Author: Alderete

I Love College Basketball

This is the best time of year to be a sports fan — March Madness! And I am headed to Vegas for the tournament opening!

Every year since we’ve been together, Rochelle is baffled by my sudden disinterest in virtually everything except watching basketball on TV. She’s weaned me almost entirely off football, and just can’t figure out what it will take to do the same for college basketball.

There’s no cure for March Madness, baby!

In the run-up to Championship Week I’m watching games a couple days a week (including one during lunch this last week where I told my co-workers to leave without me, I’ll walk back when the game is over), and then during the actual conference tournaments I’m watching games just about every day.

But the capper is the actual NCAA tournament. Most years I take vacation days so I can watch the first two rounds of the tournament. I usually just watch at home, except when an important game (to my bracket) isn’t being aired on CBS, then I have to go to a sports bar to catch that one.

This year I’m headed to the ultimate sports bar — Las Vegas — to watch the first two rounds of the tournament. I’m meeting up with a bunch of folks from my last job. Should be a blast.

Oops, gotta run, the ACC Tournament Final game is about to start!

Saving the Mouse, or Corporate Welfare?

As the debate over copyright grows, it becomes increasingly clear that the recent copyright extension is nothing more than corporate welfare.

Most people are not paying much attention to copyright and intellectual property (IP) rights issues. This is demonstrably true because virtually all of the IP-related laws passed in the last decade, including most notably the DMCA and the Sonny Bono Copyright Extension Act, have greatly enlarged the rights of corporate IP holders at the expense of the freedoms of individuals. And very few people are complaining.

Let’s talk about copyrights. When the Framers wrote the Constitution, they provided that creators of ideas should have exclusive rights to those ideas for a limited time, to encourage the advancement of the sciences and “useful Arts.”

The key word here is “limited,” and the concept is that there is a balance between the value of the idea belonging to the public domain and the incentive to produce new works. If the limited period is too short, there’s no incentive to produce new works, but if the holder retains the rights too long, or for an unlimited time, the public is deprived of other advancements that would come if the idea belonged to all.

Which brings us to the Sonny Bono Copyright Extension Act, which extended for the eleventh time the duration of copyright for a particular work, by an additional 20 years.

The Act was funded by the entertainment industry, to the tune of more than $6 million in campaign contributions to Congress.

The problem with the Act is that it’s basically just a gift from Congress to Disney, in return for cold hard re-election cash. There is no public good that comes of it.

You can read a more eloquent and rigorous examination of the issue in The Mouse that Ate the Public Domain, an article that should have you writing your congressional representatives.

Except, well, most people don’t care, because they don’t see the harm. At some point, all the little things add up and we’ll realize what we’ve lost, and wonder, how did we let this happen?

Neuhaus Chocolates

We’ve tried a lot of others, and Neuhaus chocolates are the world’s best.

One of the great tragedies of my business trip to Europe was that I was in and out of Brussels so fast that I didn’t have time to buy chocolate. Rochelle and I have tried a lot of really good chocolates, and the best — by far — have been Neuhaus. Brought direct from Belgium.

Our tenant introduced us to them, when he brought them back from visiting his parents over Xmas one year. He picked us up a $5 box of chocolates in the airport as a gift. Sort of like Sees candy in SFO, except way, way better.

We tried buying some here in the US, but you can’t get the fresh cream chocolates that way, only if you buy them in Belgium. So we thought that I’d pick up about a dozen boxes while Euro-hopping, except I never got the chance.

Fortunately for me (Rochelle made me open my suitcases at the airport to see what I’d brought her, and decide whether I got a ride home or not), I managed to pick up a kilo of Neuhaus at Harrod’s in London, right before getting on the plane to come home. But they were 3 times as expensive there, so only one box for us, which is nearly exhausted now.

More Pig-Out Photos

We’ve put up a few more photos of food from our regular visits to fine dining establishments in San Francisco. This time, Gary Danko and breakfast at Bloo.

I’ve put up a few more photos of the food we’ve eaten in San Francisco. It was a long time ago that Rochelle and I ate at Gary Danko, so the descriptions are curt. But the photos should make it clear we were eating well while there.

And in our photos from dinner at Bloo we promised a return visit, for breakfast. Well, we’ve gone twice for breakfast, ordering the same things both times. It’s quite delicious, and there’s no waiting, unlike at the popular Kate’s Kitchen just down the block (which is not as good, IMHO).

KISS: Keep It Secret, Stupid

The Bush administration has made secrecy a routine practice — beginning well before the Sept. 11th attacks.

The Sunday Washington Post has an excellent article about how the Bush administration has made the practice of secrecy and non-disclosure a routine practice.

What’s more appalling is that this isn’t in response to September 11th, but in fact began well before the events on that day. And the practice is not just bugging the liberals, there are plenty of conservative public interest groups who are seriously concerned about the new philosophy, enough so to go to court.

Larry Klayman, the Executive Director of Judicial Watch, a conservative watchdog group, said the Bush administration’s attitude is one of “arrogance throughout — that the government is not to be questioned.”

Politicians need watchdogging, and the Bush administration needs it more than most. And they know it. Why else would they be keeping all those secrets?

Update: John Dean (remember him? White House counsel to Nixon?) wrote an op-ed piece on the problems with Bush’s attempts to keep the work of the president hidden behind executive orders and other tactics.

I wonder what he’s hiding.

The Last Be Press Release?

Hopefully this will not be the last Be press release. A victory press release in their lawsuit against Microsoft (followed immediately by a victory lap around the Valley) would be nice.

I was playing with the Google Toolbar earlier today, and discovered another weblog that was linking to mine.

Dan Sandler is another former Be employee, though he and I never met or worked at Be at the same time. He noted the passing of Be from a press release, and also wrote a nice essay about what it was like to work there, and then leave.

Hopefully the press release won’t be Be’s last. A victory over Microsoft in their lawsuit would almost certainly generate enough money to send out one last note to the world. We can all hope.

Writing for the Boss

Someday someone I work for will read this. Hopefully they’ll like it, because I’m not stopping.

More of my noodling around, I found a great weblog by a very honest man, who’s boss wanted him to stop writing his weblog.

He said no.

Since someday someone I work for will surely run across this weblog, hopefully they’ll like it, or if not maybe they’ll read Mark’s article, and not ask me to stop writing. This weblog isn’t as interesting, as honest as Mark’s, but I’m working on it. And plan to keep doing so.

Senator Lott in Favor of Vietnam War

Senator Lott seems to be in favor of any war, if the president is leading the charge.

Last week Senator Trent Lott sharply criticized Senator Tom Daschle for asking some uncomfortable questions and wanting answers about the so-called war on terrorism:

In his initial reaction Thursday to Daschle’s questioning of Bush’s strategy, Senate Minority Leader Trent Lott, R-Miss., had said, “How dare Senator Daschle criticize President Bush while we are fighting our war on terrorism, especially when we have troops in the field? He should not be trying to divide our country while we are united.”

I guess Senator Lott would have been blindly in favor of the Vietnam War, too, and assert that asking questions about it would have been un-American.

I disagree, strongly, with people who say we need to unite unquestioningly behind the current administration’s policies. There’s a lot to question, and a lot that’s being kept secret about the administration’s activities (and not just about the war).

It’s pretty clear our current president likes secrecy and doesn’t like to have to answer uncomfortable questions (probably because he has to think to do so, and he’s not working with a high-horsepower engine).

I think that’s un-American.

The Body Count Grows

Billie has the soul of a killer. Mouser that is. And proves it again while we’re in bed reading the Sunday paper.

Rochelle and I were enjoying a wonderful lazy Sunday when Billie made Rochelle scream. Rochelle was coming around the corner of the bed to pet Billie, who was innocently grooming herself.

Then Rochelle screamed and ran out of the room.

She scared the daylights out of me when she did it, since I was still in bed reading the paper. From how it happened, I knew something was on the floor, so I rolled over and looked.

Sure enough, Billie has racked up another kill. This time the mouse wasn’t quite dead, or as they say in The Princess Bride, mostly dead. But clearly on its way out, so we’ll give her the points.

Brand Name Recognition

Rochelle and I are starting to get famous, via our web site covering the food we eat, and obsessively document.

Rochelle and I like to go out to nice meals, take pictures of the food we eat, and then post them on our web site with commentary. We do it more to amuse our tiny minds than anything else, but apparently some people do visit the site and read our sort-of reviews.

At least that was the news we got from our server at Bloo this morning for brunch. He asked “Aren’t you the people with the web site?” When we admitted it he said that some customers had mentioned it recently when they came in for dinner: “Who are those people? Are they trying to sell me something?”

Even Proctor & Gamble and McDonalds had to start somewhere.

Jury Duty Over in 1.5 Hours

My jury “duty” lasted less than 2 hours, and was mostly sitting around in a room with other bored people.

On Wednesday afternoon at 1:30pm I had to report to San Francisco Superior Court to serve the terms of my jury summons. It turned out there was only one case which needed jurors, but they anticipated a difficult selection, and had requested a large pool of potential jurors.

There must have been 200 of us in the room when they started explaining how it would work. They were going to take a first “batch” and keep the rest on reserve, in case they ran through the first group without selecting enough people for the jury.

The first group was called out, my name not among them. At first I thought this was going to be horrible. At least the folks in the first group would have something entertaining to do, i.e., watch the jury selection process. And if you were in the first pool there was the potential to be rejected, and sent home quickly.

The rest of us would have to wait until the first batch was all gone, or the full jury selected, before we could be dismissed. Or so I speculated to Rochelle on my mobile phone around 2:45pm, as we made plans to give the hamburger at Hotel Utah a try for dinner.

Then, not 10 minutes later, another person came over the loudspeaker and explained that the court had notified them that the first batch would be more than enough to keep them occupied for the rest of the day. Since SF has a “one day, one trial” policy for service, we were dismissed, and had fulfilled our duty.

The part I loved was how he put it: “We’re going to have to let you go.” I genuinely got the impression he would much rather have had us sitting around doing nothing all afternoon!