if they're so content, maybe they don't want to leave.
The ball appreciates the blood, sweat and tears it takes for a guy with a third-grade education to be driving a Rolls and wearing diamonds.
The Titans versus the Rams? Tennessee versus St. Louis? Are they kidding? Quick: name which conference each team plays in. Ha!
(Don't send me your answers. This is just a little way to expand your horizons. Honest.)
I've discovered I have a very short "now" these days. No thoughts about the past, very few about the future (usually not stretching much beyond giving birth). This is very odd and totally unlike me.
Of course, I'm also happier than I usually am, as I'm pretty centered in the way things are at the moment and not the way they were or could be or might be or whatever.
Is there some way to keep this now-centered existence and not be such a space cadet post-baby?
I've moved my office (mostly...I kinda started and then stopped mid-job -- I'm easily distracted) into another room in the house, one which already had a desktop Mac sitting there. A G3 with a nice big monitor -- Darin's old work machine. I've gotten really used to using this big machine and I do everything on it now. The only things I still do on the Powerbook are
- mail and
- nka entries
because those are two things I like to do when I'm traveling, so I want those to be up-to-date when I go somewhere.
Everything else -- general web surfing, reading news, playing games -- I now do on a really spiffy G3 with a big monitor. I decided I wanted to use Final Draft on that machine too.
Guess what? I'm allowed one install of Final Draft 5.0. If I want to use it anywhere else, I have to have the CD in the drive. If it gets corrupted in its original installation, I'm apparently out of luck -- so sorry, use the CD.
Final Draft uses this weird copy protection system in which you start your copy and you get a "challenge code." You take this challenge code and your serial number to the website, where you then register your copy. Then they send you e-mail with the "response code," which unlocks your copy of Final Draft. (I suspect the response code is some product of part of the challenge code with part of the serial number, but I'm not doing the math.)
Of course, the challenge code is different on every computer you install the software on, so you can't use the same response code everywhere.
They're not sending me a second response code to allow me install it on my G3.
I am very annoyed by this. It's my goddamn software, people, let me use it. I don't even mind registering every time I want to install it somewhere else -- I use my serial number, you know which software this is, and if seventeen different install requests come through for that serial number, you know you have a problem. But when the serial number comes through with the same name and the same e-mail, what's the problem?
(Okay, I'll tell you a secret I've discovered: if you have a previous version of Final Draft -- one that allowed you two installs via a "key disk" -- install the previous version on the machine where you want to use Final Draft 5.0. Voila! You can now use 5.0 no problem. Of course, this is only going to work for a grand total of three installs of 5.0, but even I don't use that many computers.
(Is this ethical for me to tell you this? I'm not telling you how to steal the software -- you have to have those key disks, and you have to have an install of 5.0, both of which I assume you have legally because you own them.)
I know that Final Draft wants to make money by having people buy it instead of copy it. I don't mind software makers making money. (As someone living off the largesse of a software engineer, I really don't mind software makers making money.) You gather the expertise, you put together the product, you put it out in the world, you should get financial remuneration.
I feel like I'm being punished for all the people who don't want to pay the money. You know, the ones who rationalize stealing to themselves because it's relatively easy to copy software, which makes it all right. Try that with computer hardware or a book or a car and see if it's all right. Oh, that's right -- you can't. It's simply the medium that makes the theft easy, and therefore easy to rationalize. I've heard not a few people say, "They make too much money anyhow." How do you decide that?
All content providers are worried about this very issue. What happens with content that isn't even as expensive as something like Final Draft? Because it's so easy to copy, people are copying a lot. CDs, DVDs, music, writing... Considering we're in the Information Age, you'd think people whose livelihoods rely on content might think about this a little more.
Does content want to be free, or do we just want free content? Is there a price at which you'll pay for things and a price at which you rationalize taking it? (I don't mean you, of course. A friend of yours, perhaps.) Do we get too much temptation if the content providers don't try to stop us in some way?
(By the way, this took me all day to write, because my attention kept wandering and I kept losing my train of thought. I apologize if this is totally incoherent. I'm not even sure I've said what I wanted to.)
In other news, I wrote 3 pages yesterday (actually, it was 5, but some of them sucked so I deleted them rather quickly). Those three pages took some doing -- like I said, I'm being a big space cadet. B.P., when I would sit down to write, I would often fidget and find some way to avoid work for a while -- for example, I might play some Civilization.
Yesterday, I discovered I don't even get to the "avoidance mode" stage. It's like I suddenly have ADD or something. I start writing, and mid-sentence I drift off to do something else, like respond to an e-mail or something, and I suddenly realize
- it's been some time--twenty minutes? thirty?,
- I have no idea what I was writing, and
- I don't remember stopping writing.
I was going to write today, honest. But I fell asleep. Which sounds like a really lame excuse, but trust me, it had to be done. Honestly, I think I know why companies hate women getting pregnant -- it's not just the post-partum sick days, it's the robot you become before giving birth.
What's this about the Republican debates coming down to Nine Inch Nails versus Rage Against the Machine (aka, "The Machine Rages On")?
(Reading that has me musing about a fictional band named "Rage Against The Sheens," which likes to protest the thespian efforts of Martin, Charlie, and Emilio.)
The answer to yesterday's question: Scientists at Stanford believe they may have picked up a very weak signal from the Mars Polar Lander, the craft recently believed lost when it landed on Mars. Of course, if it's not from the Lander, then it's from the Martians. NASA's interested either way.
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Copyright 2000 Diane Patterson
Send comments and questions to diane@spies.com