Wednesday, October 24, 2007

Picking up the pieces

Rather than writing about it, I decided to even more concern myself with actions. Those actions this time inspired me to write again. I chose the aggressive way to react to an aggressive kind of youth wanting to inspire fear upon me. No worries, there wasn't violence (though I must admit, it was kind of tempting to throw the kid into the nearby water), but I did raise my voice. Combine this with the knowledge that I have a loud voice and that the surroundings were as good as a roman Arena for using it, this must have had some impact. The annoying little kid immediately started bragging to his friends about how I couldn't do a thing about him. True, legally, I couldn't.

Let's just get to the first point. The guy came from behind me with his cell phone rubbishing out gangster-talk or something aggressive these kids call music. He was a white kid, I'd say 14, short hair (but not too short), dyed blond and combed into spikes, with at least one shiny fake-gold piece of crapmetal decorating his ear, riding some crappy old, black bike. Though it might have been another colour - I didn't pay much attention to it, and it was dark. The guy gave me this kind of stare that said I shouldn't be singing (I was) or whatever it was meant to do. I wasn't impressed and just stared back coldly, probably giving him the impression that I dissapproved of his music. Quite frankly, I do - but as long as its on the street, I don't mind much. It's the attitude that comes with it that bothers me.

So, along he rode. Before too long I heard some talking up in the street and riding down came two bikes: the guy and another bike hosting two customers of equally valuable nature. Same age, I guess, foul-mouthed as well, though the first guy was obviously their leader. I let them go, kept an eye on my dog (whom I was taking for a walk) and raised a new song. Since I had finished my old one, and I thought that keeping quiet might encourage them to become bold or worse - let them think I was impressed. Now, in my vision, letting them think I'm impressed is the worst I can do. Maybe for now, they'll leave me alone - but it also means they can scare people if they want, whenever they want. Implicitly, letting them think anything tells them they're right.

So, I raised a song. Walked on for a bit, onto the area around the basketball field. Along comes Mr. Teenage Foulmouth and rides past, about half a meter (if not less) from my dog. Had he been closer, he could have hit him. That, for me, was the trigger. If he has a problem with me, let him come at me, but he should stay away from my dog. The dog can't help it, and if the dog bites him because he feels threatened, guess who gets the death penalty? Not Mr. Foulmouth. So I told the bastard, though the name I called him was less prudent, to whatch where he was going. My dog went after him, and since the dog does have a history of chasing bikes and being dominant, I called back on him quite fiercely. The guy acted like the dog wasn't going to do anything (luckily for him, the dog wasn't, or I would have been too late, I think).

Anyway, when we went up the stairs towards the streets, I called the dog close to me to avoid him chasing another dog. The guy started taunting me about calling my dog and I shouted at him to shut the f4 up.

I'm kind of regretting I didn't throw him in the water. I might have, had it not been for the fact that I had to watch my dog.

Tuesday, May 8, 2007

"Blast Maxine Nahman!"

It has been blogged about before, a few months ago, but I think this needs a little extra attention. Why? Basically, because I feel the need to rant about it.

Maxine Nahman sends out mails, somewhat sollicited (I guess most victims would be SEO-marketeers) but very frequently and very annoying. The trouble started for me when I used a search engine submit tool that automatically gets you into a ton of mailing lists too. No problem there, most of the newsletter even have something interesting to report upon occassion. This one is the exception: "Maxine Nahman", or whoever is behind it, sends out a lot of mails with titles like: "Blast your ads!", "Guaranteed Traffid" and "Get google ads free!"

I read the latter one and even clicked the link that came with it only to read more self-declared praise and (probably fake) references about how great her "secret" was that allowed her to use google adwords without paying for it. She claimed this to be legal and claimed she wanted you to become part of her "secret". I'll spare you the number of times she repeated this, but it was a lot. In the end, of course, it boiled down to "pay me this and I'll let you in on it". I figured as much and did not, but I imagine people have fallen for this trick and paid money for this "secret". I doubt that any such thing would exist, and even more: I doubt it'd be legal and then remain unfixed by google. There was more that turned the improbability into impossibility, but I'll spare you that also. If you want, I'll forward the mail to you, so you can read it for yourself. After all, I have plenty of mails to spare.

Anyway, my call to other victims of Nahman - could we in some way join forces and get this guy/girl off the web?

Tuesday, May 1, 2007

Multiply - Share your illegal stuff with your friends

In the shadow of the current discussion on "to DRM or not to DRM" is still the background-issue that has been playing for years now: illegal filesharing. I thought the situation was under control, though of course, it's still a serious threat to the music business (and any other business that depends on intellectual property rights for its income).

The more shocking it was for me to discover Multiply.com, a sort of social community in the style of myspace. Apparently, it is possible on Multiply to upload music files without limit. Registered users can download these. The user agreement says you are not allowed to violate intellectual property.

However, Multiply appears to be a nest of illegal filesharers. Indeed, my very first encounter with the site was a profile which was sharing some tens of artists, one of which I looked into had over a hundred MP3-files for the taking.. so he must have been sharing hundreds. It's not an exception.. everywhere I went, as far as that's possible on the very not-browsable member structure of Multiply (I used google domain search for some test), there were signs of this. Not all of them that extreme and some not even illegal.. I encountered a profile that was making a stand against the infringement practices on Multiply.

I was shocked and decided to look into the Terms of Multiply.com a little better. I found this:

You represent, warrant and agree that no materials of any kind submitted by you or otherwise posted or shared by you through the Service will violate or infringe upon the rights of any third party, including copyright, trademark, privacy, publicity or other personal or proprietary rights or contain libelous, defamatory or otherwise unlawful material, or violate any other laws or regulations.

You understand and agree that Multiply may, but is not obligated to, review and delete any Member Content that, in the sole judgment of Multiply, violate this Agreement or which might be offensive, illegal, or that might violate the rights, harm, or threaten the safety of Multiply, Multiply's Members or users, or the public, without notice. Multiply assumes no responsibility for monitoring the content posted on the Web site by Members or the conduct of its Members.


In other words, they're saying: "You're not allowed to commit crimes in my home. I'll be sitting here, and I preserve the right to watch and stop if you start committing crimes, but I am not obligated to put you out of my home and I don't take responsibility for anything you do under my nose." I find this disturbing. Quite apart from the fact that they're wrong to be so careless in their dealing with the lawfulness what happens on their site, they're also accomplices. The user is not only, let's say, dealing drugs in the home of Multiply. He's storing the raw cocaine in his basement!

Of course, this is an old method of landowners getting rich on criminals using their warehouses for storage of stolen property. "We don't know what's in there and we don't care as long as they pay us." However, when you see white traces of cocaine running from the warehouse to the quay, who wants to claim that the owner doesn't know the contents of his warehouse?

My advice to Multiply is the following: try to convince the judge that you thought those MP3's were all very popular meditative recordings of nature sounds. It might help.

My call to everyone else: boycott Multiply, or sue them.

Wednesday, January 17, 2007

The Good Deed

The opposite of failing is success, and is far more gratifying. Success is easy to achieve, if you take small successes into account. I do that, because it's these small successes that change peoples minds.

A few days ago I was riding on my bike towards a friend of mine. There was a fierce wind that tried to blow me off the road. I was still in the village I live in, so I had quite a bit to go. While passing the community center, I saw a flag lying nearly on the streat. On closer inspection, it was the village weapon-flag. So I picked it up, put it inside and walked in to tell one of the volunteers behind the bar what had probably happened and that they should leave the flag off while the storm lasted.

The volunteer was highly surprised at this act. Maybe because of my age or maybe because in general people stopped caring. In any case, something I think should have been done by anyone with the possibility to do so, was only done by me and people were surprised at me doing that. This is the good example I'm talking about. These people were from my own village, where something like this would have been normal twenty years ago. Considering that, good deeds are a good way to impress people, make people feel better about society. Especially the small ones, for which you don't get any media-attention. For the moment, they are "drops of water on a very hot plate". But enough drops of water will cool the plate down.

Just make sure that a good deed is a good deed. They should take little time and be done often. The success is when people start smiling because of it. And tell me, don't you think smiles are part of a happy society?

Tuesday, January 16, 2007

Fear and Conscience

Nobody is perfect. As much as I try to practice what I preach, there are situations in which I am ashamed of myself for not doing so. After all, I'm only human.

Some time ago, before Christmas I think, I was travelling from Dortmund (Germany) to Meppel (Netherlands) by train. I had a stop at Venlo with some time in between, so I think I decided to go for a drink. Whatever I wanted to do (I travelled the route a lot in the past half year, and I can't remember what I did every time I stopped), I went to the ATM to take out some money when I heard shouting behind me. I turned around, my guitar in hand, and went to see what the shouting was about.

It turned out an employee of the Dutch Railway in a new white jacket was attacking a man, pushing him into a bush that was placed on the pavewalk in front of the station. I found out later that the man under attack had only asked the Railway-employee if the jacket was something new. An understandable question, since the concept is relatively new. To be honest, I don't know what it is about either. The other man was shouting in something akin to a parody of the dutch language that the first man had insulted him for some reason. Anyway, before I found out that, the two of them were still fighting. I wanted to drag them apart or at least do something. But the fear, fed by stories of people that got themselves killed trying to break up fights, took the better of me. I was not the only one to just stand there and look on, but that didn't help my conscience later. Thank the light security broke up the fight, but it took over 5 minutes for them to even know what was going on. Nobody so much as moved a muscle to tell them.

What I find most embarrassing though is that there were at least 20 people, and nobody, including me, made a move to have these people team up to break apart a fight consisting of 2 people. Not even a word in that direction was said.

As I said.. nobody is perfect. However, we can try.

Reasons and Triggers

The most commonly heard argument for unhappiness is probably poverty. Unemployment and underpayment of course are grounds for unhappiness. However, a common mistake is made to say that people acting "off-scale" (for example: ghetto-behaviour) are doing so because they are poor and have no real prospects. Only the latter is true. People being poor can sit through. But people being poor, without any prospects other than being discriminated, hated for the way they are and otherwise treated unfairly tend to get edgy.

This, of course, is only natural. Part of what is causing that is probably fear because of the cultural differences between these groups and the social groups further up in society. Now I'm not saying that cultural differences should be accepted per sé.. I'm saying that by fearing people because they are different, and thus treating them unfairly, they will not be inclined to change themselves (most of them). I say: do not ignore these people. Treat them like you would any other person: greet them in passing on the street, wait and smile if both of you want to go into the same ally at the same time.. that kind of thing. Chances are far greater they might pick up "good" behaviour if people show them what that is. Only by coming closer, we can prevent groups of society from drifting apart further.

Monday, January 15, 2007

Stick or Honey?

Following from an IM-conversation with Del-Jai, I wanted to write something about the way we treat people with attitudes that are contraproductive to a livable society.

Now, I've read stuff on the internet, including a lot of comics which include a lot of ridicule, humour to the point of insulting, and other ways of pointing out how bad the attitude of predominant youthly characters in western societies is. And although their behaviour may be dispreferent, I think the constant row of insults in their direction feed their attitude even more. Seriously, someone who insults people on a regular basis (interval: a few seconds) won't be very much impressed by getting clearly insulted, unless he can't understand the insult: he'll just think you're arrogant. These people often identify with characters that make "protest music" in some way, wear provocative clothes and use provocative methods to "say what they mean".

They want to show that they aren't satisfied, or something of the like. I'll be quite honest: I couldn't care less what they want to show, because I don't listen to someone who uses insults to attract attention.. See what I'm getting at?

The other way I've seen people act is silence and toleration. We know where that leads. More people following the voice that speaks, or keeping silent for fear of the speaking mass.

Getting back to the basics: how did these people become asocial anyway? In case anyone feels offended by me using that term: if you go around cursing and insulting people, dressing to provoke because you think that's the way society should see you, you've earned it.

The answer to the question, however, is: they had an example. These people can be influenced.. but we want to tell them to be nice to people, by telling them off. By acting like they are trash, why shouldn't they act their role. What we need are examples that will reintegrate society.

We've tried the stick. We've hit as hard as we could. Now, I'm handing out honey-pots.. who's helping?

So, I opened a blog.

Hello to any readers that might be visiting. I'm sure that interesting facts will pass your screen every day, only to be disturbed by the cruel reality we call spam, ignored by the 98%-junkfilter in your mind and twisted by those people on the internet we call users. C'est la vie.

I would like to welcome you to my blog for 3 reasons. First, your presence here and the fact you are reading this demands that I officially welcome you according to what I'd like to call "social behaviour". I'll have to explain that first. What is called social behaviour nowadays is not the same as what I call social behaviour. I consider the lack of asocial aspects, or just a limited number of them, no ground to call anyone social. For that matter, being asocial at times can be fun and makes us human.

Secondly, I appreciate the fact that you're still reading this. I decided to take a hand at writing a blog again. Yes, I'm an ex-ex-blogger.. and took a hand at LJ-ing for some time. That, I found to be very ennervating. Much too personal, much too much whining, far too much time put into updating three times a day to keep in the top 5 posts of your friends' friends list. Time that you could have spent actually talking with these friends. But, I wanted a more swift outlet for my creative side than the ones I've tried so far. I liked writing comics, but it's so sad I can't draw them, myself.

My third reason to welcome you, however, is because I want you to be welcome. That is my way. Welcome to those who want to be welcome, them they don't like me: leave me alone. There we go.

Up goes the blog then.