dinner party for 16 in a long, long time, but not only was the food sufficient for the horde, it was excellent. (Special thanks also to Molly, Susan, Meredith and especially Eric, for contributing to the dinner menu: Eric’s mushroom pies and pumpkin cheesecake were top notch.)
Sunday Anne and I completed the clean up, and supervised the pickup of the table, chairs and linen by the fine people of Chairman Mills. We then went back to my place and met my parents, who’d come in to Toronto to take us out to celebrate my birthday. We went to Lai Wah Heen at the Metropolitan Hotel, walking distance from my place, where after an initial concern over whether our reservation could be honoured (the front desk hadn’t bothered to check that the restaurant had any spare room, and they were very busy) we were shown to a back room. We had a magnificent feast, the Premium Dinner for Four, and rolled home very, very full and very, very happy.
Monday morning, Anne gave me my birthday present, or presents: a beautiful reproduction map of Scotland, which I’m planning to hang in the study, and a copy of No One Lives Forever 2, sequel to the brilliant 2000 game No One Lives Forever. I promptly (but with her permission) got deeply addicted, sneaking through the Japanese before-the-credits level. (Sample conversation overheard: one female ninja telling a friend about and argument with her mother attacking her: they’d been arguing about whether her ninja costume was too revealing, she’d said “Mom, this is the 60’s, get with it” and “Old people are always complaining”, and then had to subdue her mom who attacked her with a sword). When I had to give up and return to the present, I was in the process of breaking into a secret base in Siberia to uncover a Soviet plot. Great fun.
As punishment for ignoring her for most of the day, Anne then beat me at Scrabble again.
There’s an interesting Slashdot article this afternoon about the Canadian government moving online — creating digital certificates for all citizens to access their government files. One of the comments has a reference to a pgp keyserver at pgp.mit.edu that I should check out some time. I’ve always wanted a digital certificate. 😉
Saturday afternoon at Anne’s, in a kitchen full of great cooking smells. We’re preparing Anne’s annual turkey feast for a horde: 16 and a half (Maddy, not quite 1 year old). The bird has been named “Jean-Claude” and is roasting happily in the oven. A wonderful squash soup has been prepared with much toil, sausages are bubbling in pans on the stove, the cranberry sauce is ready, and we’re about to move on to the garlic mashed potatoes. MAN, I love Thanksgiving!
The Queen of Spades was great!! Go see it!! The production was wonderful, with very dramatic style. The best scene was the one with Herman tossing in bed with a nightmare: the whole room was rotated 90 degrees, so the audience was looking down on the bed. Then an eight-foot skeleton emerged from the sheets next to him…
Another Thursday, another week in Hartford winding to a close. A VERY busy weekend ahead, though since Monday’s a holiday I should have a chance to recover.
Tomorrow morning the appraiser from TD is coming around to do an appraisal of the apartment. I have to be awake and functional at 7:45 am. Ugh.
Tomorrow night Anne and I are off to see the opera, The Queen of Spades. I don’t really know what to expect: it had a great review in the Globe, but Anne’s parents panned it. Still looking forward to it.
Saturday is the big Thanksgiving feast! Anne’s cooking up the turkey(s) and I’m acting sous-chef for the day. With 15.5 guests (Maddy being present but not a big fan of turkey… yet) there’s going to be a huge amount of food to cook, dishes to clean, etc.. It’s going to be a lot of fun! I hope.
Sunday evening my parents are coming in to town. My birthday is next Wednesday, so they’re taking Anne and me out to dinner.
Finally, on Monday there’s Nothing Scheduled. Hallelujah!
The only other news is that I’ve made great strides on redesigning my website. No major changes to the appearance — yet — but the style sheets are up and running, all the pages have been converted over, and the archive pages have been merged into the main page design. Navigation through the history of the site should now be MUCH easier.
Let me know what you think! Send me your feedback…
I forgot to write a review of Me Me Me, by David Huggins. This was a strange mystery novel set in Hollywood, with the protagonist a young failing playwright, Ralph Tait, whose grandfather was a major movie star and whose family is still warped by the pressures of fame. When his grandfather disappears, Ralph seems to be the only one who’s seriously concerned. Was it murder, or a childish whim on his grandfather’s part? Not a gripping book, but it has some entertaining parts. 3 out of 5.
Happy Autumn! The leaves are starting to turn, and it was… 28 degrees yesterday. Nice weather for JUNE. Bizarre. Reminds me of the Simpsons’ newscaster Kent Brockman’s line about an unseasonable warm snap in the middle of winter (in the Mr. Plow episode): “Could this record-breaking heat wave be the result of the dreaded ‘Greenhouse Effect’? Well, if 70-degree days in the middle of winter are the ‘price’ of car pollution, you’ll forgive me if I keep my old Pontiac.”
It seems that I have been premature in writing off Hartford’s arts community. I spent my lunch hour yesterday continuing my tour through the Wadsworth Athenium art gallery, not huge, but possessed of a truly amazing collection for its size. Besides an excellent selection of American art, the Wadsworth boasts a fine collection of Italian and Spanish baroque, and twentieth century surrealist and modernist works. It also has a great lunch cafe. Admission is free for those with Travelers ID badges, like me.
Also yesterday, I went to the Hartford Stage Company‘s production of Much Ado About Nothing with a few of my colleagues. The play is quite familiar to me, as I just saw the 1993 Kenneth Branagh version last year. It was a fine production, though it really needed to be for the $48 (U.S.) ticket price… Still, Shakespeare’s text was delivered almost flawlessly, and the many jokes came through easily. It’s a great play, and an impressive company. Unbelievable that in a small city like Hartford they can stage a play for a whole month, and sell out many of the shows. Last night there were no empty seats.
So I take it all back! There are some things to do in Hartford, and it does have a rich community, despite the mostly empty streets after sunset.
‘Course I’m still looking forward to finishing the project and coming home…
Ok, a long time since my last post. Sorry! I’ve had a busy spell at work, though it’s settled down now and the next few weeks are looking relatively sane.
Hard to believe September’s almost over, and fall is here. The temperature plummeted this week, pretty much right at the official first day of fall, just to let us know that summer really was over. But what a long, long summer it was… Really nice. The leaves have started turning, and the weather is cool and crisp. I love autumn!
Lots of little news items to report. Two weeks ago, Anne and I went down to Roy Thomson Hall for to see a Film Festival showing of a spanish film, “El otro lado de la cama” (The Wrong Side of the Bed), a wonderfully fresh and sweet little sex comedy. Not a sophisticated film, but the characters were all sympathetic and easy on the eyes, and the plot was a lot of fun. Plus, at seemingly random intervals the actors broke into hilarious musical dance routines, which effectively dispelled any sense that the situation was at all serious. All in all, a great little movie, well worth your time.
Last weekend we rented A.I., something of an antithesis to The Wrong Side of the Bed. A big special effects budget, over-serious attempts to moralize, an overly complicated plot (but with big, unexplained holes), and bad acting. We didn’t even bother going through the second disks bonus materials — it was basically poor. Which is a shame, because it could have been good: American science fiction has a lot to say about defining and respecting intelligence, although with a strong bias towards anthropomorphic forms. It’s clear Isaac Asimov’s robot books were a source of ideas for A.I., but his approach relied on clear text, uncomplicated characters, and a healthy respect for the reader’s intelligence, all things missing in the movie. A shame.
It was a pretty big weekend for Anne. Roy Thomson Hall, where she works, had a massive gala reopening on Saturday. They spent 22 weeks and $20 Million (Canadian) on renovating the acoustics of the hall, and Saturday was the first time that the public could hear the results. The Toronto Symphony and Toronto Mendelssohn Choir pulled out some “big bang” music, and the sound was, in fact, greatly improved over the rather poor qualities of the last 20 years. Anne’s patron services teams did an excellent job with an absolutely full house, and the champagne and desserts afterwards capped a very successful event.
Sunday RTH followed up the gala with an open house, so Anne had to go back to work. I went off to church, and we met up afterwards at a garden party for the choir at Sheila MacAdams’ house. It was a lot of fun: a potluck lunch, a beautiful garden, and a game of croquet.
Coming up: Friday is our first opera concert for the Canadian Opera Company’s season. And, weather permitting, we’re going sailing with Bruce Hill on Saturday.