My lame holiday
2006-07-04 - 8:00 p.m.
It seems that my life will be in a constant state of flux, whether I want it to be or not.
I have a shiny new position with my company (I'm the Research and Knowledge Manager. Can you stand it?), making 40K/year, which is about twice what I've ever made in my life. Not on an hourly scale, but certainly when comparing annual income. So, I'm less poor now, but Mike is unemployed, and has been since January. He just spent a trial week as a web copywriter for a company that makes home automation systems. They told him that his copy wasn't selling the products, but was just explaining the products. But they didn't give him a directive, or an audience profile or anything. And they wanted him to lift copy from competitors' sites, and rework it to make it fit in their layouts. Mike told them that practice was illegal, and they told him that he didn't know what he was talking about, and that everybody does it, and if he knew anything about web copy, he'd realize that.
Funny how everybody doing it doesn't make it legal. Okay, I shall now proceed to rant (there's some crossover with this situation and things that I've been dealing with at work over the past two weeks):
There are no special laws governing copyright on the internet. You don't even have to assert your copyright for your work to be protected by copyright. As long as it's fixed in a medium, copyright attaches. In order to press a legal action, it's good if you have your work on deposit with the copyright office . But it's not absolutley required, if you can prove date of publication.
In order to close a potential security loophole in our new VPN at work, the IT folk came up with the bright idea of mirroring external sites on our local server when I wanted to link stuff into the knowledge base that I'm developing, so that we wouldn't have to give www access to all sites, potentially opening our point of sales systems to hacks. I explained why this would be illegal, unless I gained permission from every mirrored site, and was told that copyright wasn't an issue in this case. I stuck to my guns, and they conceded to do some research before they committed to it. Dashed nice of them. So, I reread the copyright statutes, forwarded the appropriate circulars to them, and they arrived at the conclusion that mirroring would present intellectual property issues. And, if we followed those planets, we'll find Planet X. So, now I can't have external links at all, because they can't figure out a way to configure a whitelist or screen or something that will keep the network safe.
Thus concludes the rant.
The upshot of al this is that Mike decided on Monday that he didn't want to work for sleazy people, and I support him entirely. Actually, I'm sure he decided well before Monday, but the issue didn't really come into play until then.
We've done very little today, though Mike did make a chicken curry (in honor of Independence Day, of course), and I made a Jell-O Poke cake yesterday. Incidentally, if you've never had such a cake, you really ought to. They're one of my absolute favorites (this one was white cake with orange jello and vanilla pudding for the topping). And, folks are setting off fireworks everywhere.
Saw The Devil Wears Prada on Saturday. I thought it was pretty good. Stanley Tucci was precise, insightful, and perfect as the fairy godfather. Anne Hathaway was charming as always (thought Mike fears for the day that she stars in a movie in which she doesn't become a princess, and what it will do to her sanity...). And Meryl Streep was just superb. The character was unpredictable in her actions, but Streep's brilliance is that she finds the exact character of a person who would do all of the things in the script, and then...she plays that person. It's so simple as to be zen. Whenever you hear an actor say that something is "out of character" for the character that he or she is playing, or that "I don't feel like my character would do this," that actor is displaying a fundamental misunderstanding of the concept of character. Because a script presents the totality of the known data on a character, by definition, there is no action that can be out of character. Period. I think that Meryl Streep must have some variant of this concept tatooed on the ass of her soul. I've never seen her violate it.
Yes, erratic character, but dependably, and exactly correctly so. I was disappointed that the line, "Where is my coffee? Did she go to Rwanda for the beans or something?" was not in the movie, though it was in the trailer. The second sentence was replaced with, "Did she die or something?" Not nearly as fun.
I'm in the midst of the most recent Robert Jordan book. Bah. Overwritten, poorly phrased, bad command of dialect, and I know that this won't be the last one. END IT, BLOODY END IT, ALREADY! This nonsense has been going on for over half of my life, and it's no masterpiece. And, yet, I'm compelled to read. I knew after book five that I was going to start getting pissed with him. I bought the first book in paperback from the Stars and Stripes bookstore when I was a junior in high school and living overseas. That first book wasn't bad...or that's how I remember it. My sister borrowed it from me when I was in college and never returned it. Claimed she never had it. Yes, tangential gall. I just want him to realize that not many people really care anymore, and that he could save himself pages and pages by having a really great glossary, and not feeling like he has to reestablish everything the first time he mentions it in a specific volume. To Robert Jordan: Oh, and yes, we get it, men and women are different. But women don't bristle, so stop saying that they do every ten minutes. They're not cats, they're women. Get a new metaphor. And no one is as complex as a blacksmith's puzzle. At least, not in this world you've created. And for Pete's sake, get yourself a decent copy editor and don't interfere with his or her work.
fin.
