patrissimo linked to this game 1000 Blank White Cards, which I’ve actually heard of before because my FC.o co-founder Luke Smith played the game once and posted all of his cards online. It seems like a really awesome party game, or to play with your friends some night at 3am when you’re too tired to think about normal things but too wired to actually sleep.
Category Archives: Uncategorized
I’ve written some songs, I’d like to write more
I have managed to complete a few songs since I started playing guitar in 8th grade, but I’d like to turn all of the parts of songs I have lying around into… finished pieces 😉 Each song has taken about a year to write, so it will be a long time before I have an album’s worth of stuff at this rate. Usually the music comes to me first on my guitar, and eventually I hear a line or two of the lyrics, and build the rest of the lyrics off of that inspiration. You can hear a few of my recordings at Nelson’s Music.
Therefore, even though I’ve done this as part of my 43 things, it is still on my to-do list! For those who don’t know, 43 things is kind of like Flickr or del.icio.us, except instead of sharing photos or bookmarks, you share to-do items. Neat concept, can’t wait to see how it evolves!
New Year’s resolutions
I resolve to be on time for things from now on, including personal appointments, classes, and deadlines. That started with being on time for FC.o’s conference calls, and successfully picking up Lauren when I said I would and dropping her off before her curfew. Look, see how happy she was that I dropped her off on time! Punctuality makes everyone happy!
Of course, I was late to the last FC.o conference call, but that was because I had to pick up my parents when the cops towed our car, so I’m not sure how much that was my fault…
I also resolve to post to a blog every day that I have internet access. This means that the FC.o blog counts, and if I guest blog somewhere else, that counts too. It also counts if I post privately or friends-only, so you may not see every entry. But mostly it means that you’ll be seeing updates here more frequently 🙂
New Year’s Eve party in Mahwah
Me, Kamraan, and Kim went to visit Kim’s friends from Columbia for New Year’s Eve. It was a pretty good time, I met some nice people, but Kim’s party last year was better because I knew most of the people there. All of the friendly girls at this party seemed taken. I watched the ball drop on TV, played some pool with Kamraan, fooled around with my new camera a bit, watched some of Garden State again, and then hit the sack. Not a bad evening, but not particularly exciting either.
While we were waiting at Lia(?)’s house before going to the party, I saw Megan Slankard on this “How Not To Dress” makeover show. I got to talk to her in person a little when she played at the EFF Freedom Fest while I was interning with the EFF in San Francisco, so I felt happy to see her on TV! I felt bad, however, because basically her style before going on the show was just jeans, a t-shirt, and Converse sneakers, and I thought she looked fine in that laid-back style. The makeover people wanted to put her in these funky dresses and make her wear high-heels (which will screw up her back no doubt), and I’m sure Megan was happy to be on the show because she got $5000 to spend, but I just didn’t like them harshing on her style. You should choose your own style, and I think it would be great if she became famous without having to dress like a pop princess.
In other news, I am in love with my Konica Minolta DiMage X50! Great little compact 5 megapixel camera: the internal zoom and a sliding lens-cover that is also an on-switch make it a good pocket camera. You will be seeing a lot more pictures on my blog in the future 😉
Sitting at a cafe in NYC
Well, I’m chilling out in the Esperanto Cafe in NYC while my friend Inga from Free Culture NYU finishes her last final. Daniel Putnam from Swat remarked “that’s a very chic image….working on one’s laptop in a new york coffeehouse”. It’s always nice hanging out in a public space and engaging with random people that you meet.
The first person I talked to was this fellow with an Alienware laptop. This is the first time I’ve seen an Alienware laptop “in the wild”, aside from a family friend who bought one a while back. What attracted my attention was the blinking alien eyes (“Das Blinkenlights!” I said under my breath). Windows vs. Mac vs. Linux
Do software patents destroy the American dream?
A very insightful comment on Slashdot questions whether software patents tend to prevent people from starting companies from scratch, as you can’t get started unless you have a patent portfolio to defend yourself with. If this could be shown to be the case, then I think this would be a strong line of attack against the current patent regime. I mean, this is a full frontal assault on the American dream, isn’t it?
The American dream is that you can start from nothing in this country, and as long as you work hard and you play your cards right, you can win wealth and success and make a name for yourself. But if you can’t even get in the game unless you are already a big company with a patent portfolio, then we’ve created a new nobility. Except instead of bluebloods who own all the land, it’s corporations that own all the ideas and use their profits to buy congressmen. Yes, creativity exists, people do make new things, but the new things have to be built upon old things unless we’re going to go back to the Stone Age and start trying to invent things that don’t rely on fire or the wheel.
Although some “intellectual property” can be tolerated, if people are allowed to own the very foundations of our technological society, if nobody can build without their permission, then we really are in an age of digital feudalism, and we’re intellectual serfs. There are efforts to fight back against particularly broad and stifling patents, such as the EFF’s Patent Busting Project, but ultimately we’re going to need to change the system that awards companies these egregiously bad patents. We shouldn’t have to donate our hard-earned money to strike down bad patents that are enforced with our taxes; they shouldn’t be granted in the first place.
I’m speaking at Yale | we must learn from environmentalism
I’m going to be speaking at Yale Law School this Friday (the 10th), at this event called “Digital Mix“, so if you’ll be in or around New Haven, CT then, please swing by! Also, if you’re at Swarthmore, and you don’t have any finals that day, you should come with me… Luke is planning to arrive back at Swarthmore on Thursday and take the train up with me as well, so it should be a rocking time!
Also, check out this great essay on what’s wrong with the environmentalist movement and what green activists can do to improve things. It’s definitely worth reading, since we at FreeCulture.org call ourselves “an environmentalism of the information commons” sometimes… We can learn from the environmentalist movement’s successes and mistakes. Like the environmentalist movement, we must bring together hundreds of seemingly disparate issues and unite them under one banner.
There are several differences between their cause and our cause, however… one significant one is that the golden days of the environment are irretrievably far behind us, and while we can work towards a progressive environmentalism, where we carefully steward the planet and use high technology to keep it clean and beautiful, it will never be the same as it was before humans had a population of many billions on Earth. However, while we must fight to protect the tradition of free culture that we’ve had, which has been losing ground in the past several decades, the fact is that the internet and digital technology give us the greatest promise for a truly free culture that the world has ever seen. If we can preserve our freedom, great changes will happen and the future will rock. The problem that we face is that it’s hard to get people excited about bills like the Induce Act, which threaten future innovation but which may do little to destroy our current comforts. Our opponents are clear-cutting the future, and the negative results will not be lost forests replaced by wastelands, but creativity that never has a chance to come into being. How do you measure the loss of something which has yet to be? If someone went around with a time machine and killed all our greatest proponents of peace and justice when they were still children, would we miss them?
On the other hand, what we are battling very much resembles a loss of biodiversity… a world in which only those who sign up with big corporations are allowed to create is very much like an environment that consists only of squirrels, sparrows, starlings and suburban lawns. There are many parallels which we can explore, but the point is, examine the differences, play with them, and see what insights we can draw from comparing the nascent free culture movement with 50+ years of building environmentalism into a worldwide movement.
Worst poem EVAR!
From a page about poetry, the worst poem ever written in the English language!
Is the election really over?
Perhaps I’ve underestimated Kerry. (Think Kerry Is Not Involved In This Fight? Think Again.) Maybe he’s still quietly working on making sure that election fraud didn’t turn the election in Bush’s favor, and maybe refusing to concede until every vote is counted wouldn’t have been the best strategy after all. If Kerry still manages to emerge as president after conceding the election, then he will deserve the office. And if it does turn out that the election was fixed, then we’re in for some interesting times.
Meatspace is highly overrated
I’ve decided that the first chance I get, I’m going to upload my brain into a computer, make lots of copies of myself, and then share myself over a p2p network under a Creative Commons license. Then I wouldn’t have to eat, sleep, or talk to girls in person. That would truly be geek heaven!
I could also probably take over the world, unless there are lots of other sentient beings on the p2p networks, but that’s just a pleasant side effect…
Oh yeah, and I’m in this article in Wired News about FreeCulture.org.