Quick stuff

Unusually busy as of late. Won’t be posting much over the next few days.

William Patry on copyright, first sale and used book sales

A mother sues RIAA under RICO. You gotta read these charges…Wow!

Although Hurricane Rita really sucked for Houston (my company docked all of us 2 days vacation days as a result), we are getting a lot of New Orleans jazz talent. Here’s a Houston association to help New Orleans jazz musicians find gigs. Playing in my neighborhood: Dr. Michael White

Literary Saloon on the Aesthetics of Resistance by Peter Weiss. I’m in no hurry to read this book (I need to read Broch’s Death of Virgil before I tackle another German modernist masterpiece), but it’s nice to hear about a novel like this. The hard part is accepting the alienating aspects of modernism when reading. In this time, authors cannot afford to alienate readers with style.

I knew it would happen eventually. My bloglines rss list is just too long to be of practical use anymore. Just like bookmarks, it’s tempting to keep adding feeds willy-nilly until eventually you have 20 unread posts by Conversational Reading, and then you are afraid to click on it because unless you are willing to read all 20 posts in one sitting, it will be marked as Read. (Yes, I know there’s a way to “mark as new,” but that’s beside the point.

One customer service lunacy. I don’t complain about Dell a lot, but I bought a PDA last year with interest free financing for 1 year. I signed up for automatic draft withdrawal from my bank account until I realized that the minimum payment they were taking would not bring me to a zero balance at the end of the year. So I wanted to just pay the whole thing off.

To sign up for automatic draft withdrawal, I had to download a PDF and fax it to Dell. And to cancel, I had to do the same thing or else Dell would continue withdrawing $15 from my account even if I had already paid in full. So I called tech support to confirm this and to find out which form I needed to download. He couldn’t tell me. He couldn’t send me a link or a PDF attachment, and the PDF was in a nonobvious spot–

Uma of Indianwriting compares the American and Indian public school education systems

Great Indian Frontline profile of filmmaker Adoor Gopalakrishnan . He admits to starving his lead actor to prepare for the shooting of his film Elippathayam.

A revision of a blogging cartoon.

Proposal on a scrabble board. Not that I’m in danger of getting married anytime soon, but one thing I assure blog readers: I will not be mentioning the details via my blog! (Congrats, Cam, and cool idea!).


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