Personal Notes

In going back and forth today in the Pickup-Named-Mud, I was struck by a few things. First, the 95.1 FM station sounded like the soundtrack for Grand Theft Auto Vice City because of the recent death of Michael Jackson. The next, while listening to the news, was that the media is grasping at a way to describe the crime situation in Trinidad and Tobago: When someone says, on the news, that there is 'a deteriorating crime situation', literate people everywhere cringe.

A deteriorating crime situation, you see, would be a good thing. A deteriorating pipe might be rusting. A deteriorating door may be coming off the hinges. A deteriorating state of Law would imply crime.

A deteriorating crime situation implies law and order is gaining the upper hand. Clearly, this is not the case - and all the government's politically appointed jackasses horses and all the government's politically appointed women and men can't seem to saddle that horse again. And because of that, because of this crime situation, the media is now reaching as creatively as it can to describe the crime situation. { Read more }

I don't really enjoy writing about the Amazon Kindle. I have a friend whose wife has one who swears by it, and I understand all of her points perfectly well. I told her that. And I also told her that she'll never be able to lend me a book from her Kindle. She's ok with that. I'm not. We're all good friends, so I let it go. I'd said my piece.

I looked at it. It is a nice little gadget. It's just tied down with bad policy. And as much as it irks me that Amazon.com is behind it, I know why: Publishing companies can't get their heads around the Internet. Unfortunately, even the most pristine of technological gadgets cannot and will not make those policies good. Acceptable to lone housewives with disposable income? Perhaps.

As I wrote before, I think the social networks surrounding books is of worth - of more worth than one single person. I've written caustically about fostering creativity with such devices.

And now TechDirt has Amazon Kindle DRM Strikes Again: You Don't Really Own Your eBooks. The sad thing is that the people who read that article probably already knew that. And the people who don't know that probably have no idea and will continue their mock existence of 'owning' books on their Kindles. { Read more }

Resolved: A brief explanation is made here. It's been worked out. Move along, nothing to see here... :-)

When I was going through my Flickr statistics over the weekend, I came across an article on Wired's website that was using one of my images: Environmental Destruction Could Cost World $5 Trillion — Each Year. Pretty cool to have a picture used in Wired, right?

Had they asked, I might have even given permission for their commercial use. But going through my records of who has license to use stuff and not... I didn't find them. I certainly would have remembered if Wired had contacted me about the image. Granted, I don't think the particular picture is any good. They did attribute. Good for them.

But they completely missed that it's for non-commercial use. In all the years I've been using Creative Commons licensing for... almost everything... I have always kept the same license (versions change). In this instance, the version is 2.0 because I haven't updated my Flickr images to 3.0 - the Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 2.0 Generic License.

Non-commercial. It's on a commercial website. { Read more }

Seth Godin's rant on textbooks is well worth the read. It's a simplified version of what I've been advocating as far back as CARDICIS (2003) for a variety of reasons - especially in the context of the Caribbean where so many languages are used. Electronic open content can permit rapid translation of the content.

Boiling down what Seth has written and what I have written and said in the past at conferences: Get rid of the school book publishing, allow authors to write content and make it available for free - or at no cost.

My perspective on it is a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 license.

Initially, I thought that the authors would be paid by the same bureaucracy that presently pays publishing companies to write the content and peer review it. The trouble with this idea is that the bureaucracies around the world don't want the responsibility of managing the authors (and being an author and editor (at times), I can understand that). So this is where publishing companies could actually change to make things easier for everyone.

But they haven't. This is because bureaucracy and all of it's trappings are actually, sometimes intentionally, designed to minimize change like this. The cogs love the machine. The machine loves the cogs. And maybe at some point society loved the machine. Maybe they still do.

Failing the existing publishing companies doing this, it would make sense that new publishing companies be created almost specifically for the purpose of doing the same. To pay the authors, edit the content, and deal with the irritating bureaucracy that would drive insane authors starkly sane. Or vice versa. { Read more }

The elephant in the center of the room when it comes to the Internet remains unsolicited emails that clog your email and every server between you and the sender. The idiotic spam comments that clutter weblogs in the vain hope of link popularity in assuredly vague search engine algorithms. The thriving industry of Spam clogs the Internet so much so that we can't see which side of the equator we're in based on the way the data spins down the drain.

When it first became a problem, at least a very few of us said that the sensible thing to do was to follow the money. Whoever profited from the spam - in many cases, found through the link that the email or comment has - would be penalized for the spam itself. This was too difficult to implement, even at the WSIS level, because it would require nations around the world to create and enforce laws that assured this would happen. It was too difficult to implement because it could also be used as a tool to discredit a competitor. It was too difficult because domain registrars are more interested in profit than collecting usable domain registrar information. It was too difficult because an entire industry now thrives around spam. It remains too difficult because of all of these things and a culture of acceptance. { Read more }

It's that time of year. And it's almost that time of year. And I have lasagna to make, so I'll just put up a short post here.

2008 was a crazy year for me. I got my deed this year for land my father left me, which saw me dipping my hands into agriculture, land management and real estate - all relatively unfamiliar things for me until this year. As usual, I dove in and gained some level of competency in all of the above - what level is yet to be determined. I am in no way an expert, that much I know. But in all of that, I learned a lot more too.

2009 will largely speak for itself. But plans for this site include a more innate focus on book reviews, quotations, and technology related writing. In essence, more of the same... but with a twist. I am informally retiring from 'professional' Information Technology. I will not be looking for projects or work; I have enough on my plate with the land, agriculture and real estate - and, hopefully, writing.

Bonus: To map things out, I've been using FreeMind, a mind mapping tool. I won't get into the pros and cons of mind mapping as I am fairly new at it, but I will say that it seems to be a comfortable way for me to look at the scattered impulses and projects that I'm involved in.

Update: As mentioned Your2ndPlace.com is back up. Short story: After opening another ticket and pointing to the last ticket where I explained the solutions for the problems...

I have been hosting with BlueHost.com for about 2 years at this point - Your2ndPlace.com, OpenDepth.com and KnowProSE.com. And BlueHost.com has been great. There have been issues as there always are, but they were worked through.

Today, though, I got a message that Your2ndPlace.com with a subject of:

WEB HOSTING ACCOUNT DEACTIVATED for YOUR2NDPLACE.COM

The meat of the message was:

Dear Taran:

Your web hosting account for your2ndplace.com has been deactivated (reason: site causing performance problems).
Although your web site has been disabled, your data may still be available for
up to 15 days, after which it will be deleted.

If you feel this deactivation is in error, please contact customer support as
soon as possible.

Thank you,
BlueHost.Com Support
http://www.bluehost.com

There was no warning. I was completely flabbergasted by this. So I sent in a support ticket that asked about the problem - since the problem isn't very apparent from the message. And here's the thing: All three of my websites are running the same software: Drupal 6.x. I got a response back that basically said that they were allowing me access to find out what was wrong and fix it. { Read more }

I haven't been setting thought to keyboard in about 2 weeks, and there's a reason for that. Sometimes a person just needs to think for a bit, and consider vectors. My life, at present, is pulling me in many different directions. Each direction is interesting and rewarding in it's own way, but some seemed opposed. They didn't have to be opposed, as I suspected, but it did require some time to figure that out and write about it as vaguely as I have done in this paragraph.

The first order of business is what I want to do. Over the last 7-8 years, I've spent a lot of time corresponding and discussing things on email lists regarding open source, technology use, the digital divide, and other things. More recently, a part of my life has become land related. And as that came forward, so too have other things. But I have found that there is little that I can discuss further on many topics until things actually change. It's sort of like waiting for an Obama to happen in many different areas, I suppose, but things have to go on despite a lack of change. In fact, things have to go on because of a lack of change.

So I've canceled a bunch of Google Alerts. I've trimmed my email lists down significantly; many of the email lists that I have participated in over the years simply don't give me as much value for my time as they used to. And this free time that I've created has made space for some new projects after this ebb.

I'll be launching a new site - CaribNexus.net. I'm also considering joining an active project, which I will not announce until I have decided. Plus there is the aquaculture and agriculture, the entrepreneurship possibilities in some areas. There will be no more volunteer work for NGOs, and there will likely be no more meetings and conferences in the near future. It's time to get things going, and there are many things to get going.

So if you actually missed me writing for this period, I apologize without apology - it was necessary.