Our building at CSUN had to undergo some extensive re-working of its network hardware yesterday, so I worked from home because NO computers in the entire building could be used to connect to the Internet.

As a result (after coding for a bit), working hard in lounge chair and hammock, I read Digital Copyright: Protecting Intellectual Property on the Internet. Litman spends a good deal of time explaining the history of copyright and harping on how all the laws for it got hammered out by companies with interest seeing it meet their special commercial needs.

Since the public never attended meetings, they often got the shaft when it came to policy. This way of doing things pervades the system until present, and blatantly pops up in the Digital Millenium Copyright Act, where it has become illegal to even attempt to circumvent technological protection schemes designed to limit access to material, even if some of the material bundled with copyrightable stuff lies in the public domain.

She goes on to make a case for what kind of new copyright law we need. Overall, despite obviously pushing an agenda, and being annoyingly repetitive at times, the book's eye-opening for those who want to see where copyright's heading these days.

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Here's a pretty cool video of a Honda ad that Jenn sent me. I'm not sure how much of it is real and how much enhanced, but it's fun to watch.

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Aye, lass, check out this dress up a Scotsman web site that Shelley found! It lets you pick various body parts, clothing items, tools, animals, etc. to make an amuzing scene.

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And here's a nifty thing from my brother. It's a timeline generator that graphically shows famous events against your lifespan (or anyone else's that you want to enter). Your timeline is a colored bar, and various things get lined up next to it so that you can see quickly relatively when they happened and how long they lasted.

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Not much going on this week or the next couple as far as we know. Pretty much normal.

I've been down to the violin shop twice this week and a couple other times in the last few weeks because the shop owners are both taking Photoshop classes and one of them really prefers my additional tutoring.

At least they have brand-new machines that can deal with the appication and large files well now. My patience for doing this work is running pretty thin, but the car bill and taxes won't go away by themselves so it's necessary for now.