This morning, I picked up my petitions for inclusion on the ballot. Soon (probably tonight), I will start collecting signatures in my Single-Member District. If you live in ANC 2F03 and you see a guy with a funny hat carrying a clipboard with pink pages on it, please take a moment to stop and sign. You must be a registered voter, but that's it!
Chris Dyer, the current and long-serving commissioner for ANC 2F03, announced at the last ANC meeting that he would not be seeking reelection this fall. He will be missed. And though it will be impossible to fill his shoes, I am personally looking forward to the opportunity to fight for our neighborhood as best as I can.
I guess I have to get on the ballot first, though. Wish me luck!
Ever wonder where Law & Order episodes come from? If you've ever watched the show, you know that they often scrape the headlines, sometimes mix-and-match style, throw in a homicide, and set Jack McCoy and the Good Cop/Bad Cop on the case. So when I was reading this article about the drug raid on the home of a Maryland mayor, I couldn't help wondering how long it will be until we see the episode on this one. Except for the lack of a murder - easily written in by even a semi-accomplished screenwriter - this one seems to be cake-in-a-box for prime time television.
And now, here are the plot points of my imaginary episode. Determining which are real and which are fake is left as an exercise to the reader.
A small-town mayor is suspected of having a lot of drugs.
The jurisdiction of the police is fuzzy, overlapping with several neighboring towns.
The police are issued a warrant.
The police execute the warrant, knocking down the door, shooting two dogs, and discovering an unopened package containing 32 pounds of marijuana.
While recovering the body of one of the dogs, which escaped out back, the police also discover a dead body in the back yard. It is identified as a big-city lawyer with 2.5 kids all in an expensive prep school.
The police uncover an elaborate plot involving the mayor, the dead lawyer and a big-city drug dealer to use the mayor's house as an exchange location. Police arrest the drug dealer.
It turns out that the warrant was a standard search warrant, and not for a no-knock warrant, thus making the search illegal. The mayor's attorney gets the drug charges (32 pounds!!) thrown out, and the murder rap is also teetering, and Jack McCoy the district attorney gets to say "fruits of the poison tree" like six times.
The DA figures out how to put everyone away, using a clever legal tactic and impeccable oratorical skills. Everybody gets 25-to-life, and the DA rubs it in their faces with a semi-smug, semi-stoic head wobble. The end.
Sure, it's a brain-dead piece of legislation that simultaneously undermines the longevity of our modern cultural heritage and turns graduate students into criminals, but at least Congress got one part of the DMCA right - even if only by accident. The US Court of Appeals ruled last week that the DMCA doesn't apply to the government.
So after you get over your revulsion at the apparent hypocrisy involved, stop for a minute and think about what great news this is! If the government is excluded from the DMCA, then that means that public libraries are excluded from the DMCA. So while the Air Force might give a half-hearted Huzzah! for their minor victory in cheating one of their own out of the fruits of his labor, the entire preservation community can throw a big party. Libraries can now legally pay to create DRM-circumvention software, finally giving them a chance to legally create and archive copies that might still be playable in fifty years. We might finally have a chance to save our digital heritage!
And lest you think this is a merely academic, let me point you at my recent tour of the National Audio/Visual Conservation Center. The NAVCC is charged with preserving both analog and digital movies. For the latter, they often come on DVDs, and preserving that today means either capturing and re-encoding an analog version of the movie (not so good) or deciphering the video files with (up until now) illegal software. The difficulty faced really hit home when we toured through a room filled with with dozens of DVD drives, used to capture movies.
Do you know about the Astronomy Picture of the Day? It's a site, courtesy of NASA, that showcases a cool, interesting, or sometimes funny picture that comes out of the world of space exploration, astronomy, and cosmology.
For those of us too lazy to go to the site every day, there's even a nice RSS feed to stick into your favorite reader.
Anyway, yesterday's APOD was, I think, the best one ever. Courtesy of that dancing guy, the July 22nd picture is actually a movie; and rather than being about astronomy, it's about things closer to home.
Take five minutes, and check it out. Totally worth it.
This is one of those posts where the title is disproportionately long with the post itself, but whatever.
Vacant properties are a huge problem in DC, and a particular blight in our neighborhood. Owned by everyone from churches to foreign governments to local slumlords to even the DC government, they are dangerous, unsightly, and break up the mesh of our urban village. But what do you do about them?
At the same time, one of my pet issues is the difficulty the people who serve our neighborhood have in finding places to live here. Our police should live in the neighborhoods they protect. Our teachers deserve to teach the students they meet in the street. Our fire fighters ought not live seventy miles away when a three-alarm blaze hits. But the city has so far provided no good ideas for addressing the lack of affordable housing for those who, while not below the poverty line, are underpaid thanks to our screwed-up value system.
Oh no! The transition from analog television to digital television is flawed, and civil rights groups are all mad! Their plan includes:
Organize rapid response teams to help people after February 17th;
Make the converter boxes more accessible and affordable; and
Put more money and presence into the project.
If we fail to do anything, then "23 million households will wake up [on February 18th] either completely or partially unready to receive digital broadcast television service".
Oh no! It's horrible! People without television? What will we ever do? For fuck's sake - are we so dependent on television in this country? Is society really going to collapse if 23 million people miss their re-runs of My Name Is Earl?
Here's an idea: How about we take the almost $1 billion subsidizing converter boxes and spend it on funding for our public libraries instead.
