Monday 08/29/2021
First thing I walked up to PAMF to have a blood draw. The final test the cute endocrinologist wanted was for me to take a single dexamethazone(?) tablet at 8pm, and have a blood draw at 8am. I forget what this is meant to prove; I’m sure she will tell me tomorrow.
One of the blogs I follow had, this morning, a post about the DMCA (Digital Millenium Copyright Act), the law that lets somebody claim a copyright violation against, say, a youtube video. You file a DMCA claim with the provider that hosts the content, and typically they take it down immediately and let the one who posted it, protest.
Well, that reminded me of when, 4 years or so back, I found somebody had swiped a bunch of my content and reposted it. What happened was, for 15 years or so I maintained a vanity site where I advertised my book Secular Wholeness and also posted the full text of two books I’d published in the 1980s, and two screenplays I had written. Finally I decided it wasn’t worth $25/year just to show off to the internet, so when it was time to renew the domain name, I didn’t, and let it lapse.
Some person unknown immediately bought the domain name. They had apparently scraped the content previously (there is a way to get notified of all domain names that are about to expire), and now they recreated my old site, mostly. They lost a few things so some pages came up 404 not found, but most of it was there.
As far as I could tell they didn’t put ads or malware on it; they just kept it. Which pissed me off so I paid a fee to a lawyer specializing in IP issues, to find them and write them a nasty letter. And the domain disappeared. I thought that was it and forgot about it until today. But after reading that blog post, I though, hmmm, I wonder, and I typed in the old URL and … it’s back, baby. I’m not putting the URL here because I don’t want to give them any more clicks.
With some research I found out what provider was hosting them (cloudflare.com, one of the biggest hosting companies there is) and used their DMCA claim form to say, that’s all my stuff used without permission. We’ll see what happens.
That pretty much blew the morning.
At lunch I was sitting with Lennie (Madeline) and mentioned how we still hadn’t tested the hearing aid loop in the auditorium. She said, her hearing aid worked with that. So we agreed to meet at 1pm in the auditorium. I fired up the sound system and talked into a mic. She could hear me in her hearing aid. Test complete, yay.
I brought in the spray booth and put the first coat of primer on the Chrysler. I was going to put a second coat on, but after 3 hours the first coat still felt kind of tender to me and I decided to let it harden over night.
Codgerville 