Dump the remote
I read a great blog entry over at savingadvice.com, titled “How Dumping TV Allowed Me to Quit My Job, Create an Online Business and Fund My Retirement Account.” The author states that the best decision he made was to make a conscious decision to stop watching so much television and to devote that time towards productive work. He also has a number of suggestions for people trying to break the addiction to the television.
I had a similar revelation about five or so years ago. I lived alone in a tiny studio apartment in Lawrence, KS. I was two years into my first career job as a programmer for the state. My job wasn’t very challenging, and often during the day I’d think about all of the projects I wanted to do and programs I wanted to code if I could just find the time. Of course, I had the time, but I used it for writing and surfing the internet, watching television, and the other basic things that most guys in their early 20’s do. Weekend after weekend would end with me laying in bed on Sunday night thinking to myself, “Ok, why didn’t I do any of the things that I said I would?” I promised myself that I’d do something productive next week, and the cycle would continue.
Until one day when I finally broke myself out of the cycle. I didn’t break out by making another promise to instantly change all of the things that were wrong in my life. I just made one step forward. I unplugged my cable box, drove to the cable company, and told them shut off my television immediately.
Once the television was gone, it was easy for me to make something out of myself. I used my newly-found free time to teach myself how to code dynamic, database-driven websites from scratch. My mother was starting a newspaper of her own at the time, so I volunteered to design and write her website. I took the money that I had been spending on cable and purchased a laptop, which I used to code programs outside of the tiny apartment in which I spent way too much time. After six months of real, solid work I had finished my first homemade project, the “Website Newscaster,” which made building and maintaining an online newspaper easy. And some months after that, I used my newly-earned web programming skills to get a great job building professional websites.
The positives didn’t stop there. While I was using my time on my new project, I decided to start working on another problem: my health. I first made the decision that I would stop eating fast-food garbage, and I started to lose weight. I then tried jogging, and even more weight came off. By the time I had started my new job, I was 45 pounds lighter than I was sitting in my dungy Lawrence apartment. Which, by the way, I had replaced with a great downtown KC loft, then later a townhome with my fiancee, and in a few weeks from now a house with my wife. And all of these changes boosted my self-confidence, my temperament, my pride, and made looking at myself in the mirror a lot easier.
All of these improvements in my life were the result of a lot of good decisions and a lot of hard work, not just my decision to turn off the television. Returning my cable box was just the starting point. It was the point where I made the determination that I was going to make my life better and when I was ready to take real action towards that goal. There are many other first-steps people can take to make their lives better, but if the statictics in the article are correct television is probably the best place for most people to start.
Tags: [television]Bernstein on Peter Mac Show
Andrew Bernstein was interviewed on the Peter Mac show. He went on the show to discuss Atlas Shrugged, but he also talked about socialized health care and politics. It’s a pretty long, good interview. Check it out here.
Tags: [andrew bernstein, atlas shrugged, peter mac]Chavez cartoon
Cox & Forkum just posted a great cartoon about Hugo Chavez’s recent announcement that he will not allow foreigners to criticize him in Venezuela.
If you don’t have Cox & Forkum on your daily reading feed, you should add them!
Tags: [cox and forkum, hugo chavez, venezuela]Chavez and criticism
Hugo Chavez has announced that he will expel any foreigner who criticizes him or the Venezuelan government while in Venezuela. According to this article, he stated:
How long are we going to allow a person - from any country in the world - to come to our own house to say there’s a dictatorship here, that the president is a tyrant, and nobody does anything about it?
So, his response to people who say he is a dictator and a tyrant is to kick them out of the country? Is it even necessary to point out that kicking people out of a country for criticizing the government is what tyrants and dictators do?
And is it necessary to point out that a few months ago, Chavez was here in the US criticizing our country and cracking jokes about Bush’s smell in front of the entire U.N.?
Getting Things Done
This weekend I started searching for software that will help me manage my growing list of things I have to do. My life used to be simple enough that I could manage it in my head, but after going through the wedding process, picking up some new projects at work, and now I’m buying a house and moving, some things were starting to fall through. And after talking to a house inspector who gave me a list of regular maintenance and checks that I’m going to have to make with my new house, I realized that I had to do something now. During my searches for a solution, I came across a concept called “Getting Things Done,” (GTD) a life-organization philosophy created by David Allen.
I don’t know much about the philosophy itself, except that it seems like it is built on dumping all of the things you have to do from your head into a set of organized list. Once you have a system of managing those actions that you can rely on, you can take all of the energy you’d spend managing your to-do list and focus on clearing out one thing at a time. There is more to it, but the basics seem to fall in line with the “crow epistemology” concept in Objectivism. You can only hold so many units in your head at one time, and using a system that manages your to-do list in a way that keeps things you don’t need to think out-of-sight and gives you a simple list of tasks that you can tackle one-at-a-time.
But the philosophy doesn’t matter to me as much as the software it generated does. I looked around for software built on the GTD ideas. I started with php-gtd software, thinking I could host it myself, but after deleting one project half of the screens were broken. I took a look at the code, and I decided that the software just wasn’t ready for real use yet. I moved next to Remember the Milk and thought it looked promising, but it seemed to be missing some features that I could find in my eventual favorite: Vitalist. Vitalist not only lets you manage your to-do lists, but it also offers RSS and iCal feeds. Now my to-do list is integrated with my Google Calendar, and it’s great. I’ve only been using it for a couple days now so I may grow to hate it, but so far it looks like Vitalist is really going to make my life easier.
Tags: [gtd]Checkers Is Beaten
I just read an article about a computer science professor who built a program, Chinook, that plays perfect checkers. How can they make this claim? They used the brute force method to compute every possible position and the possible resulting moves. Their program, with this enormous move database behind it, can only be drawn, not beaten.
I don’t play checkers very often, but I still think it’s interesting how they approached this problem. I can’t imagine the damage their results are going to do to the online checkers world, though. It’s probably hard enough to play against someone online who doesn’t have a computer checkers program assisting them. Now, they can use the Chinook proof and know for sure what the next best move is. Oh well. Maybe all those players can move up to chess now.
Tags: [checkers, chinook]Same old thing…
I’m starting to get my free time back, and I had some time the last couple nights to use my computer for fun. But what did I do? I debated the internet radio royalty rate issue over at talkobjectivism.com. I’m getting to the point where I can write a long statement on this subject in very little time. Since this conversation constitutes what little I’ve written this week and since my first comment is a basic overview of the reasons I don’t agree with the SaveNetRadio’ers, I’m going to repost it here.
The rest of the conversation can be read here.
Hi Mosley. I’m also a big supporter of the fair market, but in this debate I fall on the other side. I’m probably the only person outside of SoundExchange that you’ll find that agrees with the CRB ruling. I know this isn’t a fun issue for most to discuss, but if it’s ok I’d like to explain why I believe the royalty rates should be raised.
First, I believe that music artists should have full ownership and control of everything they create. Like all intellectual property, this means that anybody who wants to take or use the music the artist created should have to obtain permission from the artist. Most artists will offer you that permission in a number of ways. If you want a recording of their music, you can usually buy a cd they made. If you want to listen to their music, you can go to one of their concerts. If you want to play their music for other people to hear, like on a online radio station, you can negotiate a rate with the artist. (Who knows, the artist might pay you to play their music on your station.) An artist might even make their music available for no cost by everyone. Basically, it is up to the artist to determine who or what is done with his own music.
Second, the proper function of the government is to protect individual rights, including the right to own property. In this case, the government should protect the music artist’s right to control who can use his property. If someone takes or uses that artist’s property without permission, the owner’s rights have been violated and the government should step in.
Unfortunately, the government is not doing its job for music artists. Rather than protect a music artists right to control his intellectual property, the government created a “Copyright Royalty Board” that allows webcasters to broadcast music without obtaining permission from the music artist. If a webcaster can’t or doesn’t want to go through the trouble of negotiating with music artists, he can just use the government license and play anything he wants. And if a music artist wants to charge more than the government royalty rate for his music, he’s out of luck.
It’s important to note here that webcasters are the beneficiaries of the CRB, not the victims. Most people that protest the CRB’s decision to increase their royalty rates do not have a problem with the government’s violation of the rights of music artists. Their complaint is that thegovernment’s individual-rights-busting license will cost too much. Currently, the rates established by the government are cheap enough to allow practically anybody to broadcast other people’s music, and that’s one of the reasons we’ve seen online radio flourish. The CRB’s rate increase will make it much harder for people to use the government’s license, but I believe that they never should have had that license in the first place.
The ultimate solution to this government intrusion is to abolish the CRB and get the government out of the royalty-rate-setting business, but that’s not an option today. The debate is whether the government rates should be very high or very low. I think the rate should be very high to make the government’s license as unappealing andinaccessible as possible, because nobody has the right to use that license anyway. If the government’s rates are out of reach of webcasters, their remaining option is the only option they should have had in the first place: To negotiate with the people who own the music they want to play.
Will enforcement of the CRB’s ruling cause some online radio stations to stop? Probably. I still think that’s a better option than allowing webcasters to use the government to step on the rights of the music artists. I really believe that internet radio is going to be fine, though. I believe that if there is a demand for something, like streaming radio, the market will try to fill that need. Webcasters are always quick to tell you all of the benefits music artists receive when they play their music. If a music artist wants to receive those benefits, it would make sense for him or her to give the webcaster permission to play his music. Music artists still have the ability to establish their own royalty rates, independent of the government’s rate, so they can still get their music played on online radio stations if they wish.
Tags: [internet radio]Still alive…
I’ve worked many, many hours over the past few couple weeks, but everything is in good shape and I’m hoping to have this coming weekend to myself. I even had a computer-free night, except for the time to write this and to check some RSS feeds.
I have other big news. My wife and I are buying a house. In about a month from now, we’ll be moving into our first home. We started the process just two weeks ago, and I’m surprised at how easy it has been. It’s almost been too good to be true. We’ve had great people helping us at every step.
I’ll be resuming my regular schedule later this week. There is a lot I want to talk about but haven’t had time to.
Tags: [No Tags]MIA
I wish I could say that I wasn’t writing because I at OCON, but I’ve been working many extra hours this week to meet a couple deadlines at work. When things slow down I’ll write again.
Tags: [No Tags]Increased royalty rates for whom?
July 15th, the day that the new royalty rates will hit the internet radio, is coming this weekend. I’ve already talked a lot about this issue, but with the upcoming “deadline” (the Internet Radio Equity Act can still be passed after then) I’m going to get the rest of my thoughts out.
The save-net-radio crowd has had no trouble getting their arguments out, and after reading most news stories you’d think that the situation was dire. They refer to July 15th as “the day the music dies.” They want you to believe that all webcasters are going to go offline in a week, but there is a small fact that seems to get dropped from the discussion. A few months after announcing the increased SoundExchange announced the increased radio rates, SoundExchange made a concession that you might not have heard about.
That concession is: Small webcasters do not have to pay the increased royalty rates.
SoundExchange made an offer in May to allow small webcasters (those with below $1.2 million in revenues, if I remember correctly) to continue to pay the lower royalty rates they have been paying through 2010. This means that small webcasters can still play music just as they have been for years. This ruling is affect businesses who use this government license to play music without having to be bothered to ask copyright owners for permission.
Most importantly to me, this concession also means that small webcasters won’t be hit with a huge retroactive bill that will put them into personal bankruptcy. While I don’t believe that webcasters should be able to play people’s music without explicit permission, people who run small internet radio stations as a hobby should not have their personal and financial lives ruined by this government ruling. Whether or not the webcasters knew that they were playing music for rates that wouldn’t be decided for months, the government shouldn’t hang them out to dry.
What was the response from the save-net-radio advocates? Not good enough!
I don’t think this concession changes the fundamental issue in this debate, which is the role government should play in the music business. Still, I think this concession is important . If anyone wants to suggest that the music industry has been so damaged by government interference so badly that further government regulation is a necessary step to keep everything from collapsing, then we should discuss just how bad the situation is. Is music really going to die in less than a week? Is internet radio even going to die next week? Is your favorite webcaster even going to go off the air next week?
I don’t think the rhetoric matches the facts. More tomorrow…
Tags: [internet radio, royalty rates]