Stephen Laniel’s Unspecified Bunker

I was just thinking about the live Phish album that I downloaded a while ago, and thinking: should I add that to the list of albums I own? After all, I did pay $10 for it.

Well then, how about all the music I’ve legitimately downloaded through emusic? I’ve downloaded dozens of albums from there, all covered under a $10-per-month fee. Do I “own” those albums too? I certainly have the right to listen to them. But then, I have the right to listen to the entire emusic catalogue; by that logic, do I “own” the whole emusic catalogue?

How about this, then: you own an album if you’ve downloaded it and paid for it. Well, all right, but a lot of people who’ve downloaded full albums off Napster would have a hard time with that definition; maybe they don’t own it in the eyes of the recording industry, but they surely do in their own. And even those who’ve downloaded music legally off emusic could very well delete those digital files and redownload them later. Or when you buy an album off the Phish site, you get the right to download it infinitely many times — which is convenient, if you don’t want to waste all the storage space on your machine. Unlike a CD, you can destroy and recreate a digital album as often as you’d like. It is quite unlike physical property: once you destroy that CD, you have to buy another copy of it; in the meantime, you don’t “own” that CD.

Property ownership is commonly bound to a physical object. I proudly say that I own CDs because I can actually put my hands on them. But the future is not in physical music; it is in digital audio files, with all the trappings of physical albums — liner notes, lyrics, cover art — that we’re used to. I think our conception of ownership will have to change — perhaps subtly, perhaps not.

(And no, this idea isn’t interesting or novel; it lies at the heart of the copyright debate. One aspect of it just happened to jump out at me.)

“In the oasis complex, the thirsty man imagines he sees water, palm trees, and shade not because he has evidence for the belief, but because he has a need for it. Desperate needs bring about a hallucination of their ideal solution: Thirst hallucinates water, the need for love hallucinates the ideal man or woman. The oasis complex is never a complete delusion; the man in the desert does see something on the horizon. It is just that the palms have withered, the well is dry, and the place infected with locusts.”
(Alain de Botton, On Love)

There’s an open-source alternative to AOL Instant Messenger. It’s called gaim (for “GNU AIM”), and I’m pleasantly surprised: it will soon be better than AIM, if trends hold.

One cool thing that my friend Adam introduced me to last night is encrypted gaim: if you and your correspondent both use encrypted gaim, you can have a totally secure IM conversation. (Adam has packaged gaim-encryption for convenient use by Debian users.) Newer versions of gaim also feature a cleaner UI, fewer bugs, and nice little features like the ability to substitute text: if you find yourself often misspelling “the” as “teh,” you can have gaim correct that before your IM goes out. Or if you like the convenience of abbreviations like BTW (“By The Way”), but you would never deign to befoul the English language like that, you can have gaim spell out the proper English before anyone gets a chance to read the contraction.

As time goes on, I can see very little reason why open-source projects won’t eventually overtake their closed-source alternatives in quality. Maybe they’ll fix bugs more slowly (though even that’s questionable – has anyone seen how quickly Microsoft fixes buffer overflows?), but eventually the products will get stable; they already are getting stable. And as long as there’s an active user community that can suggest improvements, I suspect that even the UI – historically the part of Linux that people have the most problems with — will catch up. Mozilla is now a demonstrably better browser than IE, even at the UI level. Granted, they had a few years of fevered Netscape development behind them before they turned into an open-source project, but I think that only accelerated the inevitable. And if we think that corporate support for open-source projects is necessary to make them pretty, we’ve got that covered: Sun, IBM, and Apple (see OS X and Safari) all have made enormous investments in open-source software. These companies have come to realize that what’s good for the open-source community is good for them – and in particular, that what’s bad for Microsoft is good for them. I really believe that it’s only a matter of time before open-source software dominates the desktop. (And as Adam reminds me, it’s already the dominant paradigm in the server market.)

Which is to say: we’re winning.

I had seven minutes of outplacement training today. As a precondition for receiving future unemployment benefits, I had to attend a workshop that presumably gave me various sorts of training: how to handle interviews, how to write a résumé, etc. The thing is, I’ve already had that kind of training. After filling out a few pages of forms, the guy running the program told us that we could get out of it if our pre-existing outplacement counselors sent this guy a fax. So I was out the door in seven minutes. I gave my former employer a call, got the earlier outplacement center’s number, called them, and had them fax the guy some proof. I got to this place around quarter of 10, and I was out the door by 10 after 10.

Then it was off to do a little bit of shopping; my boy Josh will be receiving a master’s degree in philosophy from Duquesne this weekend, and I wanted to get him something.

That having been accomplished, I need to eat. I’m stahvin’ (spoken in gratuitous Boston accent).

I’ve mentioned in other quarters that I agree with Jeff: a Weblog is not the place to vent about your grievances with other people. I think François Truffaut said it best: “Les rendements de contes ne font jamais un chef d’oeuvre” (“Airing your dirty laundry never makes for a masterpiece”).

I’m reading through L.J. Savage’s and Lester Dubins’s book Inequalities for Stochastic Processes: How To Gamble If You Must right now, and understanding very little of it. It’s written at an incredibly high mathematical (specifically measure-theoretic) level, and consequently at high generality. I’m trying my best to understand a more concrete version of the problem, so I’ve started writing out a little formulation of some similar problems. Feel free to take a look. (That’s a list of files, one of which is LaTeX and another of which is DVI. I’ll try to find some way to put it on the Web, but MathML support is limited.)

I’m talkative today, it seems.

I just thought I’d point out a phenomenon that could be quite dangerous for the Web: Google is self-reinforcing. For instance, I wanted to find a link to Lester Dubins, below, so the natural step was to look for his name in Google. I grabbed the top result, which happened to be exactly what I was looking for: his homepage at Berkeley. But what if I had searched for something more vague? I’d probably still grab the top link. Hence links that appear at the top of Google searches are more likely to stay at the top of Google searches; relevant links toward the bottom stay down there.

Other sites are similar. If you want to search for a movie, and you’re anything like the people I know, you’ll jump over to IMDb. It’s fine in this specific case, because IMDb does its job very well. But I think it points out a possibly dangerous effect, which is that canonical sources on the Web can become just as entrenched as they do in traditional media. It’s media concentration of a different sort.

We’re starting to see signs that the Google PageRank algorithm may be sensitive to “A-list bloggers”: because of a very small number of bloggers, a phrase that had momentarily become a part of the Web lexicon fell off the map. This is part of the danger when we entrust all of our Web searching to one engine; we’re highly sensitive to technological failure.

Or, perhaps more nefariously, Google may be resisting semantic awareness for self-serving ends. I hope not, because I want to love Google almost as much as I want to love cute little puppy dogs. But it’s something to pay attention to and remain vigilant against.

In generations past, people wrote in their diaries (if they were literate, which I gather most weren’t) and wrote letters, because those were the ways you communicated if you didn’t talk in person. Nowadays we talk on the phone, send instant messages, write emails, write blog entries, etc., etc., etc. We talk more, but in a very archive-unfriendly way. In 200 years, how much of our modern lifestyle will still exist in some archived form?

The difficulties are many. First, hard drives are much more prone to failure than paper. Second, the media change very quickly: how many of us could find the equipment to play an 8-track tape? Third, the formats change very quickly; any idea how to open a VisiCalc file in Excel?

One comment I’ve heard is that, historically, documents survive either because no one finds them, or because there exist many copies of them. (I guess this is one of the Long Now Foundation’s insights.) Since Web documents are public by design, it seems our only recourse is to make many, many copies of them. (Though the point of the comment is about documents getting destroyed through contact with humans — e.g., the Dead Sea Scrolls.) With hard disks being as cheap as they are, this seems plausible. A system like Freenet is a start: everyone contributes a small bit of his hard-disk space, in exchange for the same space on others’ machines. You have no idea what’s on your machine, and I have no idea what’s on mine, because it’s encrypted. Freenet has different goals than archival (it wants to protect freedom of speech), but it seems that a similar system could do the trick.

The goal is that future societies will have as much information about our world as we do about, say, Samuel Pepys’. I’m reasonably certain that at least one copy of today’s New York Times will last into the foreseeable future, but that doesn’t concern me; in the grand scheme of things, what matters is how you and I spent our days, not how George Bush spent his (unless he blows up the world, but that’s a separate issue). The thoughts and feelings of individual people constitute history, not those of a few Great Men. I hope the memory of the little people will persist.

Do you ever get the feeling that everyone around you is thinking more deeply and profoundly than you are?

I spent the day hiking with my friends Adam and Rachele, and a woman whom I’ve only met once before named Sarah who is cute and coy and seems intelligent and seems to like a lot of good movies. Irresistible combination.

The Motion Picture Artists Association — headed by the charlatan Jack Valenti — has been fighting behind the scenes for years to crack down on the right of Americans to enjoy copyrighted works on their own terms. Valenti famously testified before Congress in 1982 that “the VCR is to the American film producer and the American public as the Boston strangler is to the woman home alone.” He swore that the VCR would kill the American movie industry, because people would be able to copy and distribute movies for free. We now know that he was wrong. But this Cassandra is still going strong at the MPAA, assuring Congress that MP3s and Napster’s progeny are the newest death knell for the recording industry.

Fast-forward: in 1998 the Digital Millennium Copyright Act was introduced, heralding a new chapter in the slow erosion of Americans’ right to produce and consume artistic works. In the years since it passed, it has faced intense opposition from many different quarters, not least among them hackers; the DMCA is one of the most important galvanizing steps in creating a hacker activist community, along with the Clipper chip. I suppose, then, that we have at least one reason to thank bad laws.

Now the MPAA is at it again, and again quietly. They are pursuing, in each of the state legislatures, a series of “baby DMCAs” (or super-DMCAs) that will cement their control of our rights to enjoy artwork.

The Massachusetts baby DMCA was introduced by Representative Stephen Tobin, whom I diligently emailed just a few minutes ago. Let me know what you think of the letter. I doubt it’ll do any good, but we try.

Dear Representative Tobin,

I write today having just read House No. 2743, a bill that would do for the states what the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) did at the federal level.

Among the most onerous provisions of the DMCA was that it made it illegal to write software which could circumvent a copyright-protection scheme, even if no one ever actually used that software to circumvent a copyright. The Russian computer scientist Dmitry Sklyarov was arrested for designing software that breaks Adobe’s eBook encryption, even though no one demonstrated that any copyright had actually been violated. Larry Lessig — a law professor at Stanford — pointed out the absurdity in the law: gun manufacturers can design handguns, which surely do kill many people every year, but they’re not subject to arrest; Sklyarov writes technology that might break an anti-circumvention technology, and he lands in jail. The ironies are remarkable.

Let’s be clear: even if Sklyarov’s technology had been used to break encryption, there’s nothing wrong with circumventing a copyright-protection technology in the pursuit of fair use. Let’s suppose I want to make a copy of DVD for my own personal use. This isn’t outlandish: a lot of people copy their CDs over to their iPods, so that they can then carry them on the subway conveniently. So I make a copy of my DVD, but in order to exercise this perfectly legitimate right of fair use, I have to break through the encryption built into the disc. The DMCA — and now the Massachusetts bill which you sponsored – would make this illegal.

What this means is that the DMCA and your bill kill the right of fair use silently. Instead of simply outlawing fair use, these bills outlaw every step that citizens would need to take to exercise their fair-use rights. It is as though we gave citizens the right to free speech, but denied them the right to books, music, movies, dance, or microphones.

I urge you to table House No. 2743 before it does further damage to the American right of fair use.

Respectfully,
Stephen R. Laniel

Here’s an idea: if Google kept track of the searches you’ve done in the past few weeks, I wonder whether it could speed up your searches.

Make it distributed, though: every user would have a small program on his or her computer that would keep track of searches, and more specifically keep track of the pages the user clicks on. It might find, for instance, that I search for a lot of Perl-related stuff. So in the background, it downloads a lot of pages that it thinks I might be interested in. Call it “predictive downloading.” Then when you carry out a Google search, the search passes through the local cache first to see whether it’s stored any pages that match your search.

This would have to be done incredibly well, and users would have to be pretty predictable, before it would be valuable to anyone. But it’s a thought. It might take some of the load off Google’s machines.

I’ve never been able to get the Google “link:” search to work correctly. Entering “link:stevereads.com” should display all the Web pages that link to a page on stevereads.com. I know that at least Adam Gerard and Adam Kessel link to me, yet if you search Google for pages linking to me, you don’t find anything.

Weirder: If you want to find all the pages linking to foo.com that aren’t themselves on foo.com, the correct syntax is supposed to be “link:foo.com -site:foo.com.” So try it with kottke.org: if you search for all the pages linking to kottke.org, you get 10,300 hits, including a few on siliconvalley.com. Then search for all those pages which link to kottke.org and aren’t on kottke.org. You get three links, none of them on siliconvalley.com.

Can anyone explain this to me? What am I doing wrong?

Whoever decided to add “blogosphere” to the language — “blogosphere” being something like “the collection of all weblogs, and the community formed therein” — should be forced to sit in a corner muttering it to himself for all eternity. That and “cyberspace,” though I forgive William Gibson; he didn’t mean for his word to turn into the overused descriptor it is now. Oh, and “information superhighway,” which I think is Al Gore’s doing. All of these words should be wrapped up in a bag, weighted down with concrete, and dumped in a river.

Well, maybe not drunk. But buzzing, and in a happy place. This inaugurates the Steve Laniel Writing Blogs While Wasted Tour 2003. Guest performers include Tom Waits and some grizzled old guy.

My friends Laura and Mike and I went to see A Mighty Wind tonight. Awesome. I was always about an inch away from concluding that Christopher Guest was stuck in the same mockumentary rut — and not only mockumentary, but mockumentary in the Spinal Tap vein, whose purpose is not just to spoof all the documentaries in a particular field, but specifically to make fun of the low-talent folks who are the documentary’s subjects. The people in A Mighty Wind aren’t low-talent, though the folk music that they perform is pathologically cheesy; the music is the centerpiece of the movie’s scorn.

It’s hard to focus on this repeated theme, though, when so much else in the movie is great. The relationship between Catherine O’Hara and Eugene Levy works really well, basically no thanks to Levy. Levy is very clearly acting a part; throughout the movie, you can never get lost in his character, because it’s so affected. O’Hara, in contrast, plays her character straight. She’s the least humorous character in the entire film, and yet easily the most captivating.

And that’s my biggest problem with A Mighty Wind. Situations are most funny when the entire background builds a layer of absurdity between you and the film. Yes, Spinal Tap features lots of hilarious moments, like the tiny Stonehenge or “this amp goes to 11,” but what makes Spinal Tap (or better yet Waiting For Guffman) most funny is the accumulated hilarity of a no-talent band. When a movie relies too much on gags, it loses the built-up punch. A Mighty Wind never achieves greatness because it exists gag-to-gag.

Perhaps it’s hard to avoid in improvisational scripts like Guest’s, but A Mighty Wind also suffers from the occasional one-dimensional character. Bob Balaban plays an anal guy; that is his schtick, established from the very first time we meet him. There is nothing else about Balaban’s character that is interesting to us; he is merely the shell of an idea. Other characters are deeper, but they never equal the richness of the characters in Waiting For Guffman. Yes, Fred Willard is The Annoying Guy in Guffman (a role he reprises in both Best In Show and A Mighty Wind), just as Parker Posey is The Ditzy Provincial Girl and Christopher Guest is The Low-Talent Unintelligent Closeted Gay Man, but somehow they all put the pieces together in a way that makes the sum work out beautifully. I didn’t feel the same magic in A Mighty Wind.

I don’t mean to suggest that I disliked A Mighty Wind. I did like it, very much; I left it laughing and smiling and talking about it. If asked to rate it, I’d probably give it 3.5 or 4 stars (out of 5). But of course no movie is perfect, and I think it’s worthwhile to figure out how the director could near perfection the next time round.

Gotta love Roger Ebert’s forthrightness:

Like so many movies dealing intelligently with teenage sexuality, “Raising Victor Vargas” has been rated R by the MPAA, which awards the PG-13 to comedies celebrating cheap vulgarity, but penalizes sincere expressions of true experience and real-life values.

Ebert is so much more than just “two thumbs up”; he’s intelligent, perceptive, subtle, erudite, and caustic when he needs to be; he’s anything but a toadie for the movie industry. I’m puzzled why he continues to do the “thumbs” thing, when the rest of his output is so much more intelligent.

I learned a valuable lesson the other day about why punctuation is important. The sign over a light switch in a bathroom read, “Employees wash your hands before returning to work.” I thought at the time, “They’ll do that for me?” They need a colon in there.

Of course context makes it clear what they mean. But the function of grammar is to reduce our reliance on context clues (with the understanding that we can never eliminate that reliance altogether). Humans have a great ability to understand words through noise, whether that noise is static over a phone line or misspelled words. Yet we still insist on speaking clearly and spelling things correctly, because we get annoyed if we have to expend the processing to sort out what the speaker meant. Punctuation fills a similar function. Sometimes the rules are picky and don’t help anyone. But often they fill a valuable role. That’s why I’m anal about such things. So sue me.

I think I should make a list of Bitter Songs and Plays and Stuff. Near the top of the list would be “I Want You” by Elvis Costello. Check it out and let me know if you agree.

“I Want You” actually reminds me in a lot of ways of a passage from the play “Closer” by Patrick Marber. Again, check it out; I may be crazy.

Brief blog. I went out to a bar tonight with my friend Stevie and his girlfriend Abby, who shows all signs of becoming my friend in her own right. I find this good. While there, we ran into a bunch of CVU alumni. Doing so always makes me a little uneasy: if I want to be in touch with them, I’m in touch with them; if I don’t, either I don’t want to be or they don’t want to be. So it’s always awkward. We have a decent time together, but still: sumpin’s awkward.

Right now I smell drearily of smoke, and my stomach aches. I woke up this morning with a stomach ache, which has gone in waves all day. Around midafternoon I went to see my grandmother, whose life is confined to her bed in her nursing home. She’s perfectly healthy, except inasmuch as she’s convinced herself that she isn’t. And since she’s old, her hypochondria led to staying in bed all the time, which led to muscles atrophying, which makes it hard for her to get out of bed. At her age, illness is self-creating.

Seeing Grammy made me view age through a very depressing lens: as a kid, the world is your oyster, and as you grow older it narrows and narrows until your whole world is as wide as a hospital bed, and then narrows even further until it’s one tiny point and you die.

That, of course, is an overly pessimistic and generalized view of life. But it’s hard not to descend into that view when you see someone like my grandmother. I hope I don’t end up like her. (Reminds me, totally at random, of a Tom Waits quote in another context: “She been married several times  . . .  I don’t wanna end up like her. She been married so many times, she got rice marks all over her face. You know the type.”)

Time to shower to get the smoke off me. Then to sleep.

It’s 1:30 a.m. Berkeley time as I write this. I wake up at 5 a.m. so that I can leave for the train station at 6 a.m., arrive there by 6:20 for a 6:30 a.m. departure, arrive at the Oakland Airport a little before 7, and catch an 8:30 flight that arrives at Dulles at 4:30 and gets me home around 7 p.m. With the time-zone difference, that’s about 10 hours of travel.

After a week in California, I want to move here. I think the weather just makes people nicer. I’ve been in Boston for about two years, and haven’t really found my groove there (no pun intended). I’ve made a few solid friends, but somehow the whole city feels tenuous. Being back amongst college friends, plus my brother and sis-in-law, reminded me what it was like to be comfortable. Maybe life is different here when I’m not unemployed and wandering aimlessly, but it seems like the base level of happiness — which has a lot to do with the amount of sunlight one gets — is just higher here.

There’s a lot to think about. Would I need a car? I suppose it depends upon where I live. Would I need to move twice — once to get to California, and once again if I get into law school? If I moved here, would it make sense to apply to in-state law schools after I get residency? There’s a lot to think about, but I’m seriously considering it. This is a great place. The vibe is right for me. I felt relaxed here, in a way that I didn’t in any of the other cities I visited (except Philly, oddly, and I can’t think offhand of why that was).

Lots to consider, little time to sleep. 3.5 hours from now, I’ll be awake. Feh.