clara raubertas: blog

Facebook is Targeting Your Obsession

noreply@blogger.com (Clara) — Tue, 19 Aug 2008 00:19:00 +0000

Before the Facebook platform was introduced, I knew plenty of people (in fact, I'm probably one of them) who had accounts, but rarely logged on — most people weren't sufficiently compelled by the minute changes in their friends' music taste to check it daily.

But once the platform was introduced, all my friends suddenly started finding reasons they NEEDED to check Facebook constantly (for most of these people, those reasons were Scrabulous). This is why the platform is such a brilliant business model. No matter what your obsession, Facebook can now target it. Not into "poking"? Fine, here's some zombies. Not into zombies? How about political propaganda?

I never got into Scrabulous, but just as Long Tail advocates would predict, I've found an app that targets my obsessive streak. So far I've mostly percieved the platform as an opportunity to crankily delete dozens of invitations from people I've forgotten I ever knew to install apps I would never care about. But the allure of seeing my friends neatly categorized by type and temperament compels me to switch to the other side.

So if we're Facebook friends, you should expect an invitation to add the "personality type" application. And you NEED to accept it.

Southern Vacation

noreply@blogger.com (Clara) — Mon, 04 Aug 2008 19:04:00 +0000

Recently, Jesse and I took a road trip through the South (or rather, Appalachia and parts of the upper south); we visited my parents (and their dog and chickens) in West Virginia, drove through Virginia, visited Knoxville and Nashville in Tennessee, crossed Kentucky, drove back up to my parents' house through Western West Virginia's mountainous highways, and visited more family in the suburbs of Philadelphia.

I've been procrastinating on blogging about this because I'm not sure what to say. I could list the places we visited and things we did there, or I could try to describe the people we met, but none of that would really convey how I feel about it. It will have to suffice, then, to say that this was a strong contender for my favorite of all the vacations/trips I've ever taken.

Transit-Filled Weekend

noreply@blogger.com (Clara) — Mon, 14 Jul 2008 22:59:00 +0000

This weekend brought me a handful of new T stops, visited both deliberately and in the course of my other adventures. I spent Friday afternoon working at a cafe in the Charles MGH area (the last new-to-me Red Line stop that's on both lines!); its architectural feel is a pleasant mix of modern urban business district and (literally centuries-)old-school upscale rowhouses.

I'd also heard great things about "that liquor store at Charles MGH", as friends had been describing it, so I stopped by. The store did not disappoint! They had two entire walls lined with single bottles of beer, including a lot of fancy/unusual brews. I've been a deficient beer geek (and hop lover!) in that I haven't yet had a chance to try 120 Minute IPA, so I was excited to be able to pick up a bottle -- though at 20% alcohol, I haven't yet found the right time to try it.

Saturday Jesse, Sam, and I spent the afternoon on an odyssey of many-transit-typed adventures around the city. We first went to an art space in the South End to see more of this guy's work (first encountered at Somerville Open Studios). We hit the Silver Line to uber-terminal Dudley Station for lunch -- though the Silver Line isn't a T stop for the purpose of my transit project (the Silver Line is not a train, my friends! it is merely a bus laboring under the *delusion* that it is a train!).

Post-lunch we took one of Dudley's approximately 7234582910 buses to Roxbury, where much to our dismay The Greater Boston Bigfoot Research Center was closed. Another time! The visit was not in vain, however, since on our way to the Stonybrook Orange Line stop (in a pretty neat place, across from a cutely-landscaped park), we accidentally walked by the Sam Adams brewery and accidentally got free beer (they were asking visitors to vote between two samples of beer, only one of which can make it into next year's officially-marketed lineup). Nom nom nom!

Since our evening plans were in Somerville (and since this was a stop I hadn't yet visited), we rode the Orange Line all the way across town to Sullivan Square. Like Dudley, Sullivan is a mega-transfer point, where many bus lines have their termini; unlike Dudley, Sullivan, as far as we could tel, offers absolutely no motive for visiting other than transferring to a bus. So, that's what we did!

Vegetables!

noreply@blogger.com (Clara) — Wed, 09 Jul 2008 21:42:00 +0000

After spending some time with some vegan friends, I decided (at least for an indefinite trial period) to give up eating mammals. Additionally, Jesse and I are subscribed to a farm share this summer, which means that we have more vegetables than usual hanging around our house.

Combined, these factors have given rise to a new dietary algorithm. Whether I'm at home or at a restaurant, I first look to see if there's a vegetable-based food I feel like making/ordering; next, I look for a vegetarian option; and only if I particularly don't feel like one of these options or they're not available do I turn to a poultry- or fish-based option.

After a week or two of this, I'm finding myself with improved mood and energy -- and I've started craving vegetables and thinking "om nom nom salad!" in situations where in the past I'd usually have chosen fried cheese. Added bonus: years of frustrating "choice anxiety" in restaurants is substantially alleviated -- I feel more relaxed going through these decision-making tiers than tackling the entire menu at once.

Vacation and Electro-Sabbath

noreply@blogger.com (Clara) — Sun, 29 Jun 2008 17:03:00 +0000

I just got back from a week with some college friends on a yacht one friend's parents had rented in the Virgin Islands for her college graduation -- which is pretty much as awesome as it sounds. I caught up with old friends, swam with a turtle, learned some sailing, drank piña coladas, and many more adventures.

Another remarkable thing about this trip was that I had no laptop, no cell phone, no blogs, no webcomics, no email, no TV, for a week straight -- a distinctive experience for someone who's accustomed to spending hours tied to a screen every day. When we were first planning this trip, I was worried about being forced to be not working and out of contact with clients for so long, but you know what? It was fantastic. I even uncharacteristically declined the opportunity to check my email when it was available at some places we pulled into port -- and since I'd warned my clients about my vacation plans and worked a little extra the week before, nothing urgent had piled up when I got home.

In some ways, this email-less week was similar to the "Electro-Sabbath" that Jesse and I instituted a few weeks ago: on Wednesday nights after 9pm, we don't check email, use the internet, or watch TV or movies. The idea is to clear our heads from the addictive and attention-fraying 20-open-tabs lifestyle of the everyday and free up time to dedicate to non-electronic activities we want to pursue (reading, painting, chatting, going for walks). It's relaxing to do this once a week, but an entire week without the electronic tether is unbelievably refreshing -- obviously something I can't do often in my profession, but something to keep in mind for the occasional vacation.

More T Stops, More Studios

noreply@blogger.com (Clara) — Mon, 09 Jun 2008 15:39:00 +0000

I furthered my plan of visiting new T stops this weekend -- we went to the open studios at the Distillery in South Boston by way of the Andrew T Stop. The Distillery was about a mile from the T stop, so we got to explore South Boston on our walk, which was pretty interesting and cool (though not literally cool -- Boston's 3 weeks of nice spring/summer weather seem to be over, and it's oppressively hot and humid). Southie wasn't quite what I'd expected -- with colorful, close-together houses on hills, some streets looked surprisingly San Francisco-esque, but the Irish pub we stopped into definitely didn't (its decor tended more toward Irish nationalist propaganda).

Later, after walking downtown post-studios, we also hit up the New England Medical Center T Stop to get home -- I hadn't realized that the FAO Schwartz Bear had a new home!

This was the smallest of the three open studios I've seen in the past year, and the artists skewed the youngest -- one friend commented that it seemed like college art, which I agreed with. In contrast, the Fort Point studios from last fall were full of mostly professional artists, and the Somerville studios from earlier this spring seemed to have a lot of adult amateurs (a demographic that I think produces a lot of interesting work!).

A Movie Without Enough Male Presence?

noreply@blogger.com (Clara) — Fri, 30 May 2008 20:43:00 +0000

The NYT has a fairly unfavorable review of the Sex and the City movie; while I haven't seen the movie, have no desire to do so, and am sure several of the criticisms are valid, part of the review rubbed me the wrong way:

Unlike the show, which allowed the men to emerge occasionally from the sidelines with lines of actual dialogue, the male characters in the movie stand idly by, either smiling or stripping, reduced to playing sock puppets in a Punch-free Judy and Judy (times two) show. I’m all for the female gaze, but, gee, it’s also nice to talk — and listen — to men, too.

Uh, right. Men don't have enough screen time?

Not according to another NYT article by the same author (!), xkcd, Jezebel, or indeed, anyone with half a brain who watches blockbuster movies (or even their advertisements). It's nice to talk and listen to men in movies, sure, but you have every other movie coming out this summer for plenty of that.

Urban Biomes

noreply@blogger.com (Clara) — Wed, 28 May 2008 21:50:00 +0000

One of the things that I like the most about living where we do is that we're within walking distance of so many urban and suburban "biomes" -- different population levels and feels, from dense forest to downtown skyscrapers.

Our apartment is in a neighborhood that's reminiscent of suburban residential areas (though the houses are closer together). When I go running, I can go to the commercial-suburban-feeling strip malls and highways near Alewife and feel like I'm in the sprawling exurbs. Or I can go to almost the opposite extreme, the parks surrounding Fresh Pond, where I can be surrounded by trees and water and out of view of human-made structures. The Cambridge and Somerville squares have almost a small-town downtown feel. Stretching "walking distance" to a few miles, Allston is a bustling urban neighborhood. And then there's the financial district, full-scale city.

Everywhere else I've lived, and most places I could live, have a much more homogenous five-mile radius around them -- but variety is just one of many perks of living in the Boston area.

TV Suspense

noreply@blogger.com (Clara) — Tue, 27 May 2008 18:26:00 +0000

I've grown enamored of watching TV dramas; I love being excited about finding out what will be revealed in the episode I'm going to watch next. But there are a couple shows that I started watching and grew tired of before the suspenseful questions were answered: Weeds and Desperate Housewives.

I think part of this is due to a split between different kinds of suspense. On the one hand, there's what I think of as forward-looking thriller suspense -- basically, "how will they get out of this?" On the other hand, there's backward-looking mystery suspense, or "how did they get into this?".

Weeds excelled in building up "how will they get out of this" situations. How will Nancy escape the cadre of drug dealers with guns pointed at her? But it eventually grew tiresome, at least to me, because it seemed like there was no "so what" or larger structure behind it. Desperate Housewives built up some "how did they get into this" questions about the past of Wisteria Lane. Why did Mary Alice kill herself? What happened to Dana? Yet with the forward-looking storylines much less compelling, I didn't feel motivated to keep watching.

I think the best suspense interleaves both styles: like one of my favorite shows, Lost. Lost mixes "how did they get into this" questions (why is there a polar bear in the tropics?) with "how will they get out of this" questions (how, if at all, will they get off the island?). The answers to both questions are often intertwined. Who built the hatch in the jungle? What will happen when they open it? Both types of suspense are given more emotional depth with flashbacks and flashforwards that show just enough to keep you curious.

Which is to say, OMG I am so impatient for Thursday night!!

Harbor Islands

noreply@blogger.com (Clara) — Tue, 27 May 2008 01:34:00 +0000

It's not a T stop, but today I went with a group for a local Boston adventure -- we took a ferry to Spectacle Island, in the harbor, for a picnic. It was a beautiful day, albeit a little windy, and our picnic, hiking, and beach football-throwing were fun. I was a little disappointed that the island seemed so landscaped (it had wide paths, and few if any trees), since I'd always thought of the Harbor Islands as a crazy wilderness -- but what do I expect from an island mostly made of landfill. It's also apparently one of the highest points in the harbor -- we saw a nice view when we climbed the south drumlin.

Familiarity Now vs. Effectiveness Later

noreply@blogger.com (Clara) — Mon, 26 May 2008 01:46:00 +0000

It's a familiar adage that an effective user interface is designed to be familiar; users don't like to encounter systems that make them think on the first try, which usually means they like to encounter interfaces that are as close as possible to the ones they've encountered before. This is on my mind because I'm currently learning the interface for a new music player; it has quite a learning curve, based in large part on its unfamiliarity (not that "File" is the most reasonable choice, in hindsight, for a menu name, but is "Engage" really any better?). But the more I dig into Amarok, the more I realize that it's incredibly full-featured, and it's just not possible to display every feature in a commonly-understood way; once I learn the basic operations, they seem straightforward and natural.

I'm reminded that the high learning curve is a common criticism of Linux -- you'll have to learn the command line, or my favorite text editor (of course! Ctl-@ Ctl-n Ctl-n Ctl-w Ctl-y to copy and paste a couple lines!), or the Gimp, or any number of unfamiliar solutions to familiar problems. But many people, once they learn these solutions, realize that the initially tricky solution can be more efficient in the long run, and that difficult-to-figure-out interfaces are often so because there are so many things you can do with them (Photoshop's advanced features aren't too intuitive to figure out, either).

Building a familiar interface will allow quicker adoption of your product; but a lot of the software people are loyal to the longest doesn't necessarily have the most intuitive interface, but the one that helps you get things done once you've learned it.

Alewife

noreply@blogger.com (Clara) — Sun, 25 May 2008 04:51:00 +0000

When I first moved to Boston I decided that before I move away I want to visit every train station on the T -- my rules are that I have to get on or off the T at the station as well as explore the immediate surrounding area.

This week I made my first deliberate visit to a T stop I hadn't been to, though in a somewhat anticlimactic way -- Alewife is one of the closest T stops to my apartment, just in terms of distance, but I'd never taken the T there because there's no bus from my house to there and biking to Harvard (which is close to the same distance) is usually a lot faster overall given the extra time I'd spend on the T.

On Friday, I decided to get to Harvard by biking to Alewife and taking the T from there. Alewife is the last stop on the red line and boasts a large parking garage where commuters from the northwest suburbs leave their cars while taking the train into the city; I was pleasantly surprised to note that they also have huge bike racks, which were totally full in the middle of the day. I took the T back around rush hour, and watched a lot of people get out to go to their cars and bikes -- the people in cars probably live in places like Arlington or Lexington, but since Alewife is kind of in the middle of nowhere I'm curious where all those bikers come from.

Gender and Politics: Followup

noreply@blogger.com (Clara) — Fri, 23 May 2008 22:09:00 +0000

Seeing the following in Slate (in, of all things, an article explaining why it's righteous for liberals to vote for Obama just because he's black) helped me clarify some of why I think it was important to bring up the issues my previous post:

(The conservative brand identity also doesn't have much room for opposition to sexism, another legitimate source of liberal guilt. But Hillary Clinton's problems, it seems to me, stem less from sexism than from Clintonism.)

Um, what?

Nobody is calling other presidential candidates bitchy, catty, shrill, or emasculating. Nobody is opening an article in a leading national newspaper with a comment on how much skin the other candidates are showing. Nobody is producing novelty nutcrackers modeled after other candidates (and displaying them prominently in places I run errands). Let me guess -- could cultural perceptions of gender be at work here?

Yes, there are a lot of reasons not to vote for Hillary that aren't sexist. If I didn't think so, I would have voted for her myself. But to say that her gender isn't a liability in her political career is an attitude both obtuse and harmful.

A lot of older feminists who voted for Clinton seem to think that young people who voted for Obama are naive about the issues of sexism Clinton and other women in politics face -- but that's not true of all of us. And a lot of young men who voted for Obama seem to think that their legitimate, non-gender-related reasons for disliking Clinton mean their perceptions are totally untainted by sexist cultural mores -- but that can't be true, either. People who support these two candidates are fighting when they should be uniting -- uniting against racism AND sexism.

Gender and Politics

noreply@blogger.com (Clara) — Thu, 22 May 2008 19:25:00 +0000

Like many peolpe my age, I voted for Obama this year. But while I didn't vote for the female candidate, it's not because I think we've reached some sort of post-feminist utopia. I'm not choosing any candidate based solely on demographic factors, but I don't think these factors are irrelevant to the effects a candidate's election will have or the way a candidate is presented and perceived.

I've heard some of my male peers say that Clinton "wasn't a good feminist candidate" because she gained political power partly through her association with her husband; I've also heard them say that it doesn't matter whether we elect a woman president, because there are already female governors, senators, and world leaders in other countries. But I think it does matter -- I think there's a lot to be gained in terms of public perception from having a woman elected president of the United States. We still live in a country where men shout "Iron my shirt!" at an accomplished professional woman -- if they think that's funny, they don't get it, and the day we do elect a woman president is one day closer to people like that "getting it".

The New York Times describes some ways in which Clinton's gender may have affected the race:

Mrs. Clinton’s supporters point to a nagging series of slights: the fixation on her clothes, even her cleavage; chronic criticism that her voice is shrill; calls for her to exit the race; and most of all, the male commentators in the news media who, they argue, were consistently tougher on her than on Mr. Obama.

The reasons I have for voting for Obama don't make me blind to these factors -- I very much do think that Clinton's campaign has been presented differently because of her gender and that she's had to contend with obstacles and perceptions that are never an issue for a male politician. This primary has been framed as a divisive, either-or situation, but it's a false choice. Obama supporters and Clinton supporters are painted as people with no common ground, when in fact most of us agree about a great deal. Just because I ended up preferring Obama doesn't mean that I don't recognize the challenges Clinton has endured solely because of her gender or that I don't see the value in having a woman president for the sake of having a woman president.

GeoHashing

noreply@blogger.com (Clara) — Wed, 21 May 2008 17:41:00 +0000

Today's xkcd outlines an algorithm for generating a new random set of coordinates every week; it generates only the decimal part of the coordinates, so there's a separate location in each "graticule" (block of space with the same integer coordinates -- 80-some miles on each side, it looks like) for local meetups.

This is pretty neat! It seems scavhuntesque, in a way -- I always enjoyed going on road trips whose destination I didn't know until I left. Now I can do that every weekend if I want!

Economics

noreply@blogger.com (Clara) — Tue, 20 May 2008 19:51:00 +0000

It's hard to graduate from the University of Chicago without getting just a little indoctrinated in the virtues of the free market. While I'm not a libertarian or much of a small-government advocate (I tend to think government-funded programs are a good thing), it does bug me when people think free trade should be restricted for humanitarian reasons.

This blog post from some UChicago economists points out that both Wal-Mart and trade with China drive the prices of basic goods lower than they would otherwise be. While there are plenty of things to dislike about Wal-Mart and its effects on local economies, it's actually beneficial to the poorest people in the communities, who are effectively less poor when prices go down and their purchasing power goes up. The goods may be shoddy, but their availability is a boon to people who can't afford higher-quality versions. The same argument in reverse applies to working conditions (both in Wal-Mart and in developing countries that are producing cheap goods) -- the jobs may be low-quality and low-pay, but they're the best options available to these workers (if Wal-Mart's employees could find better jobs, they would).

Music Downloads

noreply@blogger.com (Clara) — Mon, 19 May 2008 16:52:00 +0000

Now that allofmp3 is no longer available, I don't know where to buy new music. Allofmp3 was perfect -- inexpensive, DRM-free, convenient to download, and it even let me buy music in my favorite non-proprietary format. But alas, such perfection went hand-in-hand with questionable legality, and US users can no longer add money to their accounts.

Since I manage my music collection on a computer, buying music on CD would require tedious additional steps of ripping the music to my hard drive and leave me with an inconvenient physical artifact. The iTunes store isn't compatible with my computers' software or the OS I prefer to run on my iPod -- I refuse to by any kind of DRM'd music, anyway, since DRM means you don't really own your music. I tried eMusic, which is where I got most of the new songs on this mix, but their selection was constrictingly small, and their pricing scheme (different subscription levels get you different numbers of per-month downloads, that expire at the end of the month) created some perverse incentives. Amazon and Yahoo! sell DRM-free music, but at $1+ a song it's a bit pricey for me (perhaps the conclusion to this dilemma is that I can't actually afford to buy much new music!).

Mostly I've been listening to Pandora and music I already have lately, but if anyone knows of an alternative place to buy music that doesn't have the issues outlined above, let me know!

Command Line Magic

noreply@blogger.com (Clara) — Mon, 19 May 2008 01:26:00 +0000

Using the command line rather than a graphical interface is one of the things that a lot of people find most intimidating about the idea of using Linux. While (my last post notwithstanding!) you can accomplish most things without ever opening up the Terminal, I've grown more and more enamored of using the command line whenever possible.

I found gaining fluency with the command line to be like apprenticing to a magician; at first, you utter the magic incantations syllable by syllable knowing only what will result from the whole. But the more spells you learn, the easier it becomes to notice that each part has meaning, eventually acquiring the knowledge to recombine them in ways you've never seen and feel confident that you can predict what will result. Once you gain experience, it's simply faster to rattle off a handful of magic words than to navigate through the space of the graphical desktop.

If you have a Linux or Mac OS X machine, you can try this at home (Windows has a command line too, but it's not as integrated with the rest of the system and uses different syntax). Open the "Terminal" application and give it a try:

echo 'hello world'
will print the phrase 'hello world'
pwd
will give you the name of the directory you're currently in
ls
will list all the files in your directory
cat groceries.txt
will print the contents of groceries.txt (if groceries.txt is a text file) to the screen
man grep
will print the manual page for the command grep

Commands can have arguments that modify their functions:
ls -l
will list all the files in your directory, in a longer format
firefox &
will launch firefox in the background

The output from a command can be piped into another command:
cat groceries.txt | grep apples
will grep (search) for the phrase 'apples' in the printed text of groceries.txt
ls | grep groceries
will search for 'groceries' in the list of files in the current directory
echo 'bananas' >> groceries.txt
will append the line 'bananas' to the bottom of the file groceries.txt

Not only that, but commands can be used to search for other commands:
man -k search
will give you a list of the names and short descriptions of all the commands whose short descriptions include the phrase 'search'

Share folders between two Ubuntu computers on the same LAN with NFS

noreply@blogger.com (Clara) — Sat, 17 May 2008 21:26:00 +0000

While most things about Ubuntu work pretty much the way you want/expect the first time, one exception is sharing folders between two computers on the same LAN ("Local Area Network" -- in this case, multiple computers in the same house sharing an internet connection via a router). Surprisingly, it's easier/more intuitive to do this between an Ubuntu computer and a Windows computer! I wish Ubuntu would make a more intuitive, graphical way for non-technical users to do this -- though I certainly have fun tinkering with these things and learning more about networking (or what-have-you) as I go.

Through some command-line magic, I've gotten my laptop to be able to access the music folder on my desktop -- right now I'm playing music on my laptop that's actually stored on my desktop's much bigger hard drive. Sweet! How did I manage this?

Say you have two computers, both running Linux (in this case they're both running Ubuntu and I can't vouch that this will work on any other distro, but I suspect it would) -- the server, which has the folder you want to share on its physical media, and the client, which will connect to the server and access its data.

On the client:
1. In a Terminal window, run

sudo apt-get install nfs-common

-- this installs the software you'll need.
2. Run

ifconfig

to find your IP on the local network; it should look something like

inet addr:192.168.1.101

(If you see more than one instance of "inet addr" in the output of ifconfig, choose the address that doesn't begin with 127.)

On the server:
3. In a Terminal window, run

sudo apt-get install nfs-kernel-server

4. Edit the

/etc/hosts

file and add a line that looks like this:

neuron 192.168.1.101

where "neuron" is replaced with the hostname or a nickname for your client (in this case, "neuron" is the name of my laptop) and "192.168.1.101" is replaced with the IP you found in step 2.
5. Test this -- in a Terminal, run

ping -c 1 neuron

(or whatever name you used) and see if you get a response. If you get a response like "unknown host", something is wrong -- re-check your work from the previous steps (and check that the two computers are really on the same network!). If you get a response like "... 64 bytes from neuron... 1 packets transmitted, 1 received ... " then everything is hunky-dory so far and you are ready to move on!
6. Edit the

/etc/hosts.allow

file and add a line that looks like this:

ALL: 192.168.1.101

(again, use the IP that you found in Step 2).
7. Edit the

/etc/exports

file and add a line that looks like this:

/home/music 192.168.1.101(rw,sync,subtree_check,no_root_squash)

where again 192... is replaced with the IP from step 2, and "/home/music" is replaced with the full path to the folder you want to share. Note that for some reason it is important that the parenthesized arguments don't have a space between them.
8. Run

sudo /etc/init.d/nfs-kernel-server restart

9. Run

ifconfig

and get the IP of your server, the same way that you found it for the client.

Back on the client!
10. Edit

/etc/hosts

and add a line like

192.168.1.103 boffin

where "192.168.1.103" is replaced with the IP of your server (from step 9) and "boffin" is replaced with the hostname/nickname of your server ("boffin" is the name of my desktop).
11.

ping -c 1 boffin

to check that this worked, just like in Step 5.
12. Make a mountpoint for your shared directory -- in my case, I used

mkdir /media/boffin-music

13. Mount the shared directory at the mountpoint, like this:

sudo mount -t nfs boffin:/home/music /media/boffin-music

replacing "boffin" with your server's name, "/home/music" with the location on the server of your shared folder, and "/media/boffin-music" with the mountpoint you created in step 12.
14. Now you should be able to browse to the mountpoint and see your shared files, and open them, and use them. Awesome!

Videos

noreply@blogger.com (Clara) — Sat, 17 May 2008 04:44:00 +0000

I'm not sure quite how watching videos at parties started to bother me; I know it's much more fun to laugh at stuff with other people than by yourself, so watching funny stuff has its advantages as a social activity. But when someone starts playing videos, I usually have fun, but it doesn't seem quite "social" enough to me. I prefer playing games (though I know people who don't find games "social" enough for their tastes); probably I find it important that you're still interacting meaningfully with your companions in a game.

Videos at parties bother me less if I'm expecting it (e.g. going to someone's house specifically to watch a movie); I guess I get a little disappointed when I expect to hang out and chat, but end up spending most of the time staring at a screen.

Copyright is supposed to "Promote the Progress of... useful Arts", not keep creative works inaccessible!

noreply@blogger.com (Clara) — Thu, 15 May 2008 20:20:00 +0000

Article I of the US Constitution describes the purpose of copyright as follows:

To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries.

But as Lawrence Lessig argues in his fascinating, provocative, and well-researched text, Free Culture, the scope of copyright has changed drastically since the framers of the Constitution initially supported it. Now, copyright's reach is much farther than it needs to be to promote the progress of the arts -- in several ways, notably in the length of its term. When copyright was first established, a work was protected only if the author registered it as copyrighted -- and then only for 14 years, with an option (that most copyright holders declined) to renew it for an additional 14 years. Now, all creative works are copyrighted by default -- the only way to avoid it is to specifically release your work into the public domain or under another license. In 1973, when extending the term of your copyright was still an option, more than 85% of copyright holders didn't renew past the initial term, and the average term of copyright was 32.2 years -- in 1998, not only was the term of copyright extended to 95 years, but all current copyrights were retroactively renewed. That doesn't sound like "limited Times" to me!

Copyright's extension beyond the length that is useful in most cases leads to situations like this one, quoted from the FAQ of one of my favorite bands:

I really want a copy of Lolita Nation / Tinker to Evers to Chance / some other long out of print Game Theory album. Where can I get them, and will they ever be back in print?

This is the most frequently asked question of them all, and sadly, the answer is: the only way you'll be able to get a copy of Lolita Nation nowadays is by paying lots of money for the CD on eBay, or by stumbling across one in a used record store (which may take incredible persistence, since they're awfully scarce). [...] Since Scott Miller's music has never exactly caught on with the general public, it's unlikely there will be a full-scale reissue program in the future, but one never knows. (By the way, Scott Miller does not own the rights to Game Theory's recordings, so it's not up to him.)

In this case, the longevity of copyright is hurting everyone involved. The record company isn't benefiting from holding the copyright, since the band isn't popular enough for them to profit from a re-release; the artist is losing out, since they aren't legally permitted to fill the small but substantial demand for their music; and I'm losing out, since I can't legally purchase and listen to their albums.

Like Lessig, I don't want to abolish copyright, and I agree that artists need to retain some rights to compensate them for their efforts and encourage them to produce more. But the current lengthy term of copyright is overkill. Most artists, writers, musicians, and filmmakers would have plenty of incentive to keep producing creative work even if they only held the term of copyright for 10 or 20 years. Extending copyright by decades is profiting a few big franchises, but depriving the public of exactly the thing copyright is supposed to promote -- access to creative work. A copyright term closer to the original would protect artists' rights and profits while still allowing later archivists and derivative artists access to perpetuate the creative work's legacy.

Early Summer Playlist

noreply@blogger.com (Clara) — Thu, 15 May 2008 04:44:00 +0000

If you haven't checked out Pandora yet, you really should. Their tagline is "Listen to Free Internet Radio, Find New Music", and that's exactly what it is -- and the music it plays is uncannily well-tailored to whatever inputs (mostly song/artist names and up/down votes) you give it. You can store a lot of stations when you log in -- I have one for almost every mood.

Here's an early summer playlist (well, it's going to be a CD for the car), composed from both new music I found on Pandora and music I already knew about:

Cake - Rock 'n' Roll Lifestyle

Girl Talk - Bounce That

Spoon - Don't You Evah

The Presidents of the United States - Peaches

Maritime - Don't Say You Don't

Delays - Too Much in Your Life

Led Zeppelin - Fool in the Rain

Of Montreal - Oslo in the Summertime

Mark Sandman - Patience

Delays - Long Time Coming

Field Music - You Can Decide

!!! - Intensify

Steve Miller Band - The Joker

Belle and Sebastian - Step Into My Office, Baby

Tortoise - Peering

Paul Simon - Graceland

Broken Social Scene - Stars and Sons

Goldfrapp - Fly Me Away

Gateway T-1628 and Ubuntu Linux

noreply@blogger.com (Clara) — Wed, 14 May 2008 03:21:00 +0000

I posted recently about buying a new laptop -- how is it working out, you may wonder?

Pretty well overall. The screen has remarkable clarity, the keyboard is comfortable, and the battery life is okay; on the other hand, the speakers are the quietest and tinniest-sounding speakers of any computer I've ever owned/used extensively. At 14.1" for the screen, it's just a little bulkier than I'd like (the 12" iBook was a perfect size; how come computers that small now seem to be a luxury item?), and I'd prefer a slot-loading drive to the tray DVD drive it has. But overall it meets my needs, for now.

Judging by a quick Google search, I'm probably one of the first people to install Linux on this particular machine. It was a little tricky to find an install disk that would boot correctly; it's a 64-bit machine, but the Hardy 64-bit installer had a problem with xorg and the Gutsy 64-bit disk had a problem with the installer. The Gutsy x86 disk worked fine -- though I had to use the partitioner to wipe the entire disk rather than creating a partition alongside the Windows partition, since this computer came with a hidden partition with a "backup" install of Windows Vista. This seems like a particularly egregious invasion of the user's freedom to use the computer as they wish -- fortunately, blanking an entire hard drive still works!

Wireless and sound didn't work right away; I used Ndiswrapper to install the RTL8187B Realtek driver, which I was able to download from the internet. To get sound to work, I needed to install linux-backports-modules-generic, run alsamixer and turn everything to unmuted/full volume, and reboot.

I did the installation process the day before Hardy's official release; on release day, I used the updater to install the new release, and everything that had been working before still worked fine. I still haven't gotten around to fixing suspend/hibernate, which didn't work out-of-box, but I'm optimistic that I'll get it going when I have more time to tinker.

Coffee Shop Wireless

noreply@blogger.com (Clara) — Tue, 13 May 2008 01:09:00 +0000

As someone who works primarily on the internet, I often find myself going to coffee shops that offer wireless to get out of the house. While I wish that more coffee shops offered free wireless internet (those that do get my business more than they would otherwise!), I sometimes find myself paying for wireless internet.

This typically works as follows: while connected to that wireless access point, you can access only a handful of pages, until you create an account and pay on one of those pages. After you've paid, you have access to the entire internet.

Like most online services, these wireless subscriptions have an option for you to generate a new password if you've forgotten yours. But there's a Catch-22 -- they email you your new password, and you can't access your email until you've logged in... with your new password.

You'd think they'd have realized this issue and come up with a different solution, like a secret question, to allow you to reset your password without checking your email -- it's not like this is the highest-security application on the web. Meanwhile, I've learned from some frustrating times and am now storing these username/password combinations in text files on my laptop.

30-day Project: Succeed at Anything!

noreply@blogger.com (Clara) — Mon, 12 May 2008 03:06:00 +0000

Most people who read this have noticed that the post frequency has stepped up a lot recently, and I've talked to a handful of you about why: I'm doing a 30-day project where I blog about something I have an opinion about, every day for 30 days.

I first encountered the concept of the 30-day project in fifth grade; we were given the assignment to write something every day for 30 days. There were a handful of rules about what happened if you missed a day (10-year-olds couldn't be held to the exacting every-day-no-questions standard), but the basic premise was the same; thirty days of doing something is long enough to develop a habit.

I've encountered this concept a few other times on the internet. And I think it's true: commit to do something every day for 30 days; tell your friends/family/teachers/acquaintances that this is what you're doing; don't allow yourself to skip a day, or you'll have to start over; and you'll have acquired a new habit.

This 30-day project of blogging is my second recent 30-day project. In March, I determined (while under the spell of the out-of-shapeness that comes to most people who take on jobs that require sitting at a computer, all day, every day, in your own home) that I would go running for 20+ minutes every day. It was a satisfying and successful 30-day project; today, I had my first public confirmation of my success, by completing a 5k charity run. Not only was I able to complete the 5k (under hillier terrain than I'm used to, and faster than I normally go), but I had enough stamina to keep going through Sunday afternoon pickup basketball (which itself exhausted me when I started playing, long before the 30-day run).

I have a lot of ideas about new 30-day projects to try after I finish this one -- and I'd encourage any of my readers to join me! Weigh in in the comments -- what habits do you want to build?