Δαφνη Ευτυχια Αρθουρος

"Patent trolls, it seems safe to say, are evil. I feel a bit stupid saying that, because when you're saying something that Richard Stallman and Bill Gates would both agree with, you must be perilously close to tautologies." -- Paul Graham, "Are Software Patents Evil?"

Pleasing

I'm not feeling well enough to count on getting to Balticon today, so instead of pushing myself to try to do so anyhow, I'll be resting today (and tackling some interruptible, low-energy tasks) so as to make it easier to get myself to the convention tomorrow and Sunday. Thanks to very kind assistance from a friend, I'll even be there all legitimate-like. Art show. Programming. Yaay! Now to decide which/how many instruments to lug around.

Annoying/Depressing

I need to find a webmaster's email address and compose a nastygram. I found another illegitimate copy (i.e. they didn't ask first) of one of my stories on a web site ... with my name removed, as if violating my copyright (and removing my copyright notice) weren't bad enough. To add insult to injury, the formatting is %^&@ing braindead. (It looks like they grabbed it from a Usenet archive instead of from my own web site or one of the few places that has permission to republish it, and auto-converted each line of the text file into a separate HTML paragraph. This is wrong on so many levels, starting with the fact that it obscures my actual paragraph breaks somewhat.) I should probably send them a bill -- what's a typical license fee for web use of a story by a non-"name" author?

The other stories I peeked at on the same site are also missing bylines, so I'm guessing that most of the rest of them are stolen as well.

Hopeful

In what ought to be a positive step with regard to my mental health, and after more searching than I thought it'd take, I've finally got the times & locations of a couple of Al-Anon meetings in Baltimore. (AA meetings are easy to find; Al-Anon, not so much.) I've also had some mental inertia to overcome, of the "me, go to a support group?" variety. Here's hoping it helps.