Tag: Brian Carnell

Awhile ago I wrote about how my friend Cathy Young had to go through some bizarre, false, plagiarism claims. Meanwhile Mark Morgan is very worried about the implications of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act — Mark uses his site to let people post stories and essays, but if someone should post a plagiarized story, the DMCA potentially exposes him to a rather large degree of liability.

All of which reminded me of a very strange situation I faced in the summer of 1998. One of the things I’m really interested in is libertarianism. At the time I was dissatisfied with the libertarian-oriented web directories — they either weren’t very complete or weren’t updated very often. So I decided to make my own and registered the LibertySearch.Com domain name.

Then out of the blue I started getting some nasty e-mail about the site. I turned out one of the libertarian link sites I had visited and been dissatisfied with was behind the e-mails. The woman who ran the site decided that even though her site was a directory of sites while mine was a directory to specific articles rather than sites, that I “stolen” her idea. She posted a wonderful notice on the front of her site linking to mine saying, “Does this site look familiar? It’s a damn good rip off of the old Freedom Finder. Too bad he doesn’t have a webcam diva fueling his traffic! People who copy things suck.”

She was annoying, but the problem was people believed her and the claim started showing up on other libertarian sites by people who thought I’d literally gone to her site and stolen everything and put it on my site (which would have been pointless because her site was pretty much useless since it listed very few resources).

It took me several months to clear up that mess. It’s a shame she was so petty because she let a pretty good domain name, freedomfinder.com, slip out of her hands and now it’s used by a registrar rather than for a libertarian site.

It seems like it took forever, but I finally managed to kick the bronchitis that’s plagued me since the end of September. Basically for the last 6 weeks my life has been get up, go to work, come home, collapse on couch, repeat. This weekened I got home Friday around 6 p.m. and didn’t leave the couch until this morning at 6 a.m. (did get to watch most of the AMC horror movie festival, though — excellent).

Still got a few cobwebs in my head but I can actually use my lungs again. Take a deep breath! Exhale. Ahhhh!

Now I can get around to doing some neat things I had planned on doing with the site back in September.

My wife and I took our daughter to one of those chain pizza shops geared toward younger kids, complete with video arcade, ball pits, etc. Although kids pumped up on caffeine, pizza and video games can be occasionally rude, I’m continually amazed at how well young kids thrown together like that get along. Some of the adults, however, I could do without.

The place was very crowded and people swiped my booth not once but twice. The first time I left my jacket in my seat as an indicator that the booth was taken while my wife went to order pizza and I wandered off to try to track down my daughter. When I returned somebody was sitting else was sitting in my booth. I let them slide because they were sitting on the other side of the booth from where I had left my jacket and they were very apologetic (though come on — in a crowded restaurant with kids you have to do more than a casual scan.)

Determined not to let this sort of ambiguity in temporary property rights over our booth happen again, I took my jacket and sprawled it over the table — there’s no way anyone could miss it. Again, my wife was stuck in the slowest pizza line in the world and my daughter was doing something that looked rather dangerous at the time so I vaulted across the place to explain to her about the safe way to play.

When I return there is a family of about six sitting in our booth. They had taken my jacket, scrunched it all up, and set it on the no man’s land dividing the booth from the one next to it. My wife would have probably had some choice words for those folks, but I’m pretty much flabbergasted when I run into such bizarre levels of rudeness — I just gave them The Glare while snatching my jacket and found another booth.

Unfortunately I see such routine rudeness on a regular basis. As I’ve mentioned before, I work at a university and one of the things I’m dismayed at is the complete lack of manners and respect for others that a significant minority of students, professors and administrators have. A few weeks ago at the McDonald’s inside the student union, a mid-level manager simply cut in front of about 50 people (and either didn’t hear or chose to ignore the vulgar mutterings from those in line). Another time I saw a woman in her late 20s get in a shouting match with one of the McDonald’s register folks — her son had tried to cut to the front of a line about 12 people and the person behind the register politely but firmly explained this was rude behavior which just set the mother off.

The other day I was in line behind a professor in a cafeteria who ended up being very mean to a new Malaysian trainee who was moving a bit too slow and had difficulty understanding the professor’s requests.

Is it really asking too much for such people to be a little less impatient and a little more polite?

I’ve been sick for the past two weeks and I hate it, and unfortunately I couldn’t take any time off work because I had to finish up a lot of loose ends for a conference that takes place this weekend.

I feel like the excellent opening scene in the otherwise very bad film, Any Given Sunday. The movie stinks, but the football cinematography is excellent. Anyway, Jamie Foxx’s character is the second string quarterback who gets put in when the starting quarterback gets sacked into next week. After getting sacked himself, Foxx takes a snap and surveys the field. Everything runs in slow motion as the receivers run down the field and he sees one of them to his right open. Just as the ball gets to the receiver, out of nowhere comes a cornerback accompanied by streaks of light who zooms in front of the ball for the interception.

That’s what I feel like when I’m sick — everything’s going in slow motion and at double speed all at once.

Blah.

    Sometimes I can never figure out why people make it so hard for me to give them my money.

    In the first instance, I’m interested in some role-playing related software by a small company that is usually stocked only by game stores — you won’t find it in traditional computer distributors inventory. Anyway, every time I see this company has released a new piece of software I march down to the local store and ask if they can get it for me. Each time the guy tells me “Sure, I’ll call you on Monday” and then never does. Guess I’ll just stick to ordering it direct.

    The other example has about 10 people I know stymied but this one isn’t surprising — nobody can figure out how to get Ameritech to install the DSL service they claim is available in our area now. Over the past two years I’ve put myself on their “please notify me when it’s available” e-mail lists, left numerous messages with different people, and of course no one bothered to contact me, as they promised, when DSL finally became available. Learned that from a friend who found out by accident, and checked on their web site — sure enough, I type in my address and it informs me I too can have DSL.

    Except I and about 10 other people have spent the past three weeks e-mailing and calling Ameritech to order the darn thing without a single response. Just getting to the people who might know anything about DSL is a nightmare and then when you do get through to the right people it’s always “We’ll call you tomorrow with details.” Whatever.

    The cable company, reacting to Ameritech’s apparently illusory claim to offer DSL in the area, is finally moving forward to offer a cable modem by December. I doubt the same people who took forever to bring me the Cartoon Channel are going to be able to ramp up to installing cable modems by March, much less December.

    The only consolation is I’m moving to the Chicago area in September 2001 and Lisa’s already been informed that high-speed access is a minimum requirement for the new place.

Sometimes it is fascinating to see how people’s narrow conception of problems
artificially limits the range of options they consider. For example, last year
I drove my neighbor, who did not have a car at the time, to a local Burger King
to buy some kids meals for her children. At the time they were doing a Pokemon
promotion and the store we visited had ran out of the Pokemon toy. So when we
get up to order the kids meals, the person taking orders informs us that sorry,
they’ve run out of the toys. We try to explain we don’t care about the toys,
we just want the meals to no avail. We ask to speak to the manager and get the
same runaround — sorry, but we’re out of the toys. We don’t care about the
toys, just give us the kids meal. It just isn’t getting through his skull. We
go to McDonald’s and manage to get some kids meals for the now very hungry children.

That event didn’t surprise me since they hardly stock the Burger King with
geniuses and the people there aren’t exactly paid to think. On the other hand
the high priced consultants and human relations folks at the university I work
at keep making a similar error in reasoning. The university completely overhauled
its performance evaluation system, and is beginning to train everybody on using
it. One of the main changes that is being touted is this: the old system graded
people on a 1 to 6 scale (with 6 being best). HR claims to have improved that
by, get this, saying they’ve replaced the number ratings with four letter grades.
Of course each possible grade represents a distinct level of performance and
the “grades” are clearly going to be converted into numbers somewhere along
the way to produce statistics showing the distribution of ratings, but the HR
folks keep repeating the same mantra — we have replaced the old number rating
system with a letter grade system.

Me? Like the folks in Spinal Tap, I have relabelled my amplifier to go up to
11, but I’m thinking about ditching the numbers and replacing that with letters
from A to K!