eldred petition

June 03, 2003 by Eric Richardson

Earlier I mentioned the proposed Eldred copyright act. Now they're putting together a petition for it. In the slashdot comments, though, there is some definite misunderstanding of the act. It would not do away with the current life+70 term. Instead, it would simply require renewal at 50 years, and then if that renewal was done the normal term would transpire. You can't renew perpetually, only up to the full length of US copyright term. That said, Congress could still do its 20 year dance, but that's another whole can o' worms.

woo hoo!

June 02, 2003 by Eric Richardson

DHCP doesn't seem to like me at the moment, but with a hardcoded IP my DSL is working perfectly. That'll do for now. My apartment is no longer disconnected from the world. Now I'm off to eat food.

mmm... infomercials

June 01, 2003 by Eric Richardson

With no Internet and no cable, the only external input into my apartment is via broadcast television. Now, this is Los Angeles, so at least half of those stations are in Spanish, and pretty useless to me. The other half (minus my three PBS affiliates) seem to always be playing infomercials. For instance, I think I've seen the Miracle Blade one fifteen times in the last two days. At times it's on two channels at once. And the result? Those knives look amazing. I want a set.

black

May 30, 2003 by Eric Richardson

I took our cable box and cable modem back to Comcast today, so I have no connectivity at my apartment until Monday, when DSL gets activated. Speakeasy shipped my self-install kit last night, and it was delivered to my building this morning, 12 hours and 54 minutes later. That's impressive. I'm still working to get my phone line up, though. The building wiring guy can't figure out what binding post (the equivalent of port on a switch) is mine, and claims the number SBC gives me is wrong. Today I scheduled an SBC repair tech for Monday. I think the odds are better than 50/50 that the guy comes out, figures it out in under 5 minutes, and says their was no problem. In that case the building gets to pay that bill, since they told me to get a repair person out. Who knows, though... I claim to know what's up, but in reality I've never even seen the telco equipment.

bands i need to catch

May 29, 2003 by Eric Richardson

I really want to come up with a good way to track upcoming shows for bands I want to see. Right now I have a flat file with band names and links to pages with tour dates, but I'd love to find a way to slurp dates into a calendar. It would be impossible to do that generically, though. Hmmm....

I really want to catch Gus Black again. I had forgotten about him until I ran across his name somewhere and it looked familiar. Then I listened to one of his samples and remembered really liking him. I also plan to catch the Red Elvises several times this summer.