We’ve got a mental midget in the white house and the Mayor of Long Branch is stealing peoples’ homes because our federal courts believe that “increasing tax revenue” is a “public use” of private property. And now we’ve got the supreme court siding with the collective pool of scum that is Hollywood and the RIAA. It is almost impossible to stay on top of all the issues and even when you do, it’s so easy to feel powerless when you’re consistently faced with disappointing leadership. So instead, I’ll just send yet another donation to the EFF.
update: OK, so I read the Grokster pdf more closely and it’s not so much that the supreme court has sided with the scum here as they have not proactively sided with technology. In fact, the supreme court did very little except guarantee that lawyers will make a fortune over the next few years trying to prove that an iPod is or is not like a betamax. So it’s even more important that groups like the EFF be supported since the RIAA will no longer be looking to eliminate our personal freedoms in one clean slice, but rather, they’ll seek to whittle them down case-by-case.
Monthly Archive for June, 2005
The kids from across the stream pissed on Steve’s hat after we met at the border, accidentally, me and Steve playing dangerously on the creaking ice behind Meadow Heights Road, and the bullies from the other side catching us unaware. Of course, we were smart-asses, and so not entirely without blame. But it was lucky for me that Steve was more of a smart-ass, because their attack began with him. I tried not to laugh while I waited for my turn, having always had a bad habit of cracking up at the wrong time. (For example, when Steve was sitting on his skateboard riding down the steep hill of Amy Lane, and fell off at top speed, hitting his ass hard on the asphalt, right in front of me, then flipping fast to his chin. I cracked up, despite the blood and his tears.) The bullies, remembering, most likely, us giving them the finger and running away, pushed Steve back and forth between them and punched the wind out of him and knocked him to the ground, and while Steve’s anger rolled frustrated tears down his cheeks, all I could think was, “Please don’t laugh. Please don’t laugh.” But I was out of control, and when they pissed on his hat with him sitting on the frozen dirt watching, that was all I could stand. I broke into a wild fit of giggling that grew with hilarious intensity the more I tried to stop. If this is the reason they didn’t beat the crap out of me, then god bless confusion. All I know is I started cracking up and the bullies disappeared promptly, hopping the stream and running off through the backyards on their side of the stream. Steve left his piss-soaked hat behind, and I bit my lip, slowly and barely regaining control as we walked out through the backyards behind Meadow Heights Road. Steve had his new bruises, I had my terrible guilt, and I told myself then, not for the first time, “It’s not that I want to be this way, it’s just the way I am.”
…be back soon.
I spent a couple of hours learning the flickr web service API and wrote some python scripts to generate a listing of the WB Flickr cosmos. You can view it here.
Getting the data i needed through the API was a piece of cake, especially since someone had already written a python wrapper for it. The hardest part was, as usual, getting my head around how zope wants to handle the results returned by external methods. Frickin’ zope. I could have written this same thing in php in about 5 minutes but instead i did it in Zope so i could relearn ZPT syntax all over again and forget it by next week.
Finally had a chance to futz around with Clutter. Totally Sweet app that discovers album art/cd covers for your iTunes library. you can then drag the covers to your desktop and when you want to hear an album, just dbl-click the cover. Brings back the sensual pleasure of browsing music in the context of its packaging.
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