b.cognosco
Where leaping to conclusions is my primary form of forward motion.
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Virtual Management Consulting
From Germany, With Love
Blog-Novelist Gets Contract
Self-publishing as Minor Leagues
OPML Outlining for Palm OS
For the New Year
RIAA Copy Protection Strategy is Windows Media Player
Sunday, January 5, 2003
Keeping Airports Sane
This airport thing will eventually smooth out, as long as we keep making loud, public noises every time they get out of control. Let's face it, the kind of people who sign up to be security guards have a statistically greater probability of going gung-ho over the line with their petty power mongering. But we don't have to tolerate it, and we don't have to be quiet about it. Enough black eyes will eventually trickle down into better training, and error correction for the security managers. That, in turn, will mean a better, smoother, safer flying experience for everyone. But I do think we need to be on the lookout for passengers being handled unreasonably, and document it however we can.
Penn Jillette, airport patriot. Penn Jillette, nerd squillionairre and fearless bad-boy magician, had a bad experience with Las Vegas airport security, where a security guard grabbed his crotch during a frisking without asking permission. Penn, who knows his rights, told the guard that unless he asks first, grabbing a person's groin is assault. The guard told him, basically, that he doesn't have any rights once he's in the security checkpoint, and shut up. So Penn asked him to call the cops so that he could press assault charges. What follows is a tragicomedy for the twenty-first century, in which various airport personnel insist that poor Penn will be late for his flight if he doesn't back off of this pressing charges business, and a Las Vegas cop (who's an enormous Penn and Teller fan) tells them, Penn's right, you committed assualt, and Penn stoically insists that he won't mind missing his flight, since he can always catch a later one.The punchline is a call from a PR person at the airport who offers to ensure that he gets VIP treatment from now on whenever he flies out of Vegas.
I explained the problem. "Do you allow your crotch to be grabbed without being asked?" I didn't exaggerate, I said that there was nothing sexual, I wasn't hurt, and it wasn't my genitals. I just said it was wrong. She said "Well, your feedback is really important because most people are afraid of us..."(Thanks, Joe!) [Boing Boing Blog]She said, "Well, you know a LOT about this." I said, "Well, it's not really the right word, but freedom is kind of a hobby with me, and I have disposable income that I'll spend to find out how to get people more of it."
She said, "Well, the airport is very important to all of our incomes and we don't want bad press. It'll hurt everyone, but you have to do what you think is right. But, if you give me your itinerary every time you fly, I'll be at the airport with you and we can make sure it's very pleasant for you."
I have no idea what this means, does it mean that they have a special area where all the friskers are topless showgirls, "We have nothing to hide, do you?" I have no idea. She pushes me for the next time I'm flying. I tell her I'm flying to Chicago around 2 on Sunday, if she wants to get that security guy there to sneer at me. She says, she'll be there, and it'll be very easy for me. I have no idea what this means...
Friday, January 3, 2003
Virtual Management Consulting
We'll see more consultancies focused on virtual organization and collaborative computing over the next year, as the growing number of free agents combines with easier, more affordable technology. Recent discussions with several fellow free agents have underscored the difficulty of manning the ship alone. Some few, rare individuals are equipped -- mentally and emotionally -- to go it alone for extended periods. Most of us need some supporting and complementary partners.The first round of weblog conferences will spur some of this. It will be interesting to see how 2003 shapes up.
Virtuelle Projekte.. Take a look at vrtprj: virtual project, a consulting practice for management and technology of virtual organizations. Needed now more than ever. In English, in German, their weblog, Groove spaces. They help with the use of many tools. I suspect this is a growing specialty. Cool that they are starting in Germany, where the need to work across national and cultural boundaries will create new methods and challenge the existing tools. [a klog apart]
From Germany, With Love
Blog-Novelist Gets Contract
Yet another alternative path to getting published, the blog-novel, pays off for a sci-fi writer. The writer, John Scalzi, is a professional writer, but primarily in non-fiction. Still this is one of the first cases of a blog-based effort being picked up by a major house.Over at American Invisible, Inc. Hugh Madison is pushing along with his own blog-based novellas featuring a range of 1950s and 60s comic book-style detectives. Check it out for a sense of how weblog-based serialization works.
Blog-novel to become paper-novel. Patrick Nielsen Hayden -- blogger, senior editor for Tor Books -- announces on his blog this morning that,
...I really did make a publication offer, on behalf of Tor Books, to a writer named John Scalzi for a science fiction novel he had serialized on his web journal. And he very graciously accepted.[Boing Boing Blog]
Self-publishing as Minor Leagues
Once the domain of pathetic wannabes, self-publishing is growing as a viable path to publishing success. My former employer iUniverse recently signed a deal with Kensington to act as a "farm club" for writing talent in the categories Kensington serves.But self-publishing is not for the feint, as this article points out. It's hard work, and it's not just about the writing. Writers -- now like everyone else who wants to succeed -- have to be capable business and sales people, and have the fortitude to keep pushing in the face of adversity.
Self-promoting self-published teen author gets half-mil deal. A 19-year-old author of a self-published epic fantasy novel has successfully promoted his book into a worldwide publishing deal reportedly worth $500k.
This young author became one of the latest graduates of the difficult world of self-publishing to climb into the major publisher big leagues. World rights to Paolini's "Eragon" and its two unwritten sequels were sold recently to the youth division of one of the country's most prestigious houses, Alfred A. Knopf, in a deal reportedly worth more than $500,000...The young author, who recently turned 19, has now learned far more than just to sound like a big-time author. He has learned about the draining grind of book promotion, with more than 70 appearances around the country during 2002, from elementary schools to bookstores. And he has also learned the power of persistence, to keep slogging away through good times and bad.
(Thanks, Vera!) [Boing Boing Blog]
Friday, December 27, 2002
OPML Outlining for Palm OS
Thorough and useful notes from Rick Klau on connecting via Palm OS and OPML.
Editing Radio Outlines on Your Palm.Thanks to my new Treo, info on my PDA is always close by. I'm increasingly reliant on outlines as a way to organize info, collect thoughts, etc. But one limitation was that I couldn't edit the outlines on my Palm. When the Treo arrived, I put a little effort into trying to fix that.
You can read the results here.
[tins ::: Rick Klau's weblog]
For the New Year
"Let us contemplate our forefathers, and posterity, and resolve to maintain the rights bequeathed to us from the former, for the sake of the latter. The necessity of the times, more than ever, calls for our utmost circumspection, deliberation, fortitude and perseverance." -- Samuel AdamsRIAA Copy Protection Strategy is Windows Media Player
Here's the next big idea for copy protection -- only allow RIPping to Windoze™ Media Player files. Surely <strike>these morons</strike> they don't really think this will work.Jacobs at SunnComm said his company's latest technology fits the bill, and it's being tested by three of the five major record companies. Sexton of Macrovision, which bought Midbar in early November, said his company will have a similar offering early next year.The goal, Sexton said, is to enable all the personal uses consumers expect from an ordinary CD, just in a more limited fashion. In particular, the dual-session discs being developed by SunnComm and Macrovision don't allow consumers to convert songs to MP3 files, the most popular format for music on computers and portable digital players.
Instead, when consumers copy one of the new discs onto their computers, they end up with a set of scrambled song files in Microsoft Corp.'s Windows Media Audio format. Those files can be transferred only to portable devices that support Windows Media.
So the geniuses at the copy protection factories have decided to disable the entire galaxy of portable, personal, auto, and home MP3 players. This is a strategy? This is allowing all the same uses, just in a more limited fashion?
Even if the tech guys can sucker Valenti and friends into paying them a few hundred million for this brain-dead idea, it has about as much chance of succeeding in the US market as I have of winning the PowerBall. If this is the best they can come up with, the game is already over.
Star Tribune Record labels grapple with CD protection. "For three straight holiday seasons, record executives say, Internet piracy has been the Grinch of the music business, undercutting album sales and labels' year-end profits." "Music and technology executives vow that this will be the last holiday season without widespread use of technology that prevents songs from being transferred from CDs to the Internet. Of course, they've made that prediction before." [snowdeal.org | conflux]
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