On Technology

Top Facebook group: “I’m not yelling…I’m Italian…thats how we talk.”

Top Facebook group that someone ought to start: “Walking around naked makes me feel sexy.”

Some weeks ago, I posted “Coconut” to my Facebook status, and no one noticed. Do you know how much that hurts?

If you have to force viewers not to skip over your video ads, then you’re obviously showing them the wrong ads.

Dear spammer: How do you know that an extra inch would even fit in my pants?

Sunday afternoon is the best time to get on Twitter, because al the e-marketing gurus are off for the weekend. (Also because that’s when #writechat occurs!)

I just added more blogs to my feed reader than there were on the entire Internet a few years ago.

Another worthy domain name that should’ve been considered more carefully for ambiguity: goredforwomen.org.

On Entertainment

Star Trek is no longer a guilty pleasure of mine… Not guilty, because a lot of those stories are pretty good. The Love Boat, however, still is.

In any case, I don’t know how they make it through the galaxy in a ship as fragile as the Enterprise.

Hey! It’s Tomolok the Romulan. He’s dead now, you know. (But he’ll always be G’Kar to me.)

Ugh. Gack! Now I know that Pippi Longstocking wears green underwear. Little girls should learn to keep their knees together.

The new A-Team movie will probably be fun, but they’ll never outdo the original cast.

Happy happy cow cow! Happy happy cow cow! SING IT WITH ME! Happy happy cow cow cow. Moo! (In honor of California cows, to the tune of the “Happy Happy Joy Joy” song.)

Porky Pig just suggested to Daffy Duck that he see a speech therapist for his lisp. (Gail Bishop, of From the Ashes of Courage, would not find that funny.)

On Politics

If a CEO squanders the stockholder’s money, he goes to jail. And if a politician squanders the public’s money, he gets reelected to Congress.

Q: How do you know a politician is lying? A: His lips are moving.

We believe gravity is real only because space aliens are controlling our minds. Fortunately, the FBI and CIA can protect us from the space aliens, thus allowing us to fly. (A commentary on political logic.)

I marveled at the incentives, when I discovered that the penalties when my daughter was late for school were worse than when she was absent.

Did you know that no not even one child has ever been poisoned by Halloween candy?

On Writing

Every time someone implies that I don’t have “a job,” I should thank them for furthering my writing career.

As a writer, I always have to look up the difference between “heroin” and “heroine”: one is a drug; the other is a female protagonist.

On Life, Love, and Relationships

Having a scruffy beard is really cool, and sexy, too, except when you’re trying to lick the last of the spaghetti sauce off the plate.

The Missus has no reason to fear that I will ever cheat on her: between a wife and two daughters, there’s simply no room for any more women in my life. I honestly, seriously, don’t understand how men in polygamous cultures can emotionally support multiple wives.

Ladybugs are so cute! Except when they start swarming near the entrance to your apartment.

After we moved the goldfish bowl next to the turtle tank, the turtle kept trying to swim through the glass.

Do boogers freeze? (As a parent, you sometimes get asked questions like this.)

The plea of a stay-at-home dad: “I want a day off from being a mom.”

Right now, I can’t use my MacBook Pro. I’m using C’s computer to write this blog post.

The photo shows what the display corruption looks like while booting. After that, I get the white screen of death.

Now, my laptop may come back, because it eventually came back the two times it did this last week.

Frankly, it’s a little annoying.

What happens is, I’ll be doing something that stresses some part of the machine’s capabilities… but not always the same part. This time, I was watching a video and fast-playing through the boring bit, possibly stressing the video bandwidth. Last time, I was trying to start an application when the thing was already too busy, thus stressing CPU and disk bandwidth. The time before that… I don’t remember. In each case, the display suddenly corrupted, once in a diagonal banding pattern as you see in the photo, the other times with much worse corruption. Simultaneously, the computer crashed, hard.

Maybe my computer’s rebelling, because it’s become sentient, like the computers in Star Trek.

Afterward, in each case, I got the white screen of death. The first time, I finally got it working again by holding down the power button on power-up until I got a loud beep… I still don’t know what that does, but it’s a recommended procedure to try to get your Mac going again. But in the other two cases, this procedure didn’t help. The last time, I also tried resetting the low-level controller and wiping the PRAM, all to no avail.

It sounds like a hardware problem, right? But get this: I can boot into safe mode just fine, proving that the display works and it’s not a hardware problem. (And that’s at least good enough to back up my data.) So maybe a disk problem? Data-corruption? However, I can not boot the install DVD, proving that it’s not a disk problem.

This computer’s been acting up ever since I had it refurbished and upgraded to Snow Leopard. So I don’t know whether it’s the new mainboard or the new OS (or a combination of the two) that’s causing my problems. Since then, applications crash frequently, and the computer often slogs along through easy, straightforward requests… got plenty of free RAM, free disk space, CPU bandwidth, disk bandwidth, network bandwidth— That sentience theory is looking better all the time. I don’t know what it waits on, but it gets busy waiting on something while I wait for it to open a web simple page or my move word-processor cursor to the next line or whatever.

I’ve also been having wireless network problems. If I open up a large number of connections in sequence (such as by refreshing my RSS feeds), the wireless network will completely drop out for 30 to 40 seconds. It fortunately comes back, eventually. But get this: My wireless network works fine with my daughter’s MacBook, proving that it’s not my wireless router causing the problem. But my laptop works fine with other wireless access points, proving that it’s not my computer causing the problem.

I’d bring the laptop back to Apple, except that I don’t know what to show them or tell them. Even the white-screen-of-death problem hasn’t been consistent enough.

I once had a car like that: every time I took it to the mechanic, it stopped sputtering and stalling. I eventually gave up and just prayed it didn’t drop out on me while I was on in the middle of a Boston rotary.

-TimK

UPDATE: This time, after I had backed up all my latest data, I rebooted the machine. I did not get the white screen of death! (Yea!) But my desktop display was a corrupted version of the “Apple” startup screen, as you can see in the photo. However, this corrupted display had a working mouse cursor. (I dare you to find it in the photo! It’s there, but it’s corrupted, too.) And the computer was actually live: I could hear the hard disk clicking away as Spotlight reindexed it. I shut the lid, and it successfully suspended. I opened the lid, and it successfully resumed… with the same corrupted display. So I forced power-down and rebooted, planning to reset the PRAM just for yuks, when—to my surprise—all the display corruption was gone, repaired, just like that. Oy vey!

So back up and running… for the time being.

Final, assembled Antec Veris case, with the drive from the OneTouch inside.

It’s turning out to be another of those weeks, when I get very little accomplished. I completed a couple posts scheduled for the next couple weeks, and tomorrow will be posted the first part of a 2-part humorous series, a roast of the Boston driver. And I also picked up writing a novel I began several months ago, which I had shelved because of an irreconcilable plot issue that I needed to resolve. Having resolved the issue, I updated the story outline, began revising the zero-draft (the extended outline), and I may even work on this novel for NaNoWriMo this year.

But other than that, I spent the week doing lots that accomplished very little:

I finished reading C.J. West’s A Demon Awaits (to which I give 4½ stars) as well as John Stossel’s Myths, Lies, and Downright Stupidity: Get Out the Shovel—Why Everything You Know is Wrong.

I began reading The Silver Door, Holly Lisle’s second Moon & Sun book, because the Little One and I both enjoyed The Ruby Key, the first book in the series.

I also began reading Happily Domesticated a collection of humorous sketches on family life, by Kevin Cummings, who I talked to recently on BeTheStory.com.

And I’ve been watching Babylon 5, rented from NetFlix. I adored this series when it was first aired, and this is the first time since then that I’ve been able to watch the episodes through in order. In the interim, I became a fiction author, and now I’m having a first chance to analyze the B5 storyline from a writer’s perspective.

The Apple Store had ordered a new optical drive for my MacBook Pro, and it came in… just about the same time that my backup drive, a Maxtor OneTouch 4 USB drive, gave out. That is, the drive itself still worked, but the power connector stopped working. It had been flaky for several weeks. I guess it got stepped on one too many times. And I didn’t feel comfortable handing my laptop over to the Apple Store, even though they shouldn’t need to touch the hard drive, without a working, up-to-date backup of all my data.

The Maxtor OneTouch 4, disassembled

At first, I groaned that I might need to dig up enough cash to get a whole new external backup drive, and then spend God-knows-how-many hours copying the data from the broken one to the new one… assuming I could keep the old one going long enough. I lucked out, though. On the way back from dropping the Missus off at work Wednesday, I stopped at Staples to look for a replacement computer mouse—

Remember when computer mice used to last more than a year? On my old original-Athlon 850MHz box, I have an old, three-button, PS/2 mouse, the kind with a rubber ball that rolls against a mousepad. (You can see it in the photo above.) So, a 10-year-old computer using a 20-year-old mouse, which costed only $10 or $20 in its day, and I’ve been able to keep that mouse going strong with nothing more than an occasional cleaning. Today’s mice don’t even have any way to clean them, not that they have a chance to get dirty. Since I got my Apple laptop, I’ve gone through an $80 Mighty Mouse, a $50 wireless Logitech mouse (with a dongle that sticks out from the side of the laptop and that got whacked one too many times), and one of those $20 retractable mice (whose cable inexplicably gave out).

Anyhow, I stopped at Staples; didn’t find a suitable replacement mouse (though I did later find one at a nearby Office Depot); but I did find that Staples carries a $60 external drive kit, the Antec Veris MX-1 “Actively Cooled Hard Drive Enclosure.” (That’s what they call it, anyhow.) That’s way cheaper than a whole new backup drive, and it let me get my hands dirty with computer components. (Figuratively speaking.) Which is something I haven’t done in years.

The first step was to disassemble the OneTouch 4, easier said than done, but I found a good description of the procedure online. (And yes, that did void my warranty, but I didn’t care, because I really wanted to preserve the data on the drive.)

Magnetizing a screwdriver

The next challenge was translating the instructions for the Antec box. No, they weren’t written in Japanese. Rather, they were written without any words whatsoever. Just a series of diagrams. A good idea in concept, but a few short descriptive sentences would have helped a lot, just to let me know what I was looking at.

I also needed a magnetized screwdriver, because that was the only way to insert the two screws that held the drive in place inside the box. And before you complain that I shouldn’t be using a magnetized screwdriver with a disk drive… Let me assure you that the magnetic field of a screwdriver is much too weak to damage the data inside a hard drive. Unfortunately, I didn’t have a magnetized screwdriver, but I did have an old speaker from a dead-and-gone car stereo, a piece from my I-gotta-get-rid-of-this-junk pile. And I swiped one of my screwdrivers across it to magnetize it.

Once assembled, I hooked the drive up to my laptop using a USB cable, and it worked perfectly. The Antec case’s connectors also will be easier not to step on, so I hope they’ll last longer than Maxtor’s did.

I know I’m rambling my way through this story. But that’s been the story of my life this week. A mass of distractions and little focus and motivation. Tomorrow, I expect the pattern to continue, as I take C to a doctor’s appointment. And the last time we were at this particular doctor’s office, they made us wait for an hour before the doctor could see us. (Or was that a different office in the same building? Well, I guess I’ll find out tomorrow.) And then I need to drop my laptop off at the Apple Store, which means first backing it up anew. And between all of that, I expect to get nothing done, but I’ll probably have plenty of time to read another book or two.

At least I can hope next week will be more productive.

-TimK

© 2007 David Baker CC BY-ND 2.0

Or at least they cost life. That is, they suck time from my life, because they seriously disrupt my life, and keep me from getting much of anything done, including writing blog posts. One of my Facebook friends even asked me how I was doing, I had disappeared for so long!

So, my dad was nice enough to loan me his MacBook Pro—which I am now using—while mine is getting fixed. That is, under repair.

This all happened to happen around the Yom Kippur weekend. And here’s how it went down.

Saturday night, I did a complete backup of my MBP’s hard drive. Fortunately, I keep backups anyhow, so it didn’t take as long as it would have from scratch. Unfortunately, I had never restored a MBP from one of these backups before, and so I didn’t know what to expect, or even exactly what to do. I spent the entire afternoon Sunday trying to restore my disk image onto my dad’s MBP. Couldn’t remember how to mount the backup’s image file, and I thought I couldn’t do it from the appropriate interface. Couldn’t remember why I backed up into an image file in the first place. Spent hours copying files out of the image file, then ended up not using the copies. Finally figured out what I should have been doing from the start, and set the restore process going.

Many hours later…

By the time the restore was done, it was well into Yom Kippur, and I was at morning services, and already feeling hungry (because I had been fasting) and dirty and grimy (because you don’t shave or shower on Yom Kippur). And by the time afternoon rolled around, I was developing a headache, because I had not had my coffee, and I was snapping at the kids, because I had not eaten. Fortunately, self-denial has a time limit. By the time we got home after dinner, we didn’t even have enough energy to fight for first dibs in the shower.

Fast forward to Tuesday, and I was still working on getting my computer working correctly. I upgraded to the latest Mac operating system, which they call “Snow Leopard,” probably because it camouflages itself and then springs at you when you least expect it. Every time the Internet went down, the new operating system did too, hard. I had rebooted it 3 times before I thought I had figured out which program was bringing down the computer. Ain’t technological progress wonderful?

The new version of iCal, Apple’s calendar application, also conveniently forgot all of my appointments and reminders. And when I tried to import them from the old iCal files, it told me it couldn’t. (No good reason, it just couldn’t figure it out.) I checked the files, and they looked fine.

So I installed Sunbird, which is Mozilla’s calendar application. Sunbird imported my calendar files just fine… kind of. But I had to manually adjust most of my reminders to fix some things it did wrong. I also discovered that Sunbird has some pretty advanced to-do features. What I didn’t know, however, is that Sunbird’s “task list” system is worse than useless, because it doesn’t work right. So I converted a whole bunch of my reminders to “tasks,” and then I converted them all back again.

In the meantime, I noticed that Sunbird was ringing alarms for my reminders about 3 and a half hours earlier than it should have been, which was very confusing. At first I thought maybe I had set some time-zone setting wrong. But nope. And Google was no help, either with that or with the task-list issue.

So this morning, I exported my calendars from Sunbird and imported them back into iCal. Fortunately, iCal was able to read the exported Sunbird files, even though it couldn’t understand it’s own previous files. And now I’m back with iCal, which doesn’t do everything I want, but at least my reminders pop up now, and at the right times.

And that brings you current, and explains why I haven’t posted all week, and why I’ve disappeared from civilization.

-TimK

I’ve been using Twitter for years now, and I’ve even developed some real (though virtual) relationships that started via Twitter.

I really wanted to do a little tweeting before bed tonight, because catching up with my Twitter friends can be uplifting. But I can’t now. So instead of doing that, I’m blogging about why I’m not. And that sucks. Especially since I recently followed a bunch of other Holly Lisle fans, including other active writers, and their tweets are really interesting.

And maybe that’s what set off Twitter’s computer. That’s the only thing i can think of. I noticed that after I followed them, a few people “blocked” me, something that somewhat surprised me, because I’m not a spammer, and if they were interesting in keeping their tweets private, they would have made their profiles private. I know that Twitter has some automated trigger such that if a certain unspecified number of people block you (within a certain unspecified period of time?), Twitter will automatically suspend your account.

But all i did was to follow their public tweets, which is how you meet new people on Twitter. It’s always been that way. I know, because I’ve been on Twitter for years. While I understand that new people coming on Twitter may get annoyed, especially since there are spammers who follow a large number of people, just to get a large number of followers, and then these spammers don’t actually pay attention any of their friends’ tweets. And so I understand why some people may get bitter and want to lash out at anyone who they don’t know who follows them.

But you see, I’m not one of these spammers. I actually do pay attention to my Twitter friends’ tweets. Not all of them, all the time, but when I log onto Twitter, I actually do participate in the conversation. I’ve been doing this for years. And if Twitter had looked at my account longevity, they would have known that I wasn’t a spammer.

If their algorithm had a catch for account longevity, it wouldn’t have falsely triggered, as it did, and I would be tweeting with my friends right now, rather than complaining about how down in the dumps I feel about being cut off from them.

Oh well…
-TimK

P.S. I’ve signed up to Plurk, and I’ll be making friends there, too, now. Redundancy, you know.

UPDATE (11:04 PM EDT) — Twitter has unsuspended my account. They gave no reason for the suspension, and the support ticket I filed is still “awaiting assignment to a help desk operator.” Even so, I’ll be looking into using Plurk or some other service as a backup for Twitter in future.

The first thing I did upon installing OpenOffice 3 is to open up my current manuscript. Now, when I write, I use a formatted document, as though I were typing words directly onto the laid-out book pages. This saves time in layout, because the book comes already laid out correctly. (However, I use style sheets, so that I can make changes to the layout, if need be, cheaply and efficiently.)

So the first thing I noticed is that the formatting of my book was all screwed up.

OOo3 found all the correct fonts, but they were all misrendered in one way or another. The primary headline font (CopperplateBold) seemed to render shorter than it should have; though that could have been my imagination, because the secondary headline font (CopperplateLight) rendered too big, with tight letter-spacing (I guess, to make up for the oversized letters). The main font (Palatino) also rendered way too big, and the letter-spacing of my italic text (PalatinoItalic) was way too tight. The drop caps looked like crap, because OOo3 inserted additional gaps above their ascenders and below their baselines–I have no idea why.

Now, I’m sure that if I were to hack with the style sheets, I could probably resolve most of these issues (although I don’t know how I would deal with misrendered drop-caps). I opted instead, for now, to keep using OpenOffice.org 2.4, at least for my current manuscript. I may experiment with it for other manuscripts, but I’m disappointed that the formatting turned out so much different simply by upgrading to a new version. I don’t remember having any significant issues upgrading previous versions of OpenOffice.org.

One possible cause for some of the formatting problems is that because OOo3 runs under the native Mac GUI, it uses the native Mac fonts and the Mac font renderer. (But my understanding is that it uses the old, now deprecated ATSUI API, instead of the new Core Text API.) OOo2/Mac runs under X11, and it uses a different font renderer. So one might expect the fonts to look different now. I just don’t want to have to stop my life in order to hack with the document in order to get it back to the correct proportions. On the other hand, you’d expect 11-point Palatino to look like 11-point Palatino, no matter what font system you were using. But on the other hand, I’ve long known and accepted that I can’t open up my OOo/Mac documents in OOo/Windows and expect them look the same, because the Windows fonts are all different. I guess I can accept that taking documents authored under X11 and opening them under Aqua will likewise cause them to look significantly different.

Regarding the drop-caps, I notice in the OOo bug list, there are numerous issues still outstanding. None of them appears to address the issue I’ve observed. Still, I may need to wait for version 3.1 before they work correctly. (I might get a chance to look into the issue I’m experiencing in more detail. If so, I’ll submit a bug report, if the issue has not already been addressed.)

-TimK

Squidoodlr is a page that generates possible topics for Squidoo new lenses. But these ideas are too specific, too useful to be randomly generated. For example:

• If beauty is based on bilateral symmetry, why are most hairstyles asymetrical?
• Places to cowork in NYC
• Mean tricks to play on your kids
• How to dry cotton T-shirts without wrinkling!
• Custom wheelchairs
• Geeks you love to hate
• When are you at your most beautiful?
• Is there a better alternative to Adobe reader?
• How to be a good grandparent
• … etc. etc. etc.

So my first question was: how does Squidoodlr actually work? It’s obviously not generating topic ideas with a randomization algorithm.

I thought it might be browsing the titles of top-rated web pages. So I searched for one of the topics it spit out, and I found this thread at Squidu. Squidoodlr doesn’t actually generate ideas. The ideas were submitted by users at the Squidu forum. Squidoodlr just selects a random one each time to call it.

Uh… That actually gives me an idea. The Quirkerator (fictional character idea generator), which I could seed with character traits from 1001 Character Quirks. What do you think? Any potential?

http://twitter.com/jtimothyking

-TimK

When I struck out on my own last November, I got a MacBook Pro to develop software with. And ever since then, I’ve had everything I’ve needed right at my fingertips. And I’ve been generally happy with my purchase.

(Except Firefox sucks CPU. Literally. As I use it, it consumes more and more CPU. Right now, just sitting quiescent, it uses about 80% of half a 2.33 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo. The phenomenon does not depend on which websites I’ve been viewing, which extensions I have installed, or which version of Firefox I’m using. No other application does this. Ugh. Hold on a sec… [sound of Firefox being killed and restarted] There. That’s a little better. Just killing Firefox, restarting, and restoring the session drops its CPU usage to 12%. Still a little higher than a quiescent web browser should be using, but much better than 80%.)

When I bought my MacBook Pro, I also got an Apple wireless Mighty Mouse. It was–and still is–a très cool design. The wheel scrolls right-left as well as up-down, and it has 3 buttons on the top as well as a fourth “squeeze” button on the sides. It worked well, until…

What they didn’t tell me in the store was that it would probably break after only a few months. I use my MacBook’s track-pad for most of my computing, because I keep the mouse in my home office. When I take the laptop on the road–or even just to the living room–I use the track-pad. The mouse is much easier to use, but the track-pad is more mobile. Maybe it was because I use it so infrequently, but it did last for more than just a few months.

Then I started having trouble with my mouse’s scroll-wheel. It would stick sometimes, as if the CPU were just too overloaded to scroll the video smoothly. Then about 6 months after I bought it, the scroll-wheel stopped working correctly. I could scroll up, but I couldn’t scroll down. And when I tried to scroll side-to-side, it would instead scroll up and down. At first, I thought it might be a weird software problem. But some research proved it was a hardware problem.

On Apple’s website, I read reviews by customer after customer, all complaining that their scroll wheels developed similar problems after only a few months. Oddly enough, all of these reviews appear now to have disappeared from Apple’s website, including the review that I myself left. (What? Aren’t they interested in my opinion on their product?) Actually, the reviews probably all disappeared when Apple quietly released its new version of the Mighty Mouse, even though they don’t appear to have improved the scroll-wheel design.

So you can’t read about it at Apple’s site anymore. But you can read similar reviews at Amazon, such as:

I loved my wired Mighty Mouse until the scroll ball just wouldn’t work any longer…

I know that some people said that the scroll button stops working after a few months, but I think that has to do with the way it is used, i.e. with dirty fingers… [except I've never used it with dirty fingers, and it still stopped working]

After only a month of use, the scroll ball can go in any direction but down, and there’s no apparent way to clean it out…

There are MANY reports on apple’s store website (in the might mouse reviews) of the scroll button going out within months. For a seventy dollar mouse, this is ridiculous…

As I said, there are no reports–pro or con–on the Apple store website anymore. But that part about needing to replace a $70 mouse every few months because the scroll-wheel gets dirty and there’s no way to clean it…

Actually, Apple does have instructions on how to clean your Mighty Mouse:

Use a clean lint-free cloth lightly moistened with water. Wipe the ball and the surrounding area, making sure to rotate the ball itself to ensure complete coverage. If the scrolling feels rough or if the scroll ball isn’t scrolling up, down, or side-to-side, hold the mouse upside-down and roll the ball vigorously while cleaning it to help dislodge any particles that may have collected on the internal hardware.

Uh… Seems like a pretty ridiculous cleaning procedure for a mouse. Besides, I’m not used to my mouse’s scroll wheel becoming dirty, and i am used to opening up the mouse and cleaning off any dirty parts inside, which I can’t do with this mouse. Trust me, I tried. But I was desperate, and no one was looking. So I turned the mouse upside down, and I whipped the ball back and forth and up and down with a clean moistened cloth.

And it actually worked… For a couple more months. Then I did it again. And it kept it working for a little longer. Until the wheel broke again. And so forth. Until today, when it stopped working and wouldn’t fix. I’ve owned this thing for not even a year. (On my other computer, I have an old mechanical-ball mouse from the days before there were scroll wheels, and it still works like a champ.) I got so fed up with the Mighty Mouse–and the vigorous cleaning of the ball didn’t help–I finally grabbed the dang thing, clenched my teeth, and pitched it across the room at about 100 MPH.

On the bright side, now it’s open and I can clean it. However, one of the delicate flexible interconnects inside ripped in the process, and so it’s dead. I’ve killed it. Seeing that it was already dead, I took the opportunity to crush it like a giant cockroach between my fists. (I hate cockroaches.)

Was the Mighty Mouse worth $70. Only because I got a good blog post out of it. But I ain’t doing it again.

So, can anyone recommend a good Bluetooth mouse with a 2-dimensional wheel?

-TimK

My story began with an email from said major blog network, an email that was obviously written by a lawyer.

To understand the story, first I have to go back to last November, when I created a website dedicated to fandom for the TV show Gilmore Girls. This is Gilmore-ism.com. Being a software geek, an innovative feature inspired this site, an on-line database of short quotes from the TV show Gilmore Girls, with analysis. But being a software geek, I couldn’t help but add feature upon feature to the site.

One of these features is an on-site feed reader. I chose and categorized a number of important Gilmore Girls-related RSS feeds, and I provided a feed-reader service on the site, for people who don’t know RSS and don’t want to. Very much like I can share my BlogLines subscriptions. I’m not the first person to provide an on-site news aggregator, of course. But this is another feature Gilmore-ism.com has that no other Gilmore Girls fansite has.

The on-site news aggregator is primitive, yes. Primarily, it’s useful only for sharing lists of RSS feeds with other Gilmore Girls fans. Indeed, these pages get less than 1% of the traffic on Gilmore-ism.com. Most visitors either sign up to the original site’s feed. Or they sign up to my email list, expecting me to keep them up to date.

I Receive a Nasty Email

One of the blogosphere’s Gilmore Girls fan blogs is a member of a well known blog network, which I will call “Network 23.” Not their real name. I’m calling them that, after the fictional TV network in Max Headroom. The Network 23 blog is one of the sites I’ve recommended to my fans. And it’s one of the sites I’ve linked to, many times, both on Gilmore-ism.com and in the Gilmore-ism.com e-Newsletter.

So imagine my surprise when I got an email from one of Network 23’s staff, with the subject line “Unauthorized Use of Network 23 Property.” The email was clearly based on a template that some lawyer somewhere came up with. And like most lawyers’ letters, it did not give Network 23 a good name. Even less did it resolve any conflict. I’ve put a lot of time and energy into making Gilmore-ism.com a unique and original website, with innovative features found on no other Gilmore Girls fan site. Sending this email could only have accomplished one thing. And that is to sow angst while simultaneously covering your legal ass-ets. (Note that I am not a lawyer, which is how I can say this with a straight face.)

Let me take a moment to reiterate something that needs to be said much more often, especially to small business owners: You may need a lawyer for legal advice. But always remember, he is not the businessman. He doesn’t know your market. He doesn’t know your customers. And he doesn’t go bankrupt when they all desert you. So use your own judgement, and be polite to your customers. It’s your neck on the line.

Why do I think this email originally came from a lawyer? Firstly, it began, “To whom it may concern:” even though everyone knows me by name. And the person who sent the email also knew my name, because my name is displayed right there on the “Contact” page of Gilmore-ism.com, whence he sent the email.

Secondly, it contained paragraphs like the following:

It has been brought to our attention that the web site located at gilmore-ism.com, for which you are the site author, is distributing, displaying and reproducing unauthorized copies of Network 23’s content.

Actually, it read an awful lot like the note that Paramount sent to The Movie Blog… (Cue Twilight Zone theme.) Except I could have handled receiving that note. It at least said exactly what Paramount objected to and what they wanted The Movie Blog to do about it. The email I got from Network 23 was missing these key elements. But I’ll get to that in a sec.

As I said, I frequently linked to and referred my fans to Network 23’s blog. I quote from the same original sources. And I once had a rather marked difference of opinion with an editorial posted on that blog (though very few people seemed to care about the issue). But copyright infringement? Imagine my shock at receiving this email!

I pride myself on being a legitimate website operator and a responsible, upstanding netizen. I use double-opt-in on all my email lists, never send spam, and my email subscribers even tell me when their email addresses are changing, so they won’t miss a beat. And I respect copyright, even though I don’t always think copyright holders act in their own best interest. Still, I believe the only correct solution is to persuade them to adopt a better way… Or to provide their readers with alternative sources of vibrant, original content. But to rip them off? Why would I even consider such a thing?

The Network 23 email also invoked the ever-fearsome 4-letter acronym “DMCA,” requesting my “assistance in the removal of all Network 23 content from this web site and any other sites for which you provide services.” But as I said before, it omitted key details. In particular, Network 23 did not tell me which URLs were infringing, even though this is a DMCA-notice requirement. So I replied, politely asking which URLs Network 23 believed were infringing their copyright, so I could address the issue.

Let me reiterate again: Do not let your lawyer tell you how to interact with your customers, against your better judgement. And do not let your fear of legalities bully you into doing something stupid. Emails like this scare the recipient at best, and anger them at worst. Witness how The Movie Blog reacted to the Paramount notice. And by making demands specific enough to appear to have the force of government behind them (even if they don’t), yet vague enough that the recipient can’t actually know what he’s actually being told to do, to the recipient, this message could only feel more like dealing with a mob boss than with a respectable business… Except that a mob boss usually tells you exactly what he wants, even if it’s unreasonable.

For the record, this email did not come from the author of the Network 23 blog, but rather from a different Network 23 representative. And I don’t even know that the blog author had anything to do with it, even though it claimed to be written on his behalf. Again, that’s probably just legal boilerplate that means nothing. I’ve read plenty of legal boilerplate in my time, and plenty of it even contradicts the document of which it is a part.

Why BlogLines is Not Search-Engine Spam

Let me talk about how search-engine spam intrudes into my Gilmore Girls research. I see more search-engine spam than most people probably care to think about, because I use search feeds, from engines like Google and Technorati. For example, to get scoop on Gilmore Girls stories before anyone else does, in my feed reader, I have automatic searches set up to monitor the blogosphere for stories about Gilmore Girls.

Unfortunately, I’ll frequently see a story appear, followed by a dozen copies. All the copies are from spam blogs, which have illegitimately copied the original article. They do this so that when you go to Google or another search engine, and you type in “Gilmore Girls,” the spam site will be one of those listed. The site doesn’t actually contain any new information on the subject, much less any original content. But if you go there, you’ll see loads of ads.

Google and the other search engines hate search-engine spam, of course. And they have algorithms in place to filter it out. However, I end up seeing a lot of it, because I have my search feeds set up to give me up-to-the-minute results. I guess I see these results before the search engine’s filtering algorithm can kick in or something.

BlogLines also provides its own blog-search feature. But of all the feeds it tracks, and all the feeds that its users subscribe to, and all the subscriptions its users make public… Now, at this point, I was going to say that BlogLines prevents search-engines from scanning its users’ public subscriptions. Because I know I have a line in my robots.txt file to keep search engines out of my “aggregator” pages. This in fact is the default behavior in the latest Drupal. (Gilmore-ism.com uses Drupal, BTW.)

I assumed BlogLines did something similar. But then I double-checked. Google does index these pages. Which makes sense, because they’re not disallowed, either by robots.txt or by <meta> tags.

So… How do BlogLines public subscriptions differ from search-engine spam? One reason is that there aren’t many people using them for this purpose. Indeed, why would a spammer do so? If you want to do search-engine spam, you plop up WordPress blog with an aggregator plug-in and some pay-per-click ads. You’re trying to trick user into coming to your spam site, because some portion of them will click on your ads. You can’t do this with BlogLines, because you can’t put up your own pay-per-click ads.

BlogLines is similar to what I do with the Drupal aggregator. Sure, my news aggregator is primitive. It’s missing features you expect from any serious feed reader. For example, after you read an item, you can’t mark the item as “read.” But the Drupal aggregator does behave at its core like a reader. It aggregates feeds, which appear on a separate page and not with the other content on the site. And the software caches aggregated items only temporarily, purging them after a period of time, just as you expect a feed reader to do. And as I said, I get no search engine traffic from this content, because it’s merely displayed to my site visitors as a service to them, not actually published with the rest of the content.

Second Thoughts and Feed Readers

As I had designed the feed reader portion of the web site very carefully, when I received the email from Network 23, it never entered my mind that this was a problem. As I said, the email didn’t specify which URLs they found objectionable. It only made sweeping generalizations, leaving me to try to read between the lines. And reading between the lines is something I’ve never been very good at.

(This is an argument my wife and I are continually having, so much so that we’ve gotten used to it. She tells me what’s wrong, but always leaves out the part about what she expects me to do about it. And I have to ask her for specifics, which annoys her, and so forth. Engaging, challenging, and way better than being lonely.)

If you had been inside my head, you’d understand. At first I thought I might have quoted more from one of Network 23’s blog posts than they might have liked… Although most of these posts basically copy content from other sources. Then I thought it might have something to do with the heated exchange of opinion between our two blogs some months ago, even though that’s a long time. I did quote heavily when I wrote that piece.

After I thought a little more, I considered that Network 23 might be objecting to the on-site feed reader. But why would they? The feed reader is only available to visitors of Gilmore-ism.com, not to search engines. It does not replace Network 23’s blog, but rather aggregates it with other sources, linking to all the original sources, as a good feed reader does. And its only possible use is to allow users to read the RSS feeds, which is (I assume) what the feeds are there for– so that people can read them without repeatedly visiting Network 23’s and the other blog sites.

In fact, I’ve analyzed traffic patterns for the aggregator. Less than 100 people look at it each month–hardly worth the effort. And after they look at it, then they go off to visit the linked-to blogs! (Duh. Like, what else would you expect, man?) I gather that they probably subscribe to those blogs directly, or decide they’re not interested at all. Of course, this is what sharing RSS feeds is all about. But it’s hardly a benefit for me, if I’m interested in keeping people at my site. Rather, it’s a perk I provide my visitors when they come to my site.

Still, the whole topic is a gray area. There are no established rules for what makes a public, on-line feed reader okay or not. This is unfortunate, and it seems to be resulting in some silly demands by bloggers.

More and more bloggers are including a copyright notice on their blog feeds:

This feed is for personal non-commercial use only. If you are not reading this material in your news aggregator, the site you are looking at is guilty of copyright infringement.

There’s even a WordPress plug-in that adds a copyright message like this to your feed. Sounds pretty reasonable on the surface, but what does it really mean? The whole license hinges on the question, “What is a news aggregator?” And it seems, different people have different ideas of what a news aggregator is. (One notice I saw even said that I could only view the feed on a reader that had no ads!)

• If you read an article on BlogLines, is BlogLines guilty of infringement because “your” news aggregator is a different service?

• Okay, so what if you read it at work? Does that make the use commercial?

• What if your feed reader stores items on a company computer? What if your company or ISP uses a caching web proxy?

• What if the blog post inspires a million-dollar idea that makes you rich? Will the blog author come after you for copyright infringement? (Crazier things have happened.)

• Since FeedBurner and FeedBlitz provide on-site renderings of their customers’ feeds, complete with their own embedded ads, does that make them copyright infringers? Neither’s terms of service claims a license to do this.

• What about blog indexes with integrated feed views, especially popular among podcasting directories?

• What right does any blog author have to tell you how you’re allowed to read his feed? He makes the feed available to be read. Fair use demands that you be able to use any suitable method to read it; and it’s your choice, not his.

• If you choose to use a web-based feed reader, does that make you a copyright infringer?

• What if you can access the web-based feed reader anonymously, without registering?

• What if the feed reader provides public views of subscribed feeds, like BlogLines or NewsAlloy? How long before United Media sues NewsAlloy for copyright infringement because you can read the Dilbert feed there?

• If you select a group of feeds your fans might like, and you link to (or frame) a BlogLines public view, so that your fans can read those feeds there, does that make you a copyright infringer?

• What if you allow them to read those feeds via a public feed reader? Does that make you a copyright infringer? Just because you’re making it easy for a very specific audience to view very specific RSS feeds?

Well… I guess if I put it that way, it doesn’t even pass the laugh test, does it? How silly is it of me to make it easy for my fans to view someone else’s published content? Why would I even want to do that? Because it benefits us both. That’s the power of the blogosphere. And that’s one of the advantages of social media.

The scary part is that the rules aren’t clear. If I provide a news aggregator service innovative enough not to fit into a certain blogger’s unstated conception of a “news aggregator,” I could get sued. And if I read someone’s RSS feed on a non-approved aggregator, could I get sued? You wouldn’t think so, but the rules are unclear. In either case, even if I’m right, and even if I were to prevail in court, it would cost us both many thousands of dollars. Because in any court battle, there are 4 parties: me, my lawyer, my opponent, and his lawyer. Two are winners, and two are losers. The lawyers never lose.

What’s a Blog For, Anyhow?

If I wanted to keep my content off the Internet, I’d have it printed in a book. In fact, I’m actually having a small booklet printed, but not to keep it off the Internet. Rather, to make it available off the Internet. But that’s a different story.

If I wanted to make my electronic content available only to certain people, I’d put it behind a login screen. In fact, I do that on Gilmore-ism.com, and I’m right now planning other sites that have content and features that require a user login.

If I wanted to try to force people to visit my website every time they want to read my content, I’d avoid RSS. In fact, some pages on some of my sites are never in an RSS feed, for a variety of reasons. Actually, there are plenty of good reasons to avoid RSS. But trying to make people visit your site repeatedly is not one of them. Because now automated programs will visit your site on the user’s behalf, alerting him when the content changes.

And if I want to make my content available to a wide and growing repeat audience on an ongoing basis, I put up a blog. This allows people to read my content using a feed reader or feed-reading service, as they see fit. It allows services like Technorati and Google to store and coallate my content so that people can find it easier. And for those who don’t yet do RSS–and there are many who don’t–there’s still the web interface.

The thing is, once I let that RSS feed out into the wild, I have to expect users to do things with it that I didn’t anticipate. I expect them to use transport mechanisms, software, services, and storage mechanisms that I could never even have imagined. All four of these are present in any feed reader, of course. But too many bloggers assume the technology won’t progress. It’s like, they just learned RSS, and now suddenly people are doing new things with it, and all the rules are changing.

By publishing an RSS feed, I’m giving permission for users to view that information. I’m also giving them permission to copy it for personal use, because that’s fair use. I don’t expect them to only use the technologies that I already understand and have approved of. I do expect them to use the full power of the Internet. And I expect third parties to provide services that help them do all the things they can do with my content.

Moreover, I expect them to link to my blog posts, because this is also one of the prime characteristics of the blogosphere. A blog is not just a means to publishing content. It’s also a means to take part in the global conversation. Even if I didn’t support comments or trackbacks on my blog–and I do support them both. But even if I didn’t, I would still expect people to respond to my writings. And as a good netizen, I expect to reply in turn. This is also one of the great powers of blogs as marketing tools, something many corporations don’t yet understand. A blog is not just a one-way communication medium; it is 2-way. It enters you into the conversation. Before blogs, in order to do that, you’d have to go to an online bulletin board or forum. And that meant you had to give up control to the operators of the forum, or you had to create your own forum and turn it into a community. Now, you can become part of the community from your own website. This is all a primary purpose of a blog, because RSS is the technology that makes this all possible.

Unfortuantely, opinions differ, even among bloggers. And technology is progressing way too fast for the law to keep up, putting us right in the middle of a huge legal grey area. As Fred von Lohmann of the Electronic Frontier Foundation noted to me in an email:

The copyright issues around RSS feeds are one of the great unexplored mysteries of the cyberlaw world. The answers may differ depending on whether your site or servers actually copy the feeds, or simply link to or frame the feed source. But the most likely answer for any of these questions is “nobody knows for sure” and “if you get sued, it will be expensive no matter how it turns out.”

As RSS continue to become more ubiquitous, I fear, it will continue to become a legal quagmire waiting for victims.

But there is an ironic up-side to all this.

Here’s What I Did

I waited a day for a response from Network 23, but I got none. By that time I had decided to take down all references and links to Network 23’s blog from Gilmore-ism.com. If you go there now, you wouldn’t even know Network 23 had ever existed.

I am not the only blogger to react this way to a legalese-filled email. Bloggers take note! Blogging is more about community than it is about right. If you are too centered on controlling what others do, you will lose the friendships that make your blog worthwhile. As the writer to the Hebrews noted, “Do not forget to entertain strangers, for by so doing some people have entertained angels without knowing it.” Therefore, treat others with respect, and assume good intentions on their part. If you fail to do that, it may not matter whether you were right or wrong.

(I finally did get a response from Network 23, but they never identified which URLs they believed had infringed their copyright, and I still don’t know for sure what they were talking about. But I’m thinking my educated guess is probably correct. They didn’t want my site visitors to read their blog. And now my site visitors, and all the people on my email list, aren’t.)

One final note, for the record: You may with any of my RSS feeds, transport them, view them, and provide services that allow others to view them, using whatever technology you choose. That’s what they’re there for. This includes my upcoming fiction blog, The Conscience of Abe’s Turn. You can even share my RSS feeds with others. Just please keep them intact. I will never come after you for doing so…

In fact, I’m formalizing this statement. Even when I publish content that is “All rights reserved,” if that content appears in an RSS feed, the RSS feed itself is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivs License. I’m currently updating my copyright notices to state this on each site and in each feed. (Of course, some of my content uses an even less restrictive Creative Commons license.) In brief, the CC BY-ND License (as it’s more affectionately called) allows you to distribute or “publicly perform” the RSS feed, as long as you don’t change it and you attribute the original author. I think that should cover it.

I’d also encourage you to do the same for your RSS feeds. And get this legal nonsense behind us, so we can continue building the blogosphere.

-TimK