Changing up the blogs

I've decided to change the organization of my blogs. I added two additional blogs, and instead of just randomly posting subjects to Light Fare, I am going to focus on two subjects I enjoy: photography and cooking. Photography related items (tips, how-to's, behind the scenes, links) will be on the blog associated with my photography business: blog.vividelegance.com. (Shameless plug: Delaware Valley residents looking for portraits, contact me at bill [at] vividelegance [dot] com). Light Fare will become what I originally intended and will feature posts on what I cook: recipes, instructions, and tips. Finally, bilhelm96.blogspot.com will be what Light Fare turned into: an extension of twitter. Expect random thoughts I can't squeeze into 140 characters.

Why I love my Blackberry

It helps me find food and beer.  Not in that particular order.

I spent the early part of the week on travel to Alameda, California.  On Tues, after a 14 hour workday, a few of us headed out for dinner together.  Being the only person with my keys on me, I drew the short straw and drove.  Seeing as it was Cinqo de Mayo we decided to get some Mexican and decided to go t a smaller, family run restaurant which one the other two guys had been to before, but wasn’t sure the name of.  Following his directions we drove around Alameda for about ten minutes or so, with seemingly no hope of finding the place.  Eventually, he remembered the place was named Acapulco and did a quick Google search on his Verizon Blackberry 8830, and put the address in Google Maps to see our location relative to the restaurant.  Unfortunately Verizon disables the GPS on the 8830 and cell triangulation had us right next to the restaurant, which we weren’t.  The third member of our party had an AT&T Curve 8310, but for some silly reason didn’t have Google Maps installed (for shame).  I pulled over (safety first) and got out my AT&T 8820, loaded up GMaps got a GPS fix, put in the location and found not only were we nowhere near the restaurant on a small island, but were heading the wrong way!   A couple course corrections and a few minutes later, I had a huuuuge burrito and a cerveca in front of me and all was right in the world.

This is how it should be

Anyone who knows me, knows I am a Philly sports fan. I put the games on my calendar so I know who we play each day, and what time and channel the game is on. I have been using Calendar Updates to download the schedule and manually import it to Outlook, which sync'ed to my Blackberry (or Palm or iPaq in past device times). Ever since Google Sync came out I signed up for gCal and have been syncing calendars wirelessly with my home computer and my BB (wonderful). There are a lot of public calendars on Google so I searched for the 2009 Phightin' Phils sked and found one; nice. I decided to check the Phillies website as well and saw they offered a calendar as well (complete with gCal instructions), so I went with the Phillies version and added it to gCal and set it to sync with my Blackberry. I moved from Google sync for Outlook to SyncMyCal since Google Sync only sync's your primary calendar. Here's the best part: AT THE END OF EACH GAME, THE SCORE IS PUT IN AND IT GETS SENT TO MY CALENDAR. That's right, if I am in meetings and miss a day game, I can just look at my calendar and see who won. If the game time changes, my calendar changes. Awesome! That's how it should be, and I hope the Eagles and Flyers add updating schedule calendars next season.

Copyright and Twitter

Alex Hillman, founder of (among other things) ChoiceTweets, spent some time on Twitter yesterday lamenting some copyright arguments he had throughout the day and summarized them here. I love the gray area that is copyright in the digital age and as a photographer, I am acutely aware of how easy it is to violate a copyright and how many people do so everyday. [Aside: my wife had to persuade me not to call my cousin and her sister to ask them to remove photos which I took and they posted to Facebook]. I re-looked at Twitter's terms and found them to be very favorable to the author. Alex's comment about CNN using tweets and Facebook statuses in their broadcast set off a lightbulb in my head. I say CNN, Skittles and others, are infringing (a re-tweet is also an infringement), but that's not the issue. The issue is, do updates on Twitter really warrant full copyright protection. Most posts on Twitter are either inane personal updates or links to another website which has the material that really warrants copyright protection. I think there is/was a guy who was tweeting a book 140 characters at a time, so I could see him wanting protection, but 99+% of twitter users probably don't need it. The true power of the copyright comes through when we protect the right things.

I also find it interesting that Twitter's terms of service are inspired by Flickr's. Flickr provides an option for images to be given varying level of copyright by the poster. Full rights, any Creative Commons license, and public domain are available with a license of the user's choice set by default. I wouldn't be difficult for Twitter to implement something similar. My idea would be to append the license at the end of each tweet: (c), cc-by, cc-by-nc-nd, pd, etc. The longest license is 11 characters. Why not raise the character limit to 151 and reserve the last 11 for the copyright, which could be set by a drop down on the website, or software. SMS updates would just get the default.

Until something like that happens, I've registered my tweets with TweetCC under a Creative Commons Attribution license. If I have something to say and I want more protection, I'll post it here and link to it.