Planning to Go

My manager called yesterday to ask me to reconsider. He of course
hoped I would have thought about the benefits of staying a few more
years. I've thought about it, and these are the general trends I'm
concerned with.

The company has introduced a new platform and has been shipping it to
customers over the last year. The system is scalable, modular, and
everything you could design into a system of it's type. Unfortunately,
the continued maintenance of this is a problem. We have moved past the
point of shipping a product than can be simply replaced, and the end
user ability to reconfigure added parts or replacements is limited (by
design). This will increase the amount of time service personnel are
tasked with maintaining and upgrading existing systems. I see why this
makes sense from a business perspective, as it makes service contracts
much more attractive to the end user.

As the service engineer, I foresee more weekend and night work as
upgrades to customer sites are performed without interfering with
their business. A growing number of these sites have disparate and non
transferrable security background checks, and maintaining these will
be a logistical issue dropped onto the shoulders of field personnel.

Given the slow growth in commercial construction, more focus will be
placed on existing systems as an avenue for revenue growth. These are
typically much more involved both in planning and execution. The days
of 2 hour solutions are gone, as projects on that level are sourced to
third party contracts.

The potential for personal growth in the company, both in increased
salary and more involved roles in product development, are confined to
positions requiring relocation to the east coast headquarters. I am
very happy where I am, but I understand I have arrived in a static
position.

Additionally, now that my plans are set in motion, and I've registered
and received a green light to move ahead, the thought of staying where
I am is so personally unrewarding that I can't imagine it. I'm sure
there could have been some salary negotiation or accomodation to keep
me where I am, but I'm on track for a better life, and my wife and I
look forward to my staying home every night for the next few years.

Basically, I'm excited about what the future holds, and am curious to
see what I am capable of.

--
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What are kids coming to?

Happy Slap

I thought Sack Tap was a bad enough one. Some boys in Britain just pleaded guilty to manslaughter after recording beating an old man to death. Nothing more fun that using a cell phone to collect evidence for the police.

The New Face Of Apple

 

 

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The New Face Of Apple

via The Daily Dish | By Andrew Sullivan by Andrew Sullivan on 6/14/10

The iPad has the instincts of the Pentagon.

Apple - IPad - United States - IPhone - Search

 

 

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NorthSide Federal Credit Union

 

from http://www.newsweek.com/2008/11/14/a-risk-worth-taking.html :

Ethical subprime lenders are now expanding beyond mortgages. Ed Jacob, manager and CEO of Chicago's North Side Community Federal Credit Union, was alarmed to learn that many of his 2,700 members, most of whom have less than $100 in their accounts, were relying on the "second-tier financial-service marketplace": check-cashing outlets and payday lenders, which charge exorbitant fees. So he rolled out a Payday Alternative Loan (PAL), $500 for six months at 16.5 percent. The delinquency rate on the more than 5,000 PALs extended thus far is 2.5 percent. "For payday lenders, it's a success if customers keep taking out loans. To me, it's a success if they don't have to anymore," Jacob says. He believes such loans can build a credit history and help "move people to better products for them and us—auto loans and, eventually, mortgage loans."

 

I was looking at NorthSide's webpage, and suddenly realize I was looking at a picture of Anna from Inspiration Cafe and her son (saw her once when we got cubs tickets delivered to our door.) Although I appreciate the convenience of Chase I really feel like I could be doing something better with my money. Always felt like credit unions were a more ethical (if less convenient) place to keep money. It's refreshing to see people taking positive steps to break the stupid cycle of poverty in so many lives.

Feature Request

Am I the only person who thinks integration between latitude and gmail
would be a good thing? You see your friend is around, and you can
touch their pushpin to contact them, start a phone call, etc.

Maybe there's a smug android user confused why this doesn't just work
on blackberry... Maybe there's a google feature request crawler
already starting to implement this.

(Anyone google world cup and see the Gooooooooooal yet?)

--
Sent from my mobile device

Copyright: The Elephant in the Middle of the Glee Club

 

 

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Copyright: The Elephant in the Middle of the Glee Club

via Balkinization by Guest Blogger on 6/8/10

Christina Mulligan

The fictional high school chorus at the center of Fox's Glee has a huge problem — nearly a million dollars in potential legal liability. For a show that regularly tackles thorny issues like teen pregnancy and alcohol abuse, it's surprising that a million dollars worth of lawbreaking would go unmentioned. But it does, and week after week, those zany Glee kids rack up the potential to pay higher and higher fines.

In one recent episode, the AV Club helps cheerleading coach Sue Sylvester film a near-exact copy of Madonna's Vogue music video (the real-life fine for copying Madonna's original? up to $150,000). Just a few episodes later, a video of Sue dancing to Olivia Newton-John's 1981 hit Physical is posted online (damages for recording the entirety of Physical on Sue's camcorder: up to $300,000). And let's not forget the glee club's many mash-ups — songs created by mixing together two other musical pieces. Each mash-up is a "preparation of a derivative work" of the original two songs' compositions – an action for which there is no compulsory license available, meaning (in plain English) that if the Glee kids were a real group of teenagers, they could not feasibly ask for — or hope to get — the copyright permissions they would need to make their songs, and their actions, legal under copyright law. Punishment for making each mash-up? Up to another $150,000 — times two.

The absence of any mention of copyright law in Glee illustrates a painful tension in American culture. While copyright holders assert that copyright violators are "stealing" their "property," people everywhere are remixing and recreating artistic works for the very same reasons the Glee kids do — to learn about themselves, to become better musicians, to build relationships with friends, and to pay homage to the artists who came before them. Glee's protagonists — and the writers who created them — see so little wrong with this behavior that the word 'copyright' is never even uttered.

You might be tempted to assume that this tension isn't a big deal because copyright holders won't go after creative kids or amateurs. But they do: In the 1990s, the American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers (ASCAP) asked members of the American Camping Association, including Girl Scout troops,to pay royalties for singing copyrighted songs at camp. In 2004, the Beatles' copyright holders tried to prevent the release of The Grey Album – a mash-up of Jay-Z's Black Album and the Beatles' White Album — and only gave up after massive civil disobedience resulted in the album's widespread distribution. Copyright holders even routinely demand that YouTube remove videos of kids dancing to popular music. While few copyright cases go to trial, copyright holders like the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) don't hesitate to seek stratospheric damage awards when they do, as in the Jammie Thomas-Rasset filesharing case.

These worlds don't match. Both Glee and the RIAA can't be right. It's hard to imagine glee club coach Will Schuester giving his students a tough speech on how they can't do mash-ups anymore because of copyright law (but if he did, it might make people rethink the law). Instead, copyright violations are rewarded in Glee — after Sue's Physical video goes viral, Olivia Newton-John contacts Sue so they can film a new, improved video together.

So what should you do in real life if you and your friends, inspired by Glee, want to make a mash-up, or a new music video for a popular song? Should you just leave this creativity to the professionals, or should you become dirty, rotten copyright violators?

Current law favors copyright holders. But morally, there's nothing wrong with singing your heart out. Remixing isn't stealing, and copyright isn't property. Copyright is a privilege — actually six specific privileges — granted by the government. Back in 1834, the Supreme Court decided in Wheaton v. Peters that copyrights weren't "property" in the traditional sense of the word, but rather entitlements the government chose to create for instrumental reasons. The scope and nature of copyright protection are policy choices — choices that have grown to favor the interests of established, rent-seeking businesses instead of the public in general.

The Constitution allows Congress to pass copyright laws to "promote the progress of science" — a word often used in the 18^th century to mean "knowledge". The stated purpose of the original 1790 copyright statute was to encourage learning. So you tell me — what promotes knowledge and learning: letting people rearrange music and learn to use a video camera, or threatening new artists with $150,000 fines?

Defenders of modern copyright law will argue Congress has struck "the right balance" between copyright holders' interests and the public good. They'll suggest the current law is an appropriate compromise among interest groups. But by claiming the law strikes "the right balance," what they're really saying is that the Glee kids deserve to be on the losing side of a lawsuit. Does that sound like the right balance to you?

Christina Mulligan is a visiting fellow of the Information Society Project at Yale Law School. You can reach her by e-mail at cmulligan at gmail.com

 

 

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Orientation today

Well, orientation went pretty well. My biggest complaint wasn't the
company, but the lunch. They did not offer coffee. In fact, since it
was summer, a lot of the coffee shops were shuttered. I made it
through, met with an advisor, confirmed my registration, and checked
my progress. Apparently some things dropped down and I moved from
Junior to Sophomore (57.5 credits). I think that will only affect me
for the next four months. So my schedule stands, mostly 9-3 or 9-4 5
days a week. It's odd to say a full load sounds like a vacation, but
it really does.

--
Sent from my mobile device

Kobo eReader

Well, I must not be the only one willing to put down 150 bucks to see what this can do. According to Borders website, the kobo is sold out for it's initial June shipment. They are preordering for July 2nd.

Firstly, I am glad I don't have to try and find this at Chapters, and secondly, I am glad that it's generating interest faster than they can make them.

Everything I have seen indicates that as far as gadgets go, it is a single purpose machine, and I expect it to be good at it's only function. It's also by far the cheapest on the market, and comes unbundled from internet access and a monthly data plan. I can always harvest the news with Calibre and load it daily if that's what the internet was for.

UIC Fall 2010

Tentatively I am scheduled for the following courses this fall, any of which may change at orientation next week:

STAT 381 Applied Statistical Methods I M W F 09:00 AM 09:50 AM
LALS 127 Latin American Music (Lecture) M W F 10:00 AM 10:50 AM
MCS 260 Intro To Computer Science (Lecture) M W F 01:00 PM 01:50 PM
MATH 220 Differential Equations I (Lecture) M W F 03:00 PM 03:50 PM

ECON 220 Microeconomics (Lecture-Discussion) T R 09:30 AM 10:45 AM
MCS 260 Intro To Computer Science (Labratory-Discussion)T 01:00 PM 02:50 PM
MATH 220 Differential Equations I R 01:00 PM 01:50 PM