jeremyrandall / blog /

Images (c) Jeremy Randall

Third anniversary of the Iraq invasion - Answer Coalition protests in cities across the country.

In San Francisco:

WHERE: Civic Center, at Grove and Larkin Streets (near Civic Center BART)
WHEN: Saturday, March 18, Gather at 11 a.m.
Click Here For: March 18 San Francisco flyer

To get involved, call 415-821-6545, email sf@internationalanswer.org, or go to http://www.actionsf.org/. Weekly Organizers Meetings every Tuesday at 7 pm, 2489 Mission St., #24.

So I spent a good portion of this evening on MySpace. I added a few of my friends, and then kept looking around and found a bunch of other people that I know, and friends of friends, and old friends and people from other times and places in my life.

I haven’t had a chance to listen to this yet, but I noticed that KQED did an hour about MySpace on March 3rd.

Update: The Forum segment was focused on how kids use MySpace and what parents need to know about it. Not my area of interest, but it was a good discussion that hit on some important topics.

I have not written much about politics here. I think that there are other people out there who are actually in politics, or cover the subject professionally, that are much better equipped to comment on such things in a methodical and effective manner. I’m glad they are doing so.

As for me, I believe the intentions of the Bush administration are misguided, and their resulting policies are failures. I believe the executive branch is not exempt from common sense and, much more importantly, from the law. I believe it is wrong for the goverment to lie, invade and occupy under false pretenses and profit from doing so, torture, kill, leave citizens affected by natural disasters to die, engage in illegal wiretapping on citizens, spend the peoples’ tax dollars irresponsibly and enact policies based on greed, intolerance, moral policing and hypocrisy.

I really think it’s time for people to stand up and say enough is enough and we’re done with this now. Especially those of us that don’t normally do so.

I’d like to see if I can develop a better “voice” for this blog.

Lately I have been underwhelmed by the “safe” and “noncommittal” writing that I have been doing here. Don’t get me wrong, I really am a fan of exploring San Francisco Parks, but I feel very little passion when I write a magazine-like blurb about big trees and hiking trails.

If you read back far enough you’ll find some major time gaps and a lack of theme that goes back several years. The entries prior to 2006 were lifted from the journals and blogs I kept before this one; the deeply personal items did not make it to this public space.

I keep a private journal elsewhere, a traditional diary of sorts, which allows me to explore a lot of my thoughts and feelings while maintaining a sense of privacy. On this site it is a challenge for me to balance sharing too much about my day to day life versus writing in a way that shares virtually nothing of my real feelings and opinions. I tend to do the latter, which ends up being rather lifeless.

I would like to achieve a better balance.

Very few folks read here at the moment, but if anyone has comments, I’d love to hear them.

Apple has released the new Intel-based Mac mini. There are two models, one with an Intel Core Solo processor and one with an Intel Core Duo. Both models include Front Row, a remote control, wifi and bluetooth, gigabit ethernet and more USB ports than the previous PowerPC-based incarnation. Both start with 512MB RAM instead of 256MB and have combination optical/analog audio output and input.

It’s pretty much exactly what I had hoped the next version of the Mac mini would be (well, I guess I still wish it had surround sound output, or is that part of the optical output?). Unfortunately my current computer is still quite serviceable, so I am having a hard time really justifying the purchase of a new one.

Then again, I’d be able to use the remote to control my music from across the room instead of connecting with VNC from another laptop!

Image: Apple, Inc.

Someone I know created a “syndication feed” to my blog (this site) on LiveJournal. If you add the user “jrandallfeed” [Update: it’s now called “jrandallblog” — see below for details] to your LiveJournal friends list, you’ll see snippets from this site’s posts show up as you read your LiveJournal friends list. I think that is kind of cool for LiveJournal users who want to keep up with people who are blogging outside of that community.

I’m not particularly excited about the name “jrandallfeed” so I emailed LiveJournal and asked then to change it to “jrandallblog” since that is a bit more in line with how I have organized my site (I actually created a feed to my sailing blog called “jrandallsailing” along the same lines). They wrote back and said “no” with a link to their FAQ explaining that once a feed is created nobody owns it and they won’t delete it or modify it.

That got me thinking about how copyright issues apply to RSS feeds. Obviously, content I create belongs to me. But by providing an RSS feed of my content it is extremely easy for anyone to take it and manipulate it. A “default” RSS feed has no security policies or access restriction, so once content is made available there is nothing, at least in a technical sense, to stop it from being used in any way.

So how is copyright actually applied in the give and take realm of RSS feeds?

When listening to copyrighted music on the web or reading a copyrighted static web page for that matter, I don’t assume I can take the content and incorporate it in to my own work just because it was accessible. Is it assumed that content obtained via RSS can be used or presented in any way, with no guidelines from the owner of that content? What are the legal implications?

I took a peek at my XML to see if I am providing a copyright tag in the feed, and I am not. It looks like I can add a plugin to WordPress that will add some copyright verbage to the posts.

As for LiveJournal, perhaps they should provide some level of control to content owners when their feeds are aggregated through LiveJournal syndication? Or, again, is it just assumed that providing content via RSS removes the owner’s right to control any aspect of its distribution?

Update: The LiveJournal folks manually broke “jrandallfeed” in order to let me create a new syndication link called “jrandallblog” — I appreciate that. It’s a messy solution, but I suspect they’ll clean such things up over time as they refine how they handle their syndication system.

This is one of those “I’ve lived in San Francisco for years and I can’t believe I’ve never been here before” places: Buena Vista Park. The Haight is just north of this hilltop park, and the Castro is to the southeast on the other side of the Randall Museum. The N-Judah runs underneath it in one of San Francisco’s transit tunnels. The park is really astoundingly scenic, with huge full-grown trees from decades of Arbor Day plantings. The views of The City are framed by those trees; the top of the Golden Gate Bridge can be seen Northward and Point Bonita is visible past the Richmond District.

I went up there for the first time a couple weeks ago on one of my “urban wander-walking” excursions; I hiked through again this morning with a friend to excercise, get another look and take some pictures. It’s a dog-friendly park and a lot of them were out and about this morning — what fun.

As usual, I went online for some more information. Buena Vista Park was created in 1867 — originally called Hill Park — which makes it the oldest park in San Francisco. This is less of a neighborhood park, and much more of a landscape design showcase, if I may use such a term. The Neighborhood Parks Council has much more historical information on their site.

As for me, I really recommend checking it out.