The Real Paul Jones

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CS 380 Tonight

I’m guest speaking at Jean Walsh’s and Diane Pozefsky’s combined CS 380 class this evening at 5 in 111 Carroll. I’ve put a few links etc on my wiki, we’ll be talking about innovation and intellectual property. They will have read, I hope, Chapters 1 and 8 of Eric von Hippel‘s Democratizing Innovation. I think I need to do a little intro to the four areas of intellectual property in the US – copyright and patent (in the Constitution), trade secret and trademark (in the Code) then move on to how policy can encourage or deter democratization of innovation.

I asked the class to post questions etc in the comments here.

Sensible shoes?

The Manolo will diss me for sure. But the prices were right and the styles were err okay and the timing was perfect.

First Tucker and I went to get him some new shoes. I needed some new penny loafers too. I was ready to push the button at the Bass Store when we found a nice pair exactly my size at 1/3 the price right there in U Mall. The downside was they weren’t Bass. They were/are Hush Puppies! Yikes Hush Puppies. The squarest of the square. As in the Jimmy Buffett song “I’ve got my hush-puppies on, / I guess I never was meant for / glitter rock and roll.” But having small feet comes in handy, I can get kids shoes in the right style at a very right price.

Great feeling shoes with no breakin time required. Next comes the cane then the walker…

But from the Manolo angle, things got worse when on Ocracoke.

The weather was great for walking on the beach, but Tucker and I had left our flops at home. I didn’t want to be in the sand in my hiking shoes. Then in the Variety Store, we came up on a barrell of Crocs Knockoffs. A virtual gator farm of black plastic shoes for only $5 a pair. Cheaper than the flops. Who could avoid them at that price? I could wear them twice and toss them if necessary. But the shoes are so damn comfortable that I wore them the whole long weekend. And kept them.

Yikes!

EFF on DCMA exemptions and LC on Ocracoke

Even out on Ocracoke you can’t get away from IP talk. One morning at the Ocracoke Coffee Company I struck up a conversation with a pleasant guy who was in the process of moving down to the island. Turns out that he’s Peter Vankevich of the Library of Congress’ Copyright Office. We had a great talk as two IP/Copyright geeks.

Peter told me to be sure to take a look at the announcement from LC about DCMA exemptions. I was finally getting around to that (having been mostly net-free on Ocracoke) when I found the EFF’s analysis of the exemptions (here).

Peter had convinced me that he was really a nature photographer specializing in birds. He was being far too modest. He’s a very very serious birder and photographer. Now I know how he could pick out a myrtle warbler so quickly and easily.

Andy Ihnatko disses Zune

Andy I
Old bud Andy Ihnatko completely disses the Zune in a Chicago Sun-Times article that begins “Avoid the Looney Zune” and ends “Microsoft gets music player all wrong.”

Yikes, Mr. Gates all this and Vista too?

Not that there aren’t non-iPod players that Andy thinks are competitive and fun to use. He likes several non-Apple products:

“The Zune is a complete, humiliating failure. Toshiba’s Gigabeat player, for example, is far more versatile, it has none of the Zune’s limitations, and Amazon sells the 30-gig model for 40 bucks less.”

“Companies such as Toshiba and Sandisk (with its wonderful Nano-like Sansa e200 series) compete effectively with the iPod by asking themselves, ‘What are the things that users want and Apple refuses to provide?'”

Andy’s bottom line: “Result: The Zune will be dead and gone within six months. Good riddance.”

Laws of Simplicity on the ferry

Up in the predawn so as to get to Swan Quarter for the 9:30 am ferry, the first to get to Ocracoke in a couple of days. Since the Nor’easter blew in and blew the ferries into port and blew the ocean over the highway.

Ferry reading: John Maeda’s Laws of Simplicity. Could be simply called “Simplicity’s Laws” (Thanks to Steve Kulp for the book suggestion). Took less than the 2 1/2 hour trip to read. Tucker got half way through it after I finished reading. But I’m still thinking about the ideas there. Not the shallow business book that I feared, but a smart book on design and usability.

Ferry/Highway disconnects

Bruce the Road Worrier Siceloff is unhappy with NCDOT’s 511 service and their website. Me too. Here’s my tale:

My goal to get to Ocracoke if possible.The NC Ferry website had said that the ferries weren’t running. Then that they were but not which ones or when they would start. More importantly could I even get to the Hatteras-Ocracoke ferry by car as it turns out.

starting at 11 am

511 – no ferries are running

website- some ferries but not which ones

phone call to ferry station on Hatteras:
me: is highway 12 open down Hatteras?
ferry: the dare county sheriff has that information
me: is the ferry running?
ferry: not much reason to run with highway 12 closed
me: closed on ocracoke or hatteras?
ferry: yes, there’s an ocean overwash. would you like the sheriff’s number?

phone call to ferry station at Swan Quarter:
me: is the ferry running?
ferry: we expect it to run at 4 pm
me: can i get there from here?
ferry: now you can. the road was flooded but it’s fine now.
me: think it’ll still be good in the morning?
ferry: sure

hours later (4 pm):

web site: no update as to status of individual ferries. New line in alert “Ferry service to Ocracoke will resume once flooding subsides at Hatteras and Ocracoke.”

511: updated but not specific. notes exceptions in ferries but is vague on which ones will run when. confusing information about Highway 12 based on counties through which it runs. voice mail system aborts. “we seem to be having technical problems. please call back.”

Note: The 4 pm ferry from Swan Quarter did not run on Wednesday afterall. When we got down on Thursday morning there were several unhappy carloads of people who had spent the night as close as they could get to the ferry after having been stranded there the night before.

Translations from the Japanese – Howl and Godzilla

The winds are down but there is ocean overwash out at Rodanthe keeping Hatteras broken in two. No ferry access there. Swan Quarter will start their ferry runs this evening. We’ll likely catch an early ride from there tomorrow.

In the meantime, Tucker and I watched Howl’s Moving Castle. The best anime storytelling of a British tale designed and directed by Hayao Miyazaki (of Spirited Away fame) and executed by Pixar (as owned by Disney at the time). Much news good and bad. The worst is the Calcifer, fire demon, character who smells too much of the kind of characters voiced by Robin Williams — parrots, genies etc. But overall a very successful crossing of cultures — Japanimation, Pixarwood, and British wizardly storytelling. Some bumps in that melding but overall well-met.

Godzilla: Final Wars though was a badly done work even by the low bar set by Godzilla movies. I love what that low bar produces. But that movie played like a bad preview for a video game. The characters, their motions and the unlucky sound track by Emerson, Lake and Palmer’s Keith Emerson was annoyingly game influenced. Influenced by bad game music at that. The translation involved here was not culture as identity but culture as media format. Godzilla Final Wars the movie was more of a excuse and a long trailer for Godzilla Final Wars the game. In many cases, traffic between movie and game culture works or is at least amusing. This time it failed at every turn. And they left out Biollante.

Washed out roads and stalled ferries

The storm sitting off of Cackalacky has put all the ferries in port and flooded Highway 12 down Hatteras. Looks like the weather will continue through late Wednesday night. The State Ferry site says not to expect ferries til Thursday morning at the earliest. The upside is that we don’t have to drive down in the storm. The downside is that we won’t be on Ocracoke til Thursday at the earliest.

WRAL has the best coverage and the best links to coastal webcams.

Who’s on the Left? Jones and Moglen in India

Owning the Future

Possibly the only time that I’ll be to the left of Eben Moglen is preserved on this video made at the “Owning the future: Ideas and their role in the digital age” conference in India. I’m on your right tho ;->

Can lawyers say yes? Eben says he can since he represents hackers. Much more here in this nicely produced, CC licensed video from Red Hat.

The road to Delhi with Eben Moglen and Paul Jones
Produced by Kristin Hondros

Ever wished you could be a fly on the wall when tech-savvy folks gather? We got the chance at this summer’s Knowledge Symposium in Delhi, India.

The official title of the conference was “Owning the future: Ideas and their role in the digital age.” In between the discussions and sessions, we sat in on a conversation between Eben Moglen and Paul Jones. Two of the open source movement’s big thinkers–the lawyer (and founder of the Software Freedom Law Center) and the curator of ibiblio.org (one of the Internet’s largest public repositories).

Moglen and Jones have an open and fast-paced discussion that touches on international labor dynamics, technology expansion, intellectual property, economics, capitalism, and freedom. (Just imagine what they could do in more than 8 minutes…)

Must be more to Morrie

Went to see the opening night of the Playmakers’ production of “Tuesdays with Morrie” on Saturday. It was mostly harmless. I mean I laughed at the quips, but the play didn’t stay with me. I didn’t feel for the characters. It was without without the power and doubt of “Wit” or the insistence of “Whose Life is this Anyway?” both about dying smart people (who are more interesting than Morrie as characters — he, Morrie, is much more lovable and in a way simple which makes him predictable and ultimately shallow).

Morrie and Mitch are not as diverting or deep as say either character in “My Dinner with Andre.” Nothing in the “Tuesdays” approaches anything said or written by Spalding Gray. There is more comedy and more good ole pathos in David Mamet‘s “Duck Variations.”

I was amused by Morrie and not so taken or put off by Mitch, but soon afters I felt letdown.

There was one exchange in which Morrie asks Mitch, his former student now a Detroit sports writer, “What have you got against touchy-feely?”
Mitch answers “It’s fine by me except for the touching part [pause] and the feeling part.”

Morrie says something about God later. Mitch: “I thought you were an agnostic?” Morrie – “I was but now I’m not so
sure” that kind of thing. I laughed at the time but only once and only quickly.

But “Wit,” that play haunted me for months.

Note: The Daily Tar Heel reviewer agrees with me (on his own terms of course).

Further note: Morrie loves to quote Auden out of context and incorrectly as “We must love each other or die.” I too love the line but realize some of its complications. The line. “We must love one another or die” comes from “September 1, 1939”. Auden first changed the line to read “We must love one another and die.” Next he dropped the stanza containing the line. Then completely frustrated he dropped the poem from his Collected saying “We die anyway.” The poem was restored to Auden’s collected work only after his death. I love the line in the original and in the poem, but I also love the complexity with which I must read it. How right was Auden at each stage of revision? How true the poem at each point in his life? In my life? And the context of the poem, the beginning for World War II

Pamphlets of Sun Ra

Sun Ra at piano - in a mild moment George Clinton

Sally alerts us to the ur-texts from the ur-spaceman behind the most modern jazz. “The Wisdom of Sun Ra” is just out from University of Chicago Press.

Publishers blurb:

From the Arkestra to his experiments with synthesizers, Sun Ra was one of the most inventive jazz musicians in history. Yet until now, there has not been a collection of his earliest writings that reveal the beginnings of his work as philosopher, mystic, and Afro-Futurist. This new volume unveils over forty newly discovered typewritten broadsheets on which Sun Ra expounded his wholly unique philosophical message. While in Chicago during the mid-1950s, Sun Ra preached on street corners and occasionally created scripts to accompany his lectures—intricate texts that invoke science fiction, Biblical prophecy, etymology, and black nationalism. Until this point, the only broadsheet known to exist was one given to John Coltrane in 1956. These newly unearthed writings attest to the provocative brilliance that inspired Coltrane. Sun Ra annotated many of them by hand, and together the sheets reveal fascinating new aspects of his worldview. The Wisdom of Sun Ra is an invaluable compendium of writings by one of the most intriguing and influential jazz figures of the century.

Not by coincidence but because of an odd alignment of the planets I’m sure, Dr. Funkenstein aka Atomic Dog aka George Clinton who is surely the living heir to Sun Ra in many many ways was interviewed on Morning Edition (special features on their website).

Paul Muldoon in NYTimes Mag

Great little article on Paul Muldoon in today’s NYTimes Magazine. A bit too much on his garage band project,Rackett, and not nearly enough room to show how creative and expansive his poetry projects are — deceptively so in a very good way. Also we learn that Helen Vendler now says that Paul has an emotional center. Thanks Helen. He had one all along just not one worn on his sleeve.

Also an okay video of Muldoon reading in a studio. The poem “The Sightseers”

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