Not sure how this works

So... Osama bin Laden planned and coordinated a devastating attack on our country. President Bush vows to get him "dead or alive". Three years later, he's still alive, and he sends us a lecturing videogram 5 days before the election.

And yet... everyone expects this to HELP the President in the polls? WHAT?

OH right because despite their inability to distinguish bin Laden and Saddam Hussein, the teeming masses are SCARED WITLESS by the sight of the turbaned terrorist mastermind, and when the masses get scared, they rally behind whatever authority figure happens to be there, even if he is incompetent and worthless.

Mason Jennings

At this year's Austin City Limits, we got to hear Mason Jennings perform, and he was great. We bought two of his albums on the iTunes music store, and the other day on my commute home, I finally heard (really heard) the song "Adrian" for the first time. The lyrics are amazing but what really makes this song incredible is Mason Jennings's nuanced singing - he delivers just the right amount of resigned, sorrowful hope:

Looking down from the apple tree
My hands tied in back of me
With this rope below my chin
We don't fear death my adrian

As they set my last breath free
Turn your eyes but don't fail to see
The love you feel inside your skin
We don't fear death my adrian
We don't fear death my adrian

The lyrics are just... brilliant. Even without Mason Jennings's amazingly honest voice singing them, just reading them infuses me with such a profound sense of sorrow and an inexplicable awe at the beauty of mankind... all the hope in the midst of all the sorrow across so many millenia of human suffering and brutality.

This song, plus his wonderful song "Butterfly" (from the polar opposite of the emotional spectrum) have put him on my short list.

Tuesday

This past weekend I attended Brad's annual bonfire in scenic, rural Lancaster County, PA. I've only been away from the Northeast for 7 months and already I've become a weakling when it comes to cold weather. It stayed above 40 the whole time but I was at times freezing my ass off.

Crystal and I also visited with the Cardones and went apple picking with them near Unionville. They had a litter of kittens that they were trying to give away, and they've still got their horses. Chiara couldn't stop talking about Polocrosse, and we schemed up plans to get her and Christina down to Texas for some Polocrosse matches.

Work so far this week has been going well, and I got a more detailed schedule (or list of requirements) laid out through the end of next week and our Big Bend trip. I also downloaded and have been trying out ActiveState's Komodo IDE for Python development, and it's *sweet*. No major problems thus far, and I'm eager to see how well it stands up to serious development usage.

Also I discovered Harf BBS, a telnet-capable BBS with a zillion doors. I can't wait to get some serious BRE action going. This time around, I won't have to worry about my mom picking up the phone halfway through my turns. (Ah, the simple pleasures of adulthood.)

Woo HOO!

Not sure whether to file this under "politics" or "tech", but the evil, free-speech threatening piece of legislation known as the DMCA has been severely defanged in the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals.

The DMCA was originally intended to protect copyrighted works transmitted or stored in digital form, but its wording is such that it had much broader applicability, stripping legitimate users of their fair use rights and giving legal firepower to anyone with enough money to hire a big legal department. For instance, the DMCA was used against a Princeton University computer science professor who discovered a security flaw in a piece of software and published it in an academic paper.

Lexmark, in addition to making shoddy low-end printers, recently engaged in shoddy legal disputes by suing SCC for making generic toner cartridges that were compatible with Lexmark printers. The basis of the suit? SCC apparently had to decode the verification signature on Lexmark's cartridges in order to make compatible replacement catridges; Lexmark claimed these signature codes were copyrighted and protected under the DMCA. Fortunately the Circuit Court judge saw through this frivolous abuse of the legal system, and not only ruled against Lexmark, but issued a much broader statement that re-interprets and clarifies the DMCA:

A monopolist could enforce its will against a smaller rival simply because the potential cost of extended litigation and discovery where the burden of proof shifts to the defendant is itself a deterrent to innovation and competition. Misreading the statute to shift the burden in this way could allow powerful manufacturers in practice to create monopolies where they are not in principle supported by law. Instead, a better reading of the statute is that it requires plaintiffs as part of their burden of pleading and persuasion to show a purpose to pirate on the part of defendants. Only then need the defendants invoke the statutory exceptions, such as the reverse engineering exception. In this case, even if the Toner Loading Program were protected by copyright, and even if the access to the Printer Engine Program were "effectively" controlled, there has been no showing that SCC circumvented the authentication sequence for the purpose of accessing these programs. Indeed, the proof so far shows that SCC had no interest in those programs other than ensuring that their own cartridges would work with Lexmark's printers.

Sewiously

Ok, I'm going to really start blogging now.

Ready?

See, blogging nowadays sucks. The narrative blog voice, which used to be "introspective first person", has been perverted by the massive hordes of teenie bopper bloggers (teenie bloogers?) into something horribly whiny and presumptuous. When I first started blogging, before it was called blogging, I just put a daily record of my activities online. Nowadays one is expected to be witty and insightful, or, failing that, dry and cynical.

So I'm going to reinvent blogging by going back to basics. A neo-classical approach, if you will. Ready?

Today I woke up at 8:15am in a room on the 16th floor of a Holiday Inn about 15 miles outside of Houston, TX. I had lunch with a geophysicist and an MIT graduate in the cafeteria of the corporate offices of a large petroleum company, and between the hours of 3:30 and 7pm, my body channeled the equivalent energy of 25 pounds of exploding TNT.

For dinner I made stir-fried spicy chicken and rice. As I cooked I noticed that Jane had made a new friend outside. I went to investigate and introduce myself but her new friend fled by running up and jumping over our back fence.

Since October 1st I've been working at Enthought, a small, privately-held scientific and business software company here in Austin. Our office is in the Bank of America build at 6th and Congress, right in the heart of downtown. If jihadists decide to get medieval (or pre-medieval, as it were) on Austin, I'm probably going to be doing some high speed base jumping.

Right now I'm working on refactoring and improving Chaco, the core plotting component of the Envisage framework, but in the longer term I'll be working on electromagnetic simulation. It's great to be coding Python again.

Sewiously.

Transhuman resources

"Transhuman Resources": Some really neat ideas and concepts, organized as a dictionary.

Republicans against Bush

A couple of good web sites set up by Republicans and conservatives who think Bush and the neo-conservative agenda have gone overboard:

Rhetoric & Reality: This site documents in great detail the condictions between Bush's rhetoric and his deeds, with many links to speeches and actions.

Back to the Mainstream

Here is a Democrats for Bush page: http://democrats.bushblog.us/.