It’s anti-SOPA/PIPA day, and a number of sites have shut down for the day. O’Reilly closed their page, and of course, Wikipedia shut down.

Google didn’t do the blackout I was hoping for, but they have hidden their logo:

I like the Wikipedia closure, which appeared seconds after hitting a page. It has a great effect on me.

I debated about shutting down this site, but for a WordPress hosted site, I didn’t see an easy way to do it.

To be clear

I am not against copyright legislation, nor IP protections. We should ensure that content creators have some recourse and ability to control the way their content is used.

I think SOPA / PIPA are gross, overreaching ways of doing this that are designed to help a few large companies, and potentially hurt many small ones, and will have no impact on foreign sites. These laws simple cut the US off; they do not affect the operation of the foreign site.

We can come up with better ways to protect content, while also preserving fair use and personal liberties, and limiting copyright.

My personal stance is that the original 14 years + 14 year extension for copyright is plenty. If you cannot earn money in those 28 years, let someone else build on your work.

My main phone line at the house has been on the fritz for about 3-4 weeks. Yes, we still have a main line and it’s a legacy holdover from having that number for a decade and it links do our DSL account. We may get rid of it at some point, but for now we wanted it working. We actually weren’t aware it was down until a service repairperson told us when they arrived. We checked, and sure enough, no dial tone.

My wife and I are somewhat savvy and we tried to debug it, but it was down. With travel and holidays, it wasn’t until Tuesday morning that we called CenturyLink for service and I was pleasantly surprised by a technician arriving in the early afternoon.

He tried a few things in the house, then set up a tone generator and drove back out to the street. Yep, he drove. My driveway is 1/4 mile long and it’s another 1/4 mile to the paved road, and a mile and a half to the main road.

About ten minutes later he came back and said things were fixed. We checked, and sure enough, we had dial tone. He then explained what happened: our line was cut.

I was surprised and worried, until he explained that when you service lines in the boxes, there is often a little extra wire on a connection. Small scissors are used to snip that off and clean the connections, but there are a lot of wires in there and sometimes one gets accidently cut by a tech. He surmised that another tech was in a hurry and accidently got one of our lines (we have two). He apologized again, we shook hands and went on our ways.

My Reaction

I wasn’t quite sure how to react to the situation after that. Should I complain to CentuyLink and seek some credit on our bill? Should I vent on the Internet about shoddy workmanship? In the end, I told my wife it was fixed, explained what happened, and we both let it drop.

Andy Leonard wrote a great piece on stress during the holidays with a very important section on forgiveness. I forgave CenturyLink because it seemed like the right thing to do. A few dollars on my bill aren’t worth the time it would take me to call and the aggravation I’d cause myself and some customer service representative in order to file a complaint and seek credit.

I make mistakes at work. Heck, I make them all the time, and I don’t expect to be banned, burned at the stake, or excommunicated for them. They’re mistakes. I learn from them, I try not to make them again, I try to do my best, but I know that there will be a few that I make.

I expect my co-workers will make mistakes, and I have to live with some of those. I might be annoyed, or inconvenienced, but I understand that most of the time they are just that, mistakes.

I wonder sometimes if we’ve forgotten how to forgive in this world, forgotten how to tolerate the imperfections that exist in all of us, and in the work we do.

It sucks getting older. There are any number of reminders of that fact on a regular basis as I move through my 40s. A kid in college, the aches and pains from moving my body too quickly, the paunch that I struggle to keep under control, and the most annoying might be having to get up most nights to go to the bathroom when I should be sleeping.

One of the saddest reminders, however, is the all too regular passing of someone we admire, someone we know, someone we love. I haven’t had much death in my life to this point, fortunately. I lost a friend, a former boss, while away at college. A good friend, only slightly older was killed earlier this year. And I lost someone I admired yesterday.

I never met Steve Jobs. Never saw him speak in person, never worked at Apple, and rarely used their computers. However Steve Jobs was one of the few people that I wanted on my “what three people I would invite to dinner” list. Apple has always been a “cool” company to me, one that transcended the engineering efficiency of so many technology companies to build something that you could use, but more importantly, you wanted to use.

The comparison that came to mind this morning as I lay in bed, thoughts churning about both my day and the loss of someone I admired was the same one that Dave Winer wrote about in his memorial post: Frank Lloyd Wright.

The design, the clean, clear lines, the lack of anything extra was both elegant and insanely frustrating at times. However also genius, and reminiscent of not a better way to do things, but of the future.

That’s what Steve Jobs brought with both design and form in the Macintosh, the NeXt, Toy Story, the iPod, the iPhone, the Air, and the iPad.

The future.