Betsy and I were having a discussion today about wierd names in our family. Mine just has a LOT of old fashioned, sort of “mountain” names. Here's a short list:
Van
Jorene
Thurman
Acey
Flo
Bernice (pronounced, for some reason, Ber-ness, no long e for the i)
Check (short for Chester)
Vida Lou (pronounced VYE-DA, not VEE-DA)
Not a lot of names that you'd find on birth certificates now. None of them appear in the top 1000 names from the last 12 years.
Round-up of Links About SCOTUS Decision to Censor Library Internet Access.
Not too much new to report about the SCOTUS censorship decision yet, but here are more links from around the web. Some librarians are reporting calls from companies selling filtering software already. Oy.
Look twice at that Yahoo News headline – it refers to the Court approving “anti-porn” filters in libraries. What they fail to mention is that there's a heck of a lot more content than just porn that is also being blocked.
I want to make sure that I note that this ruling currently applies only to those libraries that accept federal e-rate money for technology and telecommunications. Unfortunately, with the funding situation facing most libraries today, many don't have a choice. And as Andrew Mutch implied in his message, it's a good bet that Congress will try to apply this logic to ALL federal funding now, which means pretty much every library everywhere.
It will be interesting to see if this applies to wireless internet within a library, too. What a major step backwards that would be.
For those that might have missed it, big defeat in library land today. Have I mentioned that I'm really not happy with the political leanings of our government right now? I think this is a poor reading of the first amendment, as well as detrimental to libraries public trust. Hopefully something like SquidGuard or something much like it will become the defacto standard for library filtering, since it's free (as in beer and speech) and it allows you to control the filtering in a plain text file. No hidden commercial filters would be great, and since the CIPA isn't specific on WHAT libraries should filter in order to continue to recieve federal funding, perhaps they could just install something like squidguard, block…oh…goatse.cx (the perennial joke on Slashdot), and then leave access to the rest of the web alone. Would that satisfy CIPA?
Donnie Darko was one of the best films I've ever seen. Either that, or an acid trip from eating contaminated mushrooms. I'm not sure. Why don't you rent it or buy it and let me know what you think?
Tonight: Made paella for Jerry, Cheryl, Karen and Stephen. Played lots of Dead or Alive 3, 4 player tag team mode. Played lots of Fluxx. Had fun. Drank wine that Marianne had given us weeks ago. Had brownies, ice cream, and caramel.
This morning: finished Harry Potter: Order of the Pheonix. 870 pages inside 36 hours.
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. 🙂