Archive for May, 2004

What a gigantomundo pain in the ass.

Uhaul started this fest off by delaying and essentially canceling the truck I reserved.

Budget came to the rescue.

Hauling shit up two flights of 100 year old stairs sucks.

100 year old apartments are pretty cool.

Cats meowing in discontent while riding in the car sucks.

A shower after a long day of moving and one missed shower is wonderful.

Sleep is even better.

Goodnight!

I wandered through Wright State‘s website today.

I took a quick peek at the new and the old members of the student government. I only know one of them, and I only know him by name.

Its shocking that so many faces have changed. I used to be at one point extremely connected into Wright State’s student politics. Now, well I could give a rats ass about half of it.

I also had to check in on Lambda Union, my former baby. I’m encouraged and discouraged at the same time. Discouraged because that asshole jeremy wright is president again. I will refrain from going any farther into the matter.

I’m encouraged because Christy Dyer seems to be doing an excellent job and it looks like they’ve got some great activities planned.

In some way I miss WSU. No, let me rephrased that, I miss Lambda Union. I worked so fucking hard at that organization and I loved every minute of it. (Okay, thats a little exaggeration, but not much.) I miss the family that I had both in Lambda Union and the Theatre Department. (Although I was the estranged black sheep in the Theatre Department, and the somewhat neurotic mother in Lambda Union.)

I’m just a little lonely right now, I don’t quite feel part of the Citifamily, I’m not yet at NKU. I’m far enough from Dayton that it makes getting together with my actual family quite hard, and well we’re all in our own worlds now a adays.

I need to sleep. Wish I had some “family” here with me right now.. ;-)

I went hunting for a Starbucks today. Specifically this Starbucks. Don’t bother trying to find it via the map. Its not where it says it is, but its close. Its just one of those dealies where the road changes name midstream, but there is another road with the same name right near it. (Whoever said urban planners had no sense of humor never drove anywhere in the midwest.)

I spent about 45 minutes aimlessly driving around and turning around way too much, and even waiting in a Burger King drive thru for a bit too long. (They would’ve failed if I was timing them. (Yeah I worked at this McDonald’s too long…))

Okay but back to the place that doesn’t make my stomach churn, Stabucks. I actually had almost given up on finding the dang store, and was gonna get on 471 to get back home via Ohio (yeah I like being suspended over lots of water in a heavy chunk moving of metal) and I thought “hmm, let me check the other side of this road..” Low and behold behind a Graeter’s Ice Cream there was a little Starbucks tucked in a plaza. From the outside the place looks like a dump. (well a dump for a Starbucks) But I walked in and I knew right away this was my Starbucks. (For the Starbucks uninitiated, addicts like me find a store that they like, and always go to it; there is something special about the store that draws us to em.) My first “my Starbucks” was the Mad River location in Dayton, Ohio. I’ve actually driven from West Chester, Ohio (a 30 minute drive!) just because I wanted to go there. When I was in Atlanta “my Starbucks” was the Little Five Points location. (Which was really convenient because it was on the way between home and work.) I really like the Newport/Fort Thomas location because, well it pulls off that architectural trick I love so well, taking the old and making it new again without destroying it. It preserves some history instead of just bulldozing over it, and re-papering the walls so you can’t see the the history. My kudos to the design team!

Hmm in other news I’ve been getting unpacked. I plan to die in this apartment, I’m just gonna live here till I’m 185 because I’m so freaking sick of moving. If I don’t live to be 185, I’m gonna sue someone, who and how I don’t know, but I’ll figure it out.

In other news, I’m amazed how fricking irresponsible people are. I went on a date a week or two ago. Cathy, my coworker, has taken to calling him the drunk. Thats how good the date went. He couldn’t even wait till he got out of the car to start drinking a beer. But what amazed me is that he actually got himself into enough financial trouble to file bankruptcy, but didn’t actually show up at the courthouse to finalize it. Now you see if a day goes by where I don’t talk to someone who is filing bankruptcy, its a rare day. Usually when I talk to someone who has recently filed, they sound really relieved. They’re happy that they are going to be done with the matter once and for all. I also get pissed at people who complain about random fees on their account when they’re five months past due. Crike, pay you bill and then don’t worry about the fees silly!

Okay but almost enough about my job, one more thing. I really like it. Its a great place to work I’ve found and hell its a great boost of schadenfreude.

Okay. Its sleepy time. And I am going to try to be more regular with making entries…

G’night!

I hate bitching, moaning, and whining.

I’ve been attempting to figure out how to write this entry without doing any of those.

I haven’t figured out how, so this will be an exercise in self loathing.

This is an entry that the geeks will follow. Others, try to tag along.

Okay, what started the whole fucking rent was when Six Apart announced its licensing scheme for Movable Type 3.0. (Its the program I use to run this eJournal, as well as my other eJournals and the Interestring Websites page.

Part of the problem is for many people it was a pretty radical change. Movable Type<=2.661 was essentially monetarily free for all non-commercial purposes. As the license for Movable Type 3.0 stands now that is no longer the case.

Some of the “geek” bloggers have been migrating to WordPress. They admittedly like it because it is GPL licensed, meaning that the license can never change on them. Lets put this right out there:

This rent isn’t as much about Movable type as it is about intellectual property in general. First off no one is forcing anyone to abandon their current license of Movable Type. Part of the current culture war is determining what the rights of consumers should be. Consumers want the right to do whatever they damn please with intellectual property. Just look at the P2P networks. I don’t blame the record companies for suing file sharers. I don’t think it a good business strategy, but they make their money from controlling intellectual property. The concern is if they exert too much control the consumers have had usage rights ripped out from under them that they previously had when they paid for the product.

An example, you used to legally have the right to make a copy of a VHS movie you purchased for backup purposes. This is one of the rights that consumers used to have. The problem was consumers abused this right, and gave away copies. The movie studios then started using Macrovision, a technology that the movie to be watched but not copied. This story goes on and on but essentially content producers keep working on novel ways to “protect” their works and consumers keep finding novel ways to circumvent those protections. Its a simple war of mutual aggression. We might as well declare WWIII now. (Assuming it hasn’t already started.)

Back to Movable Type. Us bloggers and eJournalers have enjoyed a whole bunch of free enough software. Mark Pilgrim excellently frames the issue, although he also goes on and bitches too much. It was almost free, and every version except 3.0 is still almost free. You could argue that even GPL’d software isn’t free because if you modify it you cannot license your modifications under any terms you’d want, this is the equivalent of getting a free ice cream cone at the ice cream shop, but being told that when you take a shit you’ve gotta return it to the ice cream shop to be reused by anyone who wishes to reuse it. There are specific economic costs with the GPL license, specifically you do not have the freedom to choose whichever license you like for any derivative work. (I’ll admit right up front even my entries here are not free, they’re licensed under a Creative Commons License.)

So what am I going to do as far as upgrading? I’m not going to. I’m quite happy with my almost free Movable Type. Like I commented on MetaGrrrl’s blog I’m miffed but I’ll live. I’ve considered Word Press, but quite frankly I’m not impressed with the feel of the blogs that are using it now. I still think Movable Type is a better choice. Perhaps because I’ve not been able to get Phil‘s RSS to load, and as far as I can tell it is because of how Word Press functions and the speed of his server. I’ve given up bugging him about it.

Timothy Appnel has also written an excellent piece about Movable Type and Eating, although I didn’t find anywhere to work it in.

Yeah. So thats my bitch. Movable Type, is free enough and damn it I’l stick with it.

I was reading the “Stars Speak Against the Federal Marriage Amendment” in the April 27th, 2004 issue of the Advocate. (I’m a little behind okay?)

I was a little surprised at the extremely harsh words they had for George W. Bush. But after looking them a little bit I realized many of them were just being direct. One calls for GW’s impeachment, another asserts that he should “be prevented from using words like freedom and liberty.”

Oddly enough I’m actually really respectful of Saddam Hussein. Perhaps because he has made no pretenses of his leadership. I’m sure he knows he maintained power by killing his opponents and made no promises of freedom or liberty.

Now GW on the other hand has done the exact opposite. While he is likely the most recent president to pound on concepts of freedom and liberty, he’s actually likely done the most to rescind them. Even in Iraq where he direct the United States to start an Illegal war to oust Saddam Hussein’s horrendous regime, his administration is now in a major disagreement with its own selected Governing Council as to who should be the leader of Iraq’s interim government. Excuse me, this man is trumpeting bringing freedom to Iraq paid for by the lives of our young men and women, and simultaneously denying that freedom to Iraqis. Yeah thats logical.

So excuse me if I have more respect for a horrendous dictator like Saddam Hussein than the leader of the “free” world. As least Saddam Hussein made no pretenses of preserving freedom.

Oh and one final thing. I’m in support of impeaching Bush. Its a simple matter, whereas Clinton only lied about sex, GWB has suggest that the United States violate its own Constitution by amending it to be discriminatory against a specific group. Last time that happened was when it was written, and we fought a few wars over that.