Ryan's Journal

I've been enjoying Longform's compilation of essays for the past few months, a medium with more research and style than most of what's on the web while requiring less investment than a major literary work. I look forward to their continued curation.

One of their top twenty selections for this year is the three-part New York Times' piece on Derek Boogaard, a professional hockey player who died recently after several seasons of being an enforcer - the de facto fight guy on the team, the one who goes to the mattresses to help clear bad blood, one on one with the other team's enforcer. I was under the impression fights in hockey were all random flare ups as opposed to a ritual gentleman's agreement. Apparently not; they also have designated hitters in hockey.

Derek died at the age of 28 from a bad mix of pharmaceuticals and alcohol, dependencies on which are, amongst other disturbing signs, symptoms of what is effectively brain cell loss due to repeated blows to the head leading to repeated concussions. Anybody with one concussion should back off whatever they were doing for several weeks, if not longer; Derek laughingly claimed later to have had over a hundred concussions across his career. This shouldn't be a surprise. Making a living trading bare knuckle punches to the face with other large men can't be good for you.

Reading Derek's story was transformative. So while they never got much in the way of money from me before anyways, I'm going to avoid supporting hockey and American football* from now on, despite having an appreciation and enjoyment of both. There's no denying the level of athleticism or social entertainment they provide, but until and unless someone can scientifically prove this isn't slow murder, I'm out. Entertainment forms that require brain damage from entertainers need to evolve. What we call a major sport adopted by entire municipalities, states, large corporations, and emulated in schools everywhere should not leave players empty husks at the end of their careers.

We stopped demanding the sacrifice of life for the entertainment of the masses centuries ago. Now that we're pretty clear that's what's going on, let's figure out how to keep it a thing of the past.

* I'm not sure the same applies to commercial fighting. The choice is at least obvious to participants: fights are meant to cause injury past your threshold to take any more. It would be nice if there weren't a demand for it, but that doesn't seem to have ever been the case.

Short version: write Representative Karen Bass if you live near me expressing your hope that she stops co-sponsoring this censorship bill and votes against it if it reaches the floor.

Every couple of years, content industries - music, movies - attempt to lobby their peculiar view of the world into law by introducing bills that would trade the freedoms of the Internet for their exclusive right to declare who is undercutting their bottom line, using the full backing of the US government to prop up their failing business models by criminalizing wide swaths of generally moral behavior.

This time, it's the Stop Online Piracy Act. Supposedly this bill is concerned with preventing sites operated outside of the US and directed at US customers from deriving any profit from their illegal distribution of copyrighted material. However, the powers it would grant the government are not in proportion to said nominal goal. Any site - any site, not just "foreign" ones - could have all of its payment processing cut off, all of its ad revenue shut down, be wholly removed from all search indices, and blocked at the domain name level by all service providers on the mere accusation of copyright infringement by a supposedly concerned party.

In other words, heavy-handed enforcement without any due process would become standard operating procedure by passage of this bill into law. This would clearly stifle all manner of social engagement and innovation through intimidation.

If you're not a legislative nerd, then just note that the bill is currently in a committee, not yet up for a vote. So if you care to, you still have an opportunity to weigh in with your representative. And if you live by me, you have some extra say in the matter: Democratic Representative Karen Bass is one of the co-sponsors of this bill. This means she is essentially signing on to vote in favor of it. That isn't really surprising; we live in the heart of the movie industry. But she should know that her job comes from the collective decision of her constituency, not the industry corporations that are lobbying for SOPA's passage. Please write to her and let her know she should withdraw her co-sponsorship and vote against this atrocious bill should it somehow come to the floor.

By the way, the Senate versions of this bill, the Protect-IP Act, is currently stopped thanks to a hold placed by Senator Ron Wyden of Oregon, the congressmen who most consistently and capably demonstrates how well he understands a topic as complex as the intersection of law and the Internet. His decisions are consistent with preserving the net's fundamental philosophies so that it can keep operating for everybody's benefit. Nice job, Senator. Rep. Bass, I hope you're paying attention.

After several years of dealing with trying to make approximately DVD-sized libraries out of iPhoto by hand for backup purposes, I finally got around to writing an AppleScript that takes in one library and spits out as many less-than-4.7GB libraries as needed to cover the photos, non-destructively retaining any album and metadata information associated with those photos, by successive copying and removing of excess.

It's entertaining to watch your memories wiped out live. Grab it from GitHub. Caveat, you need twice as much disk space on the same volume as your original library, and it's going to take a lot of time, around N2/5+N minutes, where N is the size of your original library in GB (so it took my ~100GB library about a day and a half to finish).

"Finally," because iPhoto is a terrible piece of software for real photography, and the need to flee hit the tipping point. What kind of software needs the user to write in horrible AppleScript to make it do something elementary? Goodbye iPhoto, hello Lightroom.

Backcountry. Half Dome. Yes. Back soon.