The internet, computing, and the many uses of technology.
Okay, it turns out that the Google Calendar gadget on iGoogle has natural-language input support too! Also, it can do locations. This is just ridiculous. Everything is going to work so much better than it would have before.
It is a good thing that Google is not evil, because if they were they would control the world.
My new motto for all things technological:
If there is a product, service, or technology, Google makes a version that is better than the one you have, and it is free.
I have just discovered that if I edit my subscribed Google calendars in iCal, they sync to the server. This is awesome. The only issue is that iCal has to be open to sync stuff. So I can no longer just use my really awesome natural-language event-creating dashboard widget QuickCal on its own. I have to open iCal first. This is not really that big of a deal. In fact, putting things in perspective, it’s pretty cool that I can receive an email, press a button, type in “Meeting tomorrow from noon until 12:30 pm”, press enter, and have it appear in my Google calendar. All that QuickCal lacks is location support, but I am sure this will be implemented soon. Perhaps it will support attendees and invitations as well for the ultimate Google integration experience.
It worked! I have done it! My calendars are all online now, and I am subscribed to them with iCal, so they show up on my iPod. Any changes I make online show up on my iPod the next time I sync it. More importantly, I don’t have to be at home to update my calendar.
The future is now.
I am switching entirely to Google Calendar. I am in the process of uploading my iCal calendars. Then I may subscribe to them in iCal once they are uploaded, so I can still sync them to my iPod.
I still need to find a good solution for my contacts.
I have finally found out how to do something I have been trying to do for a LONG time. Safari, the web browser that I use, has tabbed browsing capability (and I use it primarily), but does not, as, for instance, Firefox does, force any link set to open in a new window (target=”_blank”) to open instead in a new tab. It turns out there’s a hidden feature for it:
defaults write com.apple.Safari TargetedClicksCreateTabs -bool true
This makes my life SO much better.
Man, what an exhausting couple of days. Between two full time work days (another tomorrow), Mock Trial, and the first episode of Joss Whedon’s new show, Dollhouse, I am wiped out.
Recently I have been doing a lot of thinking about what the purpose of blogging is. I am still not sure. I know that I find it interesting because of the potential to act as both an extroverted and introverted journal simultaneously, but there is a lot of other potential, and a lot of other considerations. For instance, does one target the entries towards other people, or should it be more of a picture of what the author is thinking? Are they mutually exclusive? Ultimately I don’t think they are, but there’s a fine line between revealing your thoughts and acting like other people don’t exist.
I think I will probably write some more about this topic in the future.
Now we have a week long vacation. This seems like rather poor planning to me; we have had one week of second semester. It was a good week, but it is weird to come back and then leave again immediately.
That aside, I think this is going to be a fabulous semester. I have awesome classes.
Besides these, I have three independent studies in Spanish, multi-variable Calculus, and Physics E&M (electricity and magnetism). I have not done much work on these for the past few months, so I will be doing a lot of catch-up this vacation. My hope is to burn through the Calc assignment I’ve had sitting around for about three months, get a few more from my teacher by email, and finish all of the Physics work I should have had done by the end of first semester. The Physics study is a bit harder than Calc. First of all, Will and I are preparing to take both of the AP Physics C tests in May, so we have an actual rubric to measure ourselves against. Secondly, my advisor gives me assignments for Calc, but my advisor for Physics was too busy to do this. So while he’s still my advisor on paper, and is very helpful when I have questions about the material, Will and I are making up our own assignments as we go. We’ve created some shared Google Documents to keep track of our work on these two independent studies, but have really fallen behind since then. No more.
It is good to reach the end of the week. I will be working both days this weekend, three days next week, and potentially next weekend as well. Also, the Mock Trial team is meeting four times over vacation. One of them is to go bowling.
Our car broke down on the way home from school today. It had been making strange noises since yesterday, starting with a loud squealing, which I determined to be a bad belt yesterday. On the way home today very odd things began to happen. The radio turned off and then on again, started to sound fuzzy and crackly, the lights flickered, and then all electrical power cut out entirely. When I tried to turn on the heat and my father tried the headlights, the car lurched and started to lose power. Then, about five blocks from the house, the engine shut off entirely. We are pretty sure that the belt that I noted as bad is the one that drives the alternator. If the belt stopped working (when I opened the hood this afternoon it seemed very loose), the alternator would have stopped, and we were thus running only on battery power. As the voltage drained, we lost electrical systems, before the entire engine shut off altogether. My father is on his way home from the garage now. We will find out about the car tomorrow I suppose.
Meanwhile, I have a trial tomorrow. We’re leaving at twelve-thirty, and as it’s Wednesday, I have no classes whatsoever in the morning. I will spend my time relaxing, eating, and doing homework. I am not sure how we’re going to get to school without a car. I suppose we will figure it out.
Also, Will Szal’s site is up and running now. Check it out; there’s some pretty awesome stuff up, and more in the works.
Three important things have taken place in the last 24 hours. In reverse chronological order, I received an AWESOME Red Cross ID card in the mail that has my name and blood type and such AWESOME information, I had the first day of second semester, and I had some revelations about intellectual property.
The blood card doesn’t really need any further description. The first day of school went well. It was great to be back and see a lot of people I hadn’t seen in a long time. This is looking to be a fabulous semester; I have great classes.
Intellectual property, however, is a tricky topic. For a long time, I’ve been strongly of the opinion that it was permissible to pirate music (although I didn’t download for purely practical reasons [I just swapped with other people]) because the money that I spent on music did not go to the artists anyway, and I felt that I was listening to the music for the purpose of learning more about what I liked, and then buying tickets to shows and buying merchandise for my favorite groups, thus providing them with income down the line. I still believe that this is a good way to get money to artists, and support them. But a lot has changed since I initially formed these opinions. The Internet has evolved a great deal, giving artists a meaningful way to distribute their music to people without having record labels getting in the way of their profit. The Internet brings consumers closer to the suppliers, which is a potentially mutually beneficial arrangement.
So since this has happened, I now no longer have a method for justifying pirating music. I am in fact now stealing money. As much as we might like to consider ourselves Robin Hoods who steal from the rich for the sake of the comparatively poor (us), we are stealing, and that is wrong. Ultimately, if an artist expects to make money because they believe X number of people will purchase their music, and then half of those people just pirate it, they have lost half their money. There is no way around that.
Given all this, I run into problems. I have always strongly morally opposed DRM (digital rights management), because I think that people have the right to do what they want with music they own. The concept of intellectual property is that you are buying the right to use this music however you want. But you can’t just do whatever with it. There are laws and morals. You can’t argue that you should have the right to distribute that music to twenty other people (or just one) because that is illegal and wrong. So what is the issue with DRM? Why does, for instance, iTunes’ five-computer-per-account limit violate our rights as consumers? I mean, in an ideal world you wouldn’t need this protection because no one would be stealing the music. But the companies have a moral and legal right to impose protection in the name of preventing consumers from stealing the music.
My friend and I were arguing about this today, and it seems that the central conflict is in determining whether the duty the distributor of the music owes to the consumers or the artists is stronger. While I agree that we, the consumers, have a right to do what we want with the music, there has to be some give. What if someone has six personal computers that they want to use the music on? iTunes only allows five, so one gets left out. Is the five computer limit reasonable? Well, we have to weigh the potential inconvenience to consumers (or the infringement of their rights as the owner of the music) against the potential that removing or loosening such restrictions would do significant damage to the artists. Certainly the iTunes restrictions can be overkill and keep people from performing legitimate activities, but they definitely avoid a lot illegalities in the first place. If we were to remove all such restrictions and place the burden of enforcing this type of law on the government, it would never work. What governmental agency would have enough time or resources to prosecute everyone who violated these laws? It would be like trying to find the source of a chain email. The Internet is too big and too fast. The only thing that can stop this illegality is restriction of the content in the first place.
So while the technology for creating effective DRM does not exist or has not yet been implemented, I do think I support it in theory. For the moment, is it better to live with what we have? That is a difficult question. But I think Apple’s recent announcement of moving away from DRM is in their and our best interest. Ultimately, they are going to have the last laugh; they have ultimate control over the material, so when a better DRM technology comes along, they’ll take it. As a publicly owned and traded company, Apple is subject to public sentiment, so we, the people, need to make sure that we make a conscious effort to work towards more meaningful DRM in the future in the form of legislation and social change. If we demonstrate that we can be trusted with music, companies will be able to provide us with goods and services that reflect our ability to behave honestly in a relaxed system.
Until then, we might just have to tough it out and keep our eyes on the prize.
My wget script didn’t work. But I think I figured out why. Hopefully it will work tonight.
