More Saturday
Reading a book was good for my arms. So, in many ways, was talking on the phone. I had a great conversation with my father and managed to catch up with some friends.
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Reading a book was good for my arms. So, in many ways, was talking on the phone. I had a great conversation with my father and managed to catch up with some friends.
I did look out on my porch to try to catch sight of the aurora. No aurora, just lots of wind and fog and the moon.
I listened to Mahler's Kindertotenlieder, which I hadn't listened to for a year or two. I first encountered this work in a music class at Berkeley, and I went out and bought a copy, and I even transcribed the words once and put them up on the net on a machine which has since crashed twice over.
(Not the free software kind.) The streets between here and the 24th Street BART station are fairly covered with evangelical Christian literature, some in Spanish, some in English, including Jack Chick cartoons. I saw a notice about how there was going to be a "campaign" in honor of Holy Week, so probably I'm just seeing some of the advance publicity work.
The Mission and the South of Market are really different in visible ways, like what kinds of things typically happen in public. In the South of Market, I've never seen anyone engaged in any kind of religious proselytizing or debate (or a house of worship, except the church across from the Metreon). In the Mission, religion and religious evangelism are relatively large, active forces. (Biella, approximately: "There's a reason it's called the Mission District...")
The Chronicle or the Examiner (am I the only person who still can't tell them apart readily?) had a strange juxtaposition pretty recently. At the bottom of one page was an article which proclaimed that, "for the first time", whites were not a majority in the state of California. At the top of the same page was an article about a research result that the San Francisco Bay is the saltiest that it's been "in 400 years".
This is a little bizarre, I thought. Clearly, the top article is admitting that California history does extend at least 400 years (OK, it wasn't a state then...), because there was this San Francisco Bay here then and it had a certain salinity and that salinity 400 years ago is a part of California history. And it's interesting! All this time all of these other things were happening, and you know, San Francisco Bay kept on having a salinity! The Bay continued having various amounts of salt in it all that while, and there's this amazing sense of continuity over four centuries of San Francisco Bay saline history. But the bottom article is saying that California history is much shorter, really, because this year is "the first time" that whites haven't been a majority of the people in California. But 400 years ago, whites weren't a majority in California.
I'm sure that the Associated Press would say that they just meant "since California has been a U.S. state" and that of course whites haven't always been a majority in California, the place. This still raises a question, though: why are racial demographics only interesting since California became part of the U.S., but environmental factors, geophysical factors, are interesting before that too?
... was April Fool's Day.
There are a pretty good assortment of hoaxes on-line, although I don't think I've been fooled by anything yet.
In other news, Zack and I went to CompUSA and I got a new sound card, which I set up (after compiling Linux 2.2.19, which was remarkably easy). It's a SoundBlaster 16 PCI -- the cheapest common 16-bit PCI sound card with line in and line out. It uses the es1371 module; Creative Labs bought Ensoniq...
Oh, I got to try Mac OS X in CompUSA. It's very pretty, and I managed to find the shell (the default shell is tcsh!) without too much difficulty, and run ls, ps, df, and all -- on a Mac, running MacOS. So I can see how a lot of people will like this and will want to switch. And I do have a Mac that I'd be running MacOS 8.5 on if the hard drive hadn't crashed... but I do want to stay focused on free operating systems, not just Unix in its manifold glory.
I bought the sound card because I wanted 16-bit line in so that I could record a CD of myself singing. No, you can't have a copy (unless perhaps you are Wolfgang), but I'll probably publish the recording of "If I Were in Rescomp". It's turning out that there's a Jewish theme because the two other things my original plan calls for me to sing are "Eli, Eli" and "Shir Hamaalot". I really think that's just a co-incidence, though.
A side effect of having the sound card is that I can play WAVs from my little collection of ripped CDs. (I ripped some of my own CDs so that I could have them in digital form. I don't habitually trade illegal copies of music, even though I agree that the impulse to do that is very natural, but I think having access to music in an unencrypted digital form is very important. People reading my diary will probably already be aware that I think that.) So I can actually give a simple command like
cd /mnt/bigger
echo So/*.wav | xargs -n1 play
and I immediately get a CD-quality rendition of Peter Gabriel's So. But of course I can script things so that tracks play in a particular order or in response to a particular event.
If we give up control over digital media, we will be limited to the applications the people who control it can think of, minus those they think it's not in their business interest to permit, minus again those they think they can extract extra payments for.
I had a great time with Biella, who came by for dinner. We had a wide-ranging conversation, although supposedly we were talking about "Patent Scope and Innovation in the Software Industry" by Cohen and Lemley.
Patents are an absolutely vast risk for the free software community. Aux armes! Fortunately, there are some more encouraging things going on in the world than just software patents.
I'm sorry that I still have secrets from my diary readers, that I can't remark on every single interesting or amusing thing that happens. I remember at dinner how something happened that I thought was funny, but it was already secret there; quo magis here. So if you read this, imagine some funny and interesting things happening that I don't mention. Thanks.
Actually, not only do I not generally trade illegal copies of music, but I even accidentally buy multiple copies of the same CD! For example, I have two store-bought legal copies of The End of the Summer by Dar Williams, two of The Green World (eadem), and two of a particular recording of Bach's Mass in B minor. So I'm even sometimes buying CDs where legally I wouldn't even be obliged to.
That said, if you want my duplicate copy of any of those, let me know!
Contact: Seth David Schoen