Figment

Dear Peter,

You were right, Uncle Bobby doesn’t exist. Matt and Katherine agree: psychological coping projection.

1. Old Mike says at the beginning and the end that truth is in the teller and history is how you tell it.
2. The stepfather going to jail and Bobby leaving happens at the same time, because Mike didn’t need him anymore.
3. At the end, old Mike says “that’s how I remember it.”

It isn’t like The Sixth Sense, they don’t give you context clues, but after watching it I’m pretty sure that Bobby is meant to be fictitious.

And Back Into Debt I Plunge

No finance fees if you pay within six months? I couldn’t resist.

Why did I choose the iMac instead of a swanky 15″ PowerBook? Price was the major factor. I got a better-equipped iMac with a bigger screen for a good deal cheaper. Second, after looking at them in the store, Katherine and I agreed that the 12” really is the best one. Its ultra-portability and youngest child charm are just sooooo the way to be. And since she’s so far been kind enough to let me play with hers when she’s not using it, I’ve got my laptop base covered. And thirdly, I just loaded Warcraft III: Reign of Chaos with all the settings cranked up to eleven and wow did it soar.

After a few moments of thought, I opted not to get a Bluetooth Keyboard even though they seem cool. Most people I know who’ve gone down the wireless input device road love it, but it just seemed like $69 I didn’t want to spend just then. If only they had offered a multi-button Bluetooth mouse…

I haven’t come up with a name for my new adoption yet. For one, I can’t quite decide: is a 17” iMac male or female?

Update: When the new iMac was released, Apple had Pixar come up with a pair of adorable shorts. Apple has since taken them off their servers, but I managed to find copies. The second contains evokes an almost naughty feeling as the iMac realizes we’ve caught it checking itself out. Watch iMac Dance and iMac Superdrive.

Isabel Allows Redesign

Since Hurricane Isabel gave me the day off, I happily wasted it watching television and redesigning my site. I’ve decided to switch to TypePad for my hosting and weblogging needs. I’m just in love with the service and how easy it makes it to do stuff. At the moment my page on davextreme.com is still up, but the link to my page on the main davextreme page points here to davextreme.typepad.com, but I’ll set up domain mapping a some point. The image of the tree comes from freefoto.com, and I’ve done the color scheme from the photo’s pallete. (I later discovered this article suggesting doing that. Yay me for being clever!)

Feedback on the new look is of course appreciated.

File Sharing in Canada

As the RIAA wages war on its own customers in the US, it seems that Canadians have little to worry about. Tech Central Station reports that the Canadian Copyright Act specifically allows “private copying” of music. Their solution to the problem of music theft was to institute a federally mandated tax on blank media. In the five years since the act went into effect, the music industry has collected 70 million Canadian Dollars ($51 million US) through the 77 cent CAD (56 USD) tax on blank CDs and 29 cents CAD (21 USD) per blank tape. According to the article:

While the Digital Millennium Copyright Act may make it illegal to share copyright material in America, the Canadian Copyright Act expressly allows exactly the sort of copying which is at the base of the P2P revolution.

In fact, you could not have designed a law which more perfectly captures the peer to peer process. “Private copying” is a term of art in the Act. In Canada, if I own a CD and you borrow it and make a copy of it that is legal private copying; however, if I make you a copy of that same CD and give it to you that would be infringement. Odd, but ideal for protecting file sharers.

Every song on my hard drive comes from a CD in my collection or from a CD in someone else’s collection which I have found on a P2P network. In either case I will have made the copy and will claim safe harbor under the “private copying” provision. If you find that song in my shared folder and make a copy this will also be “private copying.” I have not made you a copy, rather you have downloaded the song yourself.

Update 12/12/03: A decision today underlines that Peer-to-Peer downloading is legal in Canada, but may levy a music player tax. C|Net has the story.

On Joining Friendster

I usually try to be on the cusp of trends. I joined eBay in 1998 and Napster in Fall 1999. For some reason, it seemed for a time like too much work to set up Friendster, but last night I got around to doing it. (I was quite overstimulated by a great idea by Kenji and finishing The Goblet of Fire, so my energy level was high.) I’m glad I did, as I do feel occasional pangs of guilt for turning my back from my high school friends. I’m sure that Friendster will help me get back into some level of contact with them. Not that I’m actively looking to rekindle long past friendships, but I’d love to at least know who’s in the area.

This Connected Selves post examines a biological charge that human beings are mentally unable to mainain more than a certain amount of close friendships. I’ve been known to point to size discrepancy for why fraternities and sororities are so different (gender differences being obviously big, too). Frats (at W&M at least) tend to be smaller, allowing for greater social interaction between all the members. Everyone has their closest group of friends, but most are entirely comfortable with any other member in the group. I think because of this you’ll also find frat guys to have fewer friends with non-members that sorority girls. Sororities go for a bigger pool, and you can see that they’re not able to maintain close friendships with all of them. It just isn’t possible to be close friends with more than a handul of people, and lesser friends with more than a few dozen.

This post on Plastic Bag discusses the first one, bringing up that Friendster and the web may be able to begin to overcome that. Online communities allow a level of casual intimacy that people wouldn’t otherwise maintain. How often would I email Whitehead if he didn’t have a webpage? But since he does, I can check in on it every few weeks, read what he’s posted, and remember the guy. Likewise, by leaving comments on your friends’ pages, you can keep up a dialogue, however mundane, that keeps a friendship burning just enough.

Update: Here’s another post on the issue, and here’s the paper by Robin Dunbar, “Co-Evolution of Neocoretx Size, Group Size and Language in Humans”.

Optical Illusions

The Hivelogic Narrative is a well-respected weblog. Very bizarrely, it is written in the second person. Today, it links to this set of optical illusions. They play off how odd it is that our brain is able to construct a three dimensional world out of the two dimensional images it gets.

There are a bunch of rules that filmakers have to follow when they’re making a movie for the audience to be able to understand what they’re seeing. If done wrong, viewers will get confused when, for example, an actor walks to a door that they thought was on the other side of the room. Citizen Kane is famous because it played with these tricks. In one scene, Kane appears to be standing in front of normal windows which are actually absurdly large and start at head-height. This works because your brain is fooling itself into believing that the images on the screen represent the real world.

Anthropologists curious about this once set up a movie screen in front of a tribe that had never seen movies or photos before. The people had no idea what they were looking at, seeing just a large, bright screen. They watched curiously for minutes, unable at all to see the movie, until a chicken appeared. Once they had seen the chicken (which they recognized from daily life), their brains were able to identify the images and could then understand to turn the flat signals into an interpretable concept.

Update: Tripod doesn’t want me linking to their images directly. To see the Citizen Kane pictures, go 3/4 down this page.

200th Post: MxPx and Dashboard Confessional Show

Sunday Katherine and I saw MxPx and Dashboard Confessional. MxPx, tagging along with Dashboard Confessional until their own tour for their upcoming album, was very good. They didn’t play a few songs I would have liked to hear, but in their short set they got in a lot of their good ones and managed to sneak in two good new tunes. Dashboard Confessional played very well, much to the delight of hundreds of teenage girls, but didn’t offer very much to me that the CD can’t provide. Mostly they just stood there any played their songs, pausing occasionally to let the crowd chime in. And they sounded good, but there just wasn’t much showmanship there. Though the cover of “Teenage Dirtbag” was a pleasant surprise. (And to make me proud, Katherine recognized it before I did.)

Bloglines

A lot of website have syndicated feeds built into them in RSS or XML formats. Mine does. Every LiveJournal page does. Most major newspapers’ sites do. But most people don’t know about them and don’t use them. I’ve known about them for a long time, but most news aggregators I’ve found are more complex than I was willing to deal with.

Yesterday I ran accross Bloglines. It’s free and is very easy to set up. Just sign up, then go to the bottom of their page and click on “Easy Subscribe.” It’ll give you a link that you can drag onto your web browser’s bookmarks bar. Then, whenever you come across a page you want to subscribe to, just click the little subscribe favelet and it’ll be added to your “My Bloglines” page. The site works very well and is very simple, which is precisely what I wanted.

Why? The friends page on LiveJournal is a very handy place to check for updates on your friends’ pages, but is of course restricted to LJ users. A news aggregator like Bloglines works with any page with a feed and checks it once an hour. When there’s an update that page’s name will appear in bold, and you can can click on it to read an excerpt or go to the actual web page. Right now I have all the non-LJ blogs I read plus Wired News and the NY Times set up. Whenever I come across a new page I want to subscribe to, I just click the favelet and I’m all set.

How does one know if a page has an RSS or XML feed? Most have a little orange button on them somewhere. (Mine looks like this.) If in doubt, click the subscribe favelet and see what happens. If Bloglines opens but doesn’t display any entries, the page probably doesn’t have a syndication format set up. Some sites provide entires posts in their feeds, others just use excepts, others offer feeds for both. Personally I prefer exceprts, because it’s easier to skip over entries I don’t think I’m interested in, and because I like to read the post in the context of the actual page.

Oh, one more thing: when you first subscribe to a page in Bloglines, the entries may appear out of date. They’ll refresh within the hour, it just means that Bloglines hadn’t been checking that site regularly.

Women, Purses, Inconsideration

Women: putting your handbag in the middle of an aisle or walkway, even if it’s right by your chair, is not okay. If it won’t fit under your chair or in front of the bench on the Metro, it goes in your lap. That’s just the way it is.

Quo Vadimus

I love the fall. I love the changing leaves and the coming of cold (as opposed to winter’s lingering cold). I even love the rain. But the impending arrival of autumn has left another season marker in my head, providing an easy check against where I was a year ago and a year before that. I’m not unhappy about where I am right now, but I know it’s not where I want to be for very long. The problem is, after all this time, I still don’t know where I’m going. Web design looks more and more appealing as an option, but with the forthcoming 1.0 release of the frat page I become less and less happy with my design (and more and more annoyed at IE/Win). Last night my dreams revolved around modifying tags and rebuilding the site. If that sounds boring, it is, and it left me in a very peculiar mood that hasn’t receeded with the morning fog.