Orphan Works, by itadela

For years, ignoring the pleas of its customers, and seemingly unbeknownst to most of us, flickR has been stripping author, license, and other information from the resized versions of every image we upload.

To most of you, this probably sounds like pointless geekery, but it poses a serious copyright problem.  This practice contributes massively to the developing “orphan works” issue and needs to be addressed by flickR, pronto.

Most cameras insert data into images when they are created, and many photographers insert additional data such as copyright information, author information, and so on.  The idea is that this information follows the image as it travels the world, and hopefully helps people (who are curious enough to look) to understand who made it and how.  It also helps honest people who, down the road, discover an image they like and want to find out how – and if – they can legally use it.

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I found this new video very disturbing:

Britney Spears was [rightly] excoriated for saying “I think we should just support our President in everything he does.” I expect to hear at least as much criticism of this stupidity – which brings Oval Office hero-worshiping to a new and nauseous level.

I totally agree with the “be the change” concept – nothing new (although still very rare).

But Ashton Kutcher (not the world’s brightest sociopolitical bulb) and Demi Moore pledge to be “servants” to President Obama. What the fuck are they talking about? Kutcher is the same moron who recently referred to President Bush as our “commander”.  Is he channeling jungsturm or something?

Who are these people?

And how many of them do you think could actually sit down and engage in a substantive, nuanced conversation about the important issues they’re pledging about?  Two, three, maybe?

This new Harpo Productions video feels right out of a 1930s propaganda machine. I truly sympathize with President Obama – a human facing inhuman expectations. He will have a very hard time living up to the high-style, breathless absurdity of fluff like this.

Hey idiots: pledge loyalty to ideals, or goals, or foundational principles that stir your heart and soul. Respect others, hope for the best for them, empower them, agree and disagree with them, but don’t worship them.  Pledging to be a “servant” to a single person is called a cult.

Hollywood needs political cluefulness, not a new branch of Scientology.

Here’s my pledge: I pledge to fight against blind, unquestioning loyalty of any kind. It’s what got us into the mess we’re in – and it’s certainly not going to get us out.

The Quake Pod

I was sitting in my magic floating office pod when there was a very explosive and intense jolt – I felt a big shock / compression wave burst through the house (and me).  Everything shook and rattled.  It was powerful and incredibly jarring.  Then, for a very short duration – maybe three seconds – there was major shaking; the house and its components made noises that I do not wish to hear again.  I made it out of the pod and up against one of the core beams of the house within that time, and waited a few seconds.  I looked out one of the small windows and the trees and telephone poles were visibly swaying.  There were several more seconds of diminishing wavey motion, underscored by the oddest, deepest, almost-soundless roaring I’ve ever heard.  Like the world’s biggest subwoofer turned way up, but without any actual music.

I stayed where I was for a bit, then checked around the house.  Pictures on the walls are moved, a few things fell over, but there’s no visible damage.

To find out that the quake was a puny 3.4 was also jarring.  A 3.4 felt like that?  I must be a serious rookie.  Virgin in the ways of earth-quaking.  Really new and gone all wimpy-Maine-kid on these nerves-of-steel Californians. But then I found out it was centered about 800 meters from my house.

So I grabbed the camera and zipped down to the epicenter – the end of Venice Boulevard where it meets Pacific Avenue – to see if there was anything up.  Everything looked normal; no sign of damage or anything.  I walked the canal area for a bit; chatted with some people at Canal Club [literally at the epicenter].  Fuck yeah we felt it, the staff said, that was crazy.  I talked with a girl who lives at Venice and Canal Street, and she said it was the biggest one she’d felt in her life, and she thought someone crashed into her house.  Everyone was buzzing about it down there.  This helped me feel a bit less wimpy.

Then I checked the Richter Scale article at Wikipedia and found that the approximate “energy yield” of a 3.5 is 747 gigajoules, or about the same shock wave as detonating 178 tons of TNT.  Put another way, that’s a quarter the yield of a small atomic bomb.

Whoa.

Nearby, Xeni had a similar reaction.

The pod is also where Deanna was sitting when we had the rolly-quake last summer.  She found that to be a unique experience.  So, I’ve redubbed it The Quake Pod, and don’t plan on going back in there tonight.

Before I get into this story I want to set the psychographic stage, because I’ve been through this enough now to know what kind of conversations these controversies stir up.

My 2007 incident in San Antonio [see An Accidental Interview With Lieutenant Phil Dreyer] – which was much scarier and more flagrant than the one I’m writing about today – made me realize how out-of-fashion standing up for your rights has become, and also how much it opens you up to criticism for being a troublemaker (and more).

People like Thomas Hawk and Carlos Miller have famously faced this as well. The assumption (often verbalized) is that we’re belligerent, in-your-face assholes who go to places sticking our cameras (and our laminated, marked-up copies of the First Amendment) in people’s faces, looking and hoping for a fight. Sorry, but that’s just not true.  I absolutely hate these confrontations and just want to make my  pictures and be left alone.  For instance, I had a terribly embarrassing and awkward police / photography incident at LAX a few months back and decided not to write about it because of the rather sensational issues it would raise.   So trust me, I am not in this for the fight.

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For the are-you-fucking-kidding-me files, we have an article from this month’s issue of Realtor – the official magazine of the National Association of Realtors. In the article “Overcoming Buyer Reluctance“, various ways to trick people into trying to catch a falling knife are discussed.  While the piece is primarily excerpted from Gary Keller’s new book, “Shift”, it’s presented as a how-to for realtors who are struggling to find buyers in this market.  (They find it odd that people finally seemed to have smartened up, I guess.)

Here is the first tip they offer:

“A simple technique to prove to potential buyers, or even sellers, that they can’t perfectly time the market is to do this easy demonstration: Take out a blank sheet of paper and pen. Now, starting at the top of the paper, draw a line going down and at the same time ask the buyers to stop you when the market has bottomed out.  As long as your line keeps going straight down they won’t be able to. The moment you start back up, they’ll say ‘there!’ but of course they missed the bottom. Now, keep drawing your line up while asking them to tell you when the market has peaked. Again, they won’t be able to tell you until you’ve rounded the top and started back down. Then they’ll say ‘there!’ and once again they’ll be behind the peak.  This should be a moment of truth for them.”

Yeah, it should.