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“The Internet is clearly about more than sports scores and email now. It’s a place where we can conduct our democracy and get very large amounts of data to very large numbers of people. ” ~Frank James
There are times when the Internet, and the world in general, can seem like a dark and lonely place. It’s filled with perverts and rip-offs and porn. Oh my! (It’s important that you say those last two sentences a la Wizard of Oz, “Lions and tigers and bears. Oh my!” It’s just more fun that way.) No seriously, we warn our children about the dangers of the Internet, we send warnings to our friends (the ones with PC’s, anyway) cautioning them against opening emails with the virus du jour and shake our heads over Facebook’s latest change and how it affects our privacy. (Then we proceed to post every detail of our day. Hmm.) However, I’m talking about the kind of cyber activity that gives me the warm fuzzies.
Perverts and rip-offs and porn! Oh My!
These past couple of years and especially the last two weeks have me looking at the Internet with fresh eyes. There’s a whole lot of good going on here. (Now, you can hum along with the tune of Herman’s Hermits “I’m Into Something Good”. ) Some of the things that are making me sit up and take notice are little things important only to me, some are germane locally, while others have seriously been newsworthy. (When I typed that last bit, the term “Sponge-worthy” floated through my brain. Spontaneous giggles ensued.) You all know I am profoundly grateful for the old friends the Web has brought back into my life and I use many web-based applications to stay in contact with all my favorite peeps. The amazing thing is I’m not just keeping up with current friends, I’m actually making new ones.
It’s a little weird, but there are people I’ve only met through email or blogging and I now consider them friends. A case in point is my fellow blogger, Jessica. She blogs on a variety of fun subjects. I never know what she’ll post on: recipes, hip new products, a movie or book review. She makes me feel so caught up. You should check her out. We’ve start emailing back and forth beyond the blogs and supporting each other’s efforts. It’s been very cool. Then there are bloggers I follow and who visit my blog from India, Great Britain, Israel and Canada, among other places. It makes the world seem so small and friendly.
There is the whole library aspect of the web. I can be writing and need a synonym, a definition or a quotation and it is quite literally at my fingertips. The research that once upon a time would have involved precious hours is now reduced to a quick trip down Cyber Google Lane. While I still do some research the old-fashioned way, they’re called books, children, I can do a lot of the heavy lifting from my computer. Doing research from my laptop has the added bonus of working with my schedule (quite often in the wee hours of the night) as opposed to say the public library’s more limiting hours, what with budget cuts and all.
I get a great deal of my news from online as well. Seems everywhere I turn there are interesting articles or informative videos to peruse. Yes, one does need to mindful that one does not allow one’s entire day to sucked away by the siren song of the computer. All things in moderation, right? I also love that the news can be and frequently is targeted just for me. (You mean, you made this whole Internet, just for little ol’ me? Aw, shucks, you shouldn’t have.) For example, I can go to my local Pleasanton Patch online newspaper and find out what’s happening in my neck of the woods. You probably have one in your area if you are in the U.S.. The Patch will tell me what’s happening with local events, community needs, city issues, my friend Cameron even writes on our schools.
More than friends and social niceties, information and news, the last few months culminating in the past two weeks have been very illuminating in terms of what the Internet can do. First, we watched in amazement at the Internet coordinated and driven revolution in Egypt and marveled at the impact social networking is making throughout the Middle East. Then at home, there was SOPA and PIPA which had everyone online in an uproar (and rightly so). These two innocent sounding acronyms inspired the now famous Internet blackout of January 18th and a blog rant by yours truly. For now these bills have been shelved. Apparently things just got too hot in Washington. (Everyone, remember the words to “Hot in the City” by Billy Idol? Sorry, this is rapidly becoming a sing along blog.) I’m sure it was my piece that made the difference, right? Okay, maybe not.
Still, even with the whole SOPA/PIPA extravaganza, last week’s Komengate surprised me. It took just one news cycle and Komen was back pedaling. Which is good, because I thought they were flipping out of their collective pink minds. Where do they think women without health coverage go for care of the female persuasion? I mean, that’s where I went for annual exams, birth control and the occasional girl problem (don’t worry, male readers, I’ll spare you the gory details) in my twenties. Those were the years when I was off my parents’ insurance but hadn’t quite gotten a good enough job to have my own. Come to think of it, even when I had insurance it didn’t cover women’s care very well. I still had to turn to Planned Parenthood. They were a lifesaver.
In these days of unlimited campaign spending (gosh, thanks, Supreme Court) and aggressively active PAC’s, are we finding there might actually be an avenue to get the voice of the people through? That there may be a way we can react quickly enough, disseminate information in such a way as to shine a light on our issues and our needs? Do the people have a bullhorn, cyberly speaking? Goodness, I don’t know, that makes me positively, well, hopeful.
A warmer, fuzzier Internet? I dig it.
“The Internet is like alcohol in some sense. It accentuates what you would do anyway. If you want to be a loner, you can be more alone. If you want to connect, it makes it easier to connect.” ~Esther Dyson
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Okay, so hopefully as we’ve gone through this wonderful journey of wine you are learning the occasional odd fact. Who knows, maybe something you can use on Jeopardy? We’ve covered the basics, then sight, sound and taste in our wine series. Yes, I’m slowly working my way through the senses. Why rush?
To begin let’s simultaneously review and encourage. I hope that you are gaining wine confidence. Have faith in your opinions, loosen up and enjoy the wine. Never worry about what some expert tells you on how wrong you are. You like the wine? Great, you aren’t wrong. Is everyone in their wine tasting happy place? That’s enough review, moving right along then.
Smell is inextricably tied to our sense of taste. We taste what we smell. The two senses are deeply entwined.
Okay, how about some friendly, practical advice on smelling your wine?
Step 1: You’ll need some wine.
Step 2: Do you have your drinking buddy? Everyone needs a drinking buddy… and money for cab fare.
Step 3: Pour the wine and swirl. (For a review on this check my “Tastes Like Street” post) Extra points if you swirl without sloshing that nice person on your left. The guy on your right had it coming.
Step 4: As you finish swirling bring the glass up, stick your nose into the bowl and inhale. Really get a good whiff. (The human nose fatigues after about six seconds, so don’t go nuts. Just one good whiff or people will turn and stare.) Some people like a couple quick sniffs, but I’m a fan of the one deep breath.
Smelling Your Wine- What it looks like
Step 5: Let your mind sort of wander as you process what you are smelling. Is it like a forest (woodsy), maybe fruity? Does it make you think of a garden? If you aren’t sure wait a moment and then try again.
Step 6: Proceed with the drinking.
See how easy that was? Next, a few do’s and don’t's with smelling your wine. First, if you are going wine tasting it’s best not to wear a strong cologne or perfume. These will compete with the wine and can affect how it tastes to you. Second, likewise if you are in a restaurant or your kitchen and someone is cooking an aromatic sauce or fish or whatever, you probably aren’t going to get the aromas you expected out of your wine. There’s just too much competition around. Third, you may be standing next to someone who’s picking out five or six different aromas on the same glass of wine that you are holding. And here you were so proud to have picked up one scent. Don’t worry. Everyone has a different nose; yours isn’t broken. Feel free to practice. When you are at the farmer’s market or cooking, smell the ingredients. Build up a scent Rolodex in your head that you can pull from when you are wine tasting to identify and describe what you are smelling.
Side bar here: for those of you kids out there, a “Rolodex” was a little file that you kept phone numbers and contacts in before the days of your iPhone contact list. It was actually on paper. I know, archaic, but true.
Becoming more aware of the smells in your wine can help you know whether a wine is good or bad before you even taste it. I recently read a very handy piece on the Huffington Post regarding the six smells you do NOT want in your wine. Just click here to check it out for yourself.
For instance, if you smell wet dog or musty sheets you may have a wine that is “corked”. There is a naturally occurring bacteria called TCA which may contaminate wine. Too much of this and it ruins the wine. Other smells which are red flags are rotten eggs or the smell of a freshly lit match. These odors may indicate improper storage or spoiled wine.
Here are some good smells to look for and some bad ones to run screaming from (figuratively). Remember, this list isn’t everything, just a place to help you get started.
Aromas to look for and some to avoid
As always, there’s the vocabulary section. What? It’s true. Stop complaining, I don’t make this stuff up; I simply relay it to you. Talk to someone in charge. Where was I? Right, vocab time. Luckily for you, it’s a short list. When you are discussing wine it’s actually not a good idea to use the word “smell”. This is because “smell” and “odor” are deemed to lend a negative connotation while words like “aroma” and “nose” offer up a more positive spin. What about “bouquet” you ask? Well, technically it is interchangeable for “aroma” in most wine tasting circles but it is a little old-fashioned.
Questions? Comments? Concerns? It’s the weekend, so you’ll have to ask that guy on your right. You need to settle his dry cleaning bill anyway. Me? Oh, I’m off to find a glass of wine. All this typing has made me thirsty!
“Drink wine, and you will sleep well. Sleep, and you will not sin. Avoid sin, and you will be saved. Ergo, drink wine and be saved.”
– Medieval German saying
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Happy Stop SOPA Day!!! Now, I don’t know if it will replace the Super Bowl as America’s most celebrated unofficial holiday but honestly, an awful lot of people took part in yesterday’s online blackout, yours truly included.
It’s interesting, isn’t it? How the Internet can change and mold our lives? One day you can see a reference to something, the equivalent of an electronic whisper and suddenly BAM! It becomes part of your life. The Web has brought us such gifts as (in some cases ones we’d prefer to take back) : Justin Bieber, eBay, Paypal (all the better to take your money, my pretty) and World of Warcraft.
I jumped into the SOPA foray only knowing a little about the topic and had my site blacked out yesterday like the good little freedom of speech supporter that I am. Today I sat down at my computer and decided to dive deeper.
So, what is the Senate’s SOPA bill and its more perkily monikered House’s little sister, PIPA?
I wondered if the issue would become more gray, you know, have some concrete pro’s and con’s. Often times one hears one side of the story and gets really gung-ho over voting someone off the island and then on closer examination one finds out they were just “edited to look evil”.
Let me reassure you so you can sleep tonight, this isn’t one of those times.
On the face of things, SOPA is a very good idea. Pirates are stealing copyrighted material and intellectual property. As a writer I am very in favor of people being compensated for the work they do. In fact, I enthusiastically encourage it. The argument that jobs need to be protected, market values maintained and revenue sheltered is also a cogent one. It seems eminently reasonable when there is theft occurring for someone in charge to decide to put a stop to it.
This is where we jump the track from a good idea to your proverbial hot mess.
The bill (specifically SOPA) operates on the idea that in order to deal with pirates, bit torrents and pharmaceutical knock-offs, who are primarily based in other countries and, ergo, beyond the practical reach of our federal government, one needs to remove them from two things: money and users. The bill would ban advertising networks from using and, more importantly, paying infringing sites. In theory this would cut the offending sites off from their revenue streams.
The bill would also give media content owners the right to block the domain names of any infringing site. That means the site would still exist but search engines would no longer list the site and when you typed in the domain name your ISP (Internet Service Provider) would no longer bring it up for you.
In this case the law also specifies for the criminalization of content/intellectual property infringers and is punishable with up to five years in prison per count. That one might be harder to directly go after the offending sites if the site owner is over seas.
The bill gets in trouble for two basic reasons. It seems that the authors did not think through the collateral damage. This would be all the ways the law can be abused that its authors did not anticipate. (Or perhaps they did, who knows?) The second reason is that as the bill is currently written it won’t work. It’s going to hurt American users and internet businesses far more than any damage it would do to the original pirates for whom the law was written.
The first problem is this whole blacklisting of infringing sites. As soon as the site is accused of infringement, the site is eligible to be blacklisted and subsequently blocked. This would be before any violation has been proven and through the blocking of the site to its users and its revenues the site owners would lose their best avenues of defending themselves from the charges. The blocking does not require a court order. Payment processors or content providers like Visa or YouTube don’t even need a letter to shut off a site’s resources. The lack of due process is alarming to say the least.
The reason so many smaller internet users, like myself, are concerned over SOPA has to do with this domain name blocking. For instance, if someone using a WordPress blog were to be blocked for infringement and they had the word “wordpress” in their domain name then all other WordPress users with the word “wordpress” in their sites’ names would also be blocked. Likewise with Blogspot or any of the other blogging sites. Even individuals in direct sales (Stampin’ Up!, Mary Kay, Cookie Lee, Tuperware, etc.) with company websites would be affected. If one of their fellow consultants or the parent company was accused and had their site blocked then all sites with similar roots to their domain names would share that fate. It could become very widespread, very quickly. ( Mind you, I’ve purchased my domain name so I don’t have WordPress in my address anymore but still, the point remains.)
There are many sites on the Web that are a conglomeration of smaller users. For example Flicker in photos, Vimeo in user made videos and Etsy in home-made crafts. If a few of their users or even only one were to be guilty, or just accused, of infringement it could effectively put the whole site out of business.
The next problem is we human beings are awfully frail creatures and easily led into temptation. In today’s media world we have just a few companies that control an awful lot of the media content: movies, music, all of our news and this bleeds into the Web. For example I found this scenario laid out on the Huffington Post’s website:
“Google could easily take it upon itself to delist every viral video site on the internet with a “good faith belief” that they’re hosting copyrighted material. Leaving YouTube as the only major video portal … Comcast (an ISP) owns NBC (a content provider). Think they might have an interest in shuttering some rival domains? Under SOPA, they can do it without even asking for permission.”
Sites that do not necessarily infringe on copyrights but instead provide “A reasonable threat to established American corporations” would also be under siege. For example, say you’d like to sell your tires on Craig’s List but Goodrich is concerned that this interferes with their business model. They can shut down Craig’s List.
Next we look at Twitter, Facebook, all the social networking sites out there. Suppose you referenced a joke or one liner from a television show or popular movie, or you put up a picture or video from your favorite band? Or if you tweeted, your blog posts, a site indexed by Google, whatever, pick your flavor. If you don’t have the proper authorization Facebook, or whichever site, would be legally obligated to take it down.
Or let’s say you figured out a clever way to get around SOPA- yea you! So naturally, you decide to tell your friends how to do it,too. SOPA has an “anti-circumvention” clause. Even if what you posted doesn’t violate any copyrights, if you are telling people how to get around SOPA then it is considered legally to be just as bad. Again, Facebook or whoever would have to take it down. If they did not they would be subject to a government “enjoinment” and would be shut down. All of these sites would have to monitor and control all of our content. (Of course, they’re mining it all now anyhow for product placement but at least they aren’t editing us, too.)
The thing which really fries my brain cells about SOPA is that it’s ri-donk-culous on two big issues. In the US, the MPAA, and RIAA already have laws in place to request that infringing material be taken down. Hello, we’ve all seen enough “video removed” messages to know that it works just fine. Why do we need more redundant laws? Then there are the pirates that this law is actually supposed to be aimed at. I hate to compliment the bad guys in this story but it seems to me they’ve done a pretty good job avoiding everything the movie studios and other media content owners have thrown at them. Do you think they are even worried about this latest proposed piece of paper?
Still confused? Undecided? So far, in my humble opinion, this is the best video (yeah, click there) explaining what SOPA and PIPA are and how they will affect life as we know it. It does a very good job of breaking down the proposed legislation and its practical applications and effects. Believe me, I didn’t even list them all. The whole security implications have me bamboozled so I left those out. That doesn’t mean they don’t scare me.
The unintended reality of this bill’s passage would a stifling of cultural communication, technological innovation and intellectual expression. I know the Internet communities were a little tickled with yesterday’s results and I agree, go team! However, if you look at who is for this bill: Motion Picture Association, Recording Association, all the pharmaceuticals, the U.S. chamber of Commerce and just about every media player you can think of. AND then you look at who is against it: American Library Association, Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, FB, all online bloggers, Mozilla, Wikipedia and so many others. On both sides are ranged huge amounts of money, talent and human power. This isn’t over. We have until the vote on January 24th to make our voices heard. You want to count? Speak the heck up! And by speak up I mean email or call your U.S. House of Representative or your U.S. Senator. Do it everyday. I like my Internet the way it is, thank you very much.
And that’s my two cents.
Life after SOPA
