Oops

“I begin each painting as a series of mistakes.”

- Robert Motherwell

Yep, that's exactly how I begin a poem.

A New Poem

Metronome

 

If you think about going,
or even motion, the destination
and the journey slip away from you,
becoming all of your old life
lost and buried under pavement.
But do not be still.

If you stare at the stars
or the lamp on the bedroom
table, at the stern sun
or its light turned back
from the surface of the grass,
you will sit for an age in darkness.

If you ask the clock for answers,
it will say nothing about months
and years, only the long and short
divisions of a day. Life’s ceaseless
metronome can’t promise
you are going to live.

Be still then. Hear the untuned
cello of traffic through the glass,
the sigh of the faucet, the heartache
of dogs in the distance.
This music is always around us,
a flowing and gathering cry.

J. Kyle Kimberlin
January 30, 2012

This work is licensed under a
Creative Commons Attribution-
NonCommercial-NoDerivs 2.5 License.

Want the PDF? Here you are, free gratis.

Different Words

If I've shared this before, here it comes again. Things like this little video move and inspire me.

An Old Friend

My friend Joseph has posted a beautiful new poem. It's about so much, I won't even say how much. You have to read it for yourself. ~ : đ ґ ä ĉ ħ ę ή ŧ ħ ґ ä x : ~: That silent thing between us

A Bit of Politics

... if you can stand it.

Did you watch the presidential speech? I did. I started watching the enhanced web version on whitehouse.gov, which was good because of my PC monitor's better resolution and superior sound. But the stream would lock up sometimes, so I switched to TV.

I thought the speech was positive, assertive, hopeful. There was more truth in it than is usually found in a political speech. Of course, maybe we can (si se puede), but I'll believe it when I see it. This ain't my first visit to the rhetorical big top.

One thing always strikes me as funny about this event is the way the members of the opposing party choose to applaud at random, or not. There were some nice bipartisan ovations tonight. Very nice.

But I swear, if they thought it was going to cost them a dime of their lunch money, and Obama suggested it might be better if Americans don't suffer and die needlessly, those Republicans would just sit there like victims of spontaneous taxidermy.

Republicans seem to passive-aggressively hate US, while Democrats are just manifestly indifferent and morally inert. Caring is as caring does.

There's an app for that

The digital app is looking more like the inevitable future of publication. And I'm not sure I like it. It's exciting, but for me the job of writing has always been finding the right words and in the right order putting them.

Blowing Up the Book

A new crop of digital books comes loaded with videos, songs, animated shorts and pop-up graphics. Is this the future of publishing?

Against SOPA

At midnight, 1/18/2012, this site will go dark for 24 hours. Metaphor is a humble little blog, but it joins in solidarity of protest with countless web sites around the world, including Wikipedia and Google, against the SOPA act. This pending legislation is nothing less than an insidious and transparent attempt by the powers of corporate oligarchy to seize control of the Internet and censor freedom of expression.

The Internet must remain free and freely accessible. It belongs to the people of the world, not to corporations.

Resources

1. An email from The White House

The White House ✆ info@messages.whitehouse.gov via cox.net	Jan 14 (4 days ago)
to kimberlin

Combating Online Piracy while Protecting an Open and Innovative Internet    By Victoria Espinel, Aneesh Chopra, and Howard Schmidt Thanks for taking the time to sign this petition. Both your words and actions illustrate the importance of maintaining an open and democratic Internet. Right now, Congress is debating a few pieces of legislation concerning the very real issue of online piracy, including the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA), the Protect Intellectual Property Act (PIPA) and the Online Protection and Digital ENforcement Act (OPEN). We want to take this opportunity to tell you what the Administration will support—and what we will not support. Any effective legislation should reflect a wide range of stakeholders, including everyone from content creators to the engineers that build and maintain the infrastructure of the Internet. While we believe that online piracy by foreign websites is a serious problem that requires a serious legislative response, we will not support legislation that reduces freedom of expression, increases cybersecurity risk, or undermines the dynamic, innovative global Internet. Any effort to combat online piracy must guard against the risk of online censorship of lawful activity and must not inhibit innovation by our dynamic businesses large and small. Across the globe, the openness of the Internet is increasingly central to innovation in business, government, and society and it must be protected. To minimize this risk, new legislation must be narrowly targeted only at sites beyond the reach of current U.S. law, cover activity clearly prohibited under existing U.S. laws, and be effectively tailored, with strong due process and focused on criminal activity. Any provision covering Internet intermediaries such as online advertising networks, payment processors, or search engines must be transparent and designed to prevent overly broad private rights of action that could encourage unjustified litigation that could discourage startup businesses and innovative firms from growing. We must avoid creating new cybersecurity risks or disrupting the underlying architecture of the Internet. Proposed laws must not tamper with the technical architecture of the Internet through manipulation of the Domain Name System (DNS), a foundation of Internet security. Our analysis of the DNS filtering provisions in some proposed legislation suggests that they pose a real risk to cybersecurity and yet leave contraband goods and services accessible online. We must avoid legislation that drives users to dangerous, unreliable DNS servers and puts next-generation security policies, such as the deployment of DNSSEC, at risk. Let us be clear—online piracy is a real problem that harms the American economy, threatens jobs for significant numbers of middle class workers and hurts some of our nation's most creative and innovative companies and entrepreneurs. It harms everyone from struggling artists to production crews, and from startup social media companies to large movie studios. While we are strongly committed to the vigorous enforcement of intellectual property rights, existing tools are not strong enough to root out the worst online pirates beyond our borders. That is why the Administration calls on all sides to work together to pass sound legislation this year that provides prosecutors and rights holders new legal tools to combat online piracy originating beyond U.S. borders while staying true to the principles outlined above in this response. We should never let criminals hide behind a hollow embrace of legitimate American values. This is not just a matter for legislation. We expect and encourage all private parties, including both content creators and Internet platform providers working together, to adopt voluntary measures and best practices to reduce online piracy. So, rather than just look at how legislation can be stopped, ask yourself: Where do we go from here? Don’t limit your opinion to what’s the wrong thing to do, ask yourself what’s right. Already, many of members of Congress are asking for public input around the issue. We are paying close attention to those opportunities, as well as to public input to the Administration. The organizer of this petition and a random sample of the signers will be invited to a conference call to discuss this issue further with Administration officials and soon after that, we will host an online event to get more input and answer your questions. Details on that will follow in the coming days. Washington needs to hear your best ideas about how to clamp down on rogue websites and other criminals who make money off the creative efforts of American artists and rights holders. We should all be committed to working with all interested constituencies to develop new legal tools to protect global intellectual property rights without jeopardizing the openness of the Internet. Our hope is that you will bring enthusiasm and know-how to this important challenge. Moving forward, we will continue to work with Congress on a bipartisan basis on legislation that provides new tools needed in the global fight against piracy and counterfeiting, while vigorously defending an open Internet based on the values of free expression, privacy, security and innovation. Again, thank you for taking the time to participate in this important process. We hope you’ll continue to be part of it. Victoria Espinel is Intellectual Property Enforcement Coordinator at Office of Management and Budget Aneesh Chopra is the U.S. Chief Technology Officer and Assistant to the President and Associate Director for Technology at the Office of Science and Technology Policy Howard Schmidt is Special Assistant to the President and Cybersecurity Coordinator for National Security Staff

2. A Podcast/Interview:

 "Internet Censorship Affects Everybody": Rebecca MacKinnon on the Global Struggle for Online Freedom

 
3. An email from Michael Moore
STOP SOPA: Why MichaelMoore.com Will Be Blacked Out Wednesday, January 18th ...a note from Michael Moore
Tuesday, January 17th, 2012

Friends, 

My websites MichaelMoore.com and Mike's High School Newspaper will both be going dark for 24 hours starting at midnight tonight in protest of the Stop Online Piracy Act now before Congress. I'm proud to join with Wikipedia, Reddit, Boing Boing and thousands of websites in this action to raise awareness of this huge threat to an open internet. 

I think we all knew that the powers-that-be would eventually try to kill the world wide web as we've come to know and love it. I'm sure it's just an accident that these bills are being proposed after a year where uprisings around the world were literally started on the internet. This is a scary device to those in power and I'm sure they rue the day they allowed us to talk freely to each other. They weren't thinking about the revolution that would cause -- they just saw it as a way to sell more stuff. Oops. And now they want to rein it in. 

Please take the time to learn about SOPA (and its twin Senate bill, PIPA) and then call AND fax AND email your Representative and Senators tomorrow. Let's melt their phone lines and computers. We've got to use the internet while we still can to organize, fight back and stop this. 

The good news is the Obama administration says it doesn't support the bills in their current form (but he said that about the National Defense Authorization Act -- and then went ahead and signed it after changes that still left its most dangerous provisions intact). 

We can win this. But we've got to pour it on right now. I'll see you on the other side tomorrow night at midnight! 

Yours,
Michael Moore

My New Keyboard

Back in April 2010, I posted about the bad ergonomics of PC keyboards. I opined that they're bad because the number pad (10 key) on the right end of the keyboard forces the mouse to play way off to the side. This causes stress to my wrist, fatigue in my arm, and an occasional generally bad attitude. I threatened to obtain a smaller keyboard to solve this problem, and I finally did. It arrived on Friday.

Here’s a photo of my old keyboard, an HP which came with my computer. See how wide it is? Almost 18 inches. There are things I like about it, especially the double size Delete button and the speaker controls.

Here’s my new keyboard.

See how much smaller it is? 12.5 inches wide. It’s the same size as typing parts of a standard desktop keyboard, but everything is grouped the the same as the keyboard on a standard laptop. The mouse is closer to the keyboard, and the typing keys are more in line with the monitor.

I’ve had it for 2 days and I’m still getting used to it, but so far it’s pretty cool. It’s just the right size for typing, if that’s what you do. If you need to do accounting, or other significant work with numbers, it’s not for you. But it’s pretty fine for writing.

The SIIG JK-US0312-S1 USB Mini Multimedia Keyboard is sold by Amazon for about $20. The customer reviews are a little better than the A4 Tech KL-5 Mini Slim Compact Keyboard, which goes for about $16.

So if you find the number pad on the right side of your keyboard mostly useless and in your way, there you go.

Punt