Saturday, November 28, 2009

Between rain and snow is the wind

Usually when there's a strong northwest wind, we have a tough time getting the fire in wood stove to behave. We get a strong downdraft and the room fills with smoke until the stove pipe is hot enough to draw the smoke up and, most importantly, away. This morning, however, the fire started nicely.
There are a couple of places where the weather-stripping around the back door need to be replaced. And, I'm not sure if the downstairs thermostat is behaving properly. And, I've been meaning to install FreeBSD 8.0 on a virtual machine to, you know, see what's new. I'm pretty happy with Ubuntu most of the time, but 9.10 has a couple of annoying bugs.

In case you haven't guessed, I have a term paper to write. It's due next Friday. I have a pretty good first draft that I haven't touched in a month. I plan(ned) to write about some of the ways that intellectual property law touches blogging.
Most of the paper, I think, will deal with fair use and the recent FTC guidelines on endorsements. There's a boatload of other stuff in the news as well - Bilski (PDF), Groklaw - An Explanation of Computation Theory for Lawyers, Google's inclusion of  court opinions in Google Scholar, free and open source software, software licensing, and a limitless number of wormholes.
It's a rainy/snowy morning, a good time to settle in, do the paper, and then enjoy the rest of the weekend. I'll get started just as soon as I finish this article that's been sitting in my reading queue for several days, Splitting Time from Space—New Quantum Theory Topples Einstein's Spacetime: Scientific American.

2 comments:

unbob said...

I'd love to read your paper when you're done with it (seriously). I'm fascinated by the modern attitude toward so-called intellectual property, especially when much of it is neither (I like to think of it as EG (exclusionary grants) more than IP). And I've been a long-time (if intermittent) follower of Groklaw.

OTOH, I heard an interview with an author that claimed that the patent office goes through periodic paroxysms that are only resolved by lengthy and expensive litigation. Maybe that's the way things work and we're overly optimistic if we expect any better.

On the smoke-going-the-wrong-way topic, we (well, I - my partner doesn't go near this) have a brutal but effective solution. I preheat the top of the stove (from the inside) with a propane torch. After a few minutes of this, the air column is usually moving in the desired direction. Of course, our chimney is more sensitive to external temperatute and time-since-last-fire than it is to wind, so YMMV.

Karl Hakkarainen said...

I was about to exclaim, "Oh, boy, a chance to use a power tool." Then, however, I started to wonder if fire is a tool or something else.

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