I apologize for the lack of updates. My time has not, lately, been my own.

This past Tuesday my grandmother, Bernice Winkelman, passed away. She was 99. I remember seeing her maybe six or seven times in my life, the most recent being in California about four years ago. Before that I was in high school, and before that, in fourth grade. We weren’t really close, but she was kin, and I miss the opportunities I never had to get to know her.

*sigh*

We have a martial arts demo at Grand Valley this weekend, as part of the International Festival. For the past three weeks Rick and I have been at Master Lee’s house at 7:30 in the morning for iron-shirt chi kung training. It’s a great way to start the day; a huge burst of adrenaline, then sit in front of a computer for eight hours. Usually by noon I am ready for a nap.

Being a hardcore member of the swinging bachelor scene I expected to curl up with a beer and some nice cuddly porn this evening, but instead a beautiful woman called at the last minute and we spent a couple of hours at the Bar Divani, where I had a glass of Condesa de Leganza Crianza ’98 ; light, dry, and quite yummy.

I first met V. at school about eleven years ago, and then recently ran into her at a bookstore. This time I remembered to get her phone number.

It is a wonderful thing to be able to talk the night away.

The Eisen case left me with a bad taste in my mouth, so in a fit of almost-civil-disobedience I marked up “The Raven” and added it to the Project Gutenberg pages.

While I was Taking It To The Man the UPS fella came by and dropped off a completely kick-ass CD by Bonerama out of New Orleans. I bought the CD based on a single track I heard on WYCE a couple of weeks ago; a twelve minute funky jam version of Edgar Winter’s Frankenstein . Sure, it’s already a bad-ass song, but when a band comprised of five trombones, a bass, a tuba and drums plays it you’d swear the top of your head is coming off. Amazing.

Look for some design changes to es.o in the next few weeks. Brian and Bock are in the process of redesigning and that has me thinking that my stuff is a little dusty.

I had the stunning insight this morning that Jacques Derrida is to philosophy what L. Ron Hubbard is to religion. My opinion has not changed: deconstructionism is still stupid.

So I see that the Eldred case didn’t pass, and that means that copyrights on currently copyrighted materials can be extended ad infinitum . So now, essentially, once a book/movie/song goes out of print, it will be gone for good. When it is no longer a money-maker for its owner – who 99 percent of the time is the publisher and NOT the creator – it will be “archive” and never again see the light of day.

If this kind of thing had been going on a hundred years ago no-one born since 1960 would have ever had the chance to read Emerson, Thoreau, Poe, Lovecraft, Whitman, Dickenson, or any of the foreign works which were translated by Americans. They would all be shelved. Project Gutenberg would not exist. Neither would the Open Source movement. The Electronic Frontier Foundation would be a troupe of Qixotic mimes.

I do not begrudge authors and publishers the opportunity to make money, or many opportunities to make a lot of money. But the rights to a piece of creativity which is no longer making any money should be given to the public – under the understanding that anyone who is willing to pay for a copy of the thing, already has.

General consensus in the online community suggests that 20 years sounds fair.

Think about it: listening to orchestral music we say “Hey: That’s that song Beethoven wrote”, not “Hey! That’s the piece the Austrian nobility commissioned!”

All is not necessarily lost, however. Lawrence Lessig is working on a proposal which would simultaneously extend the length of copyright and move a great many works into the public domain. Eldred.cc is collecting news articles and legal material relating to this issue.

I have to admit that the snob in me occasional throws out a “So What?” Think about it: 90 percent of everything produced (and by extension copyrighted) is worthless and a blight on modern culture. The fact that the creators bother to copyright Britney and that whole crowd of music androids is rather pathetic. As if having that crap is worth the real estate value of the sectors on my hard drive. The RIAA blames music pirates for the decline in music sales when it should be blaming the producers and artists for creating crap. Michael Eisner is fellating Congress with glee now that he gets to keep the Mouse for another twenty years. Twenty years of Cambodian sweat-shops pumping out cheap plastic Donald Duck bidet spouts.

Frankly I couldn’t care less if Disney goes out of business tomorrow, or every member of the RIAA winds up in an oil drum in the Okefenokee swamp. In 2050 I want to be able to download the complete works of Jim Harrison, surf to a Tom Waits feedsite, and tuck into a plate of Soyent Green. For free.

So that 90% of crap which is created by jacking in to a mixer and jacking off on a microphone can stay copyrighted forever. No-one will care. But those few gems should be available for free, forever.

That would be AT&T. They are raising my rates by $15.00 per month. Several of my friends are switching over to DSL and filing nasty letters to AT&T. Can’t say that I blame them.

Here is what I’m a-gonna do:

They will be charging me a large amount of money for a service which, in my opinion, should be less expensive that it currently is. Therefore, for the increased fee, I will become the Bastard- Customer- From- Hell. From now on, AT&T gets exactly 0% slack from me. Every time I get less that 100k/second, even if I am connected to a teletype machine, AT&T will get a stupendously vile email from me. Power outage? I better God Damn still be online. My cable is cut? I better God Damn still be online. AT&T goes out of business? Still goddamn online. End of western civilization? Still online.

I am paying more, therefore I will demand more. AT&T has no say in this. I am merely playing by rules they set up. I demand absolute perfection in this service. I will not switch providers. I will hound the support desk, mid-level leeches management, marketroids and owners to make sure that even if the Earth falls into the sun, for what I am paying, ATT will ensure I do not lose my connection for so much as a nanosecond. AT&T is now my $60.95/month beeyotch.

And no I will not add cable TV in order to keep my current broadband rates. The reason everyone is switching to satellite is that AT&T cable TV sucks. I will not be strong-armed by a company which I am paying to be my beeyotch.

Looking at my site statistics this morning I saw that over the weekend es.o got over a hundred hits. Egads! thought I, The cellular automata experiments must have caught the eye of the Right People. I have become Known! Stephen Wolfram himself might have stopped by while I was at the bar!

But on closer inspection all of the hits, or almost all of them, were referred here by a surfboard design website. Well, sez I in a desperate grab at fading hope, Maybe the members of the Fields Medal Review Panel surf in their spare time.

I suspect someone grabbed one of my javascript files, specifically the one which opens pop-up windows, and plugged it in over there. Plugged it in and neglected to get rid of the absolute URL reference in the code.

No, (he says on looking at the referrer logs and cross-referencing the error files). Someone found my site when searching for “surfboard design”, and maybe linked to something which caused everyone following that link to go to my discussion board. I don’t have a discussion board. Nor do I have a surf board.

Which leaves me right back here where I started: begging for attention.

Broog, Alien Film Critic is very funny. Read him when you are not gazing in awe at the River Project .

Raining and 45 degrees here in sunny cheerful warm Grand Rapids. The taking stock of the past year has been done, and my major accomplishment occurred this past night at midnight, when I filled the last page of a journal in which I have been writing since mid-August 2000.

Raining hard now. The skylight sounds like a popcorn popper.

The journal is 380 pages of 8 x 11 paper. I write small. But I also send my creative energies into this vampire computer machine. I spend a lot of time here. Too much. Let’s just go ahead and call me obsessive. 380 pages in 850 days. My new journal is about 150 pages, unlined, designed and built by the extraordinary Tracy, who gets nowhere near the credit she deserves for her art. Why unlined? I have never learned to draw, and now is as good a time as any to begin.

Not raining so hard now. The skylight sounds like a skillet full of bacon.

Christmas was actually kind of fun this year. My favorite gift was a 5-pound venison sausage, lately from a deer my brother done kilt. Chopped up a chunk of it and threw it into some jambalaya. A perfect match, I gah-ron-tee.

Now it the time to think about New Years resolutions; whether and what. When you think about it, resolving to do something starting exactly on January 1 is rather arbitrary. From a practical point of view one day is as good as any other. I like to think I am riding a karmic wave; that so many others are making the effort will somehow make it easier for me.

Last year I resolved to reduce the amount of mediocrity in my life and, to a large degree, I feel I have succeeded. For 2003 I think I want to learn more. Sure, I learned a lot in 2002, about writing, photography, computer stuff, people… but I’m pretty damn smart and I feel like what I learned was a by-product of things I was required or compelled to do.

So, what then? Re-learn all the Russian I have lost over the last decade? Re-learn the trombone? Learn to draw? Learn Tibetan? Learn to dance? Trigonometry? Calculus? Iambic Pentameter? Java? Guitar? Drinks? It seems that whatever the new thing is, it should be an almost purely mental exercise. I have plenty of physical pursuits to keep me occupied *snort*.

Another possibility is to do a Good Work or a Great Work, or preferably both. A Good Work might be to help Project Gutenberg XML-ize a few dozen texts. A Great Work might be to create generative art based around something no-one has ever tried. Or a combination of the two… I dunno… Whatever it is, I probably won’t realize I have done it until well after the fact.