Local Insanity

I have two classes to take next quarter: one literature and one math. I thought I was done with math because I had two 6 unit classes, which I thought would count the same as three 4 unit classes, but apparently not. That’s disappointing because math classes are invariably MWF, so I won’t be able to get a long weekend. I guess I’m not really that far ahead, but it’s still not too bad considering I’ve taken so many classes just for fun. I’ve got a CS midterm in 40 minutes, so I’m going to go study for that now.

This is one of my first letters to actually complain to a corporation. I hope it helps.

Partly in response to the recent post on the topic at DrunkenBlog, I’ve elected to voice my concern on the issue of Apple suing those users found sharing the Tiger pre-release on bittorrent. I understand that it is important to protect ones IP. I also think that Apple should be able to extract penalties from those who infringe on its IP in proportion to the damage they’ve done.

Why, then, is Apple doing so much damage to these college students? The amount it has lost from their activities cannot possibly total more than $10,000, yet this suit will force them to spend more than that each. The amount spent by each of these individuals relative to their net worth will make $10,000 look like chump change compared to Apple’s net worth. While this need not be a legal concern, it ought to be a humanitarian concern.

What does Apple hope to accomplish by suing them? Making sure they won’t do it again? I’m fairly certain they won’t. I am a college student, and if I were sued by a large corporation I’d make absolutely certain never again to engage in whatever activity was deemed offensive. Does Apple want to set an example? If that’s so, why isn’t it being publicizing more along with Apple’s explanation of the events?

I’m concerned that the punishment outweighs the crime in this case. I love Apple products and I recommend them to my friends. I switched from Windows two years ago not only because I believed the system to be technically better and that it would provide a better user experience, but because I felt the company itself was actually somewhat trustworthy and humane. I hope that this case will not show me to have been wrong.

No, not last year’s Halloween costume. It seems that Apple is suing three college students over violation of an NDA and a few other charges. Apple is mute on the issue, but a number of developers for the Mac gave a few words in an interview at DrunkenBlog.

I don’t know the details of the case, but from what I’ve heard the students did share a pre-release version of the upcoming Mac OS X Tiger. While I may not agree with the law that allows this, I agree that Apple is legally given the right to go after these people. Fortunately, and this is one of the few situations I think this is fortunate, companies need to worry about their public image. I hope that awareness of this case will reach sufficient mass to cause Apple to consider that whatever reasons they might have for being tough on these students might not be good enough, and that the students’ actions (which had almost nil affect on Apple) do not warrant this kind of behavior.

Don’t shoot yourself in the foot Apple. I’ve liked you as a company up to now, and that is very rare. Either drop the suits or release a public statement explaining why you feel it is necessary to pursue them - a legitimate reason, none of this “setting an example” bullshit people have been speculating on.

But not that near. I thought for a bit that I’d be able to graduate this quarter (that’s right, in 3 weeks or so), but it turns out that, while my classes from Singapore transferred well, I still have a literature class to take. Literature? Literature? How the hell did I miss that? I must have looked at my DPR a thousand times since I first started school at UCLA, and I somehow missed each and every time.

Therefore I have one class to take next quarter, and it has nothing to do with my major. What should I do in the meantime? Continue to work at bruinwalk.com? Look for another job? Both? Sarah still needs to figure out where she’s going for grad school, and that’ll factor into my plans. For those of you interested in attending my graduation you can take a look at the schedule. As it stands, there are two graduations I can attend: Math graduation and College of Letters and Science graduation. I can do both. They are on Sunday, June 19 and Friday, June 17, respectively. From what I’ve heard, the Math one will actually call out individual names. It ought to be less crowded too. I don’t know when you guys are available, but I’ll find out more about them from the school and post again here.

I’ve added the old posts from both my old blogs (the one at mac.com and the family one on this domain). Hopefully this will keep them all together and easy to access. Look ma! No hefty browser requirements! Nevertheless, I recommend you get Firefox up and running now if you haven’t done so already.

Also, the family site will be going down very soon. What’s that? You don’t care? That’s why I’m taking it down.

Arthur came over today and we did our math homework for 110a, which isn’t due for 5 whole days. That’s so cool. I can effectively ignore that class for a week or more. If in the next two days I can do that to any of my other classes I’ll really enjoy this next week.

It felt good to get it done, but doing things in advance is so rare a thing for people to do, even smart people. Why? It makes us feel good to get it done and to be productive, to exercise and be fit, etc. But we don’t do it. We procrastinate and put it off until we absolutely have to do it. As an exercise in this, I will attempt to get things done early until the end of the quarter, and I will take note of my desire to procrastinate, and try to figure out what causes it.

I have a few notes already:

• I invariably find anything else to do instead, no matter how inane.
• I think I can do it later, that I don’t feel like it right now.
• I think the task is too big, too difficult (esp. exercising).

What do you notice yourself doing/thinking when you procrastinate?

Despite the way that sounds, today was not so bad. What I thought was going to happen today:

• 11-12 Homework due
• 12-13 Homework due/midterm
• 17 Homework due
• 16-18 Homework due/midterm

It turned out that it was all accurate except for the 2nd midterm. How is it that I could have got that? Well the professor did give kind of a review session. Anyway it’s next friday instead. Hopefully I’ll actually use the time I have to study. Whether or not everthing really did come down to today, I realized that I felt much better after the time the 2nd midterm was supposed to be, and not because it didn’t happen - I would have been happier if it had happened - but because I expected to feel releaved after it was over. This tells me that it’s my choice to determine how I feel about this stuff, but that it may not be easy to exercise that choice.

I upgraded to WordPress 1.5, and it’s a lot better. I’ll upgrade Sarah’s soon too, as soon as I can talk to her and tell her what’s going on. I like the default theme, but I think that lots of people will be using it, so perhaps I should alter it slightly.

Sarah and I had an awesome time in Napa Valley, and enjoyed tasting the wines. Upon returning home, mom called me a Philistine for liking Muscat. I’ve gotta work my way into the reds, though. They can’t just be jumped into from root beer and water. We’ll see in the future.

We stayed at this nice little bed and breakfast called the Inn on Randolph. It had a great big soft bed and whirlpool tub with a nice view and a nice area. We went to Copia, which is a art, culinary and wine museum. It was pretty fun with the Valentine’s Day theme. Sarah wants to go back there again, to the same room, which was nice, but shouldn’t there be some variety?

So the update came yesterday and I got it, installed it, and after waking my PowerBook from sleep afterwards, the display got all screwed up. Here’s an example of what I’m talking about. Fortunately a reboot fixes it, but it’s still a major problem to not be able to sleep my PowerBook.

This is the start of my own site, which I will use for my own purposes. If you’d like to read it, fine. Mostly it’s just things that I think are cool and would like to express, regardless of whether anyone reads it. The rest of it will be commentary on things in my life or related.

First off, there’s this cool post over at DrunkenBlog about a project called Portable Firefox, a subproject of the Firefox project. It basically is a stripped-down version of Firefox for Windows that is only 8.6MB, perfect for a keychain drive. Why would you want this? I use Firefox whenever I have to use Windows, but sometimes a computer lab will not have it. Now it will.