A Disturbing Message

Some militant UCLA administrator recently put a desktop background with a vague and threatening message on all of the several hundred residence hall computers. Probably it was meant to intimidate potential pirates, but it comes off as pretty ridiculous.

"Do not download copyrighted music, movies, and software. Most material is copyrighted. Obtaining or offering such material in violations of U.S. Copyright Law may result in university disciplinary action and may be punishable with civil and criminal penalties including prison time and money damages."

This paragraph has two parts-- the imperative command at the beginning, further qualified by the second sentence, is the meat of it. The rest is standard RIAA hellfire and brimstone. In the imperative bit, we're told not to download copyrighted media. Note the absence of the words "illegal" or "pirated." Apparently, downloading copyrighted material is a sin under any circumstances. You'll be punished only if your downloading is illegal, but you ought not to download any copyrighted material at all.

This command is inane, and can't possibly be followed. A student who watches a video lecture has downloaded a copyrighted movie-- a student who gets a site licensed copy of Maple or MATlab has downloaded copyrighted software. Neither have broken the law, but they have violated what seems to be UCLA policy. It's so silly that it makes you think the author was confused-- but no! He fully understands the scope of his command. "Most material is copyrighted" he tells us.

In other words, he isn't using "copyrighted" as a synonym for "copyrighted and restricted to paying customers, where you aren't a customer" because most material on the internet doesn't fall into that category-- it is "copyrighted" only implicitly, and can be freely downloaded. He must really mean that we aren't allowed to view copyrighted content at all,  no matter what.  Luckily, the policy covers only "music, movies, and software," else we'd be restricted to Wikipedia and a few other CC sites. The warning doesn't make clear whether Flash videos are defined as "software." Hopefully they aren't-- ucla.edu contains a copyrighted flash video that downloads automatically.

!

Friday afternoon and I am done! Ha! Tired as a dog from too many stimulants and six hours of tests, but elated in a very it's-the-denouement-now kind of way. Spring has revealed herself to me in all her infinitely metaphorifiable manifestations. Basically, I'm high on a delightful concoction of

serotonin
modvigil(tm)
tired
vacation

Ow ow ow

Once more unto the breach, dear friends, once more! I'll be done by 2:00 at any rate...

l8rs

m

RR

Tomorrow I have to take a final. This is very sad. :(

Pnt

I know what you're thinking... Later and later every day! Tut tut. Oh well! I'm studying Mathematics.

Before Bed

Token! There. I wrote something. Finals are coming up, and that means rough seas ahead. I have high hopes, but that doesn't mean anyfing.

Oh no!

I almost forgot to write today! Phew.

Ba-doing

The weekly meeting of The Bruin Alliance of Skeptics and Secularists is today. I'm excited! This will be my second meeting, and unfortunately the last before Spring break. It looks like that's all for today. I'm tired.

Berp berp berp

I must sleep. Tomorrow my alarm clock will belch and fizz and blare static, and I should be ready for it. I don't want to lose the battle for my early class, but I probably will. I'll stir and smack my alarm clock, then fall asleep. Or not. Increasingly, I enjoy the guilty thrill of lying in bed awake in the morning, perfectly conscious, not doing anything at all. Nrrrrrrr.

If I make it, I'll listen to a German man patronize a room full of pre-med students for fifty minutes. After that, though, I get to do Chemistry. I work in a Laboratory, you know! I get to bang bottles together and shake beakers and things. I enjoy it, but it's not a rich source of easy anecdotes.

At 1:00 I have another class. After that I'm not sure how I'll spend my time. Frittering it away, no doubt. I'll increment a lot of hit counters, give Google another tiny shard of my soul, and make sure someone has already posted the comment I was going to make on the latest chunk of tech news.

I'm depressing myself now. Aw geez. Stoopid daylight savings.

Staying Up To Date

I'm going to use Impulsestorm to write from now on, so this blog is temporary. Impulsestorm is a utility my friend Tommy made-- it integrates Jabber, a blogging tool, and probably does some other things. I'm not quite sure-- he hasn't given me the login information yet so I haven't been able to try it. In the meantime I'm keeping time as usual, trying to get back on the wagon and write a little every day.

I promised earlier that I was going to write about my life, and I'm not going to renege on that promise. Here's a list of future topics, all of which are implicitly prefixed with the word "My":

*attendance at a Prestigious University and related desire to throw myself in front of a train
*Observations about popular culture, race, religion, and socioeconomic status at said Prestigious University
*tenure as a Chemistry Monkey and ongoing evolution into a Chemistry proto-hominid
*Hand wringing on a variety of subjects ranging from mathematics to literature

And maybe if you're very very lucky I will write a sonnet or something; I've been having fever dreams about a science textbook written in iambic pentameter. Anyway all of this will be segregated into sections, so if you are abhorred by my views on the zoning permit application process but thrill at my essays on total gum replacement surgery or my memeological analysis of the latest top-of-the-pops radio single, you will have the option of reading one without going anywhere near the other.

My spellchecker is crying foul over the word "memeological." When you search Google for it, the first result begins

"This is the same memeological mechanism that I talked about using with vloggersations."

Naturally I had to Google the word "vloggersation" to see what would happen. The second result contained the word "vlogvertising." in the first sentence. I Googled "vlogvertising" and much to my dismay, no more funny words came out. Damn. I thought I had discovered a new technique.

This reminds me: The Internet, somewhere along the line, became self aware. Moments later, it became self obsessed. The most popular topic of conversation on the Internet is... The Internet. See? I'm doing it right now. It's because the Internet is made out of people, and people want to talk to each other-- but to talk to someone beyond "howdyhowzitgoin" you need a common interest. What common interest do all Internet users have? Yup.

This has precedent, actually. Amateur Radio had same problem for the same reason. Enthusiasts spent endless hours building and buying rigs and antennas, only to hear in faint CW:
"What rig are you using?" (I was going to type the slick Ham Radio abbreviation for that, but I'd be putting on airs and I can't find it quickly anyhow. Maybe I'll ask my pa.)

Internet in jokes and rampant self-referentiality aren't that big of a problem yet, but they're worth keeping an eye on. They could end up altering the globoculture, or the memeosphere, or the macrosocial vloggersation, or any number of other ill defined abstractions with dubious use. Oh oh oh! Maybe I'll write a book about it!

Har.

White Space

What beautiful fonts! This website wants to make my words pretty-- it's politely requesting that I write. I want to help you, website, I really do! I want to populate your copious style sheets with content, to bring you a community of paragraphs that stretch from top to bottom. I will try.
Getting started writing again means straining the words from the brain talk and fixing them up so they fit on a page nicely. The "writing" thoughts and the "thinking" thoughts are different. I won't talk about it anymore; I don't know about brains, I only own one.
Oh, and this is going to be a Personal Blog! I'm going to talk about Me sometimes. I'll talk about where I live, and what I do, and what kinds of things other people want me to do. It'll be fun!
A few years ago I was afraid to write about that kind of thing, because I was afraid people would analyze me and discover that I am a terrible loser and a charlatan just like everybody else. I know better now-- no one cares! Anyway, if someone does they'll email me and then I'll get to have a flame war.
You might have noticed I used "they" as a third person singular pronoun in my last sentence. That was intentional. I think it's a good idea-- people do it in other languages and they do it for a reason. Speaking about a person using the gender specific third person pronoun is just that-- specific. Specificity causes offense sometimes: "Do you think Gregory is still sleeping with the Argentinian midget?" is more specific, and more offensive, than "Are they still together?" If old Greg is listening by chance, he's much more likely to cock his head and listen to the former statement than the latter.
When you listen to a conversation, you try to figure out who the speakers are speaking about; if they use gender to specify the third party then you know the gender of the subject. That information can be very, well, informative-- which isn't so great if you don't want people who aren't in on the conversation to know what you're talking about.

It's Saturday

This blog is for Tommy Li, so he can see how far web publishing has come. Later I will post more here. For now, let the colorful breeze of packets relax your mind. Just imagine that you have traveled back in time to 1996. The Web is ugly and made out of HTML. Every Excite search yields a new array of ramshackle homepages that moulder like abandoned buildings; without chat, without comments, without AJAX, maintained by lonely developers in the wee hours of the morning and bedecked with banner exchanges. Big black hit counters: 0000000023.