Blessed by the Potato

For the long and tortured life of this site, I’ve always reserved my copyright through the rather barbaric means of putting in the copyright notice at the bottom with the date of the last update. Considering how important this could potentially be, I’ve decided to look into the matter a little more.

Obviously, I’m allowing free, non-commerical reading/access to my content by the simple existence of this website, but haven’t made any mention of copying, performing, derivatives, or any of the other issues.

First and foremost, I’m not interested in releasing my stuff into the public domain: I have to retain certain rights, especially my right to later sell some of my crap. For example, if the site gets big enough an interesting enough, it may be possible for me to bundle it all together into a book form and sell it to those who love the site so much they wish they could put it up on the bookshelf and dust it once in a while (some people have strange ways of showing love, for example my cat shows her love for Wayfare by sneezing on her, and her love for me by sitting in my lap, purring, then getting frightened of random noises so faint as to be undetectable by the human ear, and jumping away in a panic, digging her claws into my groin for traction).

For the interrobangers out there who simply must know the motivation behind each post: no, I haven’t had any sort of publication deal, no matter how much I visualize it; this actually comes from election discussions, and how ineptly the Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister of Canadian Heritage Sam Bulte handled the accusations of corruptions stemming from the fact that she’s accepting huge donations from record companies and the like who want sterner copyright legislations… legislation that she drafted just prior to the election, which is languishing in parliament. (there are several different links buried in her title :) In the process of this, I uncovered a neat site: www.howdtheyvote.ca that details how each MP voted on, from what I can tell, pretty much every motion made in parliament. Could be a handy research tool, and a way to check up on your MPs after the election.

Anyhow, back to copyright: I’m a little torn on allowing people to copy my site. I know that if they did, I’d require a link back and a mention of the site’s title (Blessed by the Potato), or my real name for printed material. I don’t want to restrict someone’s ability to quote me if they’re writing an article of their own, and if say, Robert Munsch were to do me the great honour of performing Thump, I wouldn’t want to have him suffer the indignity of getting permission in writing; but I don’t want someone to just cut & paste the site whole cloth and put it up as their own (even with the required citation, it would still essentially be like someone else taking credit for my stuff). Obviously, I don’t want people making money off of my work without getting a piece of it myself!

As for derivative works, I don’t want to restrict someone else’s creativity if they can take something of mine and build off of it, but once again, want to reserve some rights (specifically, the right to make money :)

Some parts of the site have been opened up, though. For example, my WordPress theme (the style & layout of the page, the colours and fonts chosen, a limited amount of the functionality, etc.) is copyleft under the GNU license. That’s partly because I didn’t sink too much effort into it (so I wouldn’t be upset if it were stolen), partly because I know I’d never in a million years sell it, and partly because I based it heavily on (or more properly, made minor modifications to) the Darkfall theme that is itself released under the GNU license.

So, anyway, I’m thinking of using the Creative Commons “Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.5” license. Any opinions on that before I throw that into my page footers?

It solves all of my issues, I think (except my distaste for whole-cloth copying, though that is unlikely to happen anyway). I retain most of my rights so that if, by some miracle, a situation presents itself where I can sell my crap, I can. But, it also gives permission for a large number of reasonable uses without requiring specific written permission for each one — the issue there is that, as far as I know, a copyright holder must enforce his copyright to maintain it. So if, for example, I happened to find a site where one of my essays had been posted verbatim, even if it was noncommercial and had my name & website referenced, I would have to demand that the site’s webmaster take it down until they had negotiated permission from me for that particular use. If I didn’t, then if I later found out that someone else was selling that essay and demanded that they stop or give me my share, my claim would be void, since I had failed to enforce my copyright earlier with the free site, and thus my crap had become public domain. It really sounds like a pain in the butt, and with a license like this, I won’t need to worry about most non-commerical uses.

Of course, the open-source communist hippy inside of me might even want an even looser license, such as allowing any sort of derivative works (allowing people to build on my stuff without requiring that they also allow others to do the same to theirs).

On the topic of suicide I have but three things to say:

1. It will be the last thing you ever do in your life. Don’t fuck it up.

Do some deep inner searching and be sure whether you just want to call out for attention or really want to end it all. If you just want attention then maybe ask for it politely, or stand up on a desk and scream at work or in an exam or something. Don’t go damaging your liver or cutting on yourself just to make a point, you’ll regret it later.

Oh, and it’s down the street, not across the block.

2. Think about it, seriously.

There are many religions in the world. Many of them believe in some form of afterlife or punative reincarnation. Almost all of them frown upon suicide, and the few that do allow it tend to have very specific rules for when it is and is not appropriate. For example, to avoid dishonour or capture, or to blow away any useful bits of brain before the zombies turn you is often acceptable, earning you a “good death.” Doing it because you’re sad, scared, chemically imbalanced, or just really, really fond of flavor-aide yet never developed the ability to critically survey your surroundings generally doesn’t score you any points.

So you need to ask yourself whether it’s worse to just endure what you’ve got going now, or get yourself onto the fasttrack for eternal suffering (or, another go round of a mortal life, only with worse starting conditions). Or, if you’re willing to bet heavily on the atheist point of view, would just going blank and having nothing be better?

Naturally, even after considering the above, many people do go ahead with suicide. Which brings me to an interesting point: where does suicide come from? Is it an evolutionarily supportive behaviour that can somehow perversely be explained along similar lines to altruism?

Basically, you start with depression, which is caused by improper neural firing in the brain that leads to extreme feelings of unwell. It’s a very primal emotion, telling you that things are not right, and it sends all sorts of reinforcement signals to try to get you to escape whatever situation you’re in, to change things, to call out for help. But the thing of it is, you often can’t just up and make things better, so you sort of retreat, and get this severe repression of initiative/action while at the same time an overactive emotional centre. So what I mean is that you sit there with all of this repression going on so that you almost can’t even move (lethargy, fatigue, etc.) but inside your mind is going a mile-a-minute, but you can’t focus on anything since it’s all emotional (so what you can focus on more consciously and logically tends to be your worries, which just makes the emotional state worse).

Since this depression is usually caused by factors outside your control (whether they be real-life factors like a sick relative, a chemical imbalance, or a life gone to the shitter so badly that you just want to call a mulligan and take the last three years over again) so you can’t really do much with your internally raging fight-or-flight type responses, even if you could get past the outer depression (or agoraphobia) holding you in place. So you’re stuck there with these negative feelings (“negative affect” as we call it in smarty-pants class) overwhelming you, sort of the worst thing your brain could do to you (right up there with chronic pain).

Now the interesting thing is that your brain does manage to find an out: via death (though as I said above, I’m not sure it’s necessarily a good out). I find it interesting because in order to see that as a way to stop the suffering, you have to first realize that you’re alive and that being dead will be something different, where maybe this won’t happen. So perhaps suicide is a sign of self-awareness? I’m not familiar with any reports of animals (not even primates) committing suicide, though I do find the prospect morbidly fascinating.

Anyhow, the point is: be sure you’ve thoroughly thought it through since science and almost every religion tells us that this will be a completely irreversable move (assuming you don’t fuck it up: see #1).

3. Be considerate to those you left behind.

I read an interesting statistic recently (one of those damned lies, I’m sure — consider it even less trustworthy than regular statistics since I can’t find the source now) that said that of troubled teens who had decided they would kill themselves, more than twice as many boys went through with it as girls. A correlation with that is that far more boys decided to use jumping, cutting, or death by firearm as their method of choice, while more girls chose drugs or asphyxiation. We can theorize that guys are less considerate, and less afraid of making a big giant mess (with some of the dumb kids I’ve seen around the university, I’m sure they’d be going “cool, look at the splatter!”) so they pick the method that is more effective; with pills you’ve got maybe a whole hour to reconsider and induce vomiting. But seriously, ick. Someone’s going to have to clean that up.

Which brings me to another point: many people say that putting up suicide barriers on bridges and restricting handgun availability won’t reduce the suicide rate, since there are so many ways to kill yourself if you’re determined. Yet it is much easier to kill yourself with a handgun than it is with other methods — that is, after all, their purpose and heck, people do it accidentally sometimes by not unloading them before cleaning. Once you force them to take that extra step, you give them another chance to reconsider, and I’m sure that would lead to a drop (even if only a minor one). Similar reasoning applies to crime: while crooks can rob, kill, and maim with a knife or hunting rifle, it is decidedly harder to pull off than it is with a handgun or assault rifle.

Back to being considerate. This comes in two basic parts.

3-a. Leave a note. Be as accurate as you can, since you won’t be able to answer follow-up questions. Try to leave out some of the morbidity, and always try to spare the feelings of those who will be grieving (if you want to blame it all on your boss, then go ahead, since he’s a dick who probably isn’t grieving; after all, he’s the one that drove you to your early grave — but never, ever say anything that could be construed as blame on your mother).

No matter how moody, how depressed, how down-on-your-luck, no matter how goth, no matter how many hours you wasted on AOL before you got real internet, nobody ever sees your suicide coming, so you’ve got to explain it to them. They won’t understand. They probably won’t afterwards either, but you have to try. Remember, while you somehow came to the conclusion that it was the only way left, everyone else sees it as a hugely extreme move to take, something so far out there as to be inconceivable (or at the very least, unpredicatable).

This stipulation has other benefits: as you compose your thoughts into your last message to the universe you might just attain that moment of perfect clarity where you can see the solution the problems in your life (or at least put them in perspective), which may make you change your mind.

3-b. Don’t make a mess. Unless it really plays an important part in the artistic motif you’re going for, keep the gore to a minimum. Don’t disrupt traffic by jumping from an overpass or into the subway (come on, that’s just rude). Someone is at some point going to find you, so you probably want to find a balance between forcing your roommate/family to stumble on you and the severely public methods, while at the same time not being too hidden: when you go missing, they’ll look for you, and eventually they’ll find you. No point in being hidden so well that you get all gross and corpsified during the search. Also, as applies to #3 in general (consideration for the living), a long search is heart-wrenching, since the whole time they’ll be fearing the worst while still holding out hope. Remember, someone is going to have to find and clean up after you.

I think that’s all I have to say on the topic. More on important matters like Kraft Dinner later.

We all know, at least in some vague far-off academic sense, that backing up is an essential part of this whole computing thing that we’re so fond of. Saving every few minutes when working with something, backing up every few days/weeks to CD/DVD, tape, or external hard drive just to be sure that those 5-minute saves stay around, because, well… shit happens. A lot.

So what are your philosophies on backing up?

As far as media goes, my personal favourite is to just ghost the harddrive to an external one, since you get everything, and can restore the image to get up and running again in minimal time. Unfortunately, that’s really only available to me at work, so for home use I burn what I deem my “essential” files (website, school documents, email folders) and then just figure that the rest (games, their save files, mods, and whatever battlestar galatica episodes I have on my hard drive, etc.) are not a huge loss in the case of catastrophic system failure. This system worked well for me since I was pretty good about keeping all the important stuff in two directories, and since it all fit on one CD.

But now that I’m spilling over onto my second CD, I wonder if there’s anything else I should be including. And that constant nagging fear that there’s something important that I’m forgetting to backup… For instance, what about my instant messenger conversations? With ICQ I could back those up (though now that it’s sadly defunct for all intents and purposes, I suppose I’ll have to figure out how to export that so I can read it in the future in another program), but I have no idea how MSN handles that. I think it’s an XML file somewhere, but haven’t checked in detail yet… Edit: Oh yeah, that’s right, it’s pretty easy, it’s buried in “my received files” as a series of xml files.

Beyond that, what’s your backup philosophy? Do you have mirrored drives and just do spot backups? Do you not even worry about it, figuring you can always use low-level utilities to restore essential data in case your drive fails, and just focus on the program crash 5-minute saves? If you do regular backups, what’s your schedule like? I found that I planned on backing up weekly, and for a while actually attained a monthly backup status, but found that for the last 4 months or so I’ve only been backing up my thesis (to CD and uploading it to off-site storage :) and haven’t touched anything else. As I tried a backup just now, my power supply started making some godawful grinding noise, so I had to turn my computer off and hit it a few times (believe it or not, that did the trick). I’m thinking that letting my computer know that I’m doing a backup was probably a bad idea, so I’ve resolved to sneak up on it with backups on a random schedule, and to take a running leap at it, to try to catch it off-guard… savvy?

Leave me some comments, and let me know how you handle this very important issue in your own life (or a thank you note for reminding you to backup, which you haven’t done since 2003).

Well, I ended up checking Futureshop’s boxing day sale against my better judgement. It didn’t turn out too bad in the end: I got a 512 MB SODIMM for my dad’s laptop for $80 (with a $30 rebate yet to come), Civilization 4 for $30, and my dad’s present: QuickTax (which mysteriously existed in a quantum state of in stock but not released on the website). I only ended up going in person because I just needed to get out for a walk and stretch my legs, and it’s not all that far from my parents’ house.

Turns out it went a lot smoother than checking out the website, which was really slow from the traffic, and which kept running out of stock on things on sale, which would then come back in stock, only to be out of stock again between adding them to your cart and going to the checkout. And the system wouldn’t let you order something out of stock and just wait for it to come in — no way you were going to save money that way!

In other news, a record number of hits to the webpage was received yesterday, and I didn’t even check it myself! 40 hits. Wow. However, I don’t have the tools to say if that was one person reloading a lot through the day or 40 unique visits. Either way, it might be getting popular enough for me to consider getting a new host with renewed fervor.

Netbug sent me a flash animation that I just love (well, the animation itself is mediocre, but the whole package had me laughing out loud. I’ve watched it 8 times tonight :)

The Ultimate Showdown (of Ultimate Destiny)

Sorry I haven’t had more updates going over the break. That time has been consumed first by the hectic pace of family obligations, movie watching, and poker playing, and later by the sweet, seductive time wasting embrace of Civilization 4’s “one more turn”.

I figured out how to lay the recipes section out more like how I wanted it. I’m in the process of reformatting and posting my recipes now.

Also note some new links on the right. First up is a Page for guest rants. I already have one submitted by Joce!

Now, note how I put page up there in bold and capitalized? That’s just to clarify that a WordPress Page is a very specific type of page (“page” of course referring to just about any document we pull off the www, including this post; but usually referring to HTML documents). A WordPress Page is a dynamically generated document that exists outside the usual blog chronology, and is thus typically static (but not actually static, since it’s not just raw HTML – the contents are stored in the MySQL database and rendered on the fly).

Confused? Yeah, that’s why it took me so long to work through the WordPress documentation to make the recipes page look (closer to) the way I wanted. If you’re just reading this site, the confusion means very little to you: simply know that there are my posts on the main page here, which you can also find using the search function, categories, or monthly archives, and also some other pages linked separately on the right there that you can only get to on the sidebar links. They tend to be more static.

If you’re using WordPress, you might need to figure a little bit of this out (I know Netbug expressed interest in the concept when the Recipes first started appearing on the sidebar there). I think they’re doing themselves a disservice by choosing to call them Pages (so much confusion with lower-case pages!). I’ve seen some suggested alternative nomenclature, such as calling them a “folio”, “leaf”, “pane”, or “panel”. Personally, I like the first two, and in my head and hand-written scribbles refer to them as folios to try to reduce confusion.

But that’s delving a little too much into the guts of the site.

Next up, I’d like you all to notice that I’ve put up some links relating to the upcoming Canadian Federal Election. I would urge you all to consider the ludicracy of our first-past-the-post system. It encourages “strategic voting” so that you vote for a candidate or party that you don’t think will do the best job, but one that you think has the best chance of defeating one that you really don’t like. It discourages independents & new parties from trying to join the race, allows majority governments to form with only a minority of the popular vote, and vote splitting concerns are the main reason the old, somewhat respectable Progressive Conservatives were forced to merge with the Reform party to give us the new Conservatives (which are a fair bit scarier). There is a petition being created at Fair Vote Canada to encourage the government, no matter which one wins this election, to consider another method of voting. I would encourage you to go sign, and if you come across any other respectable petitions (as I’m sure there has to be more than one group petitioning for this) feel free to send a link my way. Also, write your new MP as soon as this election is over and let them know that you want it to be a priority of the new government (or better yet, write all 4+ candidates in your district before the election and let them know it’s an important issue for you).

Finally, has anyone tried the RSS feed from this site? I decided to give it a whirl when I was visiting my parents (in theory, to give me a feed of your comments while I was away), but I got an error about not having a style sheet for the feed. No idea what that means, as I’m still learning here.