Clara Raubertas // Freelance Web Design, Web Development, and Web Consulting // Cambridge and Boston, Massachusetts clara raubertas design. development. consulting.

I came across another zomg-your-Facebook-page-will-ruin-your-career article today. These articles usually bug me with their implication that employers are looking for employees who don’t have thoughts and feelings. I’m not a fan of employers being concerned about what employees are doing when they’re not at work — if you show up for work on time and do the job well, it shouldn’t matter whether you spent your outside-of-work time doing (or how “wholesome” it was or was not). But I’m optimistic that as more and more people who are used to documenting parts of their lives online enter the job market, employers will stop caring that there’s a photographic record that you were drunk at a college party once — after all, it’s not like anyone thought all pre-Facebook students spent their entire collegiate career soberly studying.

I’ll accept that for now it’s probably prudent to keep anything too risque off your profile, especially if you’re currently looking for work. And the author certainly has a valid point when she warns against letting your Facebook page betray lies you’ve told to your employers (”I was sick!”). But some of the quotes in this article really rubbed me the wrong way. “Try to list some favorite books, not just films and music. Employers will be impressed if you look well-read.” That sounds a little like you are trying to encourage me to lie about my reading habits! Even if you’re just suggesting I exaggerate, if someone’s not much of a reader and is applying for a job where that isn’t specifically part of the qualification, should giving the impression of well-read-ness really make a difference? Or should we be encouraging a culture of honesty on these sites, so that potential employers and employees can look for a legitimately good fit?

Then the article quotes another site’s list of ten turn-offs to potential employers. “Foul language”, “lewd jokes” — shouldn’t be a big deal, but OK, I see what you’re getting at. “Evidence of excessive alcohol consumption” seems pretty eye-of-the-beholder — it’s not necessarily obvious from a photo of a partier whether they’re overindulging or just tipsy, nor how often they’re found in this state. (I suspect they mean “Don’t let anyone see you with a beer in your hand EVARR!1!1″.) And then they add “Membership of pointless / silly groups”. Oh noes! I’d better resign my membership in “If this group reaches 4,294,967,296 it might cause an integer overflow”, lest anyone think I have a nerdy sense of humor!

Or maybe I’ll just let a personal profile reflect a little of my actual personality.

I know Obama’s not likely to win West Virginia this year, and I know his campaign’s choice to spend most of their resources in more closely contested states (and states with more electoral votes!) is rational, but it still bugs me when my friends refer to my home state as hopelessly conservative. “Oh, West Virginia? They’re never going to vote for Obama!” Oh really?

West Virginia is a traditionally Democratic state! It’s voted Democratic six times in the last ten presidental elections, while Indiana — which has been considered a “swing state” this election for a while — voted Republican in all ten. Not to mention WV’s long tradition of organized labor, its Democratic governor recently elected with almost twice the votes of his Republican opponent, and its two-out-of-three Democratic representatives.

Plus, who could forget WV’s two long-serving Democratic senators (who do so much for the state!)*? Byrd has never lost an election, Rockefeller is expected to be re-elected by a wide margin this year).

Fortunately, as polls swing ever further toward Obama, I’m getting somewhat vindicated on this issue; Real Clear Politics just pulled WV into the toss-up column, and poll analyst and fellow U of C alum Nate Silver has a post up this week about the state’s chances in the general election.

* as an almost-native of West “by Robert C. Byrd” Virginia, I have to say that I am down with pork. I don’t claim to be a fiscal conservative! I’ve seen how some of Byrd’s projects have brought much-needed jobs and infrastructure to a state that generally has too little of both.

Article I of the US Constitution describes the purpose of copyright as follows:

To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries.

But as Lawrence Lessig argues in his fascinating, provocative, and well-researched text, Free Culture, the scope of copyright has changed drastically since the framers of the Constitution initially supported it. Now, copyright’s reach is much farther than it needs to be to promote the progress of the arts — in several ways, notably in the length of its term. When copyright was first established, a work was protected only if the author registered it as copyrighted — and then only for 14 years, with an option (that most copyright holders declined) to renew it for an additional 14 years. Now, all creative works are copyrighted by default — the only way to avoid it is to specifically release your work into the public domain or under another license. In 1973, when extending the term of your copyright was still an option, more than 85% of copyright holders didn’t renew past the initial term, and the average term of copyright was 32.2 years — in 1998, not only was the term of copyright extended to 95 years, but all current copyrights were retroactively renewed. That doesn’t sound like “limited Times” to me!

Copyright’s extension beyond the length that is useful in most cases leads to situations like this one, quoted from the FAQ of one of my favorite bands:

I really want a copy of Lolita Nation / Tinker to Evers to Chance / some other long out of print Game Theory album. Where can I get them, and will they ever be back in print?

This is the most frequently asked question of them all, and sadly, the answer is: the only way you’ll be able to get a copy of Lolita Nation nowadays is by paying lots of money for the CD on eBay, or by stumbling across one in a used record store (which may take incredible persistence, since they’re awfully scarce). [...] Since Scott Miller’s music has never exactly caught on with the general public, it’s unlikely there will be a full-scale reissue program in the future, but one never knows. (By the way, Scott Miller does not own the rights to Game Theory’s recordings, so it’s not up to him.)

In this case, the longevity of copyright is hurting everyone involved. The record company isn’t benefiting from holding the copyright, since the band isn’t popular enough for them to profit from a re-release; the artist is losing out, since they aren’t legally permitted to fill the small but substantial demand for their music; and I’m losing out, since I can’t legally purchase and listen to their albums.

Like Lessig, I don’t want to abolish copyright, and I agree that artists need to retain some rights to compensate them for their efforts and encourage them to produce more. But the current lengthy term of copyright is overkill. Most artists, writers, musicians, and filmmakers would have plenty of incentive to keep producing creative work even if they only held the term of copyright for 10 or 20 years. Extending copyright by decades is profiting a few big franchises, but depriving the public of exactly the thing copyright is supposed to promote — access to creative work. A copyright term closer to the original would protect artists’ rights and profits while still allowing later archivists and derivative artists access to perpetuate the creative work’s legacy.

As someone who works primarily on the internet, I often find myself going to coffee shops that offer wireless to get out of the house. While I wish that more coffee shops offered free wireless internet (those that do get my business more than they would otherwise!), I sometimes find myself paying for wireless internet.

This typically works as follows: while connected to that wireless access point, you can access only a handful of pages, until you create an account and pay on one of those pages. After you’ve paid, you have access to the entire internet.

Like most online services, these wireless subscriptions have an option for you to generate a new password if you’ve forgotten yours. But there’s a Catch-22 — they email you your new password, and you can’t access your email until you’ve logged in… with your new password.

You’d think they’d have realized this issue and come up with a different solution, like a secret question, to allow you to reset your password without checking your email — it’s not like this is the highest-security application on the web. Meanwhile, I’ve learned from some frustrating times and am now storing these username/password combinations in text files on my laptop.

One of the things I like most about living in the Boston area is how much easier it is to get from place to place than in other places I’ve lived. The city is pretty walkable in general, and most of the time, I can choose between five different methods of travel (walk, bike, drive, public transit, taxi), depending on the circumstances. Circumstances usually also dictate that one or more of those methods is totally stupid — the weather is too nasty to walk, or I’ve left my bike somewhere, or I’m planning on drinking, or the bus doesn’t go there, or a taxi is too expensive — but given the plethora of options there’s usually a good one that’s obvious. Sometimes, however, circumstances collaborate to make my transportation choices much more obscure…

I’m currently hanging out near the Davis T stop, which is also about a 20 minute walk from my house. In a couple hours I am heading to somewhere else which is also accessible by T. My house is a 10-minute bus ride from the T (but the bus only runs every half hour).

I’ve also left my bike near the Harvard T stop with an underinflated tire; Harvard is a short T ride from Davis and a 20 minute walk/10 minute bike ride/10 minute bus ride (but the bus only runs every half hour) from my house, and I have a bike pump at my house.

PROBLEM: What is the optimal way to get from point A to point B, given that I also want to drop some stuff off/get some stuff at my house before arriving at point B? You may use scratch paper.

Tomorrow early in the morning I’m coming back to Davis. I’d hoped to get may bike back home by then so I could bike here, but that’s seeming pretty unreasonable by now — so I’ll probably take the bus to Harvard (which is of course in the opposite direction from my destination), and then take the T to Davis. And that’s why the MBTA should start bus service from West Cambridge to Davis.

A few weeks ago I decided to buy myself a new laptop. I did everything wrong, and I was aware of it; I didn’t research my hardware needs, I didn’t research driver compatibility, I didn’t comparison-shop on the internet, and I reneged on my promise to myself to vote with my dollars for manufacturers who offer pre-installed open systems as an option (sorry, Dell!). I just woke up knowing that after months without a functional laptop, essentially tethered to my desktop workstation, I wanted a laptop and I wanted it that day.

So I found myself at Best Buy. I asked an employee whether I could buy a computer that didn’t come with Windows or MacOS pre-installed, and predictably, he said no and seemed confused at the question. This was what I expected. But then, as I asked him to unlock a couple models so I could see how they felt, we had the following exchange:

Me: It looks like the specs on this one are a little better for the price.
Best Buy Dude: Yeah, and you’ll need that three gigs of RAM to run Vista.
Me: Oh, I’m not going to be running Vista.
BBD [startled]: Oh! Uh… you know the success rate for installing a new operating system is basically zero, right? For people trying to put XP on these?
Me: Oh, I’m not going to be running XP either. I’m going to be installing Ubuntu.
BBD: What?
Me: Ubuntu? Linux?
BBD: What’s that?
Me: It’s an operating system. You should look it up, it’s free.
BBD: So what is it, is it like, a word processor?
Me: … It’s an operating system. You should look it up!
BBD: Yeah, OK, maybe.

Yikes! I don’t expect salespeople at big box stores to be free software geeks by a long shot, but you’d think people who help people pick out computers for a living would at least have a vague grasp of what’s going on in the tech world. Or at least, you know, know what an operating system is.

So, I don’t actually use an RSS reader to read anything (though for years I keep saying that I’ll start subscribing to the sites I read — I always eventually conclude that it would cramp my procrastination style, which is heavily dependent on “oh yeah I forgot about this site! let me read two months of its archives now”). But, I’ve recently discovered Google Reader’s cool property — my friends (and of COURSE Google knows who my friends are — through GChat) “share” things on GReader, and I can easily view a list of things they’ve shared recently/since I last looked. Neat! A casual way for friends to point each other at websites, without the commitment of email or blogging!

Except it quickly becomes clear that this isn’t exactly what it is. A few days ago, I wanted to share a page I’d seen with friends, but because it’s not part of a feed I couldn’t share it through GReader — I had to either post it on a blog or LJ, or email it (which is what I did, but that required a more deliberate recipient selection than I’d been going for). Today, I was skimming things my friends had shared on GReader, and I found myself wanting to comment to the people who had shared things, about the fact that that person had shared that item. But there’s no way to do that. OK, I could send an email about that, too — but I thought the whole point of this Web 2.0 business was to facilitate this type of casual communication that’s not just on but also about the internet. Everything has comment functionality! Everything has “share this webpage” functionality!

So… if anyone has any ideas how I might hack GReader to work this way, or any other services I might try that are more like what I’m going for, you can let me know… in a comment on this blog post.

I understand (sort of — it’s still frustrating) when motorists think they have the exclusive right to the road (hint: legally, NO) and honk/yell at bicyclists going slower-than-car-speed in front of them. But when a public bus honks at me to get out of the way when I’m riding down Mass Ave, exercising my rights as vehicular traffic — well, I’d have hoped the MBTA would train their drivers more thoroughly in the rules of the road.