Meet the Old Dread Pirate Roberts

Yarr! Me Hardies, Grab a Pint o' Grog an' Sit Down for a Tale of a Pirate's Legacy

I have been wanting to discuss intellectual property law here, but I'm trying to find a way to do it with the dudgeon level turned to something other than "eleven". It is not an easy thing for me. So I have decided I would start by focusing on how I interacted with IP in the past.

Once upon a time, I was a pirate. This was well before the term "pirate" entered common speech in reference to IP - back then a pirate was a guy like Edward Teach or Sir Francis Drake. People pictured the eye patch, the peg leg, the parrot. But I had none of these. I was eight years old, the year was 1982.

I had received my first computer from my parents that year. A brand new Commodore 64, I was pretty lucky, I almost ended up with a Coleco ADAM. I received it so I could improve my hand-eye coordination, my childhood testing showed my as having a problem in that area. I was also to learn how to touch type on it, because my handwriting was terrible. Of course, I quickly discovered the huge catalog of video games available for the C64. I loved Blue Max, Spy Hunter (the C64 version was arguably one of the better ports of this game), Lazy Jones (the most self-referential game ever), and Zork.

I purchased a lot of games. All the Infocom classics, a number of titles by Mastertronic, and quite a few others that I've forgotten. I also joined a user group, and that's where my tenure as a pirate began.

The C64 users group I joined was based around sharing software  piracy. It was a huge group. We met in a church once a month, brought our keyboards, 1541 disk drive and a portable television set and set them up on long tables. Then we'd walk the rows looking at what other people had made copies. Most of the users were around my age and had their parents with them, there was the occasional teenager or adult as well. One of the nice things about the group was that you could get games that were not available at any American retailer. Lazy Jones, for instance, was a product of the British software boom. The American gaming market had just collapsed. No American retailer stocked it, not my local computer shop, not Service Merchandise, or Kmart. But I got a copy at the group. My Dad, my cousin and I would also occasionally get games through friends. One of my friends had a cousin who was part of a pirating group - I forget which one, but I remember his particular moniker. He was Weird Beard the Pirate. It should be noted that Weird Beard wasn't old enough to grow a beard. I think he was about ten years old at this point.

I eventually moved up to MS-DOS around my fourteenth birthday, my first IBM PC was an Amstraad. My Dad got it as a credit card perk from AMEX - but it didn't turn out to be a very good perk. Similar to the Coleco ADAM, it was a complete system. That is, it came with a printer, and the monitor, disk drives and computer were a single unit. It shipped with MS-DOS 3.2, and was not very compatible with most software available for DOS at that time. I think I returned at least one fourth of the software that I purchased, not because I was pirating (retailers were becoming better informed about piracy at this point), but because it would not work on the Amstraad. To give you an impression of how bad this machine was, Sears - one of the few American retailers that stocked it, originally advertised it as a computer. Within two weeks of advertising it they began advertising it as a word processor and cut the price by something like fifty-percent. At this point I was buying more software because copying was getting more difficult. Rights management systems included things like needing to type in a certain word from a page of the manual, or the use of a code wheel to play the game. Additionally some software had code in the program itself to make casual copying difficult.

At first glance, this looks a lot like current rights enforcement systems and that it is working. I have bad news for you if you believe this. Every single technique was defeated rather quickly and those methods filtered down from professional pirates (IE those who sell illegal copies of these programs - this is particularly prevalent in Asia and Eastern Europe today) to hobbyists like me. Yes, at this point I definitely sussed that IP piracy was "wrong."

License keys came next, when you installed a program to your hard disk, you were asked to enter in a long sequence of letters and numbers. If you fail to do it correctly, the program tells you that you're wrong and waits for you to do it properly. There were always rumors that failing to do it correctly would do horrible things to your computer. I've heard people even claim that an incorrect entry could cause your computer to explode. I wish I was kidding. These failed because those codes are generated based on an algorithm. Once someone figures out the algorithm, they can generate "valid" keys all day long. This system combined frequently with a part of the package that "phones home" to the producer's server is mostly where we are today. Ask anybody in the industry, piracy is still rampant despite the use of the "phone home" defense.

I used Napster occasionally when it first released. Napster was great because I found music that I'd never encountered before. I recall one song that was a musical interpretation of a Robert Anton Wilson novel - and it included the author in the production. But this is the point where I gave up my life of piracy and went legit. All of those songs are gone, they died with my old P4 single core.

So why did I give up a life under the good auspices of the Jolly Roger? That's a question media companies ought to be asking, but aren't.

Primarily I gave up piracy for security. Not security against being sued, but computer security. File sharing sites are rife with viruses and malware. I was never infected but the thought was always worrisome. A single song, even priced at CD pricing could cost me a lot of time reinstalling Windows.

Convenience was another factor. Using a p2p like Napster was pretty easy, but it was often difficult to find what you were looking for - of course finding things you did not intend to was often very rewarding. Also assuming you found something you wanted the download took a long time to complete - even if you had a good connection (I was on dial up back then), it didn't mean the other guy did. Frequently the other party would get disconnected in the middle of a transaction, so you might spend an hour downloading and not get the song.

Cost was also a factor. iTunes was less expensive and had a better selection than my local record store. The price was still reasonable, and you didn't have to get a whole CD just to get the one or two songs you actually cared about.

Notice a trend in my reasons? Its all about me. Here's something from the software companies that failed to convince me:



Yeah, I'm really sorry about that. That is horrible. If I were still a pirate, I'd get a billion lashes under the Articles.

The iPad Wrap Up

I needed a little bit of time to collect my thoughts on this and restrain my fanboy-ism. Let me start out by saying that I think it has the potential to be a great device and to be a category killer. The category in question is netbooks. Small, low powered notebook-like devices designed primarily towards web browsing and basic office tasks. These typically have a long battery life. The only place the iPad doesn't beat a netbook is on price, and price competition has typically not been a part of Apple's marketing strategy.

I think iBooks looks very interesting indeed. It is in ePub format, which makes it a game changer. ePub is supported by a lot of different devices - Sony's entire ebook reader line, iPhone OS (using Stanza), Barnes & Noble's Nook reader, in addition to the software available for Mac, Windows and Linux that will handle ePub. I suspect iPhone OS devices are the only ones that will directly sync with iBook, but it should be possible to use other devices by copying the file as you would to a thumb drive. How all of this works out will depend upon how digital rights management is handled with the ePub file, there is no standard for it at the moment which means Publisher A may use a very sensible set of rules, while Publisher B may use DRM that is overly restrictive or hampers the operation of the reading software.

Another nice feature of ePub is that it has been around for a while, and there are plenty of people who are knowledgeable in working with these files. Tools for creating ePub files are abundant and available across all platforms (Windows, OS X, Linux). The barriers to being a published author are dropping fast.

When I was in high school, and dinosaurs roamed the Earth, I had the opportunity to attend a writers workshop as part of my junior year English class. Nothing in the entirety of my academic or professional career did as much to turn me off towards writing as a profession as that workshop. It wasn't criticism that steered me away from writing, it was the business model.

The focus of the workshop really had nothing to do with writing as a craft, it was focused on how to get your work published. They showed off the writers guide and taught us how to read the entries, how to decipher what each publisher required from their submissions, etc. They had published authors describe how they got their book published. Send in your manuscript to somewhere between ten and thirty publishers per day, wait for a response, continue submitting. The average time until publication seemed to be about three years. They also talked a little bit about intellectual property law as it applies to publishing. It is baroque in the extreme. First rights, anthology rights, magazine rights, audio rights, and on and on. It doesn't surprise me that piracy is so rampant. Professional authors and lawyers have difficulty with the subject, how is a layman that has no interest in anything but reading content supposed to know or care about this? I'll save my rights rants for another essay though, you're welcome.

Electronic publishing is by no means a new thing, nor is the ease of access new. In the late 80s I downloaded my first electronic book. This was a few years before I had my first internet account - I got it from a BBS in Clearwater, FL. It was huge, weighing in somewhere around 1.2 megabytes. I think it took about three hours to download. It was the Jargon File, a dictionary of computer terms and geek folklore. These days you can find it here if you're interested. It was created as an ascii text file, browsing through it was slow and ponderous.

The real trouble with eBooks has always been formats. Because no single format has managed to emerge as the standard, there is always the question of "will my device or program read this?", "can I port this to a new device?", "what format should I publish in as an author?" The web itself is a great platform for publication, easy, simple to update, cross platform and available to a wide audience. The two problems with the web as a publication platform are 1) how do I make sure my customers can find my content? and 2) how do I monetize it? The iBook store solves both problems handily.

The iBook store has a large existing customer base on two of the three platforms (sadly, iTunes is not available for linux and I doubt the iBook store will be either), it has search and is organized as customers would expect. A striking difference between it and Apple's App store - but I won't get off on that rant.

The dollar and cents part is still an open question at this point, and a place where publishers can really trip this up. The customer expectation is that eBooks should be less expensive than their physical counterparts. This is not an unreasonable expectation. While eBooks do provide additional utility such as search and annotation, these features are not a selling point for most readers - they are attractive primarily to students and academic professionals. On the value negative side, you do not own a physical thing when you own an ebook, you own a license to use the content. This license if full of incomprehensible legal jargon, but usually the gist of it comes down to the fact that the retailer or the publisher may pull (or deauthorize) the content at any time, and without providing reason or recompense. This is well illustrated by the 1984 debacle on Amazon's Kindle eBook reader, see this New York Times article for details. While I believe the resolution provided by Amazon (replacement with a legal edition of 1984 or a refund of the purchase price) was ethical, the readers who had annotated the book lost their work. Additionally, readers are smart enough to know that electronic editions of a book cost a fraction of what a printed edition does to produce. Far too often, the pricing on the ebook edition in Amazon's store is very close or on occasion exceeds the MSRP of the printed edition. Additionally readers know ebooks cannot be loaned, resold or traded. B & N Nook does have a very limited and largely worthless loaning feature. I do not expect to see a similar feature in iBook.

I want to point out this article from A Newbies Guide to Publishing (which I just subscribed to) on the monetary differences between traditional publishing and self-publishing in eBook format. I would like to particularly draw attention to the pricing differences between his works published with Hyperion books (an arm of the Disney media empire) and his self-published works on the Kindle eBook platform. Hyperion is coming in at traditional paperback retail pricing, which runs from $5.99 - $9.99. Looking at it from a retailer's perspective, the numbers on his Hyperion books are not exceptional. No offense intended. Now look at his self-published work. It is sold very cheaply, but the numbers are considerably higher. Simple business 1000 level stuff, but publishers seem to have forgotten it. You can see the same process repeat itself on the iTunes app store. Software priced at the $9.99 or greater mark has few sales, at the $.99 to $1.99 level, lots of sales.

I've wandered a bit from my original topic, and there is a lot more that I want to say about this issue, but I think it is time to wrap this up. I think the iPad will be very successful based on what I've seen. I think the iBook Store will be good for publishers if they can put aside their experiences with more traditional publishing models. I think it will be a boon to small publishers and authors interested in self-publishing. Most importantly of all, I think it will be great for readers.

Live from the Fortress of Ultimate Dorkness

11:40-ish: So I made it back under the wire, and I'm ready to write about the launch. Whatever my theories about the publishing industry, I'm an Apple fan, so this is a pretty exciting day. I'll be updating this post throughout the day. Fair warning, my mouth is still numb and my dentist released mad dogs, crazed wolverines and badgers that flew about with the wings of bats into my mouth less than an hour ago - so I feel that should be taken into account when you read this post. Seriously, he did a great job and I'm thrilled to back in time to write this.

1:00: Getting ready for the start of the event.

1:03: Here we go - Steve Jobs is discussing sales to date on iPods, the Apple retail store, the App store and other miscellany. Make with the sexy tablet already!

1:12: It's called the iPad, is rather pretty (imagine a greatly oversized iPod Touch with a little different UI. It has a dock!

1:42-ish: Yep, The New York Times will have custom app ready for the tablet. Surprise? I guess? Looks the the Times reader will do flash based movies as well. No word on whether iPad Safari will support Flash, but I suspect it won't just like the rest of the iPhone OS family.

1:54-ish: Yep, now we're looking at iBook. Time to perk up your ears and have a shot of coffee. The bookshelf interface looks a great deal like aNobii.

1:58-ish: Introduces the iBook store which has a lot of big publishers behind it: Harper Collins, Hachette, Pengin, Simon Schuster and MacMillan. Works like iTunes and look like it may be ePub based (Apple supports the ePub format) - this is possibly good news. If true it means you can buy product from other stores on the web (so long as they support ePub), or import your own content.

2:00-ish: They've moved on to iWork, Apple's Office suite. Which is pretty nifty - I want to talk more about the book stuff in my wrap up though. I do like the fact that there will be an honest to the Big Whatever word processor available for this thing. That's great, and it's something I miss on my iPod Touch. Now if somebody would just create a port for iPod Touch and maybe a decent text editor - maybe one as good as Text Wrangler . . .


Mostly they've been focusing on presentation type work though, I can see this as being a good device for that.

Steve Jobs is going over the 3g (cellular internet) service available for the iPad. $14.99/mo prepaid for 250mb/month plan or $29.99 for unlimited data through AT&T. Free use of AT&T wi-fi hotspots, no contract required. That's pretty reasonable. The units with 3g capabilities cost $130.00 more though. Pricing without 3g $499.99 for 16gb, $599.99 for 32gb, $699.99 for 64gb. Not bad at all.

Wi-fi only models will be available in sixty days, 3g models will be available in 90 days.

Annnnnnd that's the show, folks. I'll do my wrap up in a separate post later on. See you then.

The Apple Tablet - Publishing's Savior?

So here we are, on the eve of the launch of Apple's tablet. I suspect I'll be missing the launch, and I'm a little bit cross about that. I'll probably be spending some quality time (and a lot of money) at the dentist.

So instead of rejoicing in what will likely be a fine product, let's do a little speculation. The publishing industry seems to betting all in on this product being their saving grace. The paper of record is putting its paywall back up. Yep, as of tomorrow, no more free content for you! Magazines are just as anxious. But I'm wondering if they've really thought this through.

As the industry seems to be committed to making all the mistakes that the music industry made in their struggle with the internet, I believe the best case scenario is that this is what will happen. That Apple's product is successful beyond their wildest dreams, people forget all those silly ideas they had about creating their own content and go back to reading, listening to and consuming someone else's. Worked out alright for the music industry with iTunes, right?

Not so fast. iTunes did do a lot to put the music industry's marker online, but not in the way that they wanted. They went from a very tightly structured oligopoly, an industry where a few large companies dominated the landscape, to having the industry dominated by one man - in the computer industry. Steve Jobs. Last I checked, iTunes was second only to Wal-Mart as a music retailer, so Mr. Jobs could and did get pretty much anything he wanted. Including $.99 per track for a very long time indeed. He also got rid of the publisher's DRM, which was a net good thing. In addition to putting Apple as a huge player in music retail, a lot of artists - major artists got the idea that maybe they didn't need a label. That they could make a lot more money by using the tools available on the internet to bring their work to their fans. Not a short list by any means, it included Nine Inch Nails, David Byrne, and Radiohead.

But let's look at the alternative to a successful Apple tablet. What if it's another Newton - which oddly enough helped pave the way for iPhone OS, Apple TV or G4 Cube? I think it's unlikely, but anything is possible. I think iPhone OS is pretty solid, great for people who aren't very computer savvy and has a nice wide range of potential applications even if it's a flop as an eReader. But what if it does turn out to be a dud, what does that mean for Apple and the publishing industry? Apple will shake it off, as it has in the past. We'll see it in the store for a few years and then it will quietly disappear. The consequences for the publishing industry are another matter. Many, like The New York Times have already assumed its success. If it fails, even if they tear the paywall back down, how many customers will have decided that they can find their news and commentary elsewhere?

In either case, how long will it be before authors realize what musicians figured out a long time ago? That publishers need them a great deal more than they need publishers?

Kicking Ideas Around

So I've been away for a little bit, there have been a few things I've been working on for the blog, but mostly I've been hammering away on stuff for another class - a class that forces me to use Windows. But I won't get off on that rant.

Mostly, I want to use this blog for its intended purpose for once and kick around some ideas for research paper topics. The restrictions that have been placed upon us aren't overly burdensome, the only troubling one for me is: Must be related to your major. Technically, I don't have a major yet. The only thing that is computer-ish that immediately comes to mind is the recent security breach in China, but frankly I'd rather puke blood for ten years than try to tell people to get rid of Internet Explorer. I've talked myself hoarse on the subject. Yeah, I know, and there was much rejoicing. Just don't come crying to me when you get infected - I'm not reinstalling your OS. Again.

So let's talk ideas.

• Portrayals of technical persons (scientists, engineers, programmers, etc) in twentieth century media - perhaps compared to real technical wonks or compared to portrayals today.
• Hoaxes, with an emphasis on the really odd ones. One thing that's always bothered me is where the pull can tabs hoax (or similar hoaxes) got started. See the Snopes article for the pull can hoax. I'm fascinated as to how these hoaxes start, but I'm not sure there is a paper there. The collective wisdom of Snopes can't find the origin of the pull can one.
  
  
  

  Another one that I recall vividly was told at my former workplace. It was an email forward (grrr! use your forward button for good, not evil) that spread around the office saying that a guy up in Tallahassee, FL in a white SUV was strapping syringes of aids infected blood to gas pump handles. Of course, it was false. So I did a little research and sent the woman who sent me it a link to the front page of the Florida State Police site (which declared it a hoax), and Snopes which listed a whole litany of similar hoaxes - almost to the letter like the email she forwarded. I also pointed out that our very hot Florida summers aren't good for a virus, or even blood for that matter. Also, consider the mechanics of taping a syringe - even a very small one like those used for insulin shots by diabetics - to a gas pump handle.

  
  

  Of course, she was convinced that the State Police, Snopes, Biology and simple mechanics were all trying to cover it up. I think this kind of cognitive dissonance is fascinating. I suspect that could be a whole paper in and of itself.

  
  

  Better still is how hoaxes like these disseminate like a virus through our mental environment, and sometimes even persist (see above, Craig Shergold, etc.) I think with well structured research (not just cites, experiments, interviews and testing) this could make for a really great paper on how information is accepted as true or false and distributes in a complex system like the internet. There are plenty of good print and electronic sources for this as well. I'll need to think about methodology for this one.

  
  
• A study on "phishing." The act of using a message (such as an email) to get the target user to disclose sensitive information, usually a password. My thesis would be that it's pretty easy to succeed, and I would include original research in the form of simulated phishing attempts against a users in a range of sophistication.
  
  
• An analysis of online scams versus classic (IE the Big Store, the Spanish Prisoner, etc) con games.
  
  
• It looks like I could do a paper on the Spanish Prisoner (and modern variations of it) alone.
  
  
• Privacy - how willing are different age groups to share information online? What kinds of information are they willing to share and under what circumstances?
  
  
• Media Piracy & Copyright Law - How informed are people on copyright? Is piracy really as common as it is portrayed by the media? Is it really that damaging to media companies? What alternatives might media companies pursue to lessen the impact of piracy?
  
  

I think that's going to be it for tonight. More is on the burner for tomorrow.

Modern Myths and Legends - Jean Shepherd

So this morning I'm chasing my textbook for LAN Concepts again. I have one of two, and I've been searching for the other, LabSim for Network+ for some time. I've been to the Clearwater bookstore, where a clerk assured me they had it in stock. Nada. I went to the library over the weekend, where my instructor told me they had a copy on reserve. Nope. So now I'm off to Gibbs campus, to once again attempt to purchase it. Wish me luck.

But my text book puts me in mind of another book. I, Libertine by Fredrick R. Ewing, a book on nineteenth century erotica which was published in 1956. It was a runaway bestseller, bookstores couldn't keep it on the shelf.

The only problem with that, is that of all the facts presented above, only the publication date is true. Even that is only true because the hoax gained so much momentum. I, Libertine was a hoax born out of frustration. It was created by Jean Shepherd, best known as the co-writer and narrator for the film A Christmas Story. At the time though, he was a radio disc jockey in New York. He was annoyed that New Yorkers would only patronize art that somebody else had vetted first. A city run by lists.

Shepherd was working the graveyard shift show at the time, and on this particular show he discussed these lists. The ten best dressed list was a big deal in New York at the time. "Top 40 music" had just arrived. The Top 40 music format was born in 1949 and was the dominate broadcast industry until the late 1980s. The New York Times bestseller list came into being only a little more than ten years earlier on August 9, 1942. Jean Shepherd had doubts about this system. Rightly so.

His theory was that were two kinds of people in the world. Day people and night people. Day people led a very orderly and uncomplicated existence. All the lists acted as the teeth in their clockwork. They told them what plays, books and songs were worthwhile. They never considered for a moment that these lists were not the truth-with-a-capital tee handed down from on high. As Mr. Shepherd put it: "They believed in file cabinets, they believed in luncheons, they believed in meetings . . ." By contrast, night people had some doubts. Doubts about whether any of this was worth taking seriously.

He decided to test out his theory with the help of his radio audience. He asked them to go into a bookstore the next morning and ask for a book that did not exist. Together, Mr. Shepherd and his audience ironed out the details. The title, the author's life story, and the publishing house. Soon enough, people all over New York were talking about this fantastic book, many claimed to have read it. The archdiocese of the Catholic church in Boston put it on proscribed works list. In the end, Ian Ballantine, head of Ballantine Publishing after a desperate search for the author of I, Libertine, he wanted to secure the paperback rights. He met with Shepherd and author Theodore Sturgeon over lunch and they revealed the truth, after which Mr. Sturgeon was hired to write the book under the pen name of Frederick R. Ewing. When it was published it sold quite well, even making the bestseller list. All of the proceeds were given

I think this might be the greatest hoax of the twentieth century. But don't listen to me, take it from the horse's mouth. You can listen to an interview with Jean Shepherd on Long John Nebel's radio program from 1968.

Publisher's note: I originally intended to cite this up properly as practice, but I am far too tired after several days of catching up for another class. I apologize for the lateness of this post, I really do want to try to produce something interesting every day. Rather than delaying this post further still, I want to move on to the next item in the series. My primary source for this article is the interview with the author linked above. I'll be back soon with a remarkable set of coincidences that happened while researching this post, and another interesting character that writers ought to know about. Coincidentally, it involves a hoax too.

It's All In Who You Know, Old Boy

This is the rare case of something people say all the time which is actually true. I think that it goes double for people with an eye towards writing fiction.

Tonight I want to talk to you about a subject near and dear to my heart. Eccentrics. Cranks. Weirdos. Kooks. I'm particularly partial to that last adjective. As a writer you should know these people. A simple conversation with a kook can produce enough ideas to launch a thousand novels. But you must be careful. Everybody is weird in some way, and while that's interesting in and of itself, what you need as a writer are olympic grade weirdos.

Britain, is of course far ahead of the Americas in eccentricity. To be fair they had a bit of a head start. The Protein Man is an excellent example. He walked the street in London town, advising couples against eating too much protein as he felt it promoted lust. See his complete pamphlet here on Flickr. The Protein Man is referenced in Robert Rankin's The Da-Da-De-Da-Da Code, in which the Protein Man's printing press which is housed in the Gunnersbury Museum provides a vital clue. Rankin also frequently mentions Count Dante, the deadliest man alive in many of his novels. Count Dante's old advertisements may be seen here and here.

I'll concede that Count Dante may not qualify as a kook per se, but he is certainly a notable character. Being knowledgeable about these subjects gives Mr. Rankin a ready supply of good characters, artifacts and settings. I think the author himself is a bit strange, or an excellent showman . Perhaps both. The videos below are excellent evidence.

Robert Rankin's works are also fun to ask for at American bookshops. With titles like The Sprout Mask Replica, Armageddon the Musical and Nostradamus Ate My Hamster. I say ask because they are incredibly difficult to find in America. Barnes and Noble has his work sporadically though. You can find out more about Robert Rankin here.

When people think of Joshua Abraham Norton, they think of him as an American. However this is incorrect, he was born an Englishman though the exact date and location of his birth have been lost. Joshua Norton has been written about by quite a few people, but the ones I am most familiar with include:

• Neil Gaiman in The Sandman comic book series, specifically in Three Septembers and a January
  
• Mark Twain in The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Norton inspired the King.
  
• Tim Powers in Earthquake Weather.
  
• Robert Anton Wilson in The Illuminatus Trilogy
  
• Kerry Thornley in The Principia Discordia
  
• Kenneth Hite wrote a column in Steve Jackson Games Pyramid magazine 1/29/99 dedicated to Norton and the symbolism surrounding his life.
  

More properly known as Emperor Joshua A. Norton I, Emperor of the United States and Protector of Mexico started out as a mere successful businessman in nineteenth century San Francisco. He cornered the market on rice just in time for a large shipment from South America to wipe out his fortunes. He was wiped out. After disappearing for a time, he returned to the city and crowned himself Emperor. Though a mad man, he was humored by an entire city. He demanded and received a suit of royal finery from the Presidio army base, which he is usually portrayed wearing. He ate free in area restaurants. He minted his own currency and his proclamations were printed free of charge in the city's newspapers. The newspapers even created a few of their own. Upon his death over three thousand people attended his full masonic funeral.

I believe I can even see the Emperor's features in Uncle Sam from John Kessel's Good News from Outer Space. This scene takes place in a bus station in an economically devastated America.

"The only person left out there was a man dressed in a navy blue swallowtail coat over red and white striped trousers that were too long for him. Their soggy cuffs bunched around his ankles. He wore a top hat painted like an American flag. With his white beard and hawk nose he looked like a run-down Uncle Sam (125)."

Uncle Sam goes on to describe his fall from academia to his present career selling genuine American made calculators in a bus station and his misadventures with his university employers, his family and the law on the way(125-130).

Kessel shows the power of using an eccentric person as a model, much as an artist or painter uses a model for their work. History is rife with odd characters that can be used as a canvas for an author to create their own "characters." Of course, it doesn't hurt to be a bit of kook yourself. Takes one to know one.

Works Cited:

• Kessel, John. Good News from Outer Space. New York: Tor Books, 1990.
  

Tools for Writers - The Word Processing Edition

Good afternoon everyone, sorry for not posting yesterday, I'm still trying to get comfortable with my new school schedule. In my last post, we talked about text editors and how versatile they are. In terms of this course though, you'll be using a word processor. I love trying new software, seeing how different developers decided to handle my problems as a writer. We are mostly focusing on free apps, but I want to talk about a couple commercial products, so that's where we'll start.

Commercial products

Microsoft Office: You currently have two options for Microsoft Office, Office 2007 or the beta version of Office 2010. What is a beta? A beta is a public software test. Beta software is usually free to use, so if you really like MS Office. There is an upside and a downside to beta software. The good news is that you get to test drive some very expensive software, you'll have an opportunity to see if you like it, and because the company will ask you about what you like and what you don't, you have a chance to make it into a better product. The downside is that beta software is buggy. It crashes, it'll eat your work, or maybe just do strange things to it. If you're interested in the beta you can find it on the Office Online Homepage

Being a student is awesome. No really, everybody wants to sell you something and they often offer you truly absurd discounts. Microsoft does this with MS Office 2007. This is what we use in the classroom, and if you like it, then this is a great thing for you. You can get it for just $59.99 at Microsoft's Student promotion page compare that to the list price of almost $700.00.

This offer can also be found on your MySPC page under student discounts. While certain terms apply, usually the big one for any software purchase is that you have a student email address. So make sure yours is set up.

One thing that is great about MS Word is that it is well suited to doing MLA formatted papers, which we will be doing for class. It has a template for the paper itself and a tool for formatting citations in MLA format. You'll hear this in class when we do our section on MLA but it bears repeating. Don't trust that Word is going to format your citation correctly. Check it and double check it. I'm not putting the onus on Word here, yes I'm a Mac user, but I feel Office is a pretty good product even though it doesn't meet my needs. This goes for any software - whether we're talking about Word or something web based like this.

I think one of the biggest problems that office suites, whether we're talking about Microsoft's product or Open Office.org is that they try to be all things to all people. That's great if you need an application that combines text, graphs and presentation software in one package because you use those things together in your job. But it also adds another layer of complication that you may not need.

A reminder about using Word in class. SPC uses Deep Freeze. That means every night, the machine resets and if you save a document to your computer at school, your work just got deleted. Some classes don't use Deep Freeze, but I would err on the side of caution and expect that they do unless the instructor specifically says otherwise. Even then, backing up your work in a lot of places is a good thing. Put it on your thumb drive, email it to yourself, save it in ANGEL's file storage area. It only takes a few minutes to do that, and if you do it this way your work is safe and available to you from any computer.

iWork: Apple's Office suite. I used this in Comp I for my MLA formatted papers and it did a pretty good job, though if I had to print the paper I had to send it to Word and Word sometimes did odd things to the formatting. You can get a trial of this, which is what I did for Comp I. If you want to own it, you can get it for $40.00 as a student, the list is $80.00. Apple's store page on iWork is here, and you can get to the education store through your MySPC page. iWork is OS X only. I think it is a very good package, when I used it for my papers it was easy to work with the template they provided, and generally easier than Microsoft's version in Word. It did not have the citation tool, but that's not really something that interests me.

I hate spending all this time on OS X software when there are what, three of us Mac users in class including the instructor? But I really want to talk for a moment about something I've used everyday in class since I've started back to school. It was some of the best money I've spent on software since I moved over to OS X.

Circus Ponies Notebook: This is my go to software for note taking, both in class and in real life. Yes, you still have to take notes when you're all grown up. Sorry about that. First, a notebook is something that just about everybody gets, it's a physical artifact that we're all familiar with. The nice thing about notebook is how flexible it is. You can do note taking in pretty much any manner you choose. You can link to sources, include photos, graphs, tables and most anything you could possibly need. I suspect you could do an MLA paper in notebook, though I haven't tried it - I might this term, and if I do, I'll let you know how it works out. As I said, this software is OS X only. You can get it as a download from Circus Ponies and they offer both a trial and a student discount.

Free Software

So that's it for the paid apps. Let's look at the free stuff.

Google Docs: I love Google Docs. I'll admit, I'm a bit of a Google fan boy. Google Docs does word processing, spreadsheets and presentations. So think of it as an on the web version of MS Office, with some of the cruft swept away. Docs has a lot of advantages because it doesn't live on your computer, it lives on the internet. First, you can access your docs from any internet connected computer. In addition to being able to type up documents, you can also store documents you've already done and access them on the web. Of course, you can download them in a variety of formats and put the document on whatever computer you happen to be using. This is great if you have a desktop, laptop and a machine you use at school. You can also share them with other people, and let them edit the document or restrict them to viewing it. Multiple people can edit a document at the same time. Obviously, there's potential for abuse here, so I want to be clear - every student needs to do their own work, I'm not suggesting collaboration as a feature in that sense. But there are legitimate uses for this feature.

For instance, one great thing to do with a paper is after you've been through it yourself several times and you're absolutely convinced it is perfect, is to show it to somebody who isn't afraid to bruise your pride a little bit. Because I guarantee you that no matter how good you think it is, there are at least a dozen things you need to correct. Then show it to a few more people. Incidentally, that's why I ask people to comment on this blog. I want to make it better. So please do. The silence is unnerving. So using docs you can share this document with someone you know, even if they're halfway around the world and let them read it. If you let them edit it, they can highlight the parts they feel need changes and comment on why you ought to do that.

It's great for group projects. One problem I have with ANGEL at SPC is that it does not allow collaboration. So what typically happens in a group project is this: you have three or four people and one guy doing the typing or writing. This guy is the one who typically does the lion's share of the work. It shouldn't be this way, everyone should contribute more or less equally. If everybody types, and you can see who typed (or deleted, edited, highlighted what) you don't have to even consider this as a problem. You know who was working and who was slacking. That's a great feature, and one of many that ANGEL should have but doesn't.

Which brings me to another cool word processing trick that can help you when you're doing a paper, whether alone or as part of a group. Revisions. Most word processors track revisions, which are a record of changes to a document. Word can do this. iWork does, and so does Google docs. The nice thing with docs is that you can see who made the changes, as I said above. This allows you to play around with a different wording, or seeing what your paper would look like without this or that paragraph before you make a final decision to keep or cut it.

You can also publish a document to the web. It is indexed by Google and it will come up in a search. This is neat, but I can't see an immediate application for Comp 2, but I figured I would mention it.

You can also choose from a wide variety of user created templates for Docs, which is true of most word processors, but the nice thing with docs is that you aren't downloading anything. Why is that good? Anything you download is a security risk. Any file could be malware or a virus, so if you can avoid putting something on your computer, that's a good thing. Word processing templates are frequently used as a vehicle for virus delivery, so if you aren't using docs, then be cautious about where you get your templates from. Another nice feature that templates has is a rating system. You can see how useful other people found the template, which might save you some time in deciding what to use. They do have an MLA template, and I will make a point to check it out and let you know what I think.

Google docs is free and works in most web browsers, I've used it in IE 7, Safari, Opera, Firefox, Flock and Chrome for Mac. Mobile browsers are a little more troublesome, forget about Mobile IE, but Safari on the iPhone/iPod Touch works well.

Open Office.org: A free and open source product that runs on Windows, OS X and Linux. There are system specific versions of it, like NeoOffice for OS X, that are designed around a particular operating system. It is an office suite containing a word processor, a database, a spreadsheet and a drawing program. I love Open Office, but I do not consider it well suited towards Comp 2. There is no MLA template, though I may look into creating one if I have time. You can get Open Office.org here

Abiword: Abiword is a word processor and nothing else. Like Open Office it is free and open source, and will work on Windows, OS X and Linux. You'll usually find this bundled in lightweight Linux distributions as the default word processor. I've never tried it, but I'll probably take it for a spin and let you know how I like if for Comp 2. You can get Abiword here.

Why do I talk at such lengths about tools? It isn't just because I'm a geek, it is about the nature of work. A student is like any other worker, your work is only going to be as good as the tools you use to produce it. That doesn't mean you have to spend a lot of money, but you do need to select tools that are appropriate to the job you need to do and that you are comfortable using.

In future installments of this series the tools are going to be a bit more "one off" than what I've talked about so far. Things like scheduling, notebooks (made of dead trees), pencils and pens. Things like that. I hope you'll find it useful and will take a moment to comment. Thank you!

Fifteen Minutes and A Cautionary Employment Fable

Confession time. I'm a serial job hopper. Up until the naughts, I never held a position for more than two years. On the other hand, I was never out of work very long either - typically it was a couple of weeks, tops. I don't really consider being a job hopper a bad thing. I find myself easily bored and I've often found the cultures of the companies I've worked for to be very weird. Jobs are okay to do for a while, like a vacation in another country, but not necessarily someplace you'd care to settle down.

Today's cautionary fable has to do with the massive power that Information Technology workers have, and why you should always treat them with a great deal of respect. Incidentally, if you're an IT major and are reading this post, please bear in mind that this is somewhat tongue-in-cheek - I have the greatest respect for your profession, even if it isn't my cup of meat.

There was this company I did telephone customer service for at the end of the nineties. Our office contained customer service and data entry workers. We were basically at the top of our professional ladders for the area. Nobody paid more for those jobs, or gave better benefits. On the other end of the office and at the opposite extreme were the graphic artists. They were at the bottom of their career ladder. Just about everyplace they could reasonably go would pay them more. This was just a notch on their resume and as a result of this, their side of the room was considerably more free wheeling and took most office rules as suggestions, perhaps even challenges as to how much they could get away with. On our side, better not be even a hint out of dress code and dot your "i"s and cross your "t"s.

Now in this job, we had an ancient, creaking IBM AS400 main frame as the heart of our computer network. Despite the fact that every worker in office had a newer-than-tomorrow Pentium four with gigantic nineteen inch Sony Trinatron monitors, we had to log into this dinosaur every shift and use it for our work. Even the artists used it to view order details, though they did the actual art in Adobe Illustrator. The AS400 runs an odd operating system, it isn't Unix or anything like it and it has this interesting feature called "screen transfer."

What screen transfer did was send a rather blurry picture of your screen, which was pretty much useless for anything as you couldn't read the screen that was being sent, and a short message to another computer on the network. You could do a screen transfer to any machine in the office that was logged on. Think of it as an intranet version of Twitter way before Twitter was a gleam in some developer's eye. Now obviously this was pretty useless for customer service work, though that seems to be its intended purpose. My night shift customer service crew had a more interesting usage. Wait until another rep is in the middle of a call and then send them a weird, funny, odd or gross message and see if you can get them to lose it in the middle of the call. It was a lot of fun. Of course any usage of this system at all was pretty much a "no-no" but it was never blocked by IT. But they could and did monitor it.

One day shift artist supervisor found another more nefarious use for the screen transfer program. The supervisor in question was very slick, oily, he fit the stereotype that most people think of when they say the word "politician." His hair was bullet-proof. He had a very Nice-with-a-capital-"N" wife - I mean that in the sense that she considered housewives from 1950s sitcoms as her role models and a brand new baby at the time of this story. He would parade them around company events as if they were trophies. I suspect that is how he thought of them.

At the same time he was carrying on with one of his artists. It would be incorrect to say that our office culture thrived on gossip. It was more like an office-wide religion, that everyone subscribed to but did not talk about explicitly. However, the gossip net was completely unaware of these events, that went on for at least six months, until they were over. This is because all of their salacious chatting at work was done via screen transfer. But IT knew, and I suspect they knew long before they mentioned it to management.

The boom came down swiftly and without warning. The head of Human Resources was waiting by his desk with a cardboard box. This was one of the most intimidating men I've ever known. He is one of only two people I've known to whom I would apply the adjective "sinister." He was an older man slight of build, and if you knew him outside of work and perhaps viewed him from a distance, you might not give him a second thought. But he projected an aura of menace, and to face him across a desk felt like a meeting with death itself. He calmly collected the supervisor's badge, and carefully watched him collect his personal belongings. After that the art room supervisor walked out of the building and, into office legend.

Moral of the story: Be nice to your IT crew. It could very well save your job. Also, don't play around on your spouse but that should really go without saying.

What started me thinking of all this is my hobby. I'm something of an armchair anthropologist. I suspect that as an anthropologist, I'm a pretty good web developer but I love watching the cultural interactions of different career fields and work environments.

Last night I had my first local area network concepts class, and for the most part it is full of people who are looking at a career in IT, but it's also an elective for my web development certificate. It got me thinking about the different tribes in the technology industry.

IT people really tend to stand apart. They tend to be very conservative - and I mean that in a non-political sense, though in a field known to stray vaguely left I think they tend to be the most conservative politically as well. They are often somewhat dour, almost like a nineteenth century banker - I've listened to people in my own field and others enthuse about some new gee-gaw, gizmo or bit of code. If there is an IT professional in our party their response to this is invariably that this thing will break the network, suck up too much bandwidth, or otherwise bring on the End of Life as We Know It. They almost seem like the grandmother figures of the tech industry, who regard certain artifacts as "too good to use," much as many grandmothers consider a given set of china or a couch.

I'm not saying this is necessarily a bad thing. It is simply what I've observed. I suspect that this tendency may well be a net benefit, providing a balance to the other sectors of the tech industries Panglossian optimism. It is certainly what I observed last night. In the course of going over the first chapter in our text, we discussed Twitter and social media in general. Which the class seemed to revile unanimously. I suspect that Twitter doesn't have enough of a focus for them, they really haven't sussed what it is good for, and because of that treat it as suspect. Social media in general is still too new for most IT people to consider as a worthwhile idea. I recall that when I first started using the internet, back when the web was still in swaddling clothes and web sites with graphics were a mutant oddity, like a three headed dog, that many IT people had similar feelings towards the web. I will now vigorously shake my cane at you.

One of their chief criticisms of Twitter specifically was that nobody would care if they talked about their day-to-day minutiae. I disagree, and I believe this stance lacks imagination. I think that if you could scrape a social site like Twitter and had enough computing power available, you could create a very interesting and accurate picture of its average user. Which is good for figuring out people in general, I suspect that's a worthwhile endeavor and probably a very profitable one if you work in a field like marketing.

While I'm not very good with people, I do find them endlessly fascinating. I think the "boring details" that these guys complain about are pretty interesting, and that if you watch closely enough, you'll find things that even those people in my class would find interesting. But if you don't pay attention, you'll miss all the interesting details. I guess that would be the meta-moral of this post.

Tools for Writers

In this series of articles, I'll be looking at tools for writers. This article covers software both on your computer and in the cloud that can help make you a better writer. Unless otherwise indicated, everything I talk about today is free software. I'm a multi-platform kind of guy (as everyone should be), so I'll be covering tools for Mac OS X, Windows, and Linux.

Let's say that I have an article, I need this article to be published in a magazine, on my blog, on my website, and I'm going to turn it into an ePub file for eReaders - oh yeah, I'll also need a few hard copies on dead trees too. What tool should I use?

Plain text. Plain text is also known as ASCII (American Standard Code for Information Interchange) text. Unlike most things you'll hear technical folks gush over, this standard is as old as the hills. It first saw commercial use in 1963, and ASCII support was a requirement for all computers purchased by the U.S. federal government in 1968.

So what's so great about plain text and how can it help you? In a word: portability. Plain text can and does go everywhere. Between operating systems, on the web (all the hypertext markup language, cascading style sheets and javascript that forms the web pages you read are created in plain text), and it can be sent to a word processor to be converted to formatted text. Also because it is such a durable standard, it can survive the ravages of time. It would likely be very difficult to take a document written on my first computer's word processor (Speed Script on the Commodore 64) and view it on my Mac. I would have no such trouble reading a plain text document written on the same computer.

This differs from formatted text, formatted text is usually produced by a word processor such as Microsoft Word, Open Office Write, Abiword, etc but is also produced by other applications such as spreadsheets and databases. Formatted text is very flashy, but not very portable. Sure that Word file can be opened in a lot of other word processors, but try adding it to a blog or a website. Not gonna happen like Duke Nuke'em Forever. Do not talk to me about how you can make a really keen website in MS Word. I am turning away from you. I am also mocking you so hard that I am boring a hole to the center of the Earth. Additionally how confident are you that Microsoft's *.doc standard that you use today will be supported in ten years? How about twenty? I am not saying it doesn't have its uses though. I can't imagine setting up a paper for MLA using plain text (without something like xhtml anyway.) So yes, when you need the bells and whistles - exactly positioned text, non-breaking line spaces, carriage returns/line breaks, bold, italics/emphasis, and so on - that's when you'll want to turn to your word processor.

So now we get to see the wonderful toys:

Windows XP/Vista/Seven

- Notepad. It comes on every windows box and though it has a very plain brown wrapper look about it, it is unquestionably the most useful program that comes on your system out of the box.

- Notepad++. This a much more full featured version of Notepad. It has a lot of nifty bells and whistles. It is free and open source (free is free as in beer, open source means the program's code is available for modification from the author - you can find out more about open source software here.)

Before I start on Mac OS and Linux, a word about what I will not be covering here. I won't be talking about Emacs or Vi. If you know what those are, you probably don't need any help from me. Also, I prefer to keep all of my limbs relatively functional. The debates over the merits of these two text editors are a considerably more religious issue than the usual My-OS-Is-Better-Than-Yours arguments.

Mac OS X

TextEdit. Comes with every Mac, but is the polar opposite of notepad. Don't use this. It sucks. I don't say that about a lot of Apple software. It has an identity crisis. It doesn't know whether it should be a mediocre text editor or a mediocre word processor and ends up being terrible at both. Take it off your dock and forget that it exists.

Smultron. This is no longer being actively developed, but is a great free and open source text editor for Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard. There is a 10.6 Snow Leopard beta available, but your mileage may vary on that one.

TextWrangler. This is my go to text editor, by Bare Bones software. It is free, but closed source. They also make a commercial product, BBEdit which has been well received. I really like TW's interface, and it's a nice light weight, hassle free program that has seen me through most of my academic career. You cannot go wrong with this.

Linux

Cream - I'm not actively using any particular linux distribution at the moment, but if I were this would probably be my go to text editor. A vim based text editor, it has everything you need. It's also available for Windows.

Putting it all together

In my example above, I'd send the plain text off to the magazine, who would likely format it for printing in Adobe InDesign, add xhtml tags so it could be uploaded to my website and blog, add xml for the ePub file and finally, copy and paste the contents of my article over to my word processor so it could be formatted for plain paper printing.

The next post in this series will cover word processors and other tools for formatted text, as with this article my focus will be on free software for all platforms. Stay tuned.

My Library and an Introduction of Sorts

Hello! Welcome to my Composition Two class blog. Keeping this journal is my extra credit assignment and I'll try to stay pretty regular with it. How about some introductions? I'm Chris Demmons, I'm a human being (citation needed), a student at SPC, a geek, and a bit of a writer. I am currently working on my web development certificate and my associates degree concurrently, which may well qualify me as crazy.

To start with, I want to talk about some of the things I enjoyed in Comp One. Then I'll talk about my library, some of the things I've written over the years. There will be some rambling, a really dumb disclaimer and perhaps some cake.

I was really surprised at how much I enjoyed Comp One, I had it and an online C++ programming during the summer term of 2009. I very much expected my programming class to be the main attraction, but really it was kind of dull. I felt we went over the basics far too frequently "This is a variable, this is an array, etc" - this is all stuff that everyone should have learned in the one thousand level class.

Composition One was a lot of fun. I really enjoyed the quote based free writes though I think I could pick better quotes to write about. We also did a sensational piece based on A Modest Proposal by Jonathan Swift. I think everyone but my partners felt like backing away a couple of feet from me after we wrote that one. Our modest proposal was an essay about potential solutions to a rising wave of senior citizen violence, using the strategies aimed at young people as a model. At the time, there were a number of cases of shocking criminal behavior in the news where the perpetrators were older than fifty-five years old. I think the most difficult piece was the first assignment, because I had fallen out of the habit of writing. It really is a skill, and if you do stop doing it, you will lose it.

I really enjoy reading, I have a huge library and a trip to bookstore is as much of a bank account killing endeavor for me as a trip to the local EBstop. Truthfully, I don't think video games and books are very far removed from one another - but I'll save that for a later post. I have a love-hate relationship with my local library. I love the fact they exist. I hate the fact that they never have, or have very limited stock of the books I want. But seriously, support your local library. Speaking of which, I love science fiction, fantasy, and mysteries in terms of fiction. In nonfiction I read a lot of things related to technology - programming manuals mostly, self-improvement, history, and current event related titles. You can see my aNobii bookshelf here, it's only a fraction of what I own, but hopefully this will motivate me to catalog and review the rest of my collection. That collection is just one shelf, I probably own ten shelves worth of books easy. I also spend far too much time reading things on the web, and I'll share those with you soon.

I've spent a lot of time writing, mostly as a hobby, but one fool actually paid me cold hard cash to put words to paper. But let's get a little context first. I started out writing as a kid, just because I wanted to be like my heroes. Isaac Asimov, Theodore Sturgeon, R. A. Lafferty and a few others that I can't recall. I wrote for my school paper in High School from tenth grade until graduation. I really loved journalism class, even though I had a pretty difficult time getting my articles to see print. I was probably the most censored journalist in my high school, though my collaborator during that time can claim almost as many red marks from the administration. Our advisor loved us and was completely amazingly great, though. Mostly we wrote humor and table-top role playing game pieces. I occasionally produced some science fiction back then too. I wrote a few things for a student run literary magazine - which was also censored by the school. Noticing a pattern here? After I graduated I wrote a one shot magazine. Short magazines were a really big thing back then, and I had a great time with it. I'll probably put on my rose tinted mirror shades at some point later and wheeze on about it. More recently, I've been writing a few articles using the Notes application on Facebook - mostly directed at friends and family, but I might post a few here as well.

Lastly, I may spend a little time talking about the publishing industry and intellectual property issues. This might be a little out of scope for this blog, so I'll tag each piece with these words ("publishing", "intellectual property") but I believe that both are highly relavent. When I talk about that, I'll be discussing how books are published now, the crisis facing the industry, some of the changes brought on by the internet, and how authors should be paid.

I shouldn't have to say this, but I will. Obviously everything on this blog is not representative of Saint Petersburg College (SPC), my instructor, or any other person connected with that institution. These are my opinions, and they are to be used for entertainment or annoyance only. So if you're looking to dice a potato, you've come to the wrong blog. With that said, I'm looking forward to class and hope you enjoy my work!