Last night:
7pm: see the Hulk (very good, Ang Lee does a fine job adapting a difficult story, and the special effects are much better than the previews)
9:30pm: Barnes and Noble to see the festivities concerning the midnight release of the 5th Harry Potter book, the Order of the Pheonix.
12:15am: out the door of B&N, on the way home.
12:30am: Home, bed, reading
3:00am: ~275 pages in, give in to sleep, wish I could read more.
The ever-amusing Senator Orrin Hatch firmly put his foot in his mouth yesterday at a hearing for copyright abuses.
From the Washington Post:
During a discussion on methods to frustrate computer users who illegally exchange music and movie files over the Internet, Hatch asked technology executives about ways to damage computers involved in such file trading. Legal experts have said any such attack would violate federal anti-hacking laws.
“No one is interested in destroying anyone's computer,” replied Randy Saaf of MediaDefender Inc., a secretive Los Angeles company that builds technology to disrupt music downloads. One technique deliberately downloads pirated material very slowly so other users can't.
“I'm interested,” Hatch interrupted. He said damaging someone's computer “may be the only way you can teach somebody about copyrights.”
The senator acknowledged Congress would have to enact an exemption for copyright owners from liability for damaging computers. He endorsed technology that would twice warn a computer user about illegal online behavior, “then destroy their computer.”
The REALLY amusing part is that Laurence Simon, a poster on the tech site Amish Tech Support has done some cybersleuthing and determined that Senator Hatch's own website fails to comply with a licensing agreement for software that he uses on it. Read the whole story here.
Still too angry to write rationally about the decision made by the UNC-CH board of the library to cancel all travel to the ALA national conference in Toronto. Yanking funding is one thing, but to do it TWO DAYS before the conference AND to disallow it counting as work time is just crazy.
Grrrrrrrrr
Well, a major event in Kentucky today…the Hatfields and the McCoys signed a truce, after a feud that lasted just over a hundred years. The feud started over a pig, and ended with over a dozen of the family members killing each other over the course of the feud. To give you all some sense of place, this all occurred basically right where I grew up…
So as some of you may have noticed, a few cosmetic changes on the blog…finally go around to photoshopping the picture I wanted to use, and added a Creative Commons license to the blog. Hopefully soon I will have that elusive ibiblio account and can run Gallery and some other software so that I can do the other things I'd like in connection to the blog and my general web presence. One great thing about doing the Library Science thing is that I can spend all this time on my web stuff, and then claim it's work AND use it as examples of things when I apply for jobs. đŸ™‚
Just for you Jean: a Parody of Famous Blogger's Styles.
Great point by Lessig about reasons that librarians should ALL be signing the petition for the Public Domain. Sign up, people!
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cutting libraries while killing the commons. Commons-blog has a nice link to a story about Milwaukee libraries being defunded. Yet at the same time, extensions of copyright terms simply increase the cost of getting access to content. If every librarian signed our Reclaim the Public Domain Petition, then perhaps we could rebuild a public domain that could make the costs of libraries fall. [Lessig Blog]
This may be the coolest use of blogger ever…anonymous book reviews by children at a library. Phenomenal idea, and great practice writing for the kids…
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Got blog? The Roselle Public Library District sure does. Check out their way cool Blogger Book Club!
“The Blogger Book Club is an 'invitation only,' online, book discussion group. It is an opportunity for kids to share their thoughts and ideas about books, anonymously, at their convenience and from wherever they happen to be (at home, on vacation, in the library… wherever!). We will be talking about several of the books from the 2004 Rebecca Caudill nominee list….
The book club is open only to kids in grades 4 – 6 who have a valid Roselle Public Library card.“
For those of you keeping up with local news, the Chapel Hill Police have fired John Moore (at least, the Chapel Hill News reported that he was fired…the link says he was released), one of the two officers who impersonated FBI agents while questioning Erin Carter (a Chapel Hill High School student) about some supposed “hacking” that had occured on the schools computers. She had a blog entry that mentioned said hacking, and thus became the focus of the police investigation.
Link to stories from The Independent. Direct link to one of the better ones.
Not quite sure what I could possibly say about this, other than Japanese culture has some very, very strange ideas.
Just had to blog it, cause it took me several minutes to figure out what the fark it was about.
Warning: not for the prudish.