Lentigo

We put together the following altar to celebrate family and friends passed...

The clueless-ness of big content owners is just amazing...

Fox shuts down Buffy Hallowe'en musical despite Whedon's protests:

Cory Doctorow: Fox has shuit down a plan to perform a fan version of the Buffy musical episode, Once More with Feeling, even though creator Joss Whedon has asked them not to. Jason Schultz has written a great analysis of this here.

Is this the kind of copyright policy we want? Those are tougher questions. Just as artists are an engine for creativity in our culture, so are fans. An artist on their own can make a work of art, but only fans can make it mean something in our society. Fans take art and translate it into culture. They invest in it, obsess over it, share it, and spread it to others. They turn it from an isolated item into a means of communication. (For more on this, see danah's posts here and here where she breaks it down more eloquently).

But where is the recognition of this reality in copyright? Well, before the digital age, it was often in the idea that copyright was a public right and fandom was a private series of acts. Copyright would control public distribution of works and fans would collect them and share them and discuss them in private. More importantly, they would do so without making "copies" of them; instead, they would trade physical goods and have verbal conversations. Some would make costumes or their own art based on the subject matter, but those were generally kept private or only exhibited at limited forums like Comic Cons.

Do the marketing departments of Fox, Disney, etc, have any say over the actions of their attack-lawyers? Do these organizations even have marketing departments any more? I remember taking marketing classes way back in college but I must have missed the day where we were taught that attacking one's best customers is an effective sales driver.

Here's something to be aware of:

EFF cracks hidden snitch codes in color laser prints:

Many color laser printers hide information about your printer's serial number and the date and time of your print job in every job you print. It's believed that this is done to get your equipment to incriminate you without your knowledge. Now EFF has decoded the information-hiding scheme on the Xerox Docucolor series, by getting EFF supporters to print out pages from their printers and mail them to our researchers, who examined them under magnification and special light and cracked the code.

Whether or not you care what your printer (your property) is telling others, it's important to know that it is telling something to somebody if they want to look hard enough!

Now that I spend about 90 minutes on the train each day I've been listening to a lot of podcasts during my commute. My favorite, by far, is the Evil Genius Chronicles. Good stories, excellent music, and great attitude, Dave rocks! If anybody actually reads this page they should go there, listen to a few podcasts, and buy the stuff package.

My Powerbook. After a couple of decades of using Windows and Linux laptops I switched about six months ago. I was never emotionally attached to my Windows boxen. I like Linux on the server side (love Debian after years of running Redhat based servers) but desktop Linux was nicely divided between love and hate. Loved the freedom, didn't love so much the constant tweaking required to get multi-media and power management stuff working, and reworking after each distro upgrade. I love my Mac. It's fast, beautiful, and just works.

Drupal. After developing sites using the proprietary Caucus platform for, um, 15 years, and then spending a couple with Plone, I'm really liking Drupal as a base for web apps. Plone was fun for awhile but the weight of the framework has gotten to be too much for the projects I build. Drupal has been a refreshing change.

Well, the test with MarsEdit didn't go very well so we're back to using Ecto for blogging. It seems to integrate much better with other Mac apps so I'll just need to learn how to sort out its quirks.

BTW, I'm trying to get into the habit of blogging more, really!

Here's a picture of Hope, Aaron and Jeffrey on the beach in Kill Devil Hills, NC. This was taken on our last beach day of our 2005 summer vacation. ...s.

This is a test entry made with Ecto. I’m attaching a picture of the family taken toward the end of our recent OBX vacation to see how it posts.