Category: Life

Since my last post on the matter (link), I have actually purchased an eBook reader. It’s a Sony thing, which works quite well. That said, I still insist that I’ll never buy an eBook – at least one that’s DRMed. This reader is for work PDF documents, books in the public domain, and other items I can obtain legally.

A story just came out (link) that reminds me why I have no appetite for paid-for DRMed eBook: Amazon just decided to take down a portion of it’s erotica books from it’s site. Not only is it doing that, however, but it’s also going to remove those books off of the personal libraries of the customers that bought the titles. You read that right: they’re going to delete books from the customers that purchased them.

The erotica books in question deal with incest. Alright, so incest is not my thing. But these books deal with adults, and as far as I’m concerned, you should be able to read whatever floats your boat. We’re talking about words and language here.

If Amazon wants to take the books off of their site, that’s fine. They’re allowed to choose what they want to sell or not. What crosses the line is when they go into their customer’s private space, into their digital library, and delete the content they don’t want their customers to have. This is why I maintain that when you buy something that’s DRMed, you don’t own it. You think you’re purchasing it, but in fact, these companies are “renting” whatever you bought – at full price.

Another DRM frustration: I bought a good game the other day called Wings of Prey (link). It’s a good game, but the DRM they put on it limits me the amount of times I can install it to 3 times. Keep in mind, games I love, like Battlefield 2, have been easily installed a dozen times over the last five years. My computers change, the hard drives die, shit happens. So now if I install Wings of Prey twice more, I’ll be forbidden from using the product I legally purchased.

The most annoying bit is that this is all in the name of stopping piracy, and yet, it doesn’t. The pirates still get to play the game, and they don’t even get their books deleted off of their eReaders, or have limits on how many times they can enjoy the game that you or I purchased at full price.

Piracy is supposed to entice people because it’s free, not because it’s better.

Aunt Caylin isn’t real. It’s just a name I picked to protect her anonymity.

Aunt Caylin is a wonderful person. She’s always been there for me. When I was down, she was always there to stand up for me, or to console me in her way, or whatever was appropriate. If I needed a hand, she was there in a pinch – even when it meant scratching her own schedule. I’ve looked up to her my whole life.

The other day, aunt Caylin and I went out for some tea. I don’t know how it started, and I’m pretty sure I wasn’t the one to bring it up, but we ended up discussing same-sex marriage. Aunt Caylin knows about me and Jay, and she’s just fine with that. But she let me know that me marrying Jay would defile the sanctity of marriage. Make marriage as a whole worth something less.

This hurt me. I asked her did me being in a happy marriage with the person I love somehow make a stranger’s commitment to their partner in the Yukon something less? My sister’s commitment to her husband? It may just, she said. This hurt me more.

We agreed that a bad marriage was one where the love had vanished, if it was there ever at all. A good marriage, I argued, was one where the love remained. So how could two people, who love each other, defile the essence of marriage? No – marriage was always a man and a woman. What about a black man and white woman? Not too long ago, that too wasn’t permissible. But I made no headway.

Now the conversation wasn’t as polite as above. I used arguments that shot below the belt, and Aunt Caylin might have used a cuss word or two. I know we love each other very much. Nevertheless, when someone tells me that my dedication of love somehow lessens the worth of someone else’s relationship, that hurts.

It hurts because this person who means so much to me doesn’t believe I’m worth affording the opportunity to express a life of love with my partner, no matter how strong the love, the bond, no matter how great of a person, or a father, my partner might be. It hurts because my Aunt Caylin won’t ever be able to recognize this and change her mind, because in her view, it isn’t about that. It’s about the sanctity of marriage.

And there’s no going against that is there.

Imagine you’re flying to Cuba for a vacation. You come up to the airport in Canada, and you put your ticket in. You’re told you can’t board the plane: the Americans have barred you from the flight. But you aren’t going to the States. You’re going to Cuba.

According to new legislation (link) being pushed by the Conservative government, situations like this could soon be a reality. Any Canadian that flies over US airspace, even if they don’t land in that country, would be subject to checks against American no-fly lists.

This means that all Canadians travelling to South America and the Caribbean would be affected. As would some Canadian travelers to Asia, Australia, and New Zealand. And those lists the Americans use? They’re so faulty that among the alleged terrorists are newborns (link) and US Senators (link).

The conservative government should take a stance against this American idiocy. We have our own security and intelligence. We have our own airport security. The Americans should have no right to interfere with a Canadian passenger on a Canadian plane leaving from a Canadian airport traveling to a destination that isn’t the US.

I mean, imagine if another country was doing this. You need to fly over Sudanese airspace to get to South Africa. Should Sudan be able to dictate who goes on the flight based on faulty lists that are ridiculed the world around? There would be outrage. But because it’s the Americans doing this, we remain silent.

Befuddler is the name of my latest creation. It’s an application that’s used to modify the signature of a file, as well as its file extension, to prevent paranoid corporate/government e-mail filters from dropping your attachments (such as ZIP files.) Just pass your file through this before you send it. The recipient on the other side will also have to do the same to reverse the changes.

The program does not change the size of the file, nor does it modify the whole thing – just the first few bytes – so it runs very fast on even the largest of files. You can download a copy below. It was tested on Windows XP and Windows 7.

Download Befuddler:
Executable: Here [2MB]
Source Code: Here [22 KB]