LOTR Easter Egg

I don’t know if this actually counts as an Easter Egg, but it’s amusing nonetheless and makes me like my rarely-used Mac just a little bit more:

From a Terminal window, type the command:

cat /usr/share/calendar/calendar.history | grep "LOTR"

(From the August 2004 issue of MacWorld)

Back to life, Back to reality

My friends’ Wedding Weekend Extravanza is over, my kind-of mini-vacation is over, and I’m back at work now. Yuck.

While catching up on my tech reading though, I read:

That the RIAA continues to be a bunch of assholes

A good article on open source myths (I don’t know when we all lost our minds and thought open source was going to solve the world’s problems)

And that we all finally got a hint of the idea that Google is not as invincible as we all think– they had a bad day yesterday after losing the Froogles.com domain name, getting hit with an age discrimination suit, and, of course, the latest email virus attacks that caused temporary outages.

AIDS Walk SF 2004: Thanks!

Thanks to everyone who supported me and donated money for AIDS Walk San Francisco 2004. I was able to beat my fundraising goal by raising $400, and the Stanford team, as small as disorganized as we were, was able to raise about $2000 total. For the overall walk, 21,000 walkers helped raise over three million dollars! It’s always great to see so many people of every race, creed, and color come together and remind us that we should not grow complacent. And I thank all those who donated– it’s great to know that I have friends and co-workers who support me and this important cause!

Universities and iPods now

Another post on Slashdot on universities and digital music– this time on Duke University handing out iPods to its entire freshmen class. Like we need to give prospective students more reason not to come to Stanford.

I wonder though if this kind of stuff continues, whether the RIAA and the MPAA will make a stink that universities are just encouraging illegal downloading of copyrighted materials. I mean, unlike the recent Napster deals, giving out iPods doesn’t discourage illegally downloading music. Duke is distributing the portable digital music players as “part of an initiative to encourage creative uses of technology in education and campus life.” Which makes me smirk because that’s what many of us have been saying is the reason for college campuses to have liberal computing and network usage policies– to promote the university’s educational mission by allowing experimentation and self-learning, especially the exploration of “creative uses of technology.” And many people would consider file-sharing, breaking DRM systems, and experimenting with what you can get on and off portable storage devices like iPods certainly as “creative uses of technology.”

Or maybe the next big iPod security risk will be violation of the Honor Code. I’m assuming that even though Duke will encourage iPods to be an integral part of coursework, the powers-that-be will have to ban them from exams (much like how many have had to ban cell phones and in a previous generation, graphing calcultors).

Links:
Slashdot post
Duke News & Communications release

Live Strong

Lance Armstrong takes the lead in the Tour De France. This makes me feel better about the Live Strong program. It wouldn’t get nearly as much attention as it should if Armstrong wasn’t wearing the yellow jersey.

Get your LIVESTRONG wristband and other products here. (Or in participating stores: Macy’s, Nordstrom, Foot Locker, Finish Line, Dick’s Sporting Goods, and all Nike Town stores.)

My mom and my aunt are both breast cancer survivors!

The shell toe and the throwback craze

I’m very excited about my new sneakers: old school adidas Superstar basketball shoes, introduced in 1969 as the first basketball shoe with an all-leather upper and rubber shell toe (not to mention the trademark adidas stripes). All Day I Dream About Sindy. Or Sex. Or Shoes, as the case may be.

All this throwback stuff is coming back into fashion and I can’t help resenting the appropriation of my childhood pop culture. I know, I’m starting to sound like a bitter old person who starts every phrase with “back in my day…”, but it’s strange to think how we spent so much time making fun of the 80’s and early 90’s and how embarassed most of us Generation X kids (hey, I still fall into the 1961-1981 bracket) became of cheesy 80’s fashion, music, and culture filled with consumerism and conspicuous consumption. And now, we embrace it in a throwback craze (like in the VH1 show “We Love the 80’s”) and Generation Y is buying old adidas shell-toe shoes and off-the-shoulder Flashdance t-shirts and sweatshirts. And look at celebrities like Will Smith– he owes his celebrity to the cheesy flourescent-colored fashions and pop rap of the Fresh Prince of Belair and now he’s promoting the old Converse basketball shoes in I, Robot.

Of course, when we embraced the old school basketball shoes, we were in a throwback crazy to 60’s style. Every generation steals from the previous one– in my mind, Baby Boomers were the last ones to really come up with something new. Since then, we’ve merely been recycling cultural artifacts and repackaging them for consumption. The commoditization of culture!

Universities and Napster

Somebody posted to Slashdot today about George Washington University making a deal with Napster. The list of comments about this is more interesting than the actual deal (since Penn State and the University of Rochester struck deals with the digital music service a while ago). Many of the comments focus on the argument that a) this won’t really stop students from downloading copyrighted music illegally and b) it’s lame that universities are spending money (read: tuition) on providing this type of service instead of on educating students.

While those arguments are somewhat valid, they are also short-sighted. And I don’t know if it’s because people don’t know much about how universities work or because when you have an online forum, you get a lot of not-very-thought-out comments. Probably both. In any case, my point is that yes, it won’t stop students from downloading copyrighted music illegally, but it will probably stop a significant percentage of them since not every college student jumps on the illegal file-sharing bandwagon as quickly as the media and the entertainment industry makes it out to seem. You still have to actually know about programs like Kazaa and BitTorrent and whatever-the-next-thing-is and you have to know how to use these technologies, where to look, etc. And with bandwidth caps and shaping, sometimes even blocking, of file-sharing traffic on an increasing number of college campuses, it makes it even harder. Not to mention that it’s getting harder and harder nowadays to get a decent download of a song on the first try. Realistically, if you find the right price point that’s trivial enough for the average college student, they will pay for music. And no matter what record companies might say, there are still plenty of college students who may download copyrighted music illegally but also buy CDs on a regular basis. The Try before you buy digital music model actually works a lot of the time.

But in general, when you’re talking about how many college students listen to digital music, an investment into some type of campus digital music service isn’t an idea that should be dismissed so readily. And especially when you consider how much of a resource suck DMCA complaints and file-sharing has become on college campuses, it’s worth it to many universities to come up with a better solution. Many universities are drowning in a sea of file-sharing and copyright melodrama and everybody is scared shitless of the threat of liability. That’s why universities are forming groups like the Joint Committee of the Higher Education and Entertainment Community Members– it may seem like they’re just getting in bed with the RIAA and the MPAA, but there’s also a desperation in alliances like this one. Universities know that something needs to be done because it really can’t go on like this– with students getting sued and university legal offices and IT departments spending all of their resources on handling DMCA issues– much longer. By choosing to provide a service like Napster, some universities are simply hoping that they’ll save money in the long run so that they can get back to the business of educating their students instead of the business of worrying about everybody getting sued.

Personally, I think that big (read: rich) universities like Stanford and MIT should lead the charge in standing up to the RIAA and the MPAA. I know, the real fear is that if they did do something like that, the RIAA and the MPAA could unleash all of their resources against them and even higher-ed powerhouses like Stanford and MIT could most likely never fight back with the same force. But you never know. These universities are leaders in technology and research and are home to people like Larry Lessig and campaigns like Computer Scientists for Social Responsibility and Verified Voting. Who knows what support they might be able to drum up if they decided to fight this fight?

In the meantime, I think digital music services like iTunes and Napster should consider offering educational pricing for all students and not worry about making deals with each individual institution. Verifying enrollment and student status might be a challenge, but think about how many college students would jump on that!

Link

Superheroes and AIDS

An interesting anti-AIDS campaign (in French). My heart aches when I see pictures like this. And it has nothing to do with the fact that they’re superheroes.

Bliss

A guilty pleasure: great spa products. I’m currently addicted to the Bliss suite of products (also available at Sephora). Especially the super minty soap’n scrub (its directions actually say to scrub “until you can’t stand it anymore”), the mammoth minty scrub soap (giant bar of soap almost too big for my small hands), and the lemon and sage softening soak (especially helps with those migraine days). I’m clearly obsessed with all things minty. Very refreshing all around and leaves your skin extra soft, smooth and kissable.

Web site logs and search engines

Why you should not spend too much time looking at your Web site statistics: top search string for my site is “Sindy.” Makes sense. Put it into Google and you get me as the 6th hit. Not bad. The others mostly have to do with the Sindy doll. One had to do with the International Social Syndicate (Sindy, for short). Apparently, there are over 6,000 members in Geneva. Weird. I kind of want to go to an event just so I can say, “I’m Sindy!”