The great thing about being involved in lawsuits is asking your lawyer what you can say. "Hey, can I post about the deposition?" "Sure." "Hey, can I discuss the <redacted>?" "Not yet." (This posting has been approved by counsel.)
So, I can't tell you about that. Or the other thing. I can maybe say that someone who has an 'a' in his name somewhere probably hates my guts, and I can say it's his own damn fault.
But I can tell you a bit about the deposition. This is in "Seebach v. CaDan". CaDan is a small-time fax spammer. Small-time meaning I have 78 faxes from them, that we know of.
So, anyway, they decided to depose me, to see if they could find anything really great. It was a lot of fun. Basically, I got to sit around for two hours while a fairly friendly-seeming lawyer grilled me. His goals may be opposed to mine, but he was polite enough.
It was, however, a very, very, funny experience. They presented a number of things as exhibits, such as bad copies of various faxes I'd gotten from them. One of the copies had the date cut off by the copier. I was asked if it would surprise me to learn that all of the faxes were sent after 6 PM on Friday, or Saturday, or Sunday. Given that the faxes in front of me had been sent at wildly different times, yes, it would have surprised me, because it ain't true.
I was confronted with a copy of my resume. Unfortunately, they weren't paying very close attention; rather than picking one of my real ones, they picked the padded one. So, under oath, I had to testify to the best of my ability the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth - which was that this resume was a joke. A parody. This is the one where I list "sorted recycling" as a job duty I had working for Saint Paul Waste Management. Which is to say, I listed something everyone in Saint Paul is required by law to do as if it were a "job". It was a joke, and they didn't get it.
They presented a Google search, allegedly on the fax number in question - but in fact, they typed in the wrong number, making the results purely irrelevant. And funny.
There's a few other things, but those give you the feel. The deposition was a desperate scramble to find anything at all which could be used to support the laughable claim that we have an existing business relationship. It failed, and it failed in funny ways.
But wait 'til you hear the stuff I can't tell you about yet. This is WAY too much fun.
Well, it actually happened. metanoia survived through the first page update. That's something. A lot of online comics don't make it that far. :)
Now we just need to see if we can do this every week. Maybe we can. I sure hope so; I'm really looking forward to reading some of these stories.
Today, in court, we reached a settlement in my case against Mobile Cellular Unlimited, who sent me 7 unsolicited faxes in 2002. So far as I'm concerned, we won. They have agreed to a court order prohibiting them from sending illegal unsolicited faxes; if the laws ever change, they can fax again, but right now, they can't. They are paying me some money. The amount of money is confidential, so I can't discuss it.
So far as I'm concerned, that's a win. It's an agreed settlement, not a judgment, but it ends up working out the same way from a legal standpoint; the agreement not to send any more illegal unsolicited faxes is legally binding, and if they backslide, they will be in for a world of legal pain.
As a result of the settlement, the court really didn't have to rule on the issues of fact or law. That's no big deal; there's plenty of case law about junk faxes, and the courts have spoken pretty much unanimously on the issue. The important point is that there will be a nice piece of paper stating, unambiguously, that Mobile Cellular Unlimited is forever enjoined from sending, or causing to be sent, illegal unsolicited faxes.
That's a win. For all of us.
The only loser in today's case was my attorney, whose box of wintergreen Altoids ended up in my pocket, rather than his, when we left the courthouse. I cannot disclose whether or not his share of the settlement will cover this expense, or for that matter whether or not it will buy him a new car.
(previous article about junk fax suits)
Well, it's taken a while, but metanoia is officially live. There's one small discontinuity; you can already get the cover for Issue #1, even though the Prologue isn't all up yet.
But you can see the first five pages, anyway.
The process by which the comic gets updated and uploaded is still a little cumbersome, but it is expected to improve over time as we get experience, and figure out which parts we can better automate. Pages are expected to come up roughly weekly, although the exact schedule may occasionally vary by a day or two. Still, it's a comic, and it has a plot, and it's really cool.
My wife's comic, Metanoia, is getting closer to being done. She designed a web page for it, which had the text "Here Peter does a cool scripty thing" on it. The idea is that I'm supposed to create the index pages the comic will use. So, I created a couple of scripts, and now, if her laptop hasn't fallen asleep, I can read the comic. Well, the first five pages. A page of comic takes a long time to draw, ink, and shade. I think it'll be a page or two a week... but it's looking pretty cool, so far. In the first five pages, we have sodomy and at least one possible death. It's sorta disturbing, but at least I don't feel that the author is coddling me, or shielding me from the gritty realities of the setting.
With any luck, the official launch will be this weekend sometime.
In late May, the hard drive in my Thinkpad failed. So, I ran out and immediately bought a slightly smaller drive, and started copying data around and so on. The old drive could still be used, just only for about 20 minutes at a time, then it would overheat and stop working.
I sent it in for repair, and it reached Toshiba on June 3rd.
On June 17th or so, I called them to ask what was taking so long. They explained it could take 10-30 days to repair the drive. (This is a $200 part. If it takes more than a couple of days to repair, it's not even remotely cost-effective to do so.) Anyway, time passed. And passed. On July 7th, I called again.
Turns out that, as expected, they're replacing the drive. The thing is, though, I have an HDD2183A, and all they have on the shelf is a HDD2183C. So, they were gonna wait in case an HDD2183A showed up. They did not call. They didn't ask. They just figured they'd wait - probably forever, since apparently the HDD2183A is a model rev they sell in Japan, or something. So they finally admitted that they could send me the functionally identical US-model drive. So now I have it.
Enter the nightmare. NetBSD's FireWire support appears to be almost-stable-but-not-quite. The external drive bay I got a while back that's supposed to do high-speed USB 2.0 doesn't seem to, and it also does FireWire, but the system panics if I try to use that for too long.
So I finally move the "old" laptop drive (the one I got in late May) into another machine so I can move files over the network. Only to discover that, about 10GB in, it appears to be able to crash the other machine too.
So now I'm sitting around copying backups in at a lousy couple of megabytes a second, which will take something like 15 hours total.
And I'm BORED.
Once that's all done, it gets fun. See, once that's done, I get to start trying to recussitate the Windows partitions. The system used System Commander as its boot-selector of choice, so I need to re-run that to "bless" the partitions correctly - currently, if I set one of the Windows partitions as active, the machine just won't boot. If/when I get that done, I can then see how many reboots it takes to catch up on security updates for XP; I'm guessing five or six.
This is annoying. In retrospect, I wish I'd spent the extra money to mail-order an 80GB drive, and then I would have only had to copy everything once.
So, I've always wondered which of my many traits are hereditary, and which are learned. I got a chance to explore these boundaries a bit over the last week, because my mom was in town. A few curious points:
It's strange; ten years ago, I would have had a hard time identifying any of my mom's personality traits in me, but as time goes on, they become more obvious. It's sort of the opposite of what you'd naively expect; you'd think that, over time, genetic influences would be less and less important, but in fact, they seem to exert an ever-greater pull over time.
It was a fun visit, especially because she got to write about my junk fax case, which had its first court hearing last Wednesday.
So, one of the points a lot of people miss in evaluating or choosing presents is that the point of a present is largely to express awareness of who, or what, someone is. Any idiot can buy you something expensive; the hard part is buying you something that makes you happy because of who you are.
I got a very cool birthday present. It's a big shiny torchiere-style light; the thing that makes it interesting, to me at least, is that it's a fluorescent one. I've seen tons of these of the 300W halogen variety. This one is a cool 55W, and that's assuming you turn it all the way up - it's dimmable. This is a great gift. I love fluorescent lights. I use them almost exclusively throughout my house, in preference to incandescent lights. When I got this house, I started buying compact fluorescent bulbs; I cleared out the entire (very limited) stock of the nearby Sears several times. Every bulb that burned out, I replaced with a fluorescent.
I like these. They last forever; one bulb which I installed in 1997, when I moved in, burned out this spring, having been left on the entire time. (This may sound wasteful, but consider that it was an 11-watt bulb, in a heavily traveled and otherwise dark hallway; the cost of leaving it on for the entire time was probably lower than the replacement cost of toggling it more often.) They also use very little power; I would guess that I use 1/4 as much power lighting my house as most people I know do. Possibly more than that - after all, I keep very odd hours, and so does my wife, so we actually have lights on most of the night - but possibly less, because we both tend to be quite happy with fairly dim light.
In fact, the general dimness of my house may have been one of the influences in this particular choice of present... But it's a great present nonetheless. I am using the light to illuminate my computer room, and it's wonderful; no glare at all on my monitor, plenty bright to read by, and very very low power consumption compared to the other similar lights I've seen before.
If you're in a place that is served by the power company we use - Xcel energy - you can probably get pretty good deals on various fluorescent bulbs.
There are a lot of objections to these bulbs. They used to take forever to warm up (some day, I will replace the kitchen bulb, which only becomes bright enough to cook by after being on for perhaps twenty minutes). Some of them buzz. Many models don't support being on a dimmer. Some, especially older ones, have pretty unusual spectral qualities, and make it hard to judge color accurately.
And yet... They're a huge improvement in the functional cost of lighting, and supporting them helps send a message that there's a market for reasonably efficient lighting. No one's gonna make products that no one will buy; if we want low-power lighting, we'll have to start buying it, so the companies producing it can stay in business and maybe even do research.
Anyway, it's a great present, and it's wonderful to know that my friends (Jordan, in particular) know me well enough to realize that I'd like it.
Which is not to say it's the only present I got which showed a keen appreciation of my interests; Dave got me a book on Biblical hermeneutics, which is one of my other hobbies.
Dave and Jordan gave me two very important kinds of light for my birthday; a very cheering thought.
It's just a first draft, but there's a book there now. The first Cranky User book is starting to look like an actual book; people have read it. There are gaps, there's all sorts of revision needed, but it's a book.
There's an interesting pattern I've noticed about writing things. The first part of a book is easy; I'm just putting down the words I know I'll need. After a while, there's a very tricky part of trying to build the struts that will hold the work together. And then... One day, it goes from a bunch of material that I hope to shape into a book, into a book with holes in it. Then I just have to fill in holes, which goes very quickly.
After this, there's a week or two during which I can't really even read the material, because I have to lose my familiarity with the stuff in the book so I'll be able to read it relatively fairly. Then, revision; revision is fast and easy, for the most part, and generally fills in a few holes I didn't notice.
Right now, the Cranky User is right about at the end of the "can't even read the material" phase. I will probably be doing the second-draft revisions starting later this week, or next week. I have a big to-do list; maybe ten items, some at the level of "revise chapter N". But the basic framework is there, and the feedback is good.
In every office, sooner or later, someone manages to turn the paperclip off; this person becomes an instant celebrity, offered free drinks at the local pub, lunch, and firstborn daughters, if only he will please, please, shut that thing off.
It's been a lot of fun writing so far. I hope people like reading it, too.