Chinese censors losing online race
Censorship
6/7/2000; 8:40:08 PM May 22,2000: "The broad range of opinions expressed on the People's Daily Web site and others is less an indication of tolerance than incapacity. Censors delete many controversial postings, but the rapid-fire technology of the Internet allows users to post comments faster than censors can sort through them. As a result, dissenting views are disseminated among millions of Chinese Internet users."

Unfortunately, this isn't as good as it works. In fact, I'm shocked to read it, as several simple solutions exist for the Chinese government, the most effective (and beaureacratic) of which is to require each posting to be approved before display. The implicit assumpting in the article that the Internet's volume of communication renders it uncensorable is unfounded... volume can be cut down or even eliminated if it suits the people in charge.

Work shock Personal Notes6/6/2000; 1:38:29 PM In the space of the past month, I've moved out of the dorm back to my parents, moved to my apartment from my parents, completed planning a wedding, gotten married, gone on a trip out east, re-arranged the apartment and set up an internal network (so we don't have to buy seperate printers, scanners, etc.), and now that I'm going back to work 8-5, well, it's a lot like culture shock except it's time I'm not used to managing yet. I'm experiencing "job shock" much harder then the last couple of years.Therefore and hence I don't have the first day's honeymoon up yet, so I'll just delay it for a day methinks. Besides, my wife was out of town being with someone who just had her tonsils removed(*) and she should really have a chance to look the stuff over before I post it (not for objectionable content, but in case I forgot something interesting to us).BTW, John VanDyk has caused a minor linkstorm on the LinkBack page for his site. That's what you get for wierd dreams, I guess.

(*)I had my tonsils out in fourth grade. It was an outpatient operation with a one-week recovery time. Apparently, when you're 22, it's a three-week recovery time. Wow! She seems to be doing well, though.

I'm back! Personal Notes6/5/2000; 8:33:16 AM It's good to be back!Hopefully this is the last long outage this site will experience in a long time. I may or may not 'cover' the news today, but check out my wedding photos and stories below! I'll be posting the honeymoon day-by-day too, we've got some nice photos and stories for that. This site will also be redesigned a bit to continue with the News Item conversion, but I've got to get back to real work for now, so... see you on the web!(If you'd like to wish the bride well, I'll forward them to her if you mail them to my irights@jerf.org account.)

Misc. Announcements Administrative6/5/2000; 8:33:13 AM Misc announcements:

  • I've finally finished what I started before the wedding, and have organized my site into various catagories. It'll be some time before I can get icons for all of the catagories, but in the meantime, I can now create a Site Index page, which lists all the catagories of stories I have.I wanted to do that as I think this site will also become useful as a historical resource... want to see a history of the RIAA and MP3 butting heads? Just look at the MP3 & Music catagory.
  • LinkBack will be down a few days while it moves to its new, hopefully final, home, though I'll try to update it every few hours.
  • I'm not going to try to catch up to the three weeks this site has missed, but as I do think this site can be a valuable historical resource in the future, I may cherry-pick the best stories I can find from reading the past few weeks of fellow-webloggers work. Should be fun!

May 20th, 2000: Our Wedding Day Wedding & Honeymoon6/5/2000; 8:32:55 AM Whew! It's been a hectic past three weeks! Finals week, then a whirlwind week of planning & moving into an apartment, then this little "wedding" shindig that we had been talking about for so long that I almost ceased to believe it would actually happen... but it did!I'll be putting a summary of the wedding & honeymoon for all to see, but it's also going to serve as a scrapbook of sorts and as a way of remembering what we did years from now, so it may seem a little detailed Clicking all of the pictures except the cake top picture will lead to a more full-sized version.On September 17th, 1999, I proposed to Heather Pratt (actually that link isn't very representative), whom I had known for many years but had not been romantically involved with for so many. We were simply best friends for a good long time, helping each other through college, when you don't just need acquaintances, you need friends.And after a whirlwind of planning and the hardest school year yet (not a good combo, I might add), we finally arrived at M-Day: May 20th, 2000 at 3:30 p.m. Here's the bride coming down with her father, looking surprisingly confident after a nerve-inducing rehearsal the previous night We don't have many pictures from the main ceremony, as we can't use the professional's pictures due to copyright restrictions... and I haven't even seen them yet as they aren't developed, so I'll just have to tell you how it went. The wedding ceremony is a case of "no news is good news"... it went even better then the rehearsal, which had way too much giggling (I think it's hard to swear to have & to hold et. al. when you don't mean it, it's just silly then).Our church is the church I've grown up in, a place dating from around 1930 which really looks better then you might first get the impression of. The pastor of the church whom I've known for almost as long married us. We kept the ceremony short... there's little worse then a over-long wedding I'll never listen to Pachbel's Canon the same way again... we used it for the processional. We lit a Unity Candle, and browsing around the web it looks like we chose an unusual combination. We had our mothers light the candle when they were escorted in, and after our vows Heather and I went up and lit the main candle, and blew both of the others out, symbolizing how we are now devoted to each other and not our families. There seems to be a reasonable symbolism for any other combination... I've seen leaving the two candles lit to symbolize joining of the families, and I thought I'd even heard of a 5-candle version somewhere, with the 2 outside for family, the inner two for the couple, and the central one for the wedding, with all 5 left lit at the end. Hopefully we'll get the rights to put a couple of the ceremony pictures on the web from the photographer when we see the photos.Eventually, you have to leave the church and start out on your way. If you look at the full version of this picture, you can see some spots on the picture. That's birdseed, which we threw as has become traditional in honor of the rice-kills-birds urban legend. Actually, while birdseed may be softer and pose less of a threat to those walking on it, I can't imagine it's any more fun to be hit with. Heather hopes to someday find out who got her in the eye with a handful of the stuff, and... ahhh... wreak vengeance. Also, a few of the kiddies seem to have missed the point and thrown the whole little packet without unwrapping it.We were shaking out birdseed for the rest of the day.Overall, the ceremony really went off with a hitch and there isn't much else to tell. (sorry, couldn't resist ) Heather's mother rented a limo for the wedding party of 10 to ride over in. Unfortunately, I think the limo was only truly meant for eight. All 4 of my men were on the back seat, which was no larger then your average car back seat, and we're not talking small people here... oops.It was kind of neat being in a limo, but there was one major downside: While everybody else was at the reception hall getting cheese and crackers, we were driving around in the limo through Ann Arbor, Michigan. When we finally arrived, everything was gone and the reception hall didn't see fit to have anything for us, the wedding party... you know, the people running around and standing up in hot clothing all day. When I sat down, I didn't even have water! As you might then imagine, when the soup came, the head table suddenly got very, very quiet, except for the clinking of spoons, as we all gave our soups the utmost attention, as nicely captured by this photo. (That's what's so interesting about the soup!) Also, if you look at full picture, you'll see a glass container full of something colorful... those are Skittles™, which we had put out as a last-minute thing by my father, who had intended that all the guests could get some during the snacks if they would like. Well, they were forgotten about then, but when we arrived, they provided a life-saving hit of sugar (or at least, headache-averting) to our wedding party... even amoung those who don't normally eat those sugary things.Advice: Make sure the wedding party has some food for them as soon as they arrive. It's not really for their comfort, it's to avoid cranky wedding parties. Dinner was OK, dessert was excellent. Of course, after dinner you have to have the first dance. We played "Happy Together" by the Turtles, which may not strike you as dancable but since neither of us can dance, it hardly mattered. Ballads from the 60s, techno, The Blue Danube, it's all the same to us when it comes to dancing .We also did something I'd never heard of until the planning sessions called a "dollar dance". Browsing around on the web, I guess some people find it controversial.... our reasoning for doing it was simple. We did it for fun! And it was fun for both of us. We have a picture of one of my coworkers, a crazy, fun-loving guy who paid to dance with me... sadly, the pictures are damaged because of the mirror behind us catching the flash. I hope I can repair the picture enough to save it, I'd love to post it later. Then I paid off the Maid of Honor to dance with the bride myself (really cheap, 'cause I got the money back ). I actually met quite a bit of the bride's family I'd never talked to for even that long before. I think in the spirit of fun it's a fine thing to do at a wedding. After we did some general mixing & socializing came the garter and bouquet toss. The garter toss is nothing to look at on photos, but this shot of the bouquet toss is perfect. What you can't see in this photo is that the bouquet is actually heading straight down. If you look at the full photo you'll see a bit of the cieling above. The bouquet actually hit that, and you can see some of the single women who braved the toss starting to react, while the bride is actually almost turned around to look at the women, which is the wrong place to look. We had to redo it. The girl with the yellow dress in the front got it... well, I think it may be a while yet before she gets married! Kind of unfortunate for some of the others up there We also got to cut the cake, which was just beautiful. A friend of my mother's made this one and it's great. Purple and white were the colors of the wedding, and the purple flower decorations on the cake were perfect. BTW, the oldest meaning of purple I know of is for royalty, which comes from the fact it is difficult to make a deep purple dye thousands of years ago... only a somewhat-rare shellfish around Greece made the necessary pigments, and only kings could afford it. We didn't get crazy about it, but we had a sort of Precious Moments theme, which started when we saw this great looking cake-top in a local Hallmark. The guestbook also has these two on it... aren't they cute? They'll last a lot better then my parent's cake top too, which is cool. We can actually display these two. All good cakes must come to an end. No, we didn't stuff the wedding cakes down each others throats (it's not always fun and games )... I don't mind being informed by tradition but I didn't want to bound by it, and that's one tradition that can just take a flying leap [off a cliff] for all I care.And oddly enough, many of the weddings I've been too have actually done this... the Locomotion! It's a lot of fun, but you have to let the bride lead so she can hike up her dress . Also, as Heather used her mother's dress, it didn't quite fit and she actually couldn't lift her arms above her shoulder (which might also explain the bouquet issue).It was a really happy day for me and we only left and went upstairs to the "complementary" rooms at about 11:00p.m., exhausted.As much as I enjoyed it, I am so glad I'm only going to do this once... (even should the worst happen and I do somehow remarry those ceremonies are generally far less elaborate.) it's a LOT of work! (But only the beginning, of course.)

Privacy activists lobby Congress for greater Net protections Surveillance and Privacy from Government6/5/2000; 8:32:35 AM April 10, 2000: "Privacy advocates today urged Congress to extend constitutional search-and-seizure rights to the Internet to protect from Big Brother consumers who shop, join groups and bank online."

Uh.... why does Congress need to expand the constitutional protections? They apply already; Congress can delimit and clarify, but I hope the 'privacy advocates' aren't truly pushing for "expansion". We're supposed to already be protected against that stuff.

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TAP Controversy: Lawrence Lessig, Round Two
Internet/Weblog Culture
6/5/2000; 7:18:13 AM April 25, 2000: TAP Controversy: Lawrence Lessig, Round Two: "But Raymond believes that no regulation is necessary here. That apparently the invisible hand will save us from networks of control. Where's the evidence? Putting aside ideology for a moment, can you point to one example in the history of the United States where owners of a telecommunications network voluntarily architected that network as open and maintained it over time as such? The Internet is not an example: It was, through the telephone network and the conditions the government placed on its birth, heavily regulated. So where else beyond the Internet?"

Dueling to Be the King of Web Content
Internet/Weblog Culture
6/5/2000; 7:18:12 AM April 25, 2000: "Even as they expand, both syndicators will face the challenge of sameness -- as in the degree of that they confer on customer sites. 'If you go to two different sports sites, they often have the exact same stories,' says Steve Outing, a columnist with trade magazine Editor & Publisher and co-founder of Content-Exchange.com, a specialized syndicator. 'As this evolves, I think there will be more need for more original content.'"

This is a problem Userland, Pita, and Blogger do not have. They have original content in spades, and a surprising amount of it is really quite good. Perhaps these companies should be actively looking around them, they may find good stuff.

Maryland governor signs UCITA UCITA6/5/2000; 7:18:10 AM April 25, 2000: "Glendening signed the Uniform Computer Information Transactions Act (UCITA) into law Tuesday. UCITA will take effect Oct. 1; as things stands now, Maryland will be the first state to enact the software licensing measure."Well, THAT'S not good.

Yahoo! vs. Free Speech Political Speech6/5/2000; 7:18:08 AM April 25, 2000: "All the big portals have rules governing the types of banner ads that can run on their pages. Some portals have specific guidelines for political advertising. Those guidelines may be good-faith efforts to set ground rules. But in some cases, they have the effect of diminishing the quantity and quality of political expression online. Yahoo!, for example, has a blanket policy prohibiting negative banner ads."I have a hard time getting upset about banning negative banner ads on Yahoo. I think that moreso then on TV, ads do reflect on the site carrying them, as there is less seperation between ad and content. This lack of seperation causes problems as advertisers abuse this fact to trick people into clicking on ads that look like operating system messages or even a normal part of the site they are viewing. Forcing Yahoo and friends to carry negative banners would directly impact the public perception of the carriers and I can't force them to do that.You know it can't be that big a deal if I can't get excited about it "smile"There are some proposed odd scenarios in the article, like "What about a banner ad that promotes an anti-candidate Web site such as NotHillary.com or gwbush.com? Would those ads be deemed 'positive' (for the site) or 'negative' (against the candidate)?" Yeah, well, who cares? Besides, just to add some confusion into the mix, if those ads are considered libelous by someone in Britain, can they sue Yahoo?