A Donkey on the Edge

Off to see Richard Stallman speak at the LSE tonight:-)

Chris’ iBook has arrived:-) I now look forward to lengthy exposés about a Unix hacker’s life on a Macintosh. Oh, and for those that know Chris, don’t y’all think we should put him forward for a “switch” advert. I can see it now:

So there I was sanding down the little bit of conductive goop that I bought at Maplins in an attempt to repair the keyboard that I had previously buggered with a piece of coarse sandpaper while trying to repair the thing that shouldn’t have gone wrong in the first place…

I say move over Ellen Feiss

Went to see Richard Stallman do his talk “Copyright vs community” at the LSE last night. Andrew’s co-worker Anthony spotted the gig and sorted tickets (thank you Anthony).

Stallman didn’t disappoint. I now wish I had brought a pen and paper as the examples he gave seemed potent from his mouth but not quite fully formed when reported to Nicki back at home. One of his main purposes is to challenge the large set of assumptions surrounding copyright legislation.

Under the guise of protecting the artist for the good of the community as a whole, legislators in both the UK and the US have enacted draconian rules that ultimately do not serve you and me.

He describes copyright as a social contract, one we entered eyes-open many years ago because at the time, we were trading a freedom that as individuals we could not use for enforcement that we could. Specifically, most individuals probably did not have access to printing presses and so could not exercise a right to share their assets with their neighbours. Instead, early copyright legislation restricted printers from copying works. This early law regulated industry for the benefit of us all—an equitable trade.

This initial trade however is no longer fair. We can now easily copy and share the assets we have payed for, so it makes sense that we/05/no longer wish to be held by the terms of the initial social contract. What was a good deal for our great great grandfathers is now very much not one.

Stallman goes on the mention other assumptions we have been trained to accept as axiomatic. For example, all copyright must be equal the same rules must cover all copyrighted items. This part of the law lets asset owners (let’s put this in Marxist terms just for fun…) protect 99% of the copyright they shouldn’t have by finding one rare exception that they can convince the courts that they should.

Instead, Stallman propose a tiered system of copyright based not on the author or the media but on the purpose. It’s at this point that memory fails me as his three-part structure seemed very lucid at the time, but I can’t remember the exact details (I must be getting old) so tonight (he is talking about patents tonight) I’ll bring a pen;-)

This from Jed, my Dad, who directed television commercials all his life, and who had the opportunity of being part of American advertising’s class of 1959, the folk who brought you Avis trying harder and Volkswagen thinking small. He moved to France with his young familly in 1968 to set up Television production for Young & Rubicam Paris and never looked back. He is now retired and lives with my mum in Budleigh-Salterton, which is in Devon which is a county in England…

The film clip (video?) is so damn small and so damn fast and shot from the wrong angle that you can’t see my handiwork on the right rear quarter.
In the far off past I did films for Gulf Oil. TV Commercials at Daytona and at Sebring ( The 24 hours at Sebring then). Gulf had sponsored the Fords earlier (Le Mans!) but were now backing Porsche in their colours of Blue and Orange.

…this colour scheme is sooo zeitgheist that the last time I was in mothercare looking at car-seats, I even spotted a LeMans Gulf-strip baby seat complete with ‘fireproof’ four-point harness…

When you are directing films of races like that with six (count ‘em 6!!) cameras with all their attendant crews, you would think you’ve gotta lotta help. No. Not so.

Gulf had an old ad idea we were supposed to give new life to - a pair of Orange horse’s hooves on the hind quarters of the car promised ” extra kick ” ( I didn’t write the stuff, I just directed!)

The race is about to start…I have all my cameras poised and positioned to shoot the bloody horse shoe logo… and, down in the pits what do I see? You guessed it. No bloody logo! So me, Mr. Director, starts screaming and finding a spare set , go running through the track marshals and - Yes! - stick the bloody things on!! As they hustle me away - the Race/05/begin! I still have one great photo blow up of the car in a high speed turn, belching fire, and proudly showing two orange hoof prints stuck on it’s backside.

End of story.

Thanks Dad :-)

More people with far too much time on their hands…

Well, Gunter, my big yellow R11150GS is gone.

(boring bike-geek post this one I’m afraid…) I handed him over to the lease company yesterday and picked up a loaner (as surprise surprise my new GS isn’t ready). I used to get really attached to my bikes, giving them names and lavishing tremendous amounts of man-hours and cash on their maintenance. Baby in particular lived with me from 10 October 1985 until I finally said good-bye to her in 1994, her engine broken and in boxes (minus some valve guides). When I picked her up from deepest Jersey one wonderful starry night and drove her back to Manhattan with just a whiff of chilled sea air creeping into my helmet. Before baby, I hadn’t ridden anything bigger than a Bultaco 350 Sherpa, so handling a half a tonne 80’s Japanese litre-bike (she was a KZ1000J2 for those who care…) was always going to be interesting.

With hindsight, I’m surprised I never crashed Baby. The early eighties big Zeds where just not up to handling the power of the engine. The Z1000 could be pushed over the 200bhp mark and many made it into the nines at the drag strip.

Anyway, I digress, what I wanted to say is that though the GS I’ve just collected is 99% identical to the old one I’ve just surrendered, it feels completely different. The suspension is completely different. The bike is taller by about 20mm with a more forward tilt and feels faster and more alert. The engine is miles torquier (this can’t be possible, but it sure feels like it) so much so that I accidentally wheelied the thing on Park Street.

As much as I hate BMW GB for their shit service and total lack of organisational skills, I am simply speechless about the performance improvements. The beast now feels a good as a 600 Ténnéré and just as light :-)

Oh, and last week I stepped on a plug which was laying prongs-up. For you Americans out there, a British plug has a brass slab about the girth of a pencil as an earth lead. So as I say, I stepped on one of these things and the big ol’ brass thing carved its way into the sole of my foot to near the heel on the right hand side.

Never mind that it hurt like shit, as I’ve said before, after seeing this photo of Dave’s leg, I decided I would never again complain about something being sore…So the interesting thing is that while the puncture didn’t get infected, the whole right side of my body started to ache. My back started spasming (is that a word) and most bizarre of all, my right knee almost seized up.

So Nick has been reading reflexology books and pointed out that the puncture on the sole of my foot was right on the appendix spot. You could say that the brass shaft cut right through the appendix point and in a way, what happened to my body felt an awful lot like what would happen if toxins were released from a punctured appendix…

Mmmmm… alarm set for 05:00—at desk 05:31 after pouring cold water into coffee instead of kettle grrrr…

Logged on to amazon.fr to buy Clementine some French DVDs. Go to “children’s DVDs” and review listing: 95% of the items on offer are American. What ever happened to the French protecting their language?

Just ordered a gorgeous specimen book from Fountain and got a lovely message back in the post, whereupon I replied for no reason convinced that a truly great e commerce brain was at work whereupon I realised it wasn’t a form letter whereupon i realised it was too late so i carried on…

hahah thank you missus ;) /p
>You’re a very well written bot;-)
>
>8=}
>
>x
>d
>
>
>>> >Hi Dug,
>>>>thank you for ordering from Fountain.
>>>>The books will be shipped first thing tomorrow.
>>>>
>>>>best regards
>>>>
>>>>peter bruhn
>>>>[fountain]
>>>
>>>Woohoo!
>>
>>
>>hahahaha :-D
>>/p
>>
>>>
>>>x
>>>d
>>>

Ok, it’s a little early for this kind of nonsense and I’m supposed to be working, but do check out Fountain:-)

OK, one more post and then back to work…

Yesterday, Clemmie started forming the bababa syllables for the first time. Nick and I were getting a tiny bit concerned as Clem wasn’t saying much and at six and a half months, wee’uns are supposed to be babbling.

So now she sits there, looks straight a me with purpose and starts “blaublaublaublau…” kinda like she’s saying “blue” in german. In any case, another growth milestone reached:-)

I’m curious at what point exactly when reading an otherwise perfectly sensible text (brief Tesla biog) one notices something a little unusual…

All of this triggered past life memories I had since my childhood. I have always seen myself as a male physicist during WW II Germany - working in an underground lab with noted scientists of the day on the time travel experiments. Since age five I have always stated that I was here to do something connected to time travel and the Great Pyramid.

The domain “crystalinks” should have been a clue;-)

From a list I’m on—the post started with commentary on scripting the EIMS mail server and finished with this. Quite encouraging I thought…

But I WILL NOT log their activities. Traffic stats to their websites are calculated and the original logs deleted. Email activities are not logged at all, beyond whatever shows up in the current activity windows.

If somebody shows up with a subpoena, I can truthfully say that I can’t give them what doesn’t exist. Or am I violating yet another obscure Federal statute I’ve never heard of? Seems to me that we (Americans, mostly, but not all…) have been busy throwing our hard-won liberties overboard in a misguided attempt to keep the ship afloat, and I won’t be any part of it. Rather the ship should sink than live aboard without them.

http://www.coconino-world.com/

Thank you to the ever in-touch Zeldman for pointing to the Creative Commons project. This is a great idea which hopes to build the public domain while making as many patent and copyright lawyers unemployed. In a nutshell, cut out the middleman by defining in legally recognised terms exactly what usage rights you wish to grant in your work.

So here goes. As of right now, this site is licensed under a CC license…

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons License.

Now, I hope the chaps at CC won’t be cross with my modifying their icons, they were just a tad on the big side;-)

Picked up the new GS last night. It’s heartstoppingly beautiful, somewhere between Mad Max and Julianne Moore (ok, so that makes no sense, it looks great ok?). Pointless fact of the day for the bikers out there—it has a 40 litre tank.

What were they thinking…

We noticed a tooth today :-) Clemmie’s first tooth! It’s just a little slit in her bottom gum, but this means less screaming for teething…

Ok, so this is a bit self-referential, it’s just that I had never heard myself described in quite these words

it’s clear that his fervor comes from a moral/aesthetic sense/desire rather than from purely pragmatic considerations

Welcome to the church of CSS, pass the plate;-)

Should be interesting to see how far this goes.

And can I just say, we’ve finally got a radio again. I can’t believe I lived so long without the Donald Rumsfelf quote of the week…

The message is that there are no knowns. There are things we know that we know. There are known unknowns, that is to say there are things we now know we don’t know. But there are also unknown unknowns—things we do not know we don’t know

- Donald Rumsfeld

Both useful and fun, from the Public Internet Project

Overall Statistics:
1) 13,707 unique nodes within Manhattan
2) 4,038 (29.46%) WEP enabled
3) 12,533 (91.44%) nodes below 96th street
4) 8,251 (60.20%) nodes below 59th street
5) 3,758 (27.42%) nodes below14th street
6) Approx. 1,000,000 data points collected.
7) EACH DATA POINT COLLECTED CONTAINS:

Longitude & Latitude,
  · Date
  · Time
  · Signal
  · Noise
  · Signal to Noise Ratio (SNR)
  · Channel
  · SSID
  · BSSID (MAC address)
  · WEP on/off
  · Vendor NAME (manufacturer)
  · Beacon Interval