This coming Friday, The Acetarium will host a party to celebrate the beginning of my twenty-fifth year of life. According to the CDC's live expectancy data for people of my sex, age, and racial demographic, I am projected to live 51.0 years past this coming Friday. In three months, perhaps I should throw a "1/3 of my projected lifespan party." Details are on The Acetarium website. If you're in Boston and would like to come, please let me know.

Buy Nothing Day is upon us again. As usual, it's being held in the US on Black Friday and elsewhere either on Friday or the day after. I'm a supporter of BND and try to celebrate each year. Unfortunately, it usually ends up turning into, "buy everything you would buy today the day before day." This arrangement is certainly more convenient for those who like to eat but perhaps not entirely in the spirit of things.

Access and borrowing privileges at Harvard libraries is one perk of being an MIT graduate student. Actually taking advantage of the privileges of course is a borderline Kafka-esque quest that involves 5 forms, several databases, two universities, a rather impressive MIT libraries official stamp, and three geographically separated offices on opposite ends of Cambridge. Only once all those obstacles are triumphantly overcome can one go through the two card swipes and/or manual verifications necessary to get into the Widener stacks. The webpage makes it sound easy and, in all fairness, nothing about the process is threatening or difficult. While the libraries are worth the effort, it is long and tortuous: by no means for the bureaucratically faint of heart. The high point of the process, in my opinion, is picking up one's ID from the Harvard ID office. The ID office is appropriately located on the ninth floor of a building that requires ID to enter.

In my computer supported collaborative work seminar, we were discussing the design of table-top systems for synchronous collocated collaboration. There was a bit of conversation on the problems and strategies with images projected onto the table (e.g., people getting in the way of the beam). There seemed to be consensus that most simple and effective solution was projectors mounted directly above the table. I pointed out that, in this context, straight down was the most straightforward.

Seth Schoen pointed me to this article by Ray Nimmer (not to be confused with the (more) famous copyright scholar David Nimmer). Nimmer is an outspoken advocate of strong copyright and is very skeptical of free software. What is interesting about this article is the overlap between my argument in Toward a Standard of Freedom and the argument made by Nimmer . Nimmer 's subject is the free information movement and he argues against a principled position and a social movement toward freedom. He argues that part of Free Software's maturation can be seen in what he sees as the movement's tendency to look beyond its principles and standards. He positively describes a trend of putting aside core values and principles -- both in terms of the particular values in the FSD, OSD and DFSG and in terms of the method of building a movement around a defined standard of freedom -- as, "an assertion of productive and healthy individualism [that] arguably, reflects an expansion of the core ideas of open source outside the narrow confines of its own limiting doctrines." He holds up Creative Commons as a productive example of how the free information and culture movement is getting beyond their whole doctrine, principles and standards nonsense. If we look at CC as part of a larger free information movement that may eventually start influencing free software, he may be right. Open Source succeeded in separating the doctrine and definitions of Free Software from its principles and ethical arguments. Creative Commons, and others following their example, has now introduced a broader free information movement that has fully excised any fixed definitions of freedom and openness and has even abandoned the strategy of providing definitions at all. This of course, is precisely the argument I made in Toward a Standard of Freedom but it's a little disconcerting to see it made by someone on the other side who then comes to the opposite conclusions. As Seth put it, "Nimmer is saying that CC is doing exactly what you're saying it's doing, except that he thinks it's good because he doesn't like free software!"

I think "Cilia" is a pretty name for a girl. My biologist friends disagree. As far as I'm concerned, it sure beats Flagella.

This article from Access North Georgia's Newsroom describes how there is a investigation in Cobb County into allegations that, "the bidding process for the 100 million dollar laptop program was slanted in favor of apple." Making a laptop for 100 million dollar hardly seems that difficult. Some of us are more ambitious. If you haven't seen it, the first demo of the laptop was unveiled in Tunis and is totally green. Congratulations to everyone else who put in long days (and nights) on making this demo shine.

Kiko, Micah, and I ate at Legal Seafood's yesterday and had this little message on the bottom of our bill:

PLANNING A REHERSAL DINNER? MAKE YOUR ONCE-IN-A-LIFETIME EXPERIENCE UNIQUE. JOIN US.

Where I come from, rehearsals are things are things that, by definition, happen more than once. When they do happen, it's usually with an a between the e and r. Of course, I have to respect Legal for so succinctly combining a redundancy and a contradiction on the same topic.

Last night I was out in Dublin and, due to the length that the night dragged on, I invited my friend to crash in the extra bed in my Hotel room in central Dublin rather than return to his place in the suburbs which, at that point, may well have been impossible. When someone came by to clean the room in the morning, they noticed both beds full and reported this to the Hotel managment who called me up to say that they knew the room had been "double occupancy" last night and that they wanted to know if it would "single occupancy" the next night. That's a pretty strange way to talk if you think about it. There is an extra person in my room and the Hotel complains that my room has somehow changed into a new state that they are unhappy with. I suppose this circuitous way of speaking is designed to avoid any potentially embarrassing discussion about who the extra body is and why they are there. That said, this type of obtuse conversation is difficult for patrons to puzzle through immediately after being awoken. Dublin, of course, is great.

Antiquated technology makes for emancipatory possibilities.

—Alan Toner (2005)

Perhaps a truism. Perhaps merely what I fear is a prescient statement.

If one is in a public or shared restroom at a urinal or in a stall and the person at the adjacent urinal or in the adjacent stall sneezes, is it appropriate to say "bless you" or "gesundheit" or another culturally appropriate post-sneeze statement? Is it appropriate to say nothing at all? It's cold season at the lab and the fact that I do not know the answers to these questions is becoming a source of stress.

My talk at BLU seems to have been carried out successfully. The talk was nothing new for folks who follow this blog and know my other Ubuntu talks. It was a long (nearly two hour) number given to an audience with mixed experience with Ubuntu. As such, it covered a lot of ground by pulling from both my introductory Ubuntu talks and my To Fork or Not to Fork talk that I gave several times this summer. The talk was given at the Sloan School of Management at MIT. Steve Ballmer gave a talk at Sloan two days later. His talk was better attended. Of course, I doubt he told people how to get free copies of his projects OS offering shipped to their homes at no cost. Slides and notes follow. Slides:

• HTML
• PDF
• OpenOffice Impress Source

Talk Notes:

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• reStructured Text Source

Next month in Dublin is going to be the Darklight digital film festival. In preparation for the festival is a now traditional symposium that has a reputation for bringing together a collection of interesting people to, "identify, profile and respond to the current transformations in the distribution of cultural production enabled by the proliferation of digital and wireless networks." I'm thrilled to have been asked to attend and give a speech there along with fellow Media Lab inhabitant Barry Vercoe (of course, he helped found the lab -- I've only been there for a month). I'll be talking about intellectual property and will try to describe some of the history of the current mess we're in, offer a rough classification of the types of solutions that are being offered and then go into some depth on the Free/Open Source Software model. I'll talk about the reasons Free Software has been successful and try to describe some of the benefits and limitations of applying this model to the production of other types of creative works. You can check out the symposium schedule and register now for a free spot in the audience. Please keep in mind that registration is limited. If you will not be able to attend but are in Dublin and would like to meet up (for keysigning, chatting, etc.), please get in contact and we'll work something out. I've never been to Ireland before am excited. The one (major) downside of course is that this talk will mean I will not be able to attend the most relevant parts of Ubuntu Below Zero conference and so am currently not planning to attend at all. I send my regards to the rest of the Ubuntu team. I'll see you at the next one am looking forward to the tsunami of new specs that will define Dapper and am looking forward to participating in whatever way I can from remote.

Obelisks have been on my mind recently. I think it started with this suggestion I made to help use up some space in the newly remodeled "Alley" (the new home of the Electronic Publishing Group at the Media Lab):

I think we would be wise to purchase and display this very high quality seven foot Large Reprocessed Garden Obelisk in the Alley. In addition to the happiness that the presence of its simple geometric shapes would bring us, it would provide us with both a great conversation starter and an undeniable symbol of our power during Media Lab teas.

Good morning Freud.

There was some confusion about my recent post on the Melnick book on manhole covers from people who were unfamiliar with the term "manhole." One way to describe a manhole cover is a sewer lid. However, manhole covers are employed to cover a variety of holes that men (and women) explore for a variety of purposes. I prefer to think of a manhole cover as exactly what an obelisk isn't.

Mika pointed out a striking similarity between the official business addresses of Apple and Canonical:

Canonical Ltd. One Circular Road Douglas, Isle of Man

Apple One Infinite Loop Cupertino, CA

A friend I trust tells me that Infinite Loop is not, in fact, infinite. I have every reason to believe that Circular Road is everything the name implies. Honesty is very important to me.