Matt O’ Rama

My new time-sucking hobby

I’ve wanted to start doing electronics work for some time but never got around to buying a soldering iron and related tools, finding a good project, etc. It’s not like I don’t have anything else taking up my free time though. But this year Kim gave me a really cool book on some electronics projects and told me to buy the tools and parts needed so I’m finally going to start with my new hobby. Whoohoo for me! Coincidentally, a guy at work passed around an awesome video of an electronic whiteboard you can make with a Nintendo Wii remote and an easy-to-make IR-led light pen. During this 4-day weekend I’m going to make up a couple of the light pens and a few of us at work are going to make one of these whiteboards. Another co-worker pointed out a project called Crayon Physics where you draw shapes and make them interact (it’s cooler than I’m making it sound) and once we get our whiteboard going, we’re going to either use it to play with this Crayon Physics or write our own version specifically to use with the whiteboard. Working with a bunch of like-minded geeks is highly recommended. :) I’ll be posting about my projects and about our whiteboard geekery in the coming months. I’m hoping to get an Instructable or two up and some videos as well.

The New

Obviously I haven’t posted in awhile so I figure this is as good of a place as any to start again. I decided I needed a change so I shaved off my beard. I’ve had the beard for awhile so I’m still getting used to my new face. I’m not excited about taking up shaving again but I think it’ll help me focus on other changes I need to make.

50 Miles Is A Lot

Man, 50 miles is a long way to ride your bike. I did a 50 mile ride on Saturday as part of the Albuquerque Century and it was hard. I mean really hard. It didn’t help that I hadn’t been riding my bike almost at all in the past 6 months. So really I had no right to ride that far and if the last 15 miles hadn’t been downhill or flat I don’t think I could have finished. But while I was unreasonably happy to see the finish line, I did it.

The main thing you forget when you don’t ride long distances for a while is how much sitting on a bike hurts your ass. That and my back muscles hurting from not being used like that for so long were what almost did me in, not my legs which is nice because it means I didn’t lose all my leg fitness. Now that I’ve done this insane ride I’m going to push myself to be ready for the 100 miles next year. That ride has 2 insane hills as well as big rolling hills on Tramway so there’s no faking that one. I’ll have to be ready for real. I’m also hoping to do some triathlons next year since I’ve been a slacker and don’t think I’ll be ready this year. We’ll see though.

I do have one suggestion for the ABQ Century folks: Do some kind of real finish line. I showed up at the finish to no applause, no picture, nothing. I figured I was just late since it took me awhile to finish but some other people there said there had been nothing the whole time they had been there either. Now to a lot of people, doing those long rides might just be another weekend but the rest of us would appreciate some kind of atta-boy or something. I don’t even need a plaque or anything. Hell, a whoohoo and a congrats would have sufficed.

But overall it was great. The food/rest stops were very well done and the route was mostly well marked. Hopefully next year some of the roads with no shoulder will be widened but that’s up to the city, not the ride people. I’m glad I did it and I look forward to going again.

More Movie Poster Photoshopping Craziness

One of the most popular posts I’ve ever done is this one, noticing the changes in clothing for Jessica Alba’s character in the first Fantastic Four movie between the movie and the poster, as well as the increasing of Keira Knightley’s cup size on the movie poster for King Arthur. I’ll leave it as an exercise for the reader on why that was such a popular post but I’ve got a new one for you, and it’s a doozy.

The very cool site PosterWire has a comparison between 2 versions of the poster for the new Harry Potter movie. In one, Emma Watson has a noticeably different shaped torso than the other. The thing with this is, Emma Watson is 17 years old. It doesn’t shock me that the poster designers do this to adult female stars. It’s lame, but I’m past being shocked by it. But to do it to a 17 year old girl is just disgusting. From reading the comments at Reddit (I’m not linking directly to the page on Reddit to spare you the pre-adolescent nerdboy “discussion”), I gather this is being labeled a mistake but Photoshop didn’t mess with this girl’s physique on it’s own. Somebody did it, and the fact that it got used, even accidentally, probably doesn’t mean that the artist did it without approval. The further problem with this stuff is that nobody is going to complain. Emma Watson and her parents probably can’t complain for fear of hurting her career. Even if people get up in arms over it, the promo company will just say it was a mistake and move on to the next adult actress’s poster. And nobody is going to skip the Harry Potter movie so nobody will take even a second to think about it and how sick it is.

New Digital Rights Protests, Just Like The Old Ones

Digg on HDDVD “key” posts

Recently one of the keys that is used to encrypt the new high-def DVD discs was found and released online. Using this key you can decrypt the movie and put it on a computer or otherwise get around the idiotic restrictions the movie companies have put on the discs. This is obviously troubling to the movie companies since the HD encryption schemes were said to be “un-hackable”. hahaha.

So this key has been floating around and the movie companies have started issuing what are called “DMCA notices” to websites printing the key. These notices are the result of a law, the DMCA, that says you can’t get around restrictions on copyrighted stuff. This is a horrible law and has been used in even more horrible ways to restrict many people from doing various projects, giving speeches, etc. The notice says you have to take down the offending material and the website Digg had been fighting its users all day about them trying to post the key on the site. Finally, Digg relented and has stopped fighting its users and will not comply with the DMCA notices in this case. Good on them I say.

But what interests me about this is how similar it is to the situation a few years ago around the DVD key that was released which allowed the creation of applications to read regular DVDs, again to the chagrin of the movie industry. That also involved a released key, basically just a series of numbers, and attempts to take down the number. However, that was before the DMCA. Before the industry had a real legal tool to use to try to get people to remove this number from their website. In the DVD case, they tried and failed to use the standard copyright infringement against people, which didn’t work and which backfired just as in this case as people who would have never heard or cared about the key heard about the controversy. Now that the movie industry has the DMCA though, they could have actually stopped this information from being released. That’s the danger of the DMCA, it is a tool used solely to information from flowing. Has the key been found by an academic who set out to “release” it in a paper or a presentation, they could have been stopped. People like to think that information is always going to be replicated infinitely out on the net but with laws like the DMCA, the information can be stopped before it even reaches the net.

Also, with the previous DVD key release, the geek community rallied behind the release of the key. Tshirts were made with the key numbers on them, people even got tattoos of the key. Now though, the DMCA forces sites like Digg to fight its own users on this stuff. It’s not like the guys at Digg were itching to rile up their users or delete stuff from their site. They had to, under the law. Even if the notices end up being bogus (as some people are saying since the key is really just a number), Digg had to remove it.

The DMCA is a gift to big media companies and serves no one but them. It stops innovation, silences speech, holds back progress, and much more. This incident should serve as yet another example of why the DMCA needs to be repealed. I hope that the big blowup about this with Digg and the many other sites involved leads to real change. Eventually the DVD key issue went away and a great many new projects and applications sprung up around DVDs. The industry will surely fight for their “right” to stop people from knowing this key so they can try to control HD-DVDs a little longer but just like with DVDs, they’ll fail in spite of the new legal club they have to bludgeon people with.

Here’s a good article on the DMCA notices

Spam and (Un)Popularity

I just implemented a new whitelist system for my email that has pretty much eliminated all the spam I was getting into my Inbox and I’ve discovered a weird side-effect. I’m a lot less popular than I once was. I used to keep my home webmail open all the time and every time I’d flip over to that tab in Firefox I’d have a bunch of email to go through. Now that I’ve gotten this whitelist going and only email I specifically allow into my Inbox gets in there, I get a lot less real email than I thought I was getting. Now I can not check my home email but 2 or 3 times a day. The fact that I was seeing tons of email in my Inbox fooled me into thinking I was getting  a bunch of real email. Strange but very useful.

It’ll be a geeky post but soon I’ll go over my whitelist setup. It’s not something most people will be able to setup but it’s turned out very well so I want to share it. If you have Postfix with Sieve email filtering going this is a good compromise between getting a million spams and losing real email to a spam filter. Stay tuned for more details and some Perl code. Admit it, you can’t wait!

On Atheism

“A quote by George Santayana, “My atheism, like that of Spinoza, is true piety toward the universe and denies only gods fashioned by men in their own image, to be servants of their human interests.”

From this article on a PBS series on atheism.
I’ve always liked what Frank Lloyd Wright said when asked about his personal religious belief: “I put a capital N on Nature and call that my church.”

I love how the people in the article speaking out against this series and atheism argue that this is anti-Christian and shouldn’t be allowed based on that. Just showing an alternative to religion doesn’t say anything one way or the other about religion. The idea that you can’t show or learn about something because it might offend people who don’t believe it is just stupid. And as I always think, if your religion is so weak that you have to be afraid of people learning about an alternative, you need to reexamine your faith.

Kurt Vonnegut is Dead

Kurt Vonnegut, Counterculture’s Novelist, Dies NY Times

Dammit. I’m as sad about this as I guess I can be about somebody who I never met. Like a lot of his fans, Vonnegut’s work meant a lot to me. More than most writers, even ones whose work I also love. I did feel like I knew him at least a little bit, based on how much of him was in his work. I started reading his work because I’d heard he was a science fiction writer, during the period when I was young (probably no older than 12) when I read only science fiction. Of course his work ended up being much, much more than just sf, without the nose-in-the-air refutation of the genre you get from people like Margaret Atwood. He always said he was glad when his work was finally removed from the science fiction drawer since people tend to mistake that one for a toilet. Slaughterhouse 5 was his best book, but I always loved Breakfast of Champions. BoC was a fun book, as dark as it is in some parts. The part near the end when Vonnegut, in the book as a character, remembers that the other character is supposed to be a speed reader and quickly makes him have taken a speed reading course so he can speed read the book he’s holding just blew my writer’s mind when I was younger. The sheer audacity of that impressed the hell out of me.

One of the things that makes me even more sad about his death is that he had to die during the Bush administration. Those people made him so angry and just confirmed his worst feelings about the darkness of humanity that I’m sad he never got to see their consignment to the scrapheap of history. I hope he did see things turning around though, as I think they are.

Luckily for us, we still have his heart, spread around through the characters and books he created. Even still, I’ll miss having him around.

So it goes.

EDIT: Jessica at Indexed (one of my favorite new sites) has such a great memorial to Kurt Vonnegut I have to share it. She nailed him completely.

Grand Canyon Skywalk – Lame?

http://www.hicks-wright.net/blog.php?id=5173

This blog post is a review of a trip this guy took to the new, highly cool-looking, Grand Canyon Skywalk. If you haven’t heard of it, it’s basically a glass-floored walkway that sticks out over the Canyon. Sounds awesome, and I’ve wanted to go on it ever since I first saw the pictures. According to this post, it pretty much sucks. First they charge you way more than advertised, then it’s not even finished, and they don’t let you take cameras. Let me repeat, NO CAMERAS. What? You’re at the Grand Freaking Canyon and they don’t let you take pictures?

I was just at the GC recently for the first time and I was pretty impressed by the tourist parts that were there, hopefully this will get better over time. But if they think they can just foist off some lame, overly-expensive, half-built thing on people (and not even let them take pictures for pete’s sake) and not have the bad word-of-mouth spread they’ve got another thing coming. I have no plans to go back to the Canyon anytime soon but until I hear that things have gotten a lot better at the Skywalk I’ll be skipping it.

Free trip to San Francisco? Um, yes please!

I wanted to take a Java programming class for work so I signed up for one here in Albuquerque. A week’s intensive class in a new language sounds like a good time to me, as weird as that sounds. So I was surprised and for a minute I was sad when they called me and said the class here was canceled due to low attendance. Of course I brightened up when the woman continued talking and said if I wanted to go, they would pay for my flight and hotel to take the class in San Francisco. Uh, sure, yeah, I can do that. Whoohoo!
San Francisco is one of my favorite cities, I fell in love with the place after taking a bus tour with my family when I was younger. I’m going to be in class most of the time I’m there so it’s not really a vacation or anything but the free trip is just an awesome opportunity. Besides being away from Kim and the kids for the week (the longest I’ve ever been gone), I can’t wait just to be back in SF for awhile.