JohnA lifeBlog

Some have asked “What is it REALLY like to live in California’s Central Valley?” Well, thanks to the power of the internet, I have provided a link to a brief video that should give you a better understanding of the Central Valley way of life.

I am too cheap or behind the times to have a real internet connection
I understand the importance of a high-speed internet connection

Someone from church set me up on a date, and to be honest, I was SOO not ready for this. First, the date was set up on Thursday for Saturday, giving me no time to emotionally prepare. Next, and far more sinister, was that apparently EVERYONE at church knew who this girl was except for me. When I got to church on Saturday night, it was like opening night at the Matrix… everyone was there, just watching.

Anyway, I ended up not going out with everyone to Michelle’s house. I dunno… maybe I’m not ready to be dating again. Who knows.

Okay, so I have moved my blog to my own server, but thanks to the ever wonderful blogger service, I can’t actually post that fact on my old blog address. So, if you are reading this at the new address (http://johna.org/), please tell your friends and loved ones about the new location.

Ugh. Stupid blogger.

Update: It appears to have worked, so yay! Go me!

I’ve Moved!
The blog formerly known as Go West is now located at JohnA.org. Please update your bookmarks!

Look at me! 3 posts in one day! Well, I am trying to make up for the fact that Blogger kept me from actually writing in my blog over the last couple of days.

If you read Lawrence Lessig’s blog (and there is no reason that you shouldn’t be reading it every day), you’ll notice that the “Eldred Act” has been officially introduced into Congress as HR 2601!

What is the Eldred Act? You can read everything there is about it at Eric Eldred’s website, but in a nutshell, it is a law whose purpose is to reclaim the public domain by requiring that copyright holders who wish to retain their copyright after 50 years pay a small maintenance fee. Why is this so important? Well, as they say, a picture is worth a thousand words.

Some companies have lobbied for increasingly longer copyright terms to protect their still commercially exploitable copyright properties, and the downside of this push is that millions of works that would otherwise be made available to the public remain incumbered by 95 year copyright terms. When you combine that with the fact that only 2% of copyrighted properties from 1925-1960 are still commercially viable, it means that the majority of important works languish and disappear to protect the very small minority.

The Eldred Act balances the scales a little bit by allowing companies that wish to continue utilizing their copyrighted material to pay a fee, but for those 98% of the properties that are no longer commercially viable, the public is able to use them in the way the constitution outlines.

I encourage you to contact your Representative and ask them to support HR 2601.

I know, I know… I said no more politics… but just a little bit won’t hurt.

In what has to be one of the most ironic things ever, I have been placed in charge of creating various multimedia for the church service I help out in.

For those just joining us, I am NOT a graphical person. In fact, my good friend Tony used to refer to all of my work as “Big Blocky Text.” In fact, he was even thoughtful enough to register the domain name bigblockytext.com just for me.

Anyway, since I am now responsible for doing graphics stuff, I am learning how to do flash stuff, although I prefer a tool called SWiSH for most of the stuff I am doing.

And, now opening myself up to what will undoubtely be mountains of criticism, I have placed one of them online. Not bad for someone whose idea of creative design is using a font other than Times New Roman.

Anyway, it just struck me as funny, that’s all. Hopefully some other people are going to learn flash and make some stuff that is better than mine. I’m pretty sure there are a number of people in the church who are creative that would be happy to help.

Okay, so for the last two days, I’ve wanted to write in my blog, but was subjected to this screen over and over.

Which was largely irritating… especially since they said it would only take “a couple of hours.” Anyway, I’m looking to replace Blogger with some other system now… I’m looking at movable type, but I don’t want to get too involved in that process right now. I have SOOOO much stuff going on it isn’t even funny.

Anyway, I was doing some research the other day, and I was wondering where women like this are in the real world. Basically, her name is Sonia Arrison and she is director of the Center for Technology Studies at the California-based Pacific Research Institute. I read some articles (like this one) she has written regarding digital liberties, and it’s obvious that she is intelligent and articulate. I dunno… these amazingly smart women must be out there somewhere, it just appears that they all exist in places that I am not.

Anyway, Jonathan is forcing me to leave the apartment, so I have to cut this entry short. I’ll write more later.

Well, I finished Book 5 at about 2am this morning. It was not bad, but I didn’t enjoy it as much as I did the previous books. It seemed like half the book was spent with Harry, Ron, and Hermione whining and complaining. I mean, it did have some neat stuff, and I am definately looking forward to the next book, but I don’t think I will be at the store 5 minutes before it opens like I was this time.

Since I live in a small, boring town, I was a good 45 minutes away from the nearest store open at 12:01 with the book, so I ended going to Wal-Mart at 7am to get it. When I arrived, there were about 20 people waiting outside for the store to open.

As they opened the doors, everyone headed to a big palette that was wrapped in black plastic. All it said was “Do not display until June 21″, so everyone know exactly what the contents were. I did some more shopping, and was pleased to discover at checkout that they were selling it for only $16.17, which was the cheapest I had seen it anywhere, online or offline.

Anyway, I don’t want to spoil it for those who haven’t had a chance to read it all yet. I am going to go back and read it again after I re-read books 3 & 4… it may just be that I forgot some stuff from the previous books…

Harry potter is less than 8 hours away. Although for you east coasters, it’s only 5 hours. I’m stoked.

I still haven’t finished Book 4 again… I mean, I remember it with no problem, but I have stuff to do tonight so I probably won’t be able to read it all before 12:01.

The local B. Dalton^TM is selling it for 40% off, which if they are open at midnight, is good enough for me. I need to call up there, though. Otherwise I might end up driving up to the Borders in Modesto. Which, now that I think about it, may not be such a bad trip to make regardless… I haven’t been up there in a while.

Well, we had rehersal Wednesday night, and some of the major people I whined about in my last blog entry weren’t there, so things went really smoothly. I am quite excited about Saturday’s service… it should be up to par with what I know everyone can do.

Anyway, enough for me. Time to call and find out who is open at 12:01 around here.

On Saturday, I had to pick up a friend from San Jose airport, so I decided to burn Harry Potter Book 4 onto CDs for listening on the way there. Man, I had forgotten how good that book was… I am hoping to finish up reading the remainder before Saturday, when Book 5 is released.

Speaking of which, I wonder who will have the lowest price on it. Typically that award goes to Wal-Mart, so I think I’ll try there first. I have a pretty good idea of what it costs at bookstores in the local area, so if Wal-Mart isn’t the cheapest, I’ll go to a bookstore instead. I was hoping someone would post to spoofee the price the stores are planning to charge, but so far, nothing.

Church hasn’t been going too well… it seems that everyone there is preferring to play politics instead of actually trying to work together to pull off a kicking service. At every turn it seems that someone is withholding information or exerting control to protect their own little domains. Which really sucks, because I thought this would somehow be different. I mean, I really want to help out and do some neat stuff, but if I am not even allowed to install software on the computer without installing l0phtcrack and hacking the Administrator account, it isn’t very realistic.

See… the problem isn’t that I don’t enjoy writing in my blog, the problem is that my life is SOOOO boring that if I wrote every day it would go something like this:

Well, this morning I woke up, did the 3 “S”-es, wrote some code, cooked lunch, wrote some code, cooked dinner, watched some Simpsons episodes, played computer games, and went to bed

So, instead of subjecting everyone to that day in and day out, I just write when something other than the aforementioned occurs. Like on Wednesday.

I take a weekly trip to Wal-Mart to purchase Sam’s Choice Diet Cola, since I am a cheapskate and it actually tastes pretty good.

Out front was a guy who circulating a petition to recall Gray Davis, California’s governor with a massive 9% approval rating. In order to sign the petition, you have to be registered to vote, so I did that.

After I went inside, I looked at the back of the form, and realized that the person had not filled out the required section saying who they were, etc. So I went back out and asked him to do so.

He said, “What are you some kind of lawyer?” I said no, I just wanted the form filled out like it was supposed to be. He then says “What, you think I’m trying to trick you?”. Again, I said no, I just wanted the form filled out like it was required to be.

He then said, “Fine. What’s your name?” I told him, and he hands back my voter registration card after tearing off the part with his name & address. He did, however, miss tearing off his phone number.

Anyway, that’s what a Republican volunteer out here is like. Defensive, agressive, and confrontational. And they wonder why they can’t win any races. What equally pissed me off was that I was supporting his petition.

Anyway, to each their own. I sure hope he doesn’t have to deal with people at his day job…