Entries from June 2008 ↓

• At home depot buying some chicken wire to keep the varmits out of my tomaters. Yeah that’s right. #
• Oooo - honey mustard with actual honey in it! Wow! And without high fructose corn syrup. Quite the find. #
• @popejephei “What else can you do except becoming a triad?” truer words were never so eloquently mistranslated. #
• For raw entertainment, nothing beats boarding the metra at a different stop than usual. #
• Monday Morning Awesome: looking up to see someone wearing one of your customer’s logo applying some deoderant just before exiting the train. #

• Happenin’ Sat Night: Water, Euchre, LL Cool J on Pandora on my MacBook, bed … soon (aka 930). No, do not call this a comeback. #
• up with a little day-night confusion. no, not on my part. i know what i should be doing. it’s this mini human in training. #

Critter, originally uploaded by ReidCarlberg.

In a stroller, wearing a hat, and just barely awake.

Flower, originally uploaded by ReidCarlberg.

In our gangway with hosta in the background.

Weed, originally uploaded by ReidCarlberg.

In an empty lot on Nordica in Chicago. I’m standing slightly behind it. Note the purple flowers towering over me.

There’s a nice front page over at GeorgeCarlin.com about disposing of his final remains. It ends with this:

Very nice.

• OK the kid just went back to sleep. Coffee. #
• Too many agreements, too much fine print: http://tinyurl.com/5zhg4x #
• @popejephei LOL. If I’m pro anything, it’s histamines. #
• mmmm Diablo III smash/kill/maim/destroy a licious. #

When you get bored of my rambling skip to the end for a radical idea and some light TMI.

Lately, I’ve been troubled by the sheer quantity of End User License Agreements, Terms & Conditions statements and other contractual notices — contracts of adhesion — I must agree to prior to doing anything. If, for example, I want to order from Pizza Hut using a little AIR app they have, I have to agree to pages of terms and conditions

Really?  To order a pizza?

My concern is that reading each one of these items in any type of thorough way would take a significant amount of time.  So I don’t — I just click agree and move on with it.  And I’ll guarantee I’m not unique.  I don’t know a single person who reads all that stuff on items they download and try for everyday use.  In fact, I’ll bet companies like Pizza Hut don’t even think twice about putting it in because our standard behavior these days is to just agree.

But what are we agreeing to?  And how enforceable are they?  I don’t know.

Some WikiP articles are interesting here: Click Wrap (some of the case detail is interesting) and then there’s the section on EULA enforceability.

I’m generally supportive of copyrights and intellectual property, etc., but I think we need some reform around this issue.  For example, a standard agreement that says — here’s the agreement — something I could read once and then know that I’m comfortable with what it says and how it applies.  Like some of the open source licensing that’s out there.

The other idea I had was some sort of EULA Advisor website.  You cut and paste the contents into it and get a rating on whether or not it’s appropriate for you.  Hey look — EulaAdvisor.com is open.  Someone should go do this.  C’mon.  You know you want to.

The final idea I’d like to see someone run with is that the increasing complexity and quantity of these type of agreements them, as a whole, largely unenforceable and meaningless.  In other words, a forced simplification. Some requirement that the agreement’s complexity be proportional to the transaction.  A $9 pizza ordered via free software would allow something like 100 words.  $250k software used to run a $25m enterprise could have a few thousand words.

Maybe the formula is simple: a word per $1.  $99 iPod?  99 word agreement.  I like.

We need to do something.  It’s just too many agreements, too much fine print.

* Apparently you can order from Pizza Hut by text message as well.  Having delivered for them (I was young and poor) and eaten way too much of their pizza, I’m not interested, but it’s still a neat idea.  (Which was apparently covered earlier this year by everyone else but that’s another story.)

What was I doing when I was 15? I don’t remember. Eating fries. Moving to New York. I started dating someone. Oh and I had a tendency to watch the Thundercats.*

What was John Kennedy Toole doing? Writing Neon Bible. It’s a slice of life covering about a decade of a young man’s life in Mississippi ca. WWII. There’s some bigotry, domestic violence, town prudery and a revival preacher who seemed to have a talent for collecting the greenbacks.

Why does it make me hate 15 year olds? Because Neon Bible is pretty good. I liked the language and the plot (such as there is), and the ending was just excellent. Makes me want to know what happened to the main character, Dave, in later years.

And dag nabbit there’s already a movie based on it with Dennis Leary as the wayward father. From 1995. More than a decade ago. Seriously? What am I the last to hear about any of this stuff? I have to discover it at random while killing time in a Border’s in northern NJ?

Well if you’ve never heard of it (which is pretty unlikely, apparently) you might enjoy it.

* Having skimmed the article, I now know more about the Thundercats than I ever really wanted to. Certainly more than I picked up when I watched it more than a quarter century ago.

• Broadcasting live now! See me at http://tinyurl.com/56fnya #
• ok that feels better — a little exercise, a little NPR, a little disappointment in Obama’s move to the center. #
• Looks like we’re getting a couple of nice, big new trees at rutherford sayre park (chicago) prob to replace the wind damaged. Awesome! #
• Looks like lupe won the metra lotto. Yeah yeah yeah yeah. #