Open Hatch

The L.A. Times on Richard Dutcher

Alex — Tue, 19 Aug 2008 21:08:55 +0000

This article at the L.A. times came to my attention.

My thoughts:

First, I didn’t find FALLING to be “spiritually disquieting” (or causing unease or anxiety). It opened some very probing questions, which, personally, only led to very assuring answers for me. And the film as a whole moved me.

Second, I don’t buy the line that Mormons are embargoed from seeing R-rated films. Bleh. Can this myth please die?

And thirdly and waxing philosophical, as for this quote of Dutcher wondering “what if it’s not true?” -

That surprises me. I don’t expect religion to leave me doubt-free. It’s clear the Savior had his profound doubts just before enacting the atonement. In my book, doubt and questioning, looking for answers - that’s the soil for faith and belief. It was certainly where Joseph Smith began his journey. Proof isn’t the point. You can no more disprove any point of religion (for example the existence of God) than anyone can prove it.

The results of living your religion are the proof. Meetings, taking the sacrament, service, study, testing the word of God. You try the experiments; and do the results make you unhappy or happy?

If you’re not trying the word of God - if you aren’t going to church, if you isolate yourself from your religious community, for starters - you won’t get results. It’s easy to conjecture there’s no merit to a theory you aren’t testing.

And much of the test is what my service or involvement can contribute. As a Bishop put it to me, he never found any ward (Mormon congregation) he liked until he stopped focusing on what others were (or weren’t) doing for him, and started focusing on what he can give.

I see friends who begin expressing doubt, mere luke-warm feelings, or even disenfranchisement, with the church, the people in their ward and the things they believe and say, and this all happens at the same time they’ve stopped attending church. Guess what? What these misguided people around you need is for you to go to church and present your take on things in a positive, non-threatening way. (And I know these friends have good and enlightening things to say.)

If others may not be seeing the light, how about shedding some of your own? The Mormon church is designed to informally acquaint us with each other’s insights. If there sometimes isn’t much insight, there’s even less if people nonplussed with that fact keep on waiting for the situation to change - without realizing they can change it. Without realizing they can never know how they positively impact others. There are many people in the LDS religious community who have no idea how they’ve positively impacted me.

Did Jesus walk the streets during his ministry visiting the sick, the poor, the social outcasts, the odd ones, the unwanted, all the while asking himself “What am I getting from these weirdos, what’s in this for me?”

Religion may not be thrilling very often, ergo the command to “endure to the end”. I’ve found that any time I give up the endurance test, again, I feel empty.

Never mind I’d tell you like many a Mormon I know it’s all true. Which I do. My doubts are about what this religion can actually do for me (the acknowledged paradox being that I shouldn’t just be in it for me). I’ll always be figuring that out - and those doubts are exactly what lead me to keep trying things out.

So cool..

Alex — Wed, 23 Jul 2008 23:27:15 +0000

I’ve mentioned this electric sheep screen saver. Here’s one mpg from it.

I may find a way to batch convert them and incorporate them into the blog design. That won’t make it impossible for you to read.. Click either “play now” or “play in popup” to see it. If either of those don’t work, click the download link and have a look at it in Windows Media Player.

The screen saver has downloaded a bajillion of these goodies into its cache on my machine. Eye candy. I think this one is morphing between four different “sheep” IDs.

More on Truth

Alex — Wed, 09 Jul 2008 18:58:23 +0000

Referring to the previous entry, good luck with the truth anyway if the internets are against you.

Wow. Bizarre twists on meaning become dominant and obliterate everything else.

(Except for one brilliant article pointed it out, and I’m posting about it, and you’re reading it. Maybe it is always free or bound to be free.)

The Windows People on Strong Truth

Alex — Wed, 09 Jul 2008 18:44:46 +0000

Ah ha ha!

“The truth will make us strong.”

I’m waiting for more. Please. Feed me another verse. I’ll start compiling it into a Windows Bible. Not that there isn’t at least one already.

FLAVOR ARCHAEOLOGY

Alex — Tue, 08 Jul 2008 08:10:34 +0000

Here is a script for something I’m going to shoot soon - my son will star.

Showbiz Pizza Redux

Alex — Tue, 08 Jul 2008 03:32:45 +0000

My brother found (or passed along) this disturbing scream of a business someone did with the Showbiz Pizza Characters.

Warning: PG-13. Perfectly shames the source material without losing much for the dignity of the characters made to sing it.

LOVE IN THIS CLUB from ( *_* ) on Vimeo.

Four Quicktime HD export test clips

Alex — Mon, 07 Jul 2008 05:01:11 +0000

The end of this entry has buttons and links to play any of four different test clips (each of a bird and/or my son “Mago”). I’d use the “play in popup” link first, starting with the last (the smallest).

The first clip is 1920 horizontal lines by 1080 vertical lines in the Sorensen 3 codec and some blah (I’m guessing) audio codec (Sony Vegas Pro lets me export to Quicktime, but not with AAC. Why?).

The second clip is 1920 x 1080 by Quicktime Pro (from an uncompressed .avi I exported from Vegas) with the H.264 codec (It seems that’s Apple’s newest video codec? - which I’m only guessing gets better mileage than Sorensen 3?) and with AAC audio at 192 Khz.

Both those files are blasted huge (45 to 55MB for a few seconds!?), so I’m realizing I just gotta sacrifice some video and audio quality for more compression..

The third clip uses Sorensen 3 and some crummy audio at 1280 x 720 resolution.

The fourth uses H.264 and AAC (like the second) and is 720 x 540.

Again, click “play in popup” to play any of these - I suggest the last one first - I wonder if the others will even load without a lot of patience..

For anyone curious I’ve started putting up notes on video encoding/distribution in my wiki (more - maybe a lot more - could aggregate there over time - I’ll see. The page title is far broader than the video notes there now).

The Electric Sheep Screen-saver

Alex — Fri, 04 Jul 2008 01:57:38 +0000

I ran across this today and tried it - so worth it.

It’s a screen-saver that does mutating, “genetic” computer-generated animated art for your screen-saver, and distributes these across the internet to everyone else who has the screen-saver installed, and users can vote for or against the various “electric sheep” (up arrow key votes yes, down votes no) so that cooler ones get promoted. I took the following image from the sites gallery of current images (which fluctuates - they render new “sheep” images from user’s machines during idle time/bandwidth) and scaled it up - it’s a desktop now.

This is a link to the image because the thumbnail isn’t working for some reason.

I love that MATRIX screen-saver I found and will probably go back to it from time to time. Meanwhile, this.

World War II US Propaganda Poster Archive (a world going by..)

Alex — Thu, 03 Jul 2008 17:07:27 +0000

Perusing the blog of a friend’s friend with Flikr photographs of posters in a WWII museum led me to look for this treasure - man, I love this.

http://digital.library.unt.edu/permalink/meta-dc-422:1

There’s a larger archive of them at that domain. I was moved by this one displaying a painting and poem, An Open Letter to the Unconquerable Greeks. And intrigued by this one. I haven’t perused the tenth of these posters probably.

Where has the world gone that gave so much place for posters like this? Nowadays so much of it is nay, nay, America the evil, the guilty, and crazy delusions that we should do things like give our enemies the right of American citizen trials. Uh.. they aren’t American citizens, and they kinda want to destroy our country?

And about that last poster, are folks careful about what they write in war time anymore? Not so many any more, and not so much.

Rebuttal to a population doomsday prophet

Alex — Wed, 02 Jul 2008 17:48:12 +0000

My pappy wrote this excellent editorial (funny also, I think) published in the Roanoke Times.

Blaster Master - Title Screen - Remix (nintendo)

Alex — Wed, 25 Jun 2008 06:55:50 +0000

[Update: this music has been revised and re-posted]

In reference to Pilcrow’s prescient request, I now present a remix of title in subject from the Nintendo 8-bit era of glory. The overlaying melody on this thing (I argue) makes the work substantially different enough from the original that this is a new work, which I provide for your download.

(Download mp3, ~2.5MB)

This combines work done in Melodyne and Cakewalk with a nintendo sound font.

For an idea of this game (or a strange nostalgic glimpse), here are several YouTube videos -

I don’t like the weird video intro for this one, but it’s the only thing I find that gives the game title sequence (without a painfully elaborate or nerdy uber-over-narration) from which this title remix was built:

http://youtube.com/watch?v=hTl1gTTOFNA

Level 1 play-through:

http://youtube.com/watch?v=Wakyt-KtoBU

For the excellent finale music and sequence, skip to 2:44 in this one:

http://youtube.com/watch?v=Ct1Ins6oZY8

Adobe “Safecast” spyware shut down my legal photoshop install

Alex — Fri, 20 Jun 2008 04:29:19 +0000

My wife has a legal copy of Adobe CS2 purchased from BYU Bookstore when she was a student at BYU.

Today, mysteriously, every time Photoshop would boot up it would close automatically, no questions asked, no statements made, no crash - just.. gone.

Exasperated that reinstalling it and several other things didn’t fix it, I started looking through Windows system services one by one, googling them, and shutting down ones that I don’t want (I want a way to make those not start - there must be some kind of service blocker tool out there..). I ran across one entitled “Adobe LM Service”, which starts automatically at system boot, and googled it. I found this page, which informs me that the cause of the problem is spyware - which was installed by Adobe with CS2. It says: show

“…If you’ve bought Photoshop CS and have noticed a new service called “Adobe LM Service”, this is Macrovision SafeCast spyware..”

“..Each time Photoshop is started, SafeCast takes an inventory of the machine it’s installed on, and will refuse to load the application if it decides too much has changed…”

“This service also connects to Adobe’s server to check if your serial is a valid one..”

“The service wants internet access.. checks for hardware changes.. will prevent [Photoshop] from running.. The service cannot be permanently disabled.. When the service is manually disabled it re-enables itself each time PS is started.”

This is what has happened. That service is running on my machine, Photoshop mysteriously closes - that’s the problem and this is the cause.

So here’s how our ethically run, modern licensing and “Digital Rights Management” works: A student purchases software from a company for hundreds of dollars. Years later, the spyware the company installed unbeknownst to the student, which has been communicating back to the company’s server the whole time, shuts off the software for suspicious reasons undoubtedly not covered in the license agreement - which agreement permits the software to be used on one machine, which is exactly how it is being used - but that’s not enough for the company. “Too much” has changed in the computer environment (what computer doesn’t change after several years?), so the company thinks the student might be a pirate, and absent hard proof, they regard suspicion as enough to violate the license agreement and pull the plug - on a weekend when it is urgent for the student to get photographs together for a client.

With “license management” going postal like this, is it any wonder anyone ever resorts to piracy or license subversion? I would at the least prefer Adobe popping up a message that says “Please give us a call when you can get to it - in the next month or so, because we know you have an infant and a toddler and it’s miraculous if you ever even get the time to open our application. Don’t ask how we know, we’ve been watching everything, we know it’s kind of creepy, but we’re sorry, for technical reasons it isn’t clear whether your install has stayed on one machine.” - then train the service reps to be very non-confrontational and polite. “Oh, we’re sorry for the glitch. Here’s a fix that will make that go away.”

Is there any phone number given for customer service? Is there any communication about the perceived problem at all? No - if I even learn about this, it’s from hackers in the true, ethical sense who are onto the way Adobe unethically hacks into user’s computers. I don’t know how to circumvent this. I’m really peeved that I have to circumvent mechanisms in software I have a legal right to operate, just to get it to operate. I’ll find a way (I thought it said blocking Photoshop with the firewall works?), but that I am forced to look for a way is so incredibly uncool.

Grrrrrr.

That slick veneer of “reputable” tagged on the name of Adobe in my mind (other than that I hate pdf files) just vanished. Is there any software giant left out there to like?

1771

Alex — Tue, 17 Jun 2008 16:56:03 +0000

This is my number in the “Million Blogs List” experiment.

Hyporcites and Dingbats on the Orphan Works Act

Alex — Sun, 15 Jun 2008 21:46:51 +0000

I’m pasting this letter from the Illustrator’s Partnership [edited only to change links to hyperlinked text]. Also following it with my comments is a reply I got from my Congressperson, Chris Cannon (R-Utah) about my letter to him opposing the bill. show

On June 12, three leading textile trade associations announced their support for the Orphan Works bill.

Writing in Textile World, James A. Morrissey writes: “The legislation, which has cleared a House subcommittee, is supported by the American Manufacturing Trade Action Coalition, the National Textile Association (NTA) and the Decorative Fabrics Association.”

Funny, that’s a 180 degree flip-flop from their House testimony of March 13, 2008. That day a spokesperson from the textile industry testified “on behalf of the hundreds of American companies” who are members of the same three trade groups. She denounced the bill, calling it “unconscionable for Congress to try to impose millions of dollars of costs on individual companies, many of which are small businesses…”

“The proposed orphan work legislation is not a solution to the ‘orphan works’ problem,” she testified. “Instead, it is a blueprint for a radically new copyright law. The inability to distinguish between abandoned copyrights and those whose owners are simply hard to find…is the Catch-22 of the Orphan Works project. This legislation would orphan millions of valuable copyrights that cannot otherwise be distinguished from true orphaned works – and that would open the door to commercial theft on an unprecedented scale.”

Strong testimony. So what happened? Did the bill improve? No, Congress just agreed to exempt textiles from the bill. So now Congress gets their endorsement.

Definition: When is cultural theft on an unprecedented scale not a problem?
Answer: When you’ve been cut out of the problem.

We hope legislators will judge the merit of such endorsements accordingly.

One last irony: the “strong testimony” quoted above was not original to the textile industry spokesperson. It was appropriated verbatim from Brad Holland’s 2006 Senate testimony and used without attribution or citation. You can read the original [here].

Don’t Let Congress Orphan Your Work
You can urge Congress to oppose these bills by linking here to a special letter.
Tell Your Senators and Representatives to Oppose the Orphan Works Act [here].

Please forward this message in its entirety to every artist you know.

My comments:

This is infuriating hypocrisy!

Now about the reply I got from Canon. My letter to him (which I now gather was vaguely scanned by an assistant and filed under “opposed”) specifically countered the oft-cited claim from supporters of the bill - that it supposedly does not endanger any managed copyrights because users of a work would have to perform a “good faith” search for the copyright holder. I went into it in my previous post on this - scan the post for the section of capital letter bullet points, it’s item E. Canon’s reply merely puppets what the drafters and supporters of the bill claim. He writes:

H.R. 5889, the “Orphan Works Act of 2008″ would limit the remedies of copyright infringement if the infringer using a work of art proves that he or she had performed a reasonably diligent search to identify and locate the owner of the copyright, but was unable to do so, or had provided accurate attribution to the author or owner if known. If proof cannot be obtained, then no limitations of remedies are available for the infringer and full copyright infringement penalties may apply.

This isn’t any kind of counterpoint - it’s exactly what my letter to him outlined is not a valid support for the bill (for the reasons I just gave here). His letter gets worse, too -

While it is obvious that the Copyright law needs updating, I simply cannot support a measure that targets or singles out a company such as satellite radio with the intention to shut down the industry as a whole by increasing its fees and negatively impacting its consumers. My position on the Judiciary Committee has given me the great opportunity to advocate technological advances while working to clarify copyright law. I will continue to work with my fellow members of Congress to resolve copyright issues in a way that addresses the interests of both the consumers and the copyright owners.

And that has what to do with the Orphan Works Act? Nothing! This is a typical political evasive non-response - but while Canon is puppeting the talking points of supporters, and he was after all on the committee approving the bill, it would appear he’s going to go right on supporting it - despite the fact that many people I know have written him to oppose it.

Canon mailed the same idiotic form reply to everyone I know who wrote him to oppose the bill.

When is it time to write President Bush and ask him to veto the bill if it crosses his desk? I’m thinking that time is now.