Last Thursday night a friend and I went to see Sons of Bill (music samples are on MySpace and Facebook). They were quite good, and both of us thought that they were better than the main act, Reckless Kelly. I'll definitely keep my eye open for them to see if they are in Metro DC again.
There's been an interesting discussion in both the mainstream media and Facebook's blog (there have been two entries) about Facebook and copyright law. My three cents is that the only thing that Facebook needs a perpetual license to is an email that I send to a friend via Facebook. I think it's weird that they'd even need this, given the fact that one normally doesn't think of email as copyrighteable. If I send an email on Gmail to my friend on Yahoo!, am I really granting Gmail a license to copy my email and send it to my friend? Ordinarily, I wouldn't have the need to claim copyright on an email I sent. Even if I was sending my friend a manuscript for a book I was writing, could I then sue Gmail for copyright infringement? I don't think I'd have a cause of action.
Anything else that I post on Facebook, like a wall post or photo, can be deleted. Therefore, any license I give Facebook for posting something like that should be revocable at my will.
I wonder whether someone who sued Facebook for copyright infringement for redistributing his or her pictures would even have a cause of action (so long as Facebook posted them in compliance with his or her privacy settings). I guess Facebook is covering itself, but are they going over the top?
Flickr's terms of service are pretty clear. Once I remove my content from Flickr (which is owned by Yahoo!), Yahoo!'s license to display and/or distribute this information is instantly revoked. Sometimes, as when I submit content to a Flickr-sponsored group, the license, by its terms (you'll need a Yahoo!/Flickr account to see these terms), expires at a certain time.
Google's answer to Flickr (Picasa Web), on the other hand, has much broader (and less favorable) terms for me as an end-user. If I upload a photo to Picasa Web, under the terms of service (Section 11.1), I give Google what essentially amounts to an irrevocable royalty-free license to display my information. As a result, I don't use Picasa much.
It's interesting to see what at tangled web is woven with all these license agreements. It also shows the importance of reading license agreements.
Go to this website for free coffee. There's no strings attached.
Update: They're out.
If you use Gmail as your email provider, you might be interested to know about this Google group. Only Googlers can post to it. It will let you know if there is a problem with Gmail. There's also an RSS feed you can subscribe to if you are so inclined.
This website from the FDA has information on the peanut recall and a comprehensive list of every product affected.
The other day I was on Amazon MP3 and saw a free download (still free as of this writing) from Steve Martin. At the time, I thought the name was just coincidence, but then I saw this article in the Times about how Steve Martin plays bluegrass.
Last Thursday, there was a piece on NPR's All Things Considered about people who are preserving "old-timey" music. The CDs available for purchase on the group's website are pretty pricey, but the audio on the story's page on NPR is free.
Google posted some interesting statistics about searches during the inauguration. It's neat (although not surprising) to see the drop in U.S. queries during President Obama's swearing in/speech.
Google also posted some interesting stats awhile ago regarding the election. I had meant to post them earlier, but here they are now.
I saw this recipe in the Times and thought it was worth a try. I modified it slightly. I used plain olives and frozen cauliflower which I prepared in the microwave. I also omitted the thyme because I didn't have any. It still worked out perfectly well.
If you're bored, you can try going to Settings|Language in Facebook and picking English (Pirate) as your language. You'll have to scroll down through the languages, but it is there. Facebook's developers apparently had a lot of time on their hands. It looks like they rewrote the entire interface in Pirate.
There was an article in the New York Times a little while back about runners and cars. When I can, I like to avoid running with cars, but, unfortunately, living in an urban area, that's sometimes difficult. I usually try to defer to cars, but it can annoy me when cars don't yield to me when I am in a cross walk. Right now, on weekends, I like running in Rock Creek Park on Beach Drive. At least a portion of that road is closed to vehicular traffic.
I also discovered a useful link, that lets you see what your pace is based on mileage run and distance traveled.
There was an interesting piece on NPR yesterday which was a musical analysis of Buddy Can You Spare A Dime -- a depression era song. Even though my musical knowledge is pretty limited, I was able to get a lot of what the analyst was talking about.
I also didn't know that the lyricist for this song also wrote Over the Rainbow of Wizard of Oz fame.
A few weeks ago when I went camping, I made Hobo Stew over a campfire. The meal is readily transferable to non-campfire cooking.
What's nice about this recipe is that you can use pre-cooked items, so you don't have to worry about cooking things extra thoroughly.
So, without further adieu, here is the recipe:
In a non-stick frying pan (although you can use a regular frying pan if you want), combine:
A customer went to his local Chevrolet dealership and, while his car was in for repairs, borrowed a loaner car from the dealer. The car was insured under the dealer's insurance policy. The customer was involved in an accident, and the dealer's insurer then turned around and sued the customer for the damage sustained to the vehicle. As the customer was a permissive user of the dealer's loaner car, an appellate court in New York ruled against the insurer. I would imagine, however, that this customer will not buy a GM car ever again.
Apple is being sneaky, sneaking applications onto people's computers without their consent. They say they're installing only iTunes, but then lots of other applications find their way onto the computer.
NPR had a good commentary by someone on why people did not evacuate during Hurricane Ike. While I don't really agree with their reasoning on not evacuating, the essay is, nonetheless, very good (in particular the last paragraph). I think it's more powerful listening to it than reading it.
In March, I wrote how the Virginia Supreme Court upheld a criminal sentence of a spammer from North Carolina who used AOL's servers. The Virginia Supreme Court issued a new opinion on Friday, vacating the convictions based on the First Amendment and the spammers right to free speech. Here is a link to the summary (search for Jaynes within the page if you don't see it at the top). Here is a link to the opinion (a PDF).
I found a utility, aptly named Desktops, which allows you to easily switch between desktops on Windows. So, if you wanted to switch between one Desktop where you had Word set up and another desktop where you had Excel set up, you could do so easily. It's published by Microsoft, and it looks like it will run on most versions of Windows.
There was a piece on NPR about the Yellowstone National Park Fires, ten years later. This is the first part of a five part series.
I also found more than you ever wanted to know about how the National Park Service manages fires.
I discovered a few plugins for Firefox, two of which are from Mozilla Labs. A disclaimer: These are all non-final versions, and therefore might be buggy. However, I have not had any real difficulty with any of them.
Ubiquity allows you to use the keyboard to quickly Google something, select text and email it to someone, or insert a map into an email and email it to someone, and more. But hitting
Second, a program called Auto Dial, which, based on your web history, builds a custom web page that opens each time you open a new tab, so that when you open a new tab, it will
Finally, a program called Ctrl-Tab allows you to switch between tabs easily, all the while seeing what tab you will be switching too.
