More Boston. Tasty looking fruits and vegetables; a splash of color on a street corner in March.

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Shot with: 6 mega-pixel Canon SD600

Shared with: Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License

Finally! Let’s start looking at some pictures from my trip to Boston. I’m not much of a city-dweller, but I enjoy visiting cities and wandering around like a tourist with my camera. This was taken outside of South Station, where the Silver Line meets up with the Red Line.

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Self service: 1600×1200 1280×1024 1280×960 1152×864 1024×768 800×600 640×480

Shot with: 6 mega-pixel Canon SD600

Shared with: Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License

Where it equals weight. I’m losing some weight and it feels great. More on that below, but first:

Hi, readers! How have you been? You may have noticed I haven’t been especially communicative lately. There’s a lot I might write about free software and culture, but for some reason I hesitate. Maybe I don’t feel confident in what I want to say.

And also I’m keeping busy with other stuff. Enjoying the summer. Last year I made the big switch to Ubuntu right at the start of June and that drove a lot of activity and posts. It also led to some regret at my time allocation. This year I’m coasting along more and taking it easy, enjoying time away from the computer and with the family. No regrets there, although as always I’m itching to do something.

One project I started in May was to do something about my weight. I’m 5 foot 8 inches (minus a few sixteenths of an inch), and for years I’ve hovered around 200 pounds. I weighed 165 in high school. Several years ago I lost 30 pounds, but then found it again and have continued to maintain way too much fat on my bones.

So I started doing Weight Watchers Online, which works great for obsessive measuring types like myself. It’s a very objective way to manage things, with the tracking of the points and all. It’s also spurred me to exercise more, because exercise earns you “activity points” which you can exchange for more food on the days you earn them. I like eating more food.

Miraculously, the combination of eating less and exercising more has contributed to excellent results so far. I’ve lost nearly 20 pounds in seven weeks, going from 210 to 190 pounds. I’d really like to get back into the 160s.

The greatest part of this system is that I almost never feel deprived. It’s amazing how much I’ve been able to eat. In the past when I tried to diet, I wouldn’t eat nearly enough and my body would rebel. “You think we’re going to live like this forever?! No way man. Get back to the cheeseburgers and fries right this instant!” So one surprising benefit of the plan is the way it lets me know when I can eat more.

Read the rest of this entry »

Some or many of you have probably heard about Randy’s Pauch’s “Last Lecture.” Randy is a professor of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University who was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer. He gave a stirring and inspirational talk on September 18, 2007, titled “Really Achieving Your Childhood Dreams.” I was emailed a link to a condensed version of this talk and I loved it, getting a bit choked up about somebody so enthusiastic and full of life and with a wife and young children, having to be “done too soon.”

However! Randy’s still hanging in there. He worked with Jeffrey Zaslow on a book version of the talk, which expands on the lecture. You can see the full talk for free on YouTube — I embedded it at the end of this post. Even so, I think it was well worth the $12 I paid at Amazon for the book. I’m enjoying the read, and I’ll enjoy having it on my bookshelf. It’s an attractive little hard cover book and I like the thought of my daughter someday picking it up and learning from it.

In one chapter, he talks about his family’s World Book encyclopedia set they had when he was growing up. (My family had one of these! What a fountain of knowledge in the days before the Web.)

I smiled at this left-handed endorsement of Wikipedia:

Given how I cherished the World Book, one of my childhood dreams was to be a contributor. But it’s not like you can call World Book headquarters in Chicago and suggest yourself. The World Book has to find you.

A few years ago, believe it or not, the call finally came.

It turned out that somehow, my career up to that time had turned me into exactly the sort of expert that World Book felt comfortable badgering. They didn’t think I was the most important virtual reality expert in the world. That person was too busy for them to approach. But me, I was in that midrange level–just respectable enough . . . but not so famous that I’d turn them down.

“Would you like to write our new entry on virtual reality?” they asked.

I couldn’t tell them that I’d been waiting all my life for this call. All I could say was, “Yes, of course!” I wrote the entry. And I included a photo of my student Caitlin Kelleher wearing a virtual reality headset.

No editor ever questioned what I wrote, but I assume that’s the World Book way. They pick an expert and trust that the expert won’t abuse the privilege.

I have not bought the latest set of World Books. In fact, having been selected to be an author in the World Book, I now believe that Wikipedia is a perfectly fine source for your information, because I know what the quality control is for real encyclopedias. But sometimes when I’m in the library with the kids, I still can’t resist looking under “V” (”Virtual Reality” by yours truly) and letting them have a look. Their dad made it.

– Randy Pausch, The Last Lecture, p41-42
  (with Jeffrey Zaslow)

Randy Pausch, The Last Lecture:
Really Achieving Your Childhood Dreams

It’s here! Big Buck Bunny is a free short movie created by the Peach open movie project. The animated movie is freely licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 license, which means, according to their “about” page: “you can freely reuse and distribute this content, also commercially, for as long you provide a proper attribution.”

Big Buck Bunny was made primarily with the awesome free Blender 3D graphics software. As far as I know, all the software used was free software, so you can download software and project files all for free and use them however you wish. That’s cool.

I wrote about the project last year: Peach! (Free Software, Free Movies). I’ve been following their blog with interest since learning about the project and investing in it by sending $40 to pre-order the DVD last September.

Still waiting for the DVD to arrive in Minnesota from Amsterdam, but I downloaded one of the Ogg Theora movie files from the site to do a vanity check on my name in the credits, a benefit of ordering before October. And I was crushed to see I wasn’t in the list. Hugely disappointed. Either I was overlooked, or I’m just a big liar and didn’t send in any money last September. But they did take my $40 and I do have an order number, so we’ll see if I get the DVD. Not all that big a deal, I suppose, but I was looking forward to that small token showing I supported the project at an early stage. I believe we can have good stuff in free culture and would have been proud to see my name in the credit roll. But again, it’s a minor thing.

Congratulations to the Peach project on successfully completing and releasing the movie, and keep up the good work. More free stuff, please! :-)

Update!

3 June 2008: Received the DVD yesterday although haven’t watched it yet. Also received an email from Anja at the Blender e-shop who tells me they had a small number of errors on the credits, including mine, and they’d like to offer me a BBB t-shirt as a gesture to compensate for the error. Well, that’s just super. T-shirts are always welcome. It was unnecessary towards keeping my good will, but much appreciated all the same. (Also mentioned was that they are planning improvements to the crediting process for next time.)

Now to go pop some popcorn and watch the movie…

Related

• Peach! (Free Software, Free Movies)
• Download Big Buck Bunny!

Much after the fact, here are a few notes about my trip to Boston last month for the Free Software Foundation’s 2008 annual associate member meeting. This is part one. Maybe I’ll get part two up before another 6 weeks go by.

I like to travel, but I guess mainly with my wife. I didn’t like leaving her and our little baby girl behind. So while the outbound trip was pleasantly uneventful and I made it there with plenty of time to see the city, I felt a bit lonely walking around Boston Friday afternoon. I took some pictures which I’ll be posting here in the days/weeks/months ahead.

Stopped in at the FSF offices at 51 Franklin Street. One of my ears was plugged from the flight, making me feel like a deep sea diver in one of those old metal helmets. It was hard to hear others or myself. I felt awkwardly conspicuous. More conspicuous than I already may have felt from just popping in on these people during their working day. I consider myself a sociable person, but often feel awkward in new situations, around new people. But Matt Lee was there and introduced me around so that I didn’t feel like a total heel.

I had exchanged some emails with Mako about getting together that evening. He was having a party at his place in Somerville, which is a few stops up the Red Line from my hotel. I debated internally whether or not to go. I’d had a long day of traveling and walking around. I wouldn’t know anyone at the party, including Mako. I wondered how safe the subway going there and back in the evening would be. But in the end, I decided I should be brave and go. I was there in Boston to meet free software people, and there would be free software people at the party.

So I went. I happened to meet up with Mako and a few others outside his place near Davis Square. They were just arriving, and he conscripted me in to going with Daf (sp?) to get some vegetables (for sushi!) and beer. Returning, I felt out of place, but not for long. People were quite friendly.

I met a couple of folks from Wikimedia, and was presented with my very own cast-iron star anchor. Kind of a physical barnstar. Thanks, Kat! (Amazingly, it went through security on the way home without question.) There were FSF people there, someone from the Software Freedom Law Center, and several others with whom I enjoyed talking about free software, free culture, and etcetera. I wasn’t the only one who knew virtually no one there; it was just a nice mix of interesting people. The sushi was delicious. Having been awake since very early to catch my flight, and in general being an early riser, I didn’t stay very long. Subway trip back to the hotel was completely mugging-free, so all in all it was a great evening.

Benjamin Mako Hill is a star in the free software and free culture sky. Check out his web page to read about some of his contributions. He is behind the awesome “Unhappy Birthday” web site, which:

…tries to educate the public and encourage folks to snitch on their friends for singing the (copyrighted!) Happy Birthday song in public places [and] is perhaps the most widely read thing I’ve ever written. It’s been seen by millions and I continue to get hate mail several times a week.

– copyrighteous

You can listen to a highly entertaining in-character interview with the nationally broadcast CBC radio show WireTap about unhappybirthday.com, on the unofficial WireTap podcast. (His bit starts 10 minutes in.)

And that was Friday, and that’s enough for this post.