Virtual Thought

A while back, Boing Boing had a little write-up about a 92-year-old blogger named Donald Crowdis. Mr. Crowdis’ blog is thoughtful and funny, but, really, after reading that write-up and every post up to that date I immediately forgot about his blog. I meant to track it, but this was just before I started using an RSS reader so I had a tendency to “lose” interesting blogs.

Boing Boing wrote about Mr. Crowdis again today because of his post, It Bothers Me That I Have To Go.

Seriously, I read his post and almost cried at work. I had to go do other things for a while, walk around, stretch my legs.

...[M]y writing bothers me, because I have to be careful to be legible, even to myself. I am quite sure I have had a stroke (the final medical diagnosis is still pending)... I know I must go fairly soon. I just don’t like the idea.
I’ve floated on the remark “Been there, done that” for some time now, but the notion that the moment is approaching when I can no longer say this bothers me. The truth is, I don’t want to go.
There are many reasons. For too long I have behaved as if I could postpone going indefinitely, and thus have so many things that I must do first. I don’t want my successors to find out how much I could have done that isn’t done, not by a long shot. There are numerous notes and letters I must write. There are places I’ve wanted to travel, but never had the chance. Actually, each of you can, if you think yourself into my age, fill out the list. At least you can try to understand why I say that I hate to go.

For some reason, reading this post, looking at his smiling picture, thinking about him writing this post at 9:30 at night while his wife is in a nursing home, while he sits in front of his computer having recently suffered a stroke and unable to write… I felt crushed by this overwhelming sadness: imagining him, plaintive, explaining to his anonymous readers that the idea of his death scares him… it’s too much!

After work, I came home and was puttering around and, for whatever reason, decided to re-read his post. This time, though, I just out and out wept. I wish I could give this guy a hug. I really wish he didn’t have to die, or, at least, not be scared. It makes me want to run around screaming… I dunno.

BTW: Beware the comments on his post. There are some good ones, but mostly the chaffe splits fairly evenly into bland new agey-ness, Christian Godliness, fuck-it-all and listen-to-ME-being-scared-of-death… nothing that would comfort me were I in his position.

I’ve been tempted before to buy those dubious books that you can find on eBay with the fantastic-sounding titles: “One Million Dollars In One Year”, “Knife Throwing Techniques Of The Ninja”, etc… I’ve never bought one, though, because I figure they’re scams; however, my curiosity lingered.

Well, I’m curious no more. This site has all those scammy eBay books online so that you can see what’s in all those books. Neat.

So I’m talking to a friend of mine about building a NAS and, possibly, a media server. We were commiserating on the state of DRM and how it limits our choices: Since I’m an iTunes user I have to use Apple TV to enjoy my media on my AV system in my living room since no other product can work with Apple DRM… dammit. By the same token, I’m not about to use Vista and its crippling of the end-user experience in the name of protecting content.

He steered me towards an ArsTechnica story about how DRM isn’t about piracy and is, in fact, a way of creating false scarcities in an effort to ensure traditional revenue channels. Of course, the flies in the face of my growing admiration for agalmics in relation to digital media of all types. I mean, c’mon: I can perfectly reproduce any digital thing I want at little or no cost… so why are we applying traditional economic models here?

The two arguments I hear the most go thusly:

1. If you are not paying someone for every digital copy of media you are stealing.
2. The content creators would make no money without a structure for generating revenue.

These are both a bit stinky:

1. Am I stealing when multiple people come over and watch the DVD that I purchased, or listen to the music that I own? What if I lend it to them? What if, heaven forbid, I make a copy for myself because CDs have a tendency to not survive for very long? What if I bought a movie on DVD and want to enjoy it on my iPod, or stream it from my in-house NAS to my TV? None of that is stealing.
2. I differentiate here between content creators and content producers. Content creators are the actual artists who, y’know, write stuff; content producers are the ones who distribute and try to control all that content… in this case the RIAA. Who would we want to protect, the creators or the producers? The creators of course. Who does our current system protect? The producers!

But I digress… I’ve heard people question why Microsoft would bow to the RIAA on this since, really, it’s Microsoft that should be in control of this relationship (since it owns 95% of the machines in the market it can use its position to dictate to everyone else how they’re gonna play in that market). Instead, though, MS says, “Okay, we’ll make everything more fragile and jump through all these hoops and force all the hardware makers to jump through these fragile little hoops as well.” Why is that?

I think it’s the side benefit to MS that makes this interesting: Vista’s content-protection scheme squeezes out the open source hardware support necessary for people to run open-source OSes on their desktops.

Since open source hardware drivers, by definition, can’t keep proprietary content protection schemes a secret, as required by the licenses, and because the licenses themselves cost money… no more hardware support for open source OSes. Microsoft gets a bit of a win on this one.

But where are the consumers in all this? Nowhere.

Robert Anton Wilson passed away today. Good writeup over at Boing Boing.

I can’t quite believe that he’s gone. I can’t quite read the last blog entry without getting too much of a sense of time passing by.

Fnord!

Engadget’s got good live coverage:

• The iPhone is here…
• ...and so is Apple TV.

I’m still betting the “And one more thing…” is Leopard, thus scooping Vista.

Here we go:

1. Leopard comes out early to scoop Vista (my guess is this’ll be the infamous “And one more thing…”)
2. No iPhone (or iPod phone, or iChat Mobile, or Apple phone, or what-have-you) yet… probably won’t even mention schedule (my early guess is Q2)
3. The iTV (Apple media set-top box) available in Apple store immediately
4. New minor rev of video iPod with 100 GB drive (by way of Gizmodo)

That’s what’ll be released. Here’s the pie-in-the-sky stuff that I would LOVE to see but probably won’t:

1. The Apple phone is available, is GSM/CDMA
2. Major rev of video iPod going full- and touchscreen with 100 GB drive

I can claim no sources inside Apple or anything… just the zeitgeist and the echo chamber of the Web.

I’m pretty neutral about birds but now that a dozen or so are dead due to mysterious circumstances in downtown Austin where I work maybe I should care more.

I came in yesterday to work on some stuff… at one point while I was smoking in the parking garage I was staring at the birds that cluster in the three trees in front of the Omni hotel and thinking about nothing really. If only I’d known that I wouldn’t see them alive again.

So I drive in today (I come in from MoPac down fifth street), a little late due to extremely bad allergies and lack of sleep, and the police have shutdown Congress. I think, Must be a marathon, and keep driving in a long loop down to first so I can come back up Brazos. By the time I get to my floor in the garage I realize that this garage is empty—there’s really a dearth of other cars about. I pull into a primo parking space, thinking about bomb threats and anthrax scares but not really concerned (I just don’t worry about terrorist attacks… not very productive kind of thoughts). When I get into the office it’s a ghost town and I finally get the news.

If I get any pictures of guys in hazmat suits on my phone I’ll post them in a flash. ( =