The oppressive tyranny of the cold

This is just getting ridiculous. It was down in the teens over the weekend, and I check the weather this morning before heading to work and it's FOUR DEGREES. I am not pleased about this development. As I mentioned earlier, I left Wyoming - It should not be this cold in Missouri!

I swear, I could move to Ecuador, on the flippin' equator, and still find myself looking at single digit temperatures at some point in the winter... Ugh.

The bright side? At least there's no ice storm! How much would that suck, an inch of ice on everything while hovering near 0ºF.

Other than the cold, it's been a pretty good weekend. Spent some time with the fam, watched some football, read quite a bit. Oh, speaking of reading - I've been digging eBooks lately. Maybe it's just the computer geek in me, but I actually enjoy reading books on my computer. It's just a handy thing. I typically listen to music when I read, so since my whole library of tunes is digital it's nice to not spend 20 minutes picking and burning a CD to listen to before I read. I just sit down at the 'puter, push play and start reading! It doesn't hurt that they tend to be a lot cheaper than paper copies.

My only worry is, what happens long-term? Imagine it's 300 years from now - how are people then going to read these things? With a paper book, you know that all they have to do is open and start reading. But with eBooks, there's that pesky encoding thing. Not only do they have to find the file somewhere on a hard drive, they have to know that this specific type of file needs to be opened by Adobe Digital Reader... oh, and it HAS to be on the same computer it was on because of the DRM restrictions. With music, I don't worry as much simply because until the last century and a half, there was basically no possible way to pass music on. Yes, there is sheet music but that's not the same thing as the actual performance of the book. Plus, music isn't all that "informative" - it's artistic and can be a commentary on life and the world, but it's not involved in the preservation and pursuit of knowledge.

And that's the catch with books - if they all go digital, there's going to come a time when knowledge might be lost simply because of DRM and file-typing issues. It's yet another reason why I look at Project Gutenberg and love the idea of what they're trying to do. Their goal is to ensure that any work in the public domain is put into a digital format that is readable for as long as we have digital capabilities. They don't rely on PDF or any other encoding scheme as the basic format; it's all just ASCII text that any basic computer system can read and is easily convertible to anything else going forward. I know Google is trying to do something similar with their book scanning program, but I don't know enough about it to know that they're looking far enough ahead to ensure that the descendants of the Digital Age of n00bism (that being us, still caught up in the birthing pains of digital life) can read and hear and share in all the content that we're populating the world's computers with right now.

Putting out the word for Gutenberg

So yeah, I'm bored today. Sitting at work with not much to do, so I figure I'll spill my random thoughts out here for a bit.

One site that not enough people know about is Project Gutenberg. It's an effort to publish books that are in the public domain online and make them available for free - an absolutely awesome goal! Now if only we could find a way to get around some of the difficulties of the past 30 years worth of copyright law "improvements".

A couple of my favorite books that are on there:
"The Problems of Philosophy," Bertrand Russell - A decent overview of some basic philosophical issues from my personal favorite philosopher. There's several other Russell books available, but I think this is the best of the bunch. Not my favorite work of his - need to find a way to get more of his stuff up on Gutenberg!

"The Ethics," Baruch Spinoza - This piece of philosophy has had a huge impact on my own thoughts and views on the world. It's a very challenging work to get through, one that truly emphasizes the work one must do to grasp the heart of any piece of philosophy, but the payoff is big.

Think this looks like a cool project? You can volunteer and take part in adding more books to the collection as part of Distributed Proofreaders. It's kind of like Seti@Home or the BOINC project, only it requires your eyeballs as well as your computer. Proofread some scanned pages to see that the OCR conversion of the text actually matches what was in the book. They've added more than 13,000 books to Gutenberg's library so far!